How To Change People’s Minds
Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.
(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month.)
For around 40 years of my life, I had an easy one-word answer to being asked if I was in favour of independence for Scotland, and that answer was “Yes”. If you’d pushed me to expand, I’d have said “Yes, obviously“.
Even though my dad was employed by the SNP leader of the time – in his non-SNP capacity as a business owner – politics wasn’t discussed in our house. (These were the 1970s, so there wasn’t a vast amount of discussion full stop.) But I was raised, basically by default, with the view that Scotland was a country.
Of course it was a country. It had its own dialect and an identifiable culture, both things personified to my young self by Oor Wullie and The Broons, and our weekly visits to my granny’s wooden bungalow in a wee ancient village near Cumbernauld that may as well have been Auchenshoogle (weirdly, sometimes “Auchentogle”).
It had national football and rugby teams. It had a flag. Why would it be any less of a country than Germany or Italy or Holland or Brazil or Argentina? (My knowledge of geography was primarily World Cup-based.)
So as soon as I had even the vaguest notion of the concept of politics – probably around the age of 7 or 8 – it seemed straightforwardly axiomatic to me that it should be independent. There was never even a thought process, it was just mad and unnatural to think otherwise, like believing the sea was orange. Countries run their own affairs, right? And that was it for the next 40-odd years.
(Post-2007, when I started to seriously examine the idea, the feeling only solidified.)
But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer is different. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.
To some degree that qualifier is a result of specific policies being advanced by the government of the day, a spectacularly incompetent shower of hateful, intolerant, joyless, arrogant authoritarian chancers (whose solitary saving grace is that the only alternatives to them are other showers of incompetent, hateful chancers), and who need more power like John Nicolson needs more pomposity or jowls.
But that’s a relatively minor part of the reason. During the indyref campaign we told people, in all honesty and sincerity, that if they didn’t like the SNP then independence was their best chance of getting rid of them, which remains basically true. (Even now we’re not at all sure that Scottish Labour has a realistic prospect of winning the next Holyrood election, so monumentally useless are they.)
It’s got more to do with this.
(The term “liberal” there is the US version basically just meaning “left-wing”.)
It’s a very hotly-contested category, but one of the leading candidates for the accolade of Stupidest Thing Ever Said By Kezia Dugdale is the below:
How best to illustrate the clattering fatuousness of that point? Ah, here we go.
Because when you get to where you’re going, you should stop.
The last major legislative inequality in Scottish and UK life was wiped away in 2014, when both countries passed equal-marriage laws. All decent people celebrated.
And did again a few months later when Ireland followed suit.
(That beautiful old Maori love song still brings a lump to my throat.)
For a very small sector of society, though, the news brought not joy but panic. Those people weren’t bigoted old homophobes, but the professional LGB-rights lobby.
The legalisation of same-sex marriage meant that to all intents and purposes gay and bisexual people now had all the same rights that heterosexual people did. The work of achieving equality was done. All that was left was for the lobby groups to pack up, go home and find new jobs.
For many, that idea was terrifying. Frantically they began looking around for another cause to champion instead, and swiftly alighted on “trans rights”, something basically nobody had heard of at that point. Stonewall, the UK’s main LGB charity – which until that point had been actively hostile to trans people – leapt onto the bandwagon with enormous gusto.
(Tellingly, it didn’t consult with gay people about the change, only trans ones.)
It opened with a self-serving pseudo-apology, pretending that its previous antagonism towards trans people had been for their own good.
Almost overnight it devoted the vast bulk of its attention to trans people, all but abandoning the LGB ones it was founded (and funded) to advocate for.
(Other groups ostensibly focused on “LGBTI equality”, and taxpayer-funded for that purpose, including the Scotland-based “Equality Network“, have been completely one-eyed for most of their existence.)
Ironically, existing trans lobby groups were wary of Stonewall’s sudden conversion and wondered if they’d “start corporatising trans”, fears which have been realised to a spectacular degree.
(Trans Media Watch, whose director is quoted above, has been completely sidelined, reduced to occasional tweets that get single-figure engagements.)
Stonewall’s CEO at the time of the change, Ruth Hunt, gave a speech in which she openly admitted that the adoption of “trans rights” was an attempt to create a new revenue stream because donors were abandoning the charity, feeling that its goals had been achieved.
(The move was a failure. Having posted surpluses for 10 straight years before taking up the trans cudgel in 2015, the following year was the last one in which the organisation traded at a profit. The last five years of accounts have all seen the company record losses, cumulatively of over £2.7 million, slashing its cash reserves by 50% as well as leaving a trail of civic destruction in its wake the likes of which the UK hasn’t seen since the Black Death.)
But I digress. What I wanted to talk about was this, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I go through it in a bit of detail before I get to the point. In for a penny, in for a pound.
It’s a column from The National yesterday, penned by the sort-of newspaper’s launch editor Richard Walker. When the publication launched in late 2014 it tapped into a huge pent-up demand for a pro-indy daily, and average sales in its first week were 44,000 copies a day, which would have seen it almost tie with the Scottish Daily Express as the 4th biggest-selling title in the country.
But the quality of the paper was so dire – an unedifying blend of po-faced, hectoring wokery from some of the country’s blandest pundits and ironically Express-level crude partisanship – that by the time it posted its first official circulation figures a little over a year later sales had plunged to just 12,000. When it withdrew from ABC auditing at the end of last year, its recorded daily sale was down to 3,555.
Nevertheless, Walker still for some reason feels able to pontificate on how to build support for the Yes movement, despite being unable to even hold onto the people who were desperate for The National to succeed, and he duly launched into the fray.
Yeah, you and me both, pal.
Still no disagreement there. We’ve been saying the same thing since our first days.
Oh, hello. Someone say our name?
Walker doesn’t specify which tweet he’s referring to, but it’s probably this one.
It was actually a pretty popular tweet that evidently struck a chord with a lot of people. As a rule of thumb you’re doing well on Twitter if you get a 0.5% like rate (1 like for every 200 views), and 1% is really good. This one got 2.3%, which is exceptional.
The image shows some of the SNP’s most obnoxious and abusive little reptiles. From left to right are Teddy Hope, Declan Blench, Fiona Robertson, Emma Roddick, [don’t know, but most likely a Lithuanian wokebloke called Dovydas Kuliesas from the absolute-wanker collective Our Republic], Jordon Henderson, Jack Deeth, and Fatima Joji, who the Ethical Standards Commissioner recently found to have twice broken the Councillors’ Code Of Conduct for abusive remarks about me.
(We can’t see who the two on the far end are.)
Everyone named above has spewed untold amounts of poisonous invective into the Yes movement, aimed not just at Wings but at gender-critical feminists and anyone in general they deem not to have met their standards of moral superiority.
One is an SNP MSP and two are SNP councillors. We very much doubt that Richard Walker is unaware of who they are and how they conduct themselves, particularly as his partner Suze McLaughlin is closely linked to the faction and, how should we put this, not shy of expressing herself in strong terms.
(Kelly Given is NOT in the picture and the rudest thing we’ve ever said about her is that she’s a bit on the brainless side, which frankly is pretty generous of us.)
The tweet makes not a single reference to anyone’s looks or age. Our assessment of those pictured is based solely on their behaviour, as outlined in the links above. We wonder if Walker feels able to “stand side by side” with his partner as she likens people to “repugnant fascists” and worse, and if it’s just the C-bomb he draws the line at.
Hmm, can’t be that.
Wings makes no apology for our “withering eyes”. The SNP’s only job is to “advance the cause of independence”, and it has dropped the ball, stabbed it with a garden fork, set it on fire and thrown the burning, melted mess into a sewer in the years since 2014. Neither inactivity nor active sabotage are acceptable and we’re not sure why Walker thinks they are.
We just openly snorted at this bit, on every level:
But we don’t have another decade to waste. After its abject performance over the last nine years the party deserves every last bit of critical scrutiny we can bring to bear on it and more besides. One might almost think that doing so – rather than cheerleading apologism for failure after failure, ensuring that said failure continues unbroken – was a journalist’s most basic duty.
Humza Yousaf has been a minister in a variety of roles for years, and hopeless or worse in all of them. He’s been First Minister for more than five months and overseen plummeting poll ratings while bumbling all over the place trying to formulate any sort of independence strategy. He is simply not good enough, manifestly unfit for purpose, and it’s entirely within our legitimate remit to say so.
As for Operation Branchform, Wings has never asserted anyone’s guilt. We just did a journalist’s job of uncovering the story while Scotland’s “trained” media sat on their backsides and looked the other way. And if hundreds of thousands of pounds of indy supporters’ money HAS been embezzled or even just wasted, surely those people deserve to be told about it and the SNP must be held accountable? Shouldn’t Richard Walker be at least as worried about that as we are?
(Walker, of course, has insisted that EVERYTHING IS JUST FINE.)
Finally we get to the column’s headline claim:
Frankly we exercised heroic restraint with regard to Given and Heather’s abominable piece in The National from the previous day. It was an idiotic, offensive, exclusionary and massively ageist stream of drivel which we’d have shredded line by line if we could have been bothered to attach any significance to it. (We’d do it now if this post wasn’t so massively overlong already.)
But then Walker looks like he’s going to address the one point we made about it:
Sadly, though, the paragraph is then just left hanging in the air as Walker embarks on an incoherent rambling diatribe about Marc Bolan and Mick Jagger’s hair.
David Bowie never claimed to be female and didn’t go barging into women’s toilets waving his cock around. Bryan Ferry was one of the most strikingly, unambiguously male and heterosexual stars of his era, even with a bit of eyeliner on. (Breaking: men were wearing makeup for centuries before the 1970s.) Mick Jagger is an 80-year-old straight white super-millionaire and still has long hair. Did you have a point, grandad?
And then we’re abruptly back to making excuses for the SNP again for several more paragraphs of disconnected wittering until the column limps to a merciful end.
(“Inject new energy into the independence campaign”? WHAT campaign? Did you all enjoy that barnstorming “summer of independence”, folks? Honestly, there was one. Humza knocked a couple of doors in Dundee one afternoon.)
And here – belatedly, sorry – is the thing: Walker’s 1600-word firehose of petulant, insulting drivel comes from one of the people you KNOW the SNP would enlist as a “representative of Scottish civic society” to shape a new independent nation.
Wings wouldn’t be there. You wouldn’t be there. It’s highly unlikely that anyone who doesn’t think women can have penises would be there. You know exactly who’d be sat round that table, and it wouldn’t be anyone who looks anything like you.
And that’s even more dispiriting than the fact that the SNP’s incompetence and hubris has left independence out of sight, far beyond the pale horizon: the thought that even if it were to be miraculously plucked from the skip fire of radioactive sludge Nicola Sturgeon left behind her, all we’d be winning would be a godawful pious craphole of a country that made North Korea look like a beacon of tolerance and that you wouldn’t want to live in for all the heroin in Afghanistan.
(Heroin? Christ, it can’t be long now before they outlaw chips.)
So where does that leave someone like me? My views haven’t fundamentally changed since I was about 25. I still show up on every political compass test as pretty far to the left. I believe in progressive taxation and the redistribution of wealth. I believe in free speech and equality for everyone. I believe in renewable energy and building council houses and nationalising public transport and utility companies. Every one of those views is almost painfully moderate, mundane and mainstream.
But as Richard Walker and his Byres Road pseudo-revolutionaries run full-tilt towards the wildest edges of radical Queer Theory extremism, screaming “How do you do, fellow kids?” in pursuit of Stonewall points, chasing after a company which itself is only desperately chasing money to keep itself in a job, suddenly I find I’ve become a “bigot” on the “far right” and everyone I thought was on my side and going to build a better new country with wants to kill me.
And what happens to people when the only group NOT shrieking abuse at them and loudly disavowing them are the right-wing? What happens when the only people willing to stand against the witch-hunting mobs and speak sense are your former enemies?
What happens when the purity spirals get so tight that everything within their orbit is crushed down to a tiny singularity like the impenetrable heart of a black hole, and the range of permissible opinions is so narrow and fragile that you’re supposed to kow-tow, on pain of instant and total cancellation, to the sort of skin-crawling creeps you’d tell your children not to accept sweeties from?
Sooner or later most people will just go “Sod this” and cross the floor, to the side where you might not agree with people on much but you’re at least allowed to have an argument and tell a few jokes without getting threatened with a barbed-wire baseball bat and having psychotic mental cases nail dead rats to your door and shit in your car.
Frankly, if it’s a moral choice between someone who wants to cut inheritance tax and someone who wants to lock women up with rapists, pander to nappy fetishists and abolish the age of consent, that decision isn’t going to keep me up at night.
It’s got nothing to do with “the young generation”. The people named in this post range from their 20s right through 30s, 40s and 50s up to mid-60s, like Walker himself. If anything he’s even worse than the Twitler Youth brats, because he’s old enough to know better. We were all a bit stupid in our 20s, but there’s no excuse for still being a nasty, gullible dimwit when you’re 67.
The honest truth, friends, is that if there was somehow a referendum tomorrow and I had a vote, I’d struggle to get myself out of the house. (I feel a bit uncomfortable about putting forward ideas on how to make it happen, but the main point of doing so is to expose the SNP’s total lack of interest in it to those who still haven’t woken up. We’ve done all the work for them and put the solutions on a plate, if they don’t take them up they can’t claim it’s because they didn’t know.)
I could never, ever vote No in a thousand years. I’d rather die. But as someone who’s believed in independence since I was in Primary 3 I’m far from sure that I could bring myself to bear any responsibility for the nightmarish Aunt-Lydia nanny state the likes of Richard Walker, Humza Yousaf, Patrick Harvie, Shirley-Anne Somerville, Karen Adam, Maggie Chapman, Ross Greer, John Nicolson, Lorna Slater and all the rest of their gruesome horde of Gestapo-wannabe bedwetters are ostensibly determined to create.
I say “ostensibly” because obviously we know that while the Greens are genuine fundamentalist loonbags, the only things the SNP are actually determined to create are enormous pension pots for themselves. But if we give them the benefit of the doubt and accept the obviously false proposition that they honestly DO want to achieve independence, the outcome is even worse.
Luckily these are people who can’t manage to organise a headcount or build a couple of ferries or arrange a bottle deposit scheme like the one me and my granny were using in 1974 as we scavenged building sites for empty Red Kola bottles to exchange for a quarter of Midget Gems at the corner shop. Oh God, sorry, I mean Mini Gems. No offence meant to Patrick Harvie or David Leask.
(And while it’s Theresa May who’s chiefly responsible for the revolting chemical sludge that is Red Kola now – and Irn Bru and Pepsi and nearly everything else – you know that the obsessively-nannying SNP would have brought the sugar tax in if only they’d thought of it first.)
The idea that we could vote for independence and sort it out with all these deranged ideologues still in place is a leap of faith far too great to be credible. They have to go first, then we can talk, and my inbox these days is jam-packed with a queue of lifelong indy campaigners saying much the same thing.
In the meantime, I’m clinging on to my belief with my fingernails. Walker and his army of howling rainbow stormtroopers have very nearly succeeded in changing my mind.
And that’s how it happens, readers.
“Some people (at the time of writing we have no idea how many) are marching in Edinburgh today, notionally in favour of Scottish independence although the event’s barely-concealed true purpose is to firmly establish Believe In Scotland as the official, SNP-approved “grassroots Yes movement”.”
Quite.
In fact it is officially being referred to by the SNP house ragazine as the “Believe in Scotland and Yes For EU rally” (see https://archive.ph/FCEqE#selection-1675.14-1675.54).
More like ‘Make Believe in Scotland’.
Whether you believe in Scottish independence or not, the biggest threat to freedom is the career politician.
Haha excellent piece.
Midget gems, LOL
Excellent, excellent post. A very powerful point, well made. I too currently would fear the current SNP being in charge of a transition to independence. Too, too many loonies in their ranks.
As a gay person, I am sick and fed up of the gender cultists, dominating our spaces, and re-branding HARD-WON GAY rights, as something they own, as this pseudo ‘2slgbtqiaa++’ pish. THAT is what is leading to a rise in actual homophobic attacks. Things were progressing fine, until the gender cultists hijacked our spaces, our history and our movement.
Like the post, I am left wing, and for exactly the same logic, believe in Scottish independence (why would we not want to run our own affairs?? It is that simple).
I will be attending the next AUOB march for independence in Edinburgh. I won’t be attending this SNP-controlled charade on offer today.
Excellent writing and echoes exactly how I feel. Thanks Wings. Still subscribed and I am glad you are still writing. I am in Alba and have hopes because of them.
Oh God, sorry, I mean Mini Gems. No offence meant to Patrick Harvie or David Leask.
Hahahahahahahaha
Stay strong and stay the course Stu, I can agree with everything you have written here. All the best
Harvie? Leask? Gems?
I had exactly this conversation with a customer in my office yesterday.
In 2014, we tried to move people by saying that a vote for Indy wasn’t a vote for Alex or the SNP. With Indy, we could then choose for ourselves.
Now, like you Stu, I’ve been politically homeless since 2018. Each election in the past five years has seen me draw a large cross through the whole paper. None of the above.
A referendum tomorrow would give me a real dilemma. And I was even more independence minded than you!!
I wish the marriage laws required an agreed surname
making shameless nepotism is easier to spot.
My feelz exactly Stu. Thank you for your erudition.
Doubtless, in any regime run by such incompetents, the best anyone could hope for who signs the petition highlighted in this piece is some sort of gulag.
https://twitter.com/SexMattersOrg/status/1697715661433090365
The worst? Most likely their individual existence being completely cancelled in a post modernist form of ultra-outlawing; no bank account; no job; no home; no food; no shelter; no company etc.
The oddest aspect of all this is the marketing of this nonsense as belonging to the political and progressive “left”.
The insistence on the primacy of subjective based individual/group narratives over testable evidence based objective social reality, because objective society does not exist, only the subjective feelings and narratives of the individual and the group, has familiar echoes.
It should do because this is the narrative of “no such thing as society, only the individual and the family” philosophy of Thatcherism.
An approach which should be anathema to any political or social based group, organisation or institution claiming to be progressive or of the left. It is divisive and represents an extremely effective divide and rule Class based attack using the disguise of left/progressive labels. Salami slicing groups in society which do and should have more in common with each other in a hierarchy of oppression sold as “progressive” by identity politics.
Driving a coach and horses through the principle of equality in terms of objective treatment and approach in favour of subjective?—?ie selective?—?judgement based on identity and where that subjectively manufactured identity is located within that hierarchy of oppression pecking order and rejecting outright any practical notion of a wider society.
Randism on steroids.
A process and approach which ultra emphasises subjective based differences to divide what should be united. Where Class based action is neutralised in favour of an atomised approach of a war of all against all in order to achieve and maintain control against any practical challenge to the current status quo within that artificially manufactured hierarchy of oppression and the primacy of its narrative. Which is why it is actively supported and financed by authoritarian State institutions and organisations from the police service and judiciary through to corporations and the media?—?both corporate and in some cases “left” media?—?across a variety of issues.
“Thus arises an intriguing ‘binary’ relationship between extreme individualistic subjectivism and extreme state authoritarianism. Assertion of non-negotiable pseudo-sacrosanct narcissistic power is common to both. Objective law as irreducible sphere of reality is subverted by arbitrary personalism. Might determines right. Autocracy of self-ID is mirrored by autocracy on high.”
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh
This rebranding and relabeling something as “left” or “progressive” makes it possible to enforce and get away with any old reactionary policies and behaviours. A double whammy because too many on the left are are eagerly embracing this process and its reactionary ideology and insisting it is ‘progressive.’
The political right can barely believe their luck. Not only are significant parts of the political left doing all the heavy lifting for this post-modernist/post structuralist Thatcherite/Randian contagion?—?which the Establishment elite have injected into the left body politic using Establishment institutions and organisations acting as support for the enforcement of the process and its narratives?—?it is making it possible for the political right to gain significant ground by presenting themselves as coming to the rescue of the wider society as the last bulwark against mob rule.
A classic divide and rule approach which the careerist performative and dishonest numpties highlighted in this Wings piece – and that picture should be titled the Bay City Groomers by the way – are pushing on behalf of a right wing establishment who are laughing at them and their ignorant stupid cretinous marks.
Agree with every word. Yet another Sturgeon legacy.
How many of the transcult are there ? I would suggest very few, but they are always the most intolerant and joyless people you could meet.
They have no diversity and always promote their fellow Borg.
They, and their ideas are not popular. And that is why they are always promoted by stealth.
Mainstream journalists have failed us all by not telling the truth about the transcult.
Eminent psychiatrists are now saying that it is a form of mental illness. Courage is calling to courage. The days of the transcult are coming to an end.
And their apologists, handmaidens and enablers have nowhere to hide. We have receipts. They are finished.
There is hope. Let’s see how many turn up for Humza ?
When the truth comes out, our rage needs to be directed against those responsible. You have named some of them. There are others.
Stuart, you have just described my own political journey, my politics today and my utter despair along with a forensic explanation of the reasons why we are here. I despise these people for what they have done. I’ve watched it unfold like a slow car crash and I have no idea how anyone with an ounce of intelligence can interpret the events in any other way.
I can barely summon the energy to keep up with the varied machinations of the so called independence movement never mind go to any of the marches and events I attended for years (and certainly not today’s).
Wake me up when the adults are back in the room.
Depressing but true.Independence is disappearing over the horizon and our oppressors are not having to move a muscle.
Correct, Sturgeon and her cabal used the independence movement as a Trojan horse for their real agenda. Clue: it ain’t independence.
Once again Rev Stu hits the nail on the head
I just wish it wasn’t so depressingly accurate ?
I’m at pretty much the same place now. We needed independence before Brexit happened, and we needed it with the energetic, United, inclusive movement we had in 2017. Before the SNP and Greens went all out to undermine and destroy that movement and Scotland’s best leaders and genuinely radical politicians.
I’ve accepted it won’t happen in the next decade, and the likelihood is that means not in my lifetime either, as all momentum will have gone by then and it’ll be up to a new generation to re-build support, if they can. Politicians like Alex Salmond don’t come around as much as once every ge elation though, so the youth now are likely to find themselves still looking around in their 70s wondering why Scotland never became independent, as they were promised would just magically happen if they did nothing other than monster the generation of activists who actually almost delivered it.
But I’ve also accepted that, with the current crop who have manoeuvred themselves into power with knives in the back, smears, lies, using the state to prosecute and jail those genuine activists etc, that’s maybe for the best for now. We had so much hope in 2014 and a better country was there for the taking. That hope continued with the massive open goal opportunities of Brexit, Johnson etc. It’s been killed though. The bad guys have won. The political fight now is somehow trying to remove them before they strangle everything good about our county and remove democracy entirely. Scotland is now run and controlled by a political and media establishment which is utterly dysfunctional and colonial.
It will be down to the youth to have to fix that. I don’t for one second believe the people in that picture – or in any political youth wings – represent tr youth. And Richard Walker, John Nicolson, Pete Wishart, John Swinney, Michael Russel and all the other whitest of white old men, pretending to be down with them certainly don’t. I only hope as a generation they’re strong enough to stand down their Godawful peers that such men are currently enabling and putting into power.
Stay strong Stuart and keep calling out the grifters, ("Tractor" - Ed)s, perverts and deviants. The silent majority are with you every step of the way but we’ve taken so much shit that our days of staying silent are rapidly coming to an end.
Wonderful writing, Stu. – You know what the simple truth is?
Cue Jack Nicolson – THEY CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
The current bunch of nu SNP and pseudo Greens won’t be delivering independence anytime soon and that’s probably just as well. We need to get rid of these grifters, ideologues and numpties and start electing adults! Intelligent, strategic and competent pro indy people exist in Scotland and we need them to be in charge. Scotland is rich enough, big enough and clever enough to be independent once more. It pains me though to see the low calibre of supposedly pro-indy politicians, especially in Holyrood. I can only hope the genuine Yes supporters still left in the nu SNP can wrestle back control of their party
I’d no idea Richard Walker’s partner was Suzanne McLaughlin – that explains a lot!
I suspect the march today will be a damp squib. It has not put me off independence but it HAS put me off the nu SNP and a great many elected politicians!
ScottieDog says:
2 September, 2023 at 8:10 am
Whether you believe in Scottish independence or not, the biggest threat to freedom is the career politician
Indeed, and to that I would add the career police officers, lawyers,and other assorted public service lackeys as such nodding dogs will implement the regimes police state with relish and without thought of the consequences to our hard won freedoms.
The transcult is a worse contagion than covid.
It has spread throughout the `progressive left` world,
Canada,Ireland,Scandinavia,Australia,New Zealand,US,Brazil,
voting for centre left is voting for Self Id with all the horrors that come with it,
the only reason there is a halt on it in Scotland and UK is we are controlled by a right wing government.
If/when British Labour get in this gate will be opened for all the transcult abominations to rush through.
I share your despair. At my age and given some recent health problems, I have no hope now that I’ll see independence become a reality. I dread the topic of politics coming up when I’m with friends who don’t share my views as I can no longer talk in defence of the SNP. I generally try to divert to other topics or go off for a prolonged spell in the loo till the talk has had a chance to move on!
I’m especially incensed when I think of the hours I spent working to get our local SNP MP elected. He’s a complete waste of space who has done nothing to further the cause of independence and (since I draw the line at naming him in print much and all as I’d love to) was one of the wee rats who voted to have Margaret Ferrier removed and let’s just say, didn’t exactly disguise his enmity towards one of the few SNP MPs who is still fighting the good fight.
End of rant.
An excellent post with which I fully align.
Walker’s defence of the SNP reminded me of the Sturgeon video that the accounts are healthy and people should stop saying otherwise.
Walker made no mention of internal democracy being removed from the SNP to silence any criticism and to block any challenge.
Keep up the good work Stu. I also hope everyone else does the same. Keep telling your friends, neighbours and workmates what the SNP have become.
Only very recently have we had the SNP screaming that the MAJORITY of MSPs at Holyrood supported GRR. That is the same driver as the destruction of internal Party Democracy.
The SNP want to use Indy votes to keep power under their control by making Sovereign NOT us.
The SNP are not interested in Independence. The have one mission….keeping control of Holyrood to enjoy the perks of Vichy Scotland.
Attaining Independence will require hard nosed, obstinate, argumentative politicians who fight for ALL of Scotland. What we currently have are pension chasers and Cult worshippers who like the status quo.
If you are still a member of the SNP after the removal of your powers by the Party Elite then I very much doubt your interest in Independence.
If you are still a member of the SNP and accept theTransCult dominance of the Party rhen Independence is not your priority.
I meant to say earlier that is one (out of very many) of the most powerful pieces ever written by WoS.
Richard Walker, having obviously refused your X/Twitter request for him to debate with you, must be cowering behind his rainbow tartaned sofa.
Hope over Fear
Organising indy events since 2014, inspiring Auob, Yes Bikers and many more genuine grassroots organisations to develop and grow,keeping the flame of independence burning.
Snp.They vilified us, tried to Bury us, but we were just seeds.
We’re Still here and “We’re still Yes.
Two weeks today we will rally in George Square Glasgow promoting a Scotland United ticket for next year’s wastemonster elections.
Please help us to make the event huge by attending and/or sharing the event page with all of your like minded friends.
https://facebook.com/events/s/scotland-united-for-independen/1364552180826292/
Ditto Stu.
I’ve also believed Scotland should be an independent nation since I was old enough to realise it wasn’t.
I’ve read this three times this morning & struggle to find anything I disagree with in it. I want Scotland not to be thirled to the rest of the UK of course, but do I want to live in a country where a different set of clowns are in charge? I’m not sure I do, even if those clowns are wearing tartan suits & ‘see you, Jimmy’ bunnets.
Still, I’m 67 so it’s probably not something I need to worry about. I’ll have starved in my freezing home long since because if we’re relying on the SNP independence it won’t be happening any time soon.
One of the best pieces of journalism I have read in my life.
I am 61.
I started reading broadsheets at the age of 9 in an era when print journalism was still credible and important.
Mind you, in his first copied tweet above, Stu does end a sentence with a preposition.
Wouldn’t have happened in my day.
The TWAW faith practice gave power to lazy young people & incompetent older ones. All the capable & hard working activists either walked away or got pushed out. You only need look at the enthusiastically posted photos of the canvassing teams in our local branch to see how it played out. Once filled with a mix of young people (or in actuality teenage boys) & women as well as middle aged men, what’s left now is older men who’ve been doing it for years & who didn’t want to get involved because, well they don’t care enough about the women in their lives I guess. Yet at branch meetings there’ll be no shortage of young men in branch positions and very few, if any at all, middle aged women, some of whom were the hardest working activists I knew, who had the most sensible conversations on doorsteps, appealing to the soft nos with their reasonableness, life experience & logic. My first SNP conference, I was blown away by how sensible & competent the policies & people, how they platformed a sex industry survivor who championed the Nordic Model and everyone voted for it. That was 2015 (I left in early 2022, I tried)- in 2023 we still haven’t criminalised sex buying and incompetence rules. I can’t help but think the two are related and there’s a reason we haven’t progressed changes in law that would criminalise men who want to pay to rape women or other men. Where there once was compassionate, competent leaders & activists I can’t help but think they’ve been replaced by deviants, lazyboys & incompetent,cowardly handmaidens who’ve learned that ‘where power is lacking, a little of it is tempting.’ (Quote from ‘The Testaments’ to explain the motivation of the ‘Aunts.)
After the 50 attendees finish their March (PoliceScotland estmate 500 000)
They are to retire for refreshment at ‘The Wilted Thistle’ karaoke bar.
Party pieces will be performed by –
Peter Wishart singing, ‘Tiger (slipper) feet’ by Mud
Humza Yusless singing, ‘It’s my party (I’ll cry if I want to)’ by Lesley gore
Patrick Harvie singing, ‘The Laughing gnome’ by David Bowie
Isla Bryson singing, ‘Three times a lady’ by The Commodores
Proceedings will close with a rendition of ‘ No More Heroes’ by The Stranglers
Anyone caught singing ‘Freedom Come All Ye’, will be ejected.
Nappy changing facilities are available on request.
So they still want to pursue the neoliberal, globalist model where a techocratic elite makes the decisions and society is run on Maoist one size will fit all principles. Not much room in there for democracy, which suits the moneyed classes just fine since they’ve expressed admiration of the Communist Party of China’s ability to get things done. Inidentally this is the same model wanted by Dominic Cummings* and the rest of the Brexit radicals, though they want to run their feudal society from Silicon Valley, not Brussels. Quite simply, it will be a return to Victorian values. Outward piety masking a seedy underbelly of depravity.
*You should hunt down his blogs and settle down to a good read. Far from being the poster boy of a new generation of Conservative thinkers he’s really a moron with an oligarch fetish.
So, what to do? What to do? This endless sniping is not getting anywhere and simply perpetuates the problem which is what many want as it leaves the technocrats to continue their plotting unmolested. Appeals to sanity and reason are a waste of time. Wokism is based on a religious fervour so you can’t talk them out of it. It’s also a chance for sad, pathetic people to gain power and order people around. You’ll never prise that out of their hands, warm or cold.
The only option I can think of is to divorce the Yes Movement from the clutches of the SNP. If the people are sovereign then independence has to be won by the people. Politicians only make the laws, they aren’t the law. They could be bypassed completely if some legal minds stepped forward to take up the challenge. It would also be a great opportunity to redeem their profession.
Perhaps an opportunity will arise as the UK slowly decays into a failed state. The only thing certain right now is that we’re looking at a future exactly like the recent past but the SNP will ensure that it will takes decades and get nowhere. It’s not what they want but it’s all the bright young things and their faithful entourage are capable of delivering.
Interesting times, sadly.
No call for despair. Enough rope by which they may hang each other has been provided for use at their pleasure. Just sit back and watch the spectacle of factional disintegration within the destructive folly of «non reason» unfold.
The monster will consume its children.
On the subject of sweets, my favourite used to be Odd Fellows until they rebranded them Deviant Fellows , I never liked the green ones though , they left a bitter after taste and didn’t appear to be as sweet as they looked.
My journey to Indy was much shorter than many. I started voting SNP after Blair and Iraq. I genuinely thought they had better ideas than Labour and continued to vote for their pro Scottish ideas. Up until 2012, if asked, I’d probably have said I was a Devo Max-er, never having given actual Independence any serious thought as there was no vote on horizon.
Naturally after 2012 I did have to think, and I did my research hard. Thanks in no small part to the actions of Better Together, the writings of Wings and others, etc, by 18th Sept I was a heartfelt Yes and I was devastated by the result as I truly believed we’d win. Then my OH and I joined the SNP, helping locally, and in 2016 in particular we spent virtually every day of the Holyrood campaign delivering letters, manning the hub and working alongside lots of other new activists who had joined after the referendum. By 2017 however, it was apparent that our MP, bumped into a snap GE by T May, wasn’t exactly the nicest of people and after she was horribly rude to me and my husband, I walked out of her campaign hub and said ‘never again’. I admit, due to her behaviour, I quietly rejoiced as Ms Oswald lost her seat. In 2018 I started to appreciate the awfulness of many other elected reps, both MPs and MSPs. Then my awareness of the gender issues started to emerge fully and then the Salmond charges came along. We both resigned our membership. I still believed in Indy though, but increasingly just with my heart. Recent years have only reinforced my views. I will never vote SNP again and, like the Rev, I would struggle to vote FOR indy if there was a vote on, say, the 19th October (ha ha).
My heart is sore but I need to move on, my aim is to get the SNP out before they ruin the country further. The shocking thing about our politics is there is no good alternative, but change is needed, and so perhaps previously unthinkable deeds must be done. Have I lurched to the right? I don’t think so, like Stu my political views have been pretty consistent through all my adult life. Almost all our local SNPers, activists who joined in 2014, have left, some like me remain out of the party system, some went to ISP and Alba. It’s politics that’s broken, not us. But that vote on Indy? Well let’s just say I’m almost happy I don’t have to think about it right now.
The SNP is 800K in the red, it owes 600k for a Referendum which it can’t hold it owes another 106K to Mr Murrell. lost 50,000 members when Sturgeon was in charge and has lost another 10,000 or more members this year alone, their being investigated by the police for fraud and embezzlement of funds, the membership sum that people pay went from £12 to £3, donations to the party have fallen.
Its simple the SNP is being destroyed and Independence is being denied by the very people who say they support Independence and EU membership.
Make no mistake this March and Rally isn’t for Scotland or the Re-joining the EU its about stopping the rot that Sturgeon started and Humza is hell bent on finishing.
This isn’t an attack on the SNP the party was fine until Sturgeon took over it, I remember the days when the SNP had less than 6,000 members up and until Salmond was leader when it had 85,000 membership, it was a great party to be part of, now look at it.
The party hasn’t destroyed itself its been done deliberately by the NEC and the leadership.
If you’ve watched this video why on gods earth would you hold a march and rally in Scotland when it’s the Independence minister saying Westminster who’s denying it, the answer is simple get of you arse get down to London and don’t leave until you’ve been given the Section 30 then you’ll be worth the £150,00 wage packet we’re paying you.
Brother and sister the answer is simple our politicians shouldn’t take no for a answer, if they really wanted a section 30 then do something about it, as we all know they won’t because its easy to blame Westminster and say to us we asked, well it isn’t. It isn’t good enough for the SNP leadership to keep saying we have a mandate well if you had a mandate then act upon it and bring forward a Holyrood election so we can have the promised vote only then will we have our say. The mere mention of bring forward a Holyrood election to the leadership in the SNP is like asking then to walk on water.
There is a story here and its simple the SNP leadership is extremely happy with devolution and with Independence brings all the power of a full country in control, something the SNP has demonstrated they cannot do.
We should have been Independent 7yrs ago before the UK left the EU, it would have been prudent for Scotland to be negotiating with the EU to stay while the UK was negotiating to leave but Sturgeon blow it.
“No offence meant to Patrick Harvie or David Leask.” Genuine laugh out loud moment there.
Paraphrasing a part of the article:
“After 2014, they needed to win over the old, but instead they focused on the young.”
That right there is the proof that nuSNP are incompetent or acting in bad faith, and it’s definitely not pure incompetence.
I remember being told strenuously by SNP activists in 2014 that we couldn’t talk about a republic because it would alienate older voters. 8.5 years of doing everything under the Sun imaginable to alienate older voters later and we’re finally getting around to bashing “Charles” – without, as far as I’m aware, talking about a republic. Why? Well maybe “a republic” conjures up visions of a country with a sensible written constitution, which might contain provisions for things like free speech, and not one governed on an ad-hoc basis by a ruling party and its “civil society networks” of chummy, on-message cronies…?
Independence Live are broadcasting the Believe in Scotland march from Edinburgh. Wingers will be able to make their own assessment of the success of the event.
“There is barely anything independence-related that escapes the withering eyes of Wings and co.”
He truly is telling us to look the other way no matter what the SNP does. Thank goodness for your “withering eyes”.
I’ve been in the camp of “no to indy if the SNP is setting up our new country” for a while now. Heartbreaking it’s come to this but you describe what would happen quite well. Hope others read your words and finally understand Scotland would be set up to fail from the get-go if the current SNP sets it up. No thanks. They must go so we can progress.
I’ll be there – handing out Salvo leaflets
Mohamed Al-Fayed died and someone posted a link to the film “Unlawful Killing” which I just watched.
If you have not seen it feels very relevant to today and what the establishment are capable of doing and how they do it.
Craig Murray’s recent piece about the completely biased judicial system and talk of a Gestapo state above… I am not sure we are quite there yet but we can definitely see it from here.
None of the hopes in this film that the truth would come out and the truth understood came to a hill of beans. That is power.
Victor Lewis Smith (died late last year) co wrote this but when I looked on his wikipage the film is not even mentioned.
bitchute.com/video/QuZ4wZ2lk97X/
Looking forward to hearing the speakers in Edinburgh today.
They’ve had weeks to prepare. They know the gathering is controversial, and why.
So there’s no excuse for the kind of rambling rubbish we heard from Lesley Riddoch at Glasgow Green.
Attendance figures will get too much attention – they can never ever be confirmed, even by folk who are there. But the words spoken from the stage are recorded, they’re right there in black and white, forever.
The biggest obstacle to Scottish independence is the Scottish National Party.
Worth repeating.
Best thing that can happen is for the SNP to be routed in Rutherglen and the GE forcing a total change of leadership and direction, disbanding of the NEC and removal of the women haters.
Then again pigs might fly.
A great read Stuart, first class both passionate and pointed. regarding the premise, I agree with you and the dozens of thoughtful comments from the other subscribers above.
I believe in independence, I live in Edinburgh, I wont be at the march. Nothing to do young people and everything to do with a total lack of belief in the motives (and previous actions) of the organisers.
Meantime I’m off to do something important for some young people…I’m “helping” my granddaughters decorate their bedroom. Much more enjoyable, despite the proposed colour scheme.
Let’s get it to £2k…..
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/rutherglen–hamilton-west-by-election#start
In journalism, as a general rule, there are three types.
Type One – the good writers.
Type Two – the great production guys (or girls).
Type Three – the wankers.
Rare indeed are the journalists who are both good writers and great production guys.
I have known Richard Walker professionally for around 40 years – he is a brilliant production journalist; terrific at page layout and making great words look and read even better. He’s a great Editor.
He cannae dae joined-up writing, however.
@ Dave Hansell at 9.16am:
You have expressed in detail exactly what I’ve thought ever since this preoccupation with identity and gender ideology arose. It infuriates me every time I see wokism referred to as a left-wing or socialist ideology. It patently obviously is not. If it genuinely had anything to do with socialism, corporations, politicians and the mainstream media wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. But it is they who are imposing this nonsense on society.
That article was a tour de force and describes almost exactly my own political journey. When campaigning during the 2014 referendum build-up I remember saying exactly the same thing to waverers at the time about the SNP not necessarily being in government come independence. (Usually Labour voters who distrusted the political leanings of the SNP or basically saw all nationalist movements as suspect.)
However, political re-alignment post independence was generally the consensus among independence supporters I spoke to then. it was a pretty widely-held assumption at the time. Unfortunately, I think many within the SNP heard that message and were determined that that wouldn’t happen. (I’m sure many remember the dire Yes hub at the time which gave every appearance of hostility towards ordinary grass-roots activists. The psychological battle lines were actually being drawn then.)
Those within Sturgeon’s clique had obviously begun to formulate the firm conviction that there would be no independence without them being in charge. Eventually that controlling determination and what became a gathering distrust of their won voters simply became – there would be no independence and they would still be in charge.
However, that is hindsight. At the time, I excused the seeming managerial reserve of many in the leadership (except for Alex Salmond) as a kind of fortress mentality developed due to a hostile media. Perhaps that actually is how controlling, manipulative leadership begins?
I never suspected the SNP would turn into everything that is antipathetic to my thinking and would actually become deniers of rational belief altogether. It’s as if we did go down the rabbit hole and found Alice had turned into the Red Queen.
Powerful and persuasive writing, leavened by humour.
Thanks for that.
Politics abhors a vacuum, and that’s what we have in the SNP, a negative total of charisma, competence, policies, character and virtue.
Just because we can’t yet identify the new people who are going to sweep the current chancers and troughers into history’s dustbin, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
I just want to say to Rev. Stuart Campbell that I share your anger and agree with every point you’ve made in this post. That is all.
Even by your own high standards , that is a truly excellent article , Stuart .
Like others say , above , your political trajectory mirrors my own
This despite a familial/cultural background steeped in Left Wing political affiliation . Heroic Red Clydeside included .
Like yourself , I’m certain , I can see the glee of the Right exulting in the breathtaking idiocy of it’s historic opponent ( brilliantly described by Dave Hansell , above ) for the cynical opportunism that it is , and will still NEVER support or vote for any of it’s political incarnations .
But …… when the stakes are as high as they are ( too many still don’t realise just how high ..eg .. everything of any value to civilised , freedom-cherishing , rational Society ) , one has no choice but to find common cause with anyone/group that sees the great peril we face , and , crucially , is prepared to make a stand to oppose the destructive , coercive elements currently gaining power all around us .
If someone had told me even a few years ago it would come to a point where I thought someone like Neil Oliver was more worthy of respect than the leader of the SNP I would have laughed in their face .
That point has arrived .
Helpful analysis Rev. The march of the astroturfer payroll right enough. Today might see plenty of rainbow, EU and Green etc flags – but relatively few saltires. These folks don’t claim to be nationalists, do they, which is a statement of fact and intent; i.e. their aim is not national liberation.
However, “It had its own dialect”?!?
Hardly. Scotland has two recognised indigenous languages, Scots and Gaelic, also at the time of colonisation. The Gaelic speaking community was mostly wiped out post 1707/46, and 3-4 million Scots displaced overall since. The diminished Scots speaking community are still being replaced, mainly through cultural assimilation, record low birth rate and via an accelerated policy of ‘new Scots’. Some might call this genocide. In postcolonial theory it is a procedure known as ‘banishment of the natives’.
On the matter of the colonial mindset and the urgent need to change (or repair?) peoples minds:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2023/09/01/the-new-thinking/
If you aim to bring as many people as possible ‘under one banner’ to achieve independence then that one banner has to make sure it is as firmly in the middle of consensus politics as possible at all times. Doing so is the backbone strategy for ensuring the SNP umbrella is as wide and as appealing as possible to the full spectrum of independence supporters.
Sturgeon of course quite deliberately did the exact opposite, she deliberately adopted the most divisive and contentious policies imaginable.
The reason for this is obvious… to undermine the SNP’s ability to be that banner that everyone could unite under to achieve our independence. This is exactly why she did this almost instantly after getting into power.
Salmond steered the SNP down this consensus path with exceptional skill throughout his entire leadership. Sturgeon steered the SNP off the consensus path and off the tranny cliff within minutes of getting behind the steering wheel.
And here we are today… the whole lot of them (near enough) need removing before anything can be achieved.
What a difference a (real, non-rat) leader makes.
Turabdin, you always ease my despair.
You are one of the few here who realise what is happening in Scotland and most of the “democratic” West.
This is not really about Independence at all, “sovereignty” has become a vehicle to give bad actors( LGBT+++++++) the opportunity to destroy traditional society, that has always been their prime motivator. They realised lang syne that their brand of equality could never be attained while heteros held the trump card of reproduction, so they set about changing society …..from the inside slowly and insidiously. They have met with a setback by pushing the anti biology idea too far and too quickly, so the first three letters panicked and jumped behind women’s rights as a holding exercise, but the anti birth and family ideology is strong and supported by media will come again aided by medical technology which can already produce babies to order and I suppose fully programmed or programmable.
My advice is to forget Indy for the time being and concentrate on the future of our children…..be afraid, but be vigilant.
“After 2014, they needed to win over the old, but instead they focused on the young.”
Of course they did. The young are far easier to manipulate and if you want to re-write relatively recent history and create a new, utterly false narrative, they’re the only ones to focus on.
Agree with every word.
The only thing which gives me hope, well 2 things, are Salvo and Alf Bairds history of decolonisation.
The current SNP need destroyed politically.
I will never vote for them again.
We have another insulting puff piece in the National today by some nobody, insulting our intelligence, claiming to talk for the grassroots.
Well it’s amazing how the SNP have changed my mind – they can whistle for my vote as they won’t be getting it.
I’m always surprised by idiot mutterings of certain SNP MPs , not to mention the MSM.
Once upon a time in the dim and distant past there was some gravitas and honesty clearly displayed by both MPs and the MSM now it is those with mushy brains and loud voices who berate and deceive us.
Thanks Stu for all that you do.
P.S I cannot believe that M&S are so cringy as to re-name midget gems ,what will happen to an MG Midget now??
Another fantastic rebuttal of someone elses terrible journalism.
Young people want jobs, careers and designer clothes. Season tickets and to learn new skills. Girlfriends and holidays.
Teddy Hope is not representative of young people. The majority of young people are not like that middle aged man. They are political swats or in Kelly Given’s case, she’s in the “Independence industry.” They are the beta bullies.
I found myself clicking on all the links and discovered Mhairi Black’s video – “The Sneer of Power.”
Very succinct article, reflecting my own reasons for leaving the SNP, with the Salmond persecution the last straw.
The SNP need to lose, and lose badly, at the next election before there’s a chance of them getting back to the fundamentals of winning hearts andinds to achieve independence.
A good first step would be dropping the disastrous liaison with the Greens and their obsession with trans issues and demolition of women’s rights.
When you become a careerist politician. You bypass the reslience and hardship that comes your way with the highs and lows of life.
The crazy gang are nothing like Scotland’s young people.
I see Humza has not been invited to Balmoral get together with the king. I suspect his handlers are going to pull the chain and flush him down the toilet.
Same. With regret, but same.
This excellent piece (like JKR’s famous essay) is far too long for the challenged comprehension and stunted attention-span of the would-be Gestapo, so of course they and their fond admirers will all cry: Look, told you, vile Wings was never in favour of independence. etc, etc.
Walker’s getting his negatives in a twist when he complains about “Westminster’s refusal to ignore the undeniable democratic demand . . .” is he not? As you say, “We just openly snorted at this bit, on every level”
Meanwhile, chez MI5, trebles all round, presumably.
Would it be a hate crime to commission statues of Imelda n Pete, entirely for the purpose of throwing things at them?
Teddy Hope’s gang of crazies… They are all political deviants. Unlike normal young people, that go to music festivals. His gang of crazies enjoy the sneerings of power as careerist politicians.
I think it’s a disgrace that Teddy Hope which I’ve just learned was allowed to bully the mothers and women of the Bearsden women’s group.
I know that John Nicholson lives in Bearsden, and he’s a bully so it comes as no surprise to me.
Phew
As a supporter of the Union I broadly welcome the Editor’s piece while accepting that his conclusion must be painful to him.
I have thought for quite a while that the Editor’s forensic skewering of this rabble at every turn would not be comfortable for him but I think has performed a good service by shining a light into some (intentionally) very dark places.
I know it’s a bit of a knee-jerk but the expression ‘go woke, go broke’ isn’t a million miles away
The ‘midget’ line was a gem. Years ago I had an MG Midget-maybe that’s why BL brought out the Mini..
Time, surely, to things seriously about UDI – the process whereby the people themselves seize control of the state institutions. Craig Murray sets out a blueprint for it, and nothing else is going to work.
Does anybody have views on this?
Fortunately I am settled in England. But if I were still living in Scotland – the land of my ancestry and birth – I would have to leave. I would be an ‘unter menschen’. Tory, gender critical, anti Canada style euthanasia, supportive of my Catholic English husband. Oh and a Yoonie. (Up till 5 years ago for purely practical reasons – if Brexit was difficult, untangling a 300 year old union would be 1000 times harder – but if Scots voted for Indy I would accept the result and help to make it work).
But I can now see that Scots like me, would be persecuted as ("Tractor" - Ed)s, racists, transphobes etc in an independent country. Hounded out of jobs. Bank accounts cancelled by the government. Even jailed. Vilified.
Children would be indoctrinated in “right think’ and taken away from dissident parents. (My mother was German. Went to school as Hitler took power. Completely bought into the propaganda, so much so that even when US soldiers entered the telephone exchange where she was working, she still thought Germany was winning the war. So something I feel strongly about.)
My love of Scots culture, including the language of Burns and Scott, the country side (I have travelled the length and breadth of the country including the Isles) and my knowledge and study of Scottish history would count as nought. The country that produced the Enlightment would be a totalitarian hell for anyone who did not toe the establishment line.
So now I am a committed Yoonie on principle. Some one said (on this site I think) that “Perhaps we should stick to the English else the country will be run by the Glasgow Labour Party.” I fear it would be worse – More like the Glasgow Trotskyist Party with a dollop of post modernism.
Those young folk in your photo remind me of Maost cadres in the Cultural Revolution. Hounding the dissidents. Chilling (Read Wild Swans by Jung Chan.)
A serious independence movement would say a citizen would be welcome regardless of their political, social and religious views. Oh and even if they voted for the union!
When I was at university in the 70s, many Nats I knew were Conservative economically, and conservative on social issues. They would not be comfortable in an independent country.
Planning a trip to Paisley this Autumn to visit my sister. Will come armed with my Suffragette scarf and stickers which I will post all over town, including Mairi Black MPs office. A small defiance. Will I get arrested for a hate crime?
With you all the way Stu, WTAF have they done and are planning for our country! The dirtiest of dirty bombs would be cleaner. Not in my name, we must fight back and restore some sanity to the movement. Let’s start with a declaration, there are two genders and women do not have penises. Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me. You are welcome to your opinion and me to mine. Leave our kids alone. That should start us off nicely, feel free to add. Oh and I’ll have a quarter of midget gems thanks!
Brilliant article Stuart.
Thanks for once again revealing what the current SNP/Greens ruling elite really are and are not, and what the implications of this are for the genuinely progressive independence forces in Scotland.
Thank you for genuinely speaking truth to power, and for genuinely holding the rotten, lying, totalitarian SG to account.
trannyism is just the current state of the sexual liberation juggernaut, the endpoint of which can only be broadband libertinism; i.e. a fetish club is the model for society, and to be placed everywhere – anything goes, animal, mineral or vegetable and any holes a goal … a lot of people jumped on the juggernaut/bandwagon, but it doesn’t just stop when it gets to your destination; “this far and no more” doesn’t work
– some people think “the trannies turned up 5 years ago and it all went nuts … ” – no, it’s deep, very deep …
Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control by E. Michael Jones
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” – St. Augustine, City of God
Writing at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, St. Augustine both revolutionized and brought to a close antiquity’s idea of freedom. A man was not a slave by nature or by law, as Aristotle claimed. His freedom was a function of his moral state. A man had as many masters as he had vices. This insight would provide the basis for the MOST SOPHISTICATED FORM OF SOCIAL CONTROL known to man.
Fourteen hundred years later, a decadent French aristocrat turned that tradition on its head when he wrote that “the freest of people are they who are most friendly to murder.” Like St. Augustine, the MARQUIS DE SADE would agree that freedom was a function of morals. Unlike St. Augustine, Sade PROPOSED A REVOLUTION IN SEXUAL MORALS TO ACCOMPANY THE POLITICAL REVOLUTION then taking place in France. Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.
Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how SEXUAL LIBERATION WAS FROM ITS INCEPTION A FORM OF CONTROL. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy.
Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that
“as POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FREEDOM DIMINISHES, SEXUAL FREEDOM TENDS COMPENSATINGLY TO INCREASE.”
This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of technologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.
Some gays (even wingers) would have us believe “ordinary decent homosexuals” are nothing to do with this depravity and try to separate out the LGB from the TQ+ but they played their part in it all, and now fear the backlash which is coming.
The link between de Sade and the French Revolution is not some anomalous happenstance, over la manche we have the connection between – “le vice anglais” (public school sodomy) and british imperialism and in Germany we had Ernst Rohm trying to turn the NSDAP into his personal “gay fucking club”. Scotland’s plight can be neatly summarised by the “climax” of Outlander series 1 where the highlander gets buttr4ped by the redcoat.
– there’s loads to read here; but take Kinsey, who supposedly “wrote the book” on human sexuality – most of his test subjects were prisoners, including paedophiles, r4pists and men engaging in homosexual relations (whether consensual or not, or “prison gay”) – and he concludes we are all really “queer”. But the sample is skewed.
It is the gays (and their faghag allies, the feminists) running wild for a generation who have created this (current) mess.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/snp-planning-to-honour-nicola-sturgeon-with-statue-in-scottish-parliament-4087364
Apparently Humza is planning a statue of the dear leader of the cult.
You’d have to pull the statue of Nicola Sturgeon down like Saddam ahaha.
“like believing the sea was orange”
That’s just a Fanta Sea.
@ Jock McT at 11.44am:
There are not two genders, there are two SEXES! Gender isn’t an objective fact, it’s just an arbitrary concept that means whatever its proponents want it to mean. That’s the whole problem with gender ideology.
Otherwise, I agree with your comment.
You’re speaking for a lot of people in the indy-movement, Stu. The great majority, in my opinion! That is, those of us who expect the party-of-independence to get on with the only reason for its existence: to secure Scottish independence. Who amongst us can’t now see that this one fundamental task has been deserted and replaced of recent years, by largely minority-interest, policies-of-public-mystification? Let me remind Richard Walker: when the people desert the hype, they always take their votes with them.
The rally that makes folk want to Be Leavin’ Scotland.
It does what it sounds like when you say what it says on the tin.
Ian Brotherhood says:
2 September, 2023 at 10:30 am
Looking forward to hearing the speakers in Edinburgh today.
They’ve had weeks to prepare. They know the gathering is controversial, and why.
So there’s no excuse for the kind of rambling rubbish we heard from Lesley Riddoch at Glasgow Green
Yes there is: stupidity.
Excellent, hard-hitting, yet succinctly accurate piece, Rev. Lang may yet lum reek.
Goth was once thing, but who would be insane enough to push Goth policies for the entire population and politics?
Youth always must have its wee rebellions, but most grow up and out of the tantrums. Adult Svengalis like Mr Nicolson and Richard Walker should butt out and support real politics, which, in Scotland’s case, is independence or union.
I wish we could say that ‘gender fluid’ is harmless, but it bears too many similarities to Maoism, Pol Potism and Stalinism. That people like Richard Walker do not see the parallels, must be down to a willingness to be blindsided. Nobody who had even a fleeting contact with the 20th century could seriously write what he did.
You are uncomfortably honest and they hate you for seeing through them. Prophets in their own land…
I suppose the one thing we could all agree on, is that this current SNP must go, unless by some miracle the party was recaptured by genuine indy politicians, which looks very unlikely.
Sturgeon the Judas and her acolytes really did a number on the party and ripped the heart out of it, and replaced it with their own agenda which is where we are now.
Removing the SNP from office won’t go down well with everyone who supports Scottish independence, but sometimes you need to go backwards to move forwards and this looks like one of those occasions where this would benefit the indy cause.
Continuing to believe that the current SNP is a party for Scottish independence, is only fooling ones self, and in the long run it will set the indy cause back even further.
It’ll get worse before it gets better, but it will get better in the long run, once the current SNP is voted out.
SNP OUT at every election, Vote Alba, Join Alba.
@ Shennachie at 12.05pm:
Hahaha! That’s a cracker!
proper journalism, stu
painfully accurate assessment
agree 100%
Shennacie @ 12.05
Dear me, if the mouthful of coffee I spluttered out giggling when I read “Fanta Sea” has done my Ipad any damage, you have much to answer for.
Still chortling.
David Hannah @ 12.02
Somehow the proposed 1st April seems so dreadfully appropriate for a Nicola Sturgeon Memorial Day.
Except, of course, that the joke is on independence supporters who gave Ms Sturgeon the benefit of the doubt.
Midget gems. Brilliant. What a memory that brought back. BTW a midget is a perfectly formed and proportional human being. Dwarfism is altogether different. Still, academics know better. Eh?
The Notional is supremely bad at all it does. I had a subscription until 2018. Since then not a penny from me but I can still sign in as a subscriber. Organised as fuck and more and more like a 5th year school mag.
“The diminished Scots speaking community are still being replaced, mainly through cultural assimilation, record low birth rate and via an accelerated policy of ‘new Scots’. Some might call this genocide.”
Those people would be mental.
“Look, told you, vile Wings was never in favour of independence. etc, etc.”
I am sadly not joking when I say that I fully expect James Kelly to have a post up before the weekend is out saying that I’ve just announced I’m a Unionist.
Confused @ 11:57 am
“trannyism is just the current state of the sexual liberation juggernaut, .. the model for society, and to be placed everywhere”
The longstanding colonial procedure vis-a-vis the extirpation of ancient national identities and peoples and thus ‘national consciousness’, otherwise known as genocide, also appears to be closely linked to this gender ideology. That should be an urgent worry for any independence movement which is always dependent on national consciousness, based on the solidarity of the oppressed ethnic group, their culture and language.
Rev. Stuart Campbell @ 12.56
Ach well then, Stuart, you’ll just have to declare yourself an “Independent Unionist”, with all the inconsistincy on view from current SNP MSPs & MPs they’ll see nowt wrong with that position.
I’ve been warning of the phenomenon Stu describes for years, now. He’s said it far better than I could have. If the fanatics and lunatics are not driven out, Scotland will never be independent because no halfway reasonable person is ever going to vote themselves into a country whose dominant political party is the Orange Lodge of Wokism.
It’s interesting to see the increase in nudges here trying to push thoughts and perhaps the conversation towards a more conservative, no, restricted, form of society. That’s the problem with calling everyone a fascist. When the real ones start showing up, nobody notices or bats an eyelid.
Coming from a culture no stranger to shooting itself in head and foot, aided it must be stated by outside elements eager to have it do so, I empathize with those frustrated to the point of tears by what is going on in Scotland, and not just in Scotland for the entire Western world is infected by this sentiment loaded cult of unreason.
Fortunately, my culture gives little opportunity for such weirdness and inevitably even in the benighted West the thing will be slain by a return to the clarity of pure reason, Europe’s gift to the world.
Totalitarianism and its spawn Globalism feeds on ignorance, the I don’t know much about it but it can’t be so bad, the I feel more than I think, the it’s all for our collective good, the that’s progress isn’t it «community».
This chimera has no clothes and is gruesomely unappealing without the conditioning.
Rev. Stuart Campbell @ 12:53 pm
“Those people would be mental.”
‘A people’ can never be content with their colonial ‘condition’, but should maybe seek to better understand their oppression. As Prof Hechter reminds us, an independence movement ‘depends on the solidarity of the oppressed ethnic group’, which is in turn based on national consciousness (Fanon), the latter built on their national culture and language.
Those who have been to e.g. a large pro indy march or a Scotland football game should understand national consciousness.
Robert Hughes at 10:52 am:
“Even by your own high standards , that is a truly excellent article , Stuart .
Like others say, your political trajectory mirrors my own.”
Yes indeed; insightful, heartfelt, entertaining, smart writing.
The ‘political trajectory’ mirrors my own too. The old ‘centre ground’ seems to have shifted left and put me in the ‘right wing’ when my views haven’t really changed, they’ve just become as unfashionable as blue-collar jobs and blue-collar representation, I guess.
Stu wrote:
“And what happens to people when the only group NOT shrieking abuse at them and loudly disavowing them are the right-wing? What happens when the only people willing to stand against the witch-hunting mobs and speak sense are your former enemies?”
Quite. The thing is, this disillusionment is happening across the UK, it’s not unique. If Scotland can create change for itself through Indy fair enough, but not if it lands with the same bunch of entitled, incompetent but least-worst bunch as Holyrood, Westminster, Stormont and Cardiff. “That wouldn’t happen,” you’ll say, “-because we’d vote for change.” But who? How?
It makes me sad that while most of the UK has the same apparently undeliverable desire for change it’s often expressed here in the comments (not by Stu) in anti-English sentiments.
Alf Baird @10:56am
I was never resistant, I just didn’t know. I didn’t know that Scotland was a colony until I started reading comments btl on WoS and came across Alf Baird. He made me aware of Scotland’s subjugation through his papers and book, Doun-Hauden.
I knew from a very young age that something was rotten in the kingdom of Scotland; but I didn’t have the education, knowledge, clear perspective or ability to articulate what that ‘something’ was.
I’m very grateful to Alf Baird for explaining so clearly the true nature of Scotland’s bane. Much of the bizarre behaviour we see in Scotland’s national ‘leadership’ makes somewhat more sense in the context of colonialism.
Link for Independence Live coverage of Edinburgh event.
https://twitter.com/IndyLiveStream/status/1697730943077990573
Please ignore my last – it isn’t a link for live coverage, it’s a show broadcast last night.
Sorry about that.
🙁
I agree with every word Stu except legalising gay marriage was not in my option giving equal rights to homosexuals it was rewriting the definition of ”Marriage” Marriage is the joining together of a man and a woman in matrimony and same sex adoption is rewriting the meaning of the word ”Family” Family comprises of a Father (male) and a Mother (female) and if that makes me a homophobe then that’s what I must be otherwise I believe homosexuals should enjoy the same rights as any other member of society
Getting the national seemed like a win at the time. The first nationalist focused paper.
I now wonder if it is not good, as:
Nationalists only look at the National and do not look wider.
Unionists do not buy it, so are not open to the influence and only see their own views in the sun, record or herald.
In effect we have created an echo chamber.
Any letters we write dismantling the union are only see by the converted. The remaining no’s do not hear the message as they are restricted to their own paper.
In addition the London controllers have a tool to undermine and split the movement that focuses on nationalists.
Northcode at 1:40 pm.
“I’m very grateful to Alf Baird for explaining so clearly the true nature of Scotland’s bane. Much of the bizarre behaviour we see in Scotland’s national ‘leadership’ makes somewhat more sense in the context of colonialism.”
‘I hear you’re a racist now, Father.’
I won’t vote for any party until we have a Scottish Government Nd Scottish parliament
Not a pretendy parliament.
Rebranding is the name of the game.
From the “parliament of Englands Westminster = parliament of Westminster Great Britain = Scottish devolved parliament from parliament of Westminster.
The circle is unbroken.
GRAEMEGEORGE
The nature of inclusivity seems indifferent to the idea that there may be natural boundaries to its embrace.
In reality it’s «all are OK», just do not ask searching questions, do not request «definitions».
Let maudlin sentiment prevail and put your brain in the pickle jar.
John Park: Can you post more details of the Hope Over Fear event on 16th September. I am not on social media, so miss these things.
I am in the same position as a lot of poster here: a lifelong socialist independence supporter. I haven’t changed my views at all. I have been wondering how I got to be the right wing nazi that I have been called by the Trans lobby.
I haven’t been able to discuss this with a Trans supporter because they shout me down.
This despite the fact that I have been discriminated against several times in my life for being a woman. I’ve had to fight battles against the Establishment to e.g. rent a TV, get a utilities supply (I needed a man/husband to sign for me despite having a well paid job) and get unemployment benefit because I had not ‘proved’ I had child care for my child. Would a man ever have beeen asked this? (Luckily by the time this decision was presented I was working with child care in place. No apology from the Unemployment people, though.)
I struggled against discrimination and now I am expected to hand over hard won rights to a bunch of spoiled weans who cannot even conduct a civilised discussion? Aye, right.
The Gender Recognition Act and the Hate Crime Act are both flawed pieces of legislation which were imposed on Scotland against the will of the Scottish people so that Nicola Sturgeon and her clique of supporters could get themselves lined up for good jobs and great pensions.
When will SNP supporters ever learn?
(It’s so grassroots that for just £1,800 you and some pals can hobnob with Humza Yousaf and, um, Janey Godley at their annual dinner at the Hilton later this month
Godley is a figure that sums up exactly where we are. She’s sold out what principles she had to extend her career so she’s become firmly part of the new Scottish establishment as well as trying to cement herself as a figure in the UK establishment. Sure, she’s had to support Queer Theory & the rape culture embedded within it not to mention the mutilation of vulnerable children and adults, but it gets her on TV and a seat next to power at expensive meals.
But since 2018 or so, for the first time in my life, my answer has changed. If you ask me now whether I believe in Scottish independence, I’ll say “Yes, in principle“.
Me too. I’ve been on a journey since 2018 when I started to think that Sturgeon and her group were doing their best to avoid pushing for independence. Then once I peaked in regards Queer Theory and the Trans issue I realised just what Sturgeon and her cronies were doing.
During lockdown I watched Sturgeon being praised by people for doing exactly the same thing as Boris Johnson but with a sad face. Then there were the policies that had morphed from leftish socially democratic ones (on the whole) to increasingly neoliberal and bathed in identity politics. There was also an increasing incompetency as well as suspected corruption, not to mention a deliberate attempt to alienate a large section of not just SNP voters but people like me who support independence but wouldn’t always vote SNP. I foolishly thought then voting Green would also help but then again that was the party of Andy Wrightman and genuine eco-socialism rather than Ross Greer’s feeble student politics.
Now I’m at the stage where I’m probably not going to vote in the next elections making it the first time I’ve not voted since I was 18. I can’t support the SNP or Greens as they are now. Both are corrupt parties who’ve turned the cause of independence into a grift. Neither especially want it but they sure as hell know how to monetize the desire for it & use that desire to gain and maintain power.
I can’t vote Labour, nor would I consider Alba an option. I’d be insane to vote Lib Dem or Tory so opting out is the only thing left unless of course I spoil my paper. It’s so depressing that in 2023, when the Tories are wrecking so many lives the SNP’s main priority is maintaining the gravy train and enabling child abuse.
But sometimes things have to die so they can come back better and I think Stu’s mostly right here. Support for independence isn’t going to vanish. It remains at a good baseline to start any real independence campaign from however the problem lies in that nobody in their right mind wants the likes of Yousef, Harvie, Greer, etc making policy in an indy Scotland while the likes of Janey Godley, David Paisley and all the other Stasi-like grifters see their chance to turn us into the authoritarian hell they’d like us to live under.
Labour are coming to power next year. The SNP will be highly diminished in Westminster. One also hopes ongoing criminal cases results in prosecutions. The medical evidence against Transing children is now overwhelming and the amount of detransitioners rises each week as are the court cases starting to come forward. Things can change as quickly as they have over the last 5 years or so. I hope they do as they idea of these people in power (or coming to power) holding the reigns terrifies me.
This piece is red raw like an open wound, and lays bare the despondency that a lot (the majority?) of folk feel after witnessing the shambles play out over the last nine years. The present occupants of the SNP establishment and its parasitic infiltrators are having a serious impact on those same folks’ mental health. Cracks are there though, eh. The ones that lead to stress fractures and catastrophic failure, sooner or later. Let’s all keep a watching eye on ‘events’, and wish for a decent break in the weather. And those 70s days were the best, just like yer Mither told you at the time – red kola and Curries Lemonade bottles rescued from ditches and embankments all for the best cause: trading at the café for a Captain’s Ball.
The patriotic flame will never die!
There’s thousands of Independence supporters out in Edinburgh.
Don’t give your money to the Believe in Scotland collection box. Don’t kneel at the altar of Humza or Jamie Hepburn. They are liars!
You could put a rosette on a monkey and some of these people will still vote SNP.
Well. I think it’s a good thing so many people have turned out for Independence.
The British state won’t be happy. Get it up them.
Hail Alba. Independence!
I think it’s a good thing. The British State won’t be happy. There’s thousands upon thousands marching in Edinburgh. That’s encouraging! The natives are restless!
I’m watching the live feed of today’s Make Scotland Great Again, sorry, ‘Believe in Scotland’ rally. Attendance is better than I expected, so I’d say 5-10k at least.
However nobody who voted no or is at best sitting on the fence is going to be swung over by people chanting ‘FREEDOM’ and supporting a rally for a party that has no path towards that which they want.
Rallies like this or AUOB aren’t really about converting No/undecided voters but energising the base support. It’s a way to keep the faith but one has to have faith we’re heading towards independence than just being used to generate income and support as today clearly is.
As ever a great article Rev. Please keep doing what you do. No other journalist in Scotland can compare to your work.
Stuart MacKay @ 1.16pm
I agree with your comment. I don’t welcome a future, crushed between two opposing camps of moral absolutists, moral anarchy and moral conservatism. When it comes to intolerance, they are the mirror image of each other.
If yer really a desperado and huv nowt better tae ,like stick pins in yer eyes.
Here they are now
Given etal
https://www.facebook.com/IndyLiveStream/videos/kris-indy-events-group-indylive-isles-edinburgh-believeinscotland-scotland-indep/850768799943061/
Family” Family comprises of a Father (male) and a Mother (female) and if that makes me a homophobe then that’s what I must be otherwise
You’re a homophobe.
See, this is the flipside of Queer Theory and it’s barely hidden homophobia. Old school homophobic bullshit like this is rearing it’s ugly head again and rather than people realising they’re terrible people for wishing LGB suffer being second class people, they’re brazen enough to think it’ll be fine to add this sort of caveat.
LGB people had a good four or five years of being regular normal people with equal rights before the loons and the bigots ruined it for them.
@ Ian Brotherhood.
I’m oot n aboot the day and not on twitter, nitter, nor the shitter…
Howz the march numbers looking at Auld Reekie?
And have Underbelly been charging folk 15 quid to walk aboot oor capital city yet?
Further to my earlier comment (and BTW I meant to say ("Tractor" - Ed), not trackter).
The Rev finding himself moving towards the right ‘socially’ if not actually politically is the experience that many other commentators are undergoing. The Spectator, the Times, Telegraph, Unherd, Spiked etc seem to have become the home of many left wing journalists. Refugees from the Guardian, because they have been banned for GC views. Hadley Freeman, Suzanne Moore, Jo Bindel et all. SM wrote for the Guardian for 30 years. Now for the Telegraph, where she is free to write not just about gender but has the editorial freedom to criticise Conservatives in a Conservative paper.
A completely accurate article, and very brave.
Keep letting them know they mess with Wings at their peril.
Your journalism knocks their’s into a cocked hat.
You have anticipated how they will respond. They will give you more ammunition to shoot them down (metaphorically speaking). You are a giant compared to those midgets. There will be no progress towards independence until they have been swept away.
A gem of an article.
Stuart MacKay 9:58am
There is NO such thing as Democracy – As I keep saying on here and elsewhere Democracy Is An Illusion as I have PROVED on my video of that name on my william woods Youtube channel which is also on my Billy Carlin Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute channels – all EVIDENCE that I took through the corrupt Courts right up to the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
The Courts just like the UN, EU, UK, US, Countries, Governments, including the Scottish Government, Political Parties, Police, Health Service, Hospitals etc etc are all Private Corporations listed on Dun & Bradstreet and being traded on the New York Stock Exchange for PROFIT and all worth £hundreds of BILLIONS at least and the biggest laugh is how people like you think that the UK is a failed state because of Brexit when every country in the world is being DELIBERATELY destroyed by their own Private Corporation Governments and Political Parties as part of their One World Social Credit Government with NO cash and a digital currency and passport to control the population which they have set up in China first and are now attempting to roll out world wide.
These MAFIAS behind this agenda have been dividing people for thousands of years with their OCCULT Religions and Secret Societies, Politics – the left and right etc are all controlled by these people, Sex, Gender etc keeping the dumb masses fighting each other while these MAFIAS carry on with their agenda. Like I said every single political party is involved in this agenda and everything that is going on – only one MP Andrew Bridgen exposing what is going on especially with the bio-weapon death jabs and the massive amount of people dropping dead and being seriously injured by them every day and also the FACT that they are going to lock everyone down again and force even more of these jabs on EVERYONE by force this time – they want a permanent lock down under the guise of their totally FAKE Global Warming SCAM which is also part of this agenda.
We were all born with inalienable rights – no one can give or take away any of your rights hence why they conned our mothers into registering us into their SCAM Bonded SLAVE System as per my video. That all caps name – Capitis Diminutio – that is on your bank card, birth certificate, deeds of your house, voting card etc is NOT you but they have convinced you that it is – It is a Private Corporation as per my video and that is who owns the things that you think that you own. The biggest laugh is people spending £tens of thousands to get “married” and it is NOT them that are getting married – it is the all caps names Private Corporations that are getting married and new Trusts being formed. There is a reason that a Common Law marriage is so named because that is the REAL marriage – no need for the SCAM all caps name one or to create FAKE “rights” for anyone to get married gay or not.
I NEVER voted in the independence referendum and have never voted since I was kicked out of the SNP in 2006 – anyone who thinks that the SNP suddenly because corrupt and controlled since Sturgeon took over is living in la la land and there are plenty of people who also want independence who do NOT vote in any elections because they know how corrupt this system is and how clueless most of the people are re this especially those supposed people wanting independence from the MAFIAS controlled Private Corporation UK and THEIR corrupt banking system who want out of that and absolutely NO independence in the MAFIAS controlled Private Corporation EU and THEIR corrupt banking system – the EXACT same corrupt banking system that controls almost every country on this planet including these MAFIAS Private Corporation China.
That is also why they destroyed our countries by sending our jobs to China as part of their agenda and are flooding our countries with immigrants just now to get RID of countries and being part of that EU or United States of Europe with Scotland being a REGION in that and England being split into nine REGIONS is NOT going to make any different to any of you being stuck in your 15/20 minute neighbourhoods and NEVER being allowed out of them hence all of the ULEZ crap to get RID of all cars etc under their Global Warming SCAM as well. Being part of these MAFIAS EU and corrupt Central Banking System with massive FAKE debt is NOT independence.
I agree with a lot of this, and the sad thing is I don’t feel able to say so, amongst friends or at the school gate.
I voted No in 2014, quickly swung to Yes, but am now wavering.
However, my question is:
how have the implications of an Indy Scotland back in the EU – the calamity and sadness of a hard border with England – been addressed by this march / movement?
I’m not anti-English (well, only very very occasionally, by accident!), and I would reject any movement that was. Do all the people marching today know how that circle would be squared?
Scotland does have its uses.
https://archive.ph/XMoIJ
New Scot?
I’m glad I never wasted my time marching.
Humza didn’t reveal an Independence strategy.
EU Bearocrat lives matter!
Says Humza.
Give the Independence Industry your money, says Kelly.
What do we want? Your money. Says Gordon Kemp. Hand over your family silver.
What about trident in an Independent Scotland within the EU military block?
We’ll never get rid of it. I don’t want to sign up to anymore NATO wars.
Bairns not Bombs. No to the EU.
“…The oddest aspect of all this is the marketing of this nonsense as belonging to the political and progressive “left”
Dave Hansell: it is from the hard left. Cultural Marxism. It was hidden inside the huge former Labour exodus into the SNP, and allowed to infest every aspect of the party, with the help of, mainly, the devolutionists/gradualists and youthful ‘woke’ SNP staffers and MSPs. Before anyone gets annoyed and thinks I am defaming genuine former Labour independistas, I am not, because this bunch of hard left ‘regressive’ would have done exactly the same to Labour or any other party in power. Like the ‘regressive’ Greens, they saw an opportunity to gain power and influence for little outlay.
The people – all billionaires, all men – who back this stuff are in Ameria/Canada, up to their armpits in Big Tech, Big Pharma, etc. One or two of them are ‘trans’, and they are families who have invested in the next phase of global, corporate capitalism. Just as the SNP was and is the vehicle for the hard left ‘woke’ to advance, so they are being used, the gormless foot soldiers and the ultra stupid activists, to advance capitalism, the very thing they purport to detest. The billionaires want to make money from the new technologies coming into play now, but, in order to make that possible, they need to have society overturned by the useful idiots, who will carry on, if they are allowed to, to make everyone under 40 a medical patient for life, with a snapped-up NHS catering (privately) for their needs.
The philosophers, academics, psychologists, etc. who espouse this horse manure are all from the left. They believe in equality for all, they tell us, but what they actually mean is that they want equity. The former is sensible and achievable and is based on equality of opportunity; the latter is an impossible goal based on equality of outcome for all.
Hard left and far right are totalitarians/fascists. That much, they have in common. However, there is no doubt that the gender woo woo is directly born of the left. When was the last time you heard anyone on the right talk about equality, let alone equity? Of course, neither believes in equality for females; they only pretend to do so.
The gender woo woo have all their rights, same as everyone else, incidentally, and what they want is an extension to those rights, to the extent that they will have many more than everyone else. Most of them are interested only in new ways to get their rocks off, the more repulsive, the better, to the point where their dongles fall off and have to be replaced with new, bionic ones, where wombs can be grown in labs, child dolls are imported, et al. I read of one psychopath explaining that all needs could be catered for with AI, and sex crimes would cease. How long have blow-up lady dolls been around, and what were the rape statistics last year? The laws of the land are already crumbling under the onslaught.
Humza: “BUREAUCRAT Lives Matter.”
What do we want?
Your family silver. Oh dear oh dear.
At least Leslie Riddoch said that the EU membership should go to a vote.
EFTA is a better idea. I like it.
I’m heartened by the numbers of people that clearly went out today. Well done.
Just dissapointed at how gullible so many people are about the message.
They gave Humza a roaring cheer. I don’t know what newspapers these people read. It’s a shame. We get the politicians we deserve I’m afraid.
@ Billy Carlin at 3.52pm:
You are a raving nutter. You’re like David Icke on crack. I’m giving you a whole lot more attention than you deserve, so I’ll leave it at that.
Humza Yousaf: Scottish independence can fix ‘historic wrong’ of Brexit
Many FM might consider an earlier «historic wrong» more germane.
Fortunately, the rest of this sentimental whinging is behind The National paywall.
Thanks be to God for small mercies.
Most of these people are not evil, but foolish and easily led by the filth which Mr Campbell has depicted in his leader.
Its very easy to follow the flag and ignore the corruption, but that has happened many times before, 30’s Germany being an example. Independence is simply not worth the destruction of our society and family based outlook to compensate tiny minorities, no matter how voluble or over represented they become in public life.
LGBT++ are hugely over represented in both parliaments and the all powerful media, they are not some poor oppressed minority made to wear sackcloth or carry a star. They have become the oppressors who use the equality agenda to victimise the majority who just want a quiet life to bring up their children in a sane world.
The word homophobia is a complete cop out and is applied to anyone who tells the truth about the “Gay” or “Trans” lifestyles though hundreds of articles by medical and psychology experts have been written detailing the extreme negatives medical and social. Now we ordinary people who are usually monogamous and dedicated to the protection of our children and grandchildren find ourselves corralled by these power backed believers in alternative lifestyles.
Better that a few live with what they have become than a whole nation tethered to a ghost.
Michael Laing 9:16 am:
This cartoon succinctly sums it up:
http://steelcityscribblings.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/power-loves-identity-politics.jpg
Regards
Dave Hansell
Sorry guys, I have to disagree.
There seemed to be at least 10,000 plus there, maybe many times that.
What is far more clear is that the organisation was much more professional than we have seen on other marches even if that did make use of SNP expertise, although I expect a lot of that was down to Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp himself.
I also thought the speeches by Lorna Slater, Jamie Hepburn and yes, even, Humza, were excellent.
Credit where credit is due.
Here’s hoping they keep it up.
TURABDIN 4:05
Thanks for that link – I enjoyed reading the article.
I guess we Sovereign Scots could have let the place collapse, or maybes some unfortunate Scots could have been denied medical treatment or education so that HR could have spent the £10 mill needed for restoration.
But I don’t like either of these options. Far better the New Scot mentioned in the article spends her own dosh to do the place up.
P.S. If Humza had mentioned Alex Salmond in his list of past indy greats I may even have rejoined the SNP.
But he didn’t (or maybe couldn’t).
The end of any hope of the UK becoming a modern state ended with Blair in 1995. A book about him – Broken Vows The Tragedy of Power (a title that could so easily be used for NS too) gave evidence that he was always out for one thing only: money. And he was spectacularly successful at that.
https://archive.ph/jXzmA
But to get into a position where he could make serious money, first Labour had to be electable. What he pushed through in 1995 (Clause 4 amendment) got them elected and ended labour as a leftish wing party. Welcome to New Labour. From that time on, the people in England had no party to vote for other than those on the right. Labour proved who they considered their masters – ‘light touch’ financial regulation pre-2008. Blair pissed off before the shit from that policy hit the fan to go and make lots of money.
https://archive.ph/SbiEn
Sturgeon has done basically the same since 2015 (for whatever motive) but instead of openly changing any of the SNP’s key policies as Blair did, instead relied for ongoing support entirely on what had been achieved by Salmond’s SNP to hide what would become evident as the years passed. Given the utter political corruption of the New SNP since 2015, any hope of reforming it would be wishful thinking. The key question always seemed to be – Does the SNP look and act like a government in waiting? Since 2015 they were never serious about independence as the ‘caliber’ of their senior personnel showed all too clearly (too often with hindsight such is the power of hope over evidence). To call most of their MSP’s & MP’s since 2015 mediocre would be a compliment. They had become the Party that saved the union and they did it in a way that was a lot more despicable than anything than even the tories have done.
England still doesn’t (and never will again) have a political party with even some left leanings. No marches there to highlight dissatisfaction with the status quo. Voters there that want leftish policies are stuffed. Scotland isn’t in such dire circumstances and clearly does have very high support for changing the status quo, albeit with a slog ahead thank largely to the New SNP. But the SNP are probably finished. No wonder they are trying to distance themselves from Sturgeon (changing of the guard/out with the old bs).
I just hope that the fall of the SNP happens quickly so that a real party of independence can build the support needed to allow Scotland to get serious about it once again and escape from an unchangeable and economically/socially suicidal England pulling most of the strings in Scotland. But most importantly, for Scotland to choose and effectively follow it’s chosen political and economic future. Enough of the SNP and it’s love of the status quo.
I am not so sure it is a Anti- English sentiment,
The confusion appears because the Great Britain name often shape shifts to thename England and back again,
It makes treaties since the Treaty of union 1707 as the parliament of England as we have mentioned on here previously.
The problem arises how to define or distinguish a English person as separate from England – separate from Great Britain – separate from the UK when they are constantly intertwined over hundreds of years of history,
In Scotland the people are just known as Scots, not the Scottish devolved parliament, nor as Great Britain,
Thus we have the majority of Comments here referring to down south parliament as englands british english, as one amalgamated unit,
It is understood by most Scots that our in our nature we do not mean the ordinary man on the street in England,
But the ordinary man on the Street in England must understand that from a Scots, Welsh Or Irish point of view “The Great British Government thinks it is Englands Government of Great Britain,
It makes treaties of london and treaties in thename of the parliament of England,
It even acknowledges that 1707 parliament of Scotland was ratified out of the treaty of Union to become extinguished in 1707 prior to the new named entity of Westminster parliament into the self creation. New rebranded name Great Britain,
The actual people are no different between all four nations, as ordinary people in there daily wants and needs. For food, shelter, security, family, andJustice served fairly.
So do not take it to heart, plenty of people in England and Scotland have been taught the ” great divide and Conquer indoctrination” of hate thy Neighbour because it Suits Governments control to incite and divide the people into smaller groups for control.
I have always thought that all four nations of Britain should be independent and be in total control of their own nations democratically.
I live in Scotland so my loyalty And support is for Scottish independence,
People in England should consider making their nation independent also free from Globalisation, wokery and climate change nonsense,
Likewise Wales and Ireland,
It is a fact that more nations are recognising the need now to retracti from the dominance of one world order as they witness their Countries being demolished and big brother controlling free speech, travel, cars, enviroment, social IDs, credit scoring people into enslavement,. and multipul land grabs from ordinary people as their mortgages crash under big banks capital system.
Do not think Scots are your enemy but perhaps your new allies,
the ordinary man, woman and child, all people on every Street must recognise this new paradigm to survive regardless of past history,
All ordinary people are victems.
Dan says:
2 September, 2023 at 3:07 pm
@ Ian Brotherhood.
I’m oot n aboot the day and not on twitter, nitter, nor the shitter…
Howz the march numbers looking at Auld Reekie?
Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp has estimated the numbers at 25k.
I’ve no reason to doubt it,.. but I do.
I’ve been on loads of marches, and frankly, guessing the numbers is near on impossible, but instead, you very much do get a sense when you’re on a “big” one. There’s a feeling when it’s a big one, and it wasn’t there in what I saw. So I reckon below 20k.
You don’t see gaps in the throng, and people trying to make headway against the crowd are pressed down to single file. It feels like the crush in a bar, or Hogmanay at the Tron back in the days before Edinburgh brought in the crowd control checkpoints and ruined Hogmanay in Edinburgh. The videos I’ve seen didn’t look like that today.
Do I believe it’s as high as 25k? No, afraid not. Do I believe it’s a low as 8k? No. So, somewhere in between. Half one and double the other, and you’re looking at 12.5k to 16k…. -ish. Probably as good a guess as anybody’s.
I think it’s big enough (just) for Humza not to be in trouble about the numbers. But that feels like the worst of all worlds. Not good enough to lift the banners and spirits high again, but not dismal enough for Yousaf to call it a day and quit from the humiliation.
Scotland’s death by a thousand let downs continues…
We are now on course for a plebiscite General Election where an SNP party failing in the polls will not entertain the obvious wisdom of the Scotland United approach to candidates. Oh joy.
Divided we fall, but yet, being united with these stupid douche bags seems just as unpalatable, and equally forlorn. They’re gonna fight the next fight as a rerun of 2014, and they’re going to blow it and lose.
If you wanted to make Brexit your battleground, where the fk were the SNP in 2016 when the UK had an existential Constitutional crisis on it’s hands? That boat has sailed. It’s been the only “successful” boat launch there’s been on the SNP’s watch.
Independence was literally right there in the palm of our hands, there for the taking. We’d won, with a Constitutionally sovereign stronghold , underpinned by an emphatic 62.5% democratic majority, we were there! Across the line! Close the damned trap! We’ve got them!
But no… with everything in our favour, the SNP and that useless %#@! Sturgeon, chose to volunteer Scotland’s insipid and unforced capitulation. And oh how these SNP sycophants and gobshites cheered, in between their grovelling excuses.
What a fkg bleak horizon for Scotland in every direction.
I don’t know what the answer is.
I mean I do, it’s unequivocally Scotland’s sovereignty and Constitution steered by SALVO which can win this, but given this Scottish Government, somehow that feels like handing a loaded gun to a child. And a spoiled brat child at that…
How do we rid our cause of this crippling absurdity?
@ Breeks: I am hoping that Geff Bush will come in at some point to tell us that the Salvo people on the march signed up thousands for Liberation.scot.
As I have mentioned before, I am a prisoner of hope.
Dangerous malcontents such as Stu Campbell are why we must have only a state press for information and why the internet must be made safe from people like Stu Campbell.
Excellent writing, Rev, someone has to say it and you do it extremely well.
Re midget gems, Leask was apparently deleting any references BTL on his articles at the Herald to the £1 a year rent paid by the husband of Susan Aitken for a gallery in the Saltmarket area of Glasgow. I spoke to a New Scot who was working there and they told me that they were not there for the experience but that the contacts they made there would be invaluable for their career.
Billy Carlin.
Add to that all the videos on Maui, Hawaii wild fires being blame on climate change .
Climate change dissconnected their internet the day before, climate change provided noWarning System and Climate Change gave the police orders to corral the population within the heart of fire area,
Over a hundred children missing over a thousand dead.
No one is allowed back, to search, to film or use drones even although the bodies and premises have been cleared nearly a month afterwards,
American Army base nearby did not provide immediate response if any to help vacate the people, some people were jumping into the sea,
However it looks latterly with many rumours it looking more like it will be a state land grab of the scorched earth area from the native Hawians
JOHNMAIN @4:33 pm
Agree, the place would probably become a ruin if left to local initiative. It is ever thus, alas, regardless of country.
Whatever, the adopted «gender», good for you, though I doubt I could ever afford to stay there.
This person is from my birth land and is probably related to members of the entourage of Hejazi Hashemites for whom the British created a throne.
Might there be a Hashemite tartan?
Ya salaam, as we say. roughly OMG, WOW!
It was more than I expected but no where near 25k.
Considering the publicity given by the National and other side groups plus a nice day, went in their favour.
It was all too twee and controlled.
Someone posted up the grassroots Glasgow one where we were all dancing in the rain.
That was a proper show of strength
I agree with every single word of this piece, and from discussions I’ve had with my family, husband, daughters, sons and grandchildren, who out of 13 only 3 are not of voting age, they do to. How sad it’s come to this, but I haven’t been physically able to vote for these charlatans in yonks, certainly aided by Blackford lying through his teeth whilst being grilled by me, when he was campaigning for GE2019. Will never forgive the sanctimonious wee dick. Will never forgive the NuSNP for making me feel this way.
A word of advice to any politician from any party campaigning for the next one, lie to my face and don’t be surprised to find your exposed in the local press. You all know bloody fine “what a woman is.”
Alastair Crooke former British Diplomat who knows his stuff re politics and current affairs said a month or so ago, in the not to distant future it wont be left v right, it will be woke v non woke.
I agreed at the time and after reading this article it reinforces my belief, although at this moment in time i would still vote for Indy with the hope we could get rid if them after Independence.
I’m fucking embarrassed and enraged by how fucking pigshit thick and totally useless the Scottish government is now. The absolute anti-intellectual, deranged dregs of the country, thinking they’re useful and superior to others! Incredible. I wish I could leave Scotland, quite frankly, but I’m too old to go. Having these eighth-wit cunts representing Scotland on the world stage is genuinely more than I can bear. Fifth columnists tollie torpedoers, all of them, too stupid to realise how FUCKING STUPID AS SHIT they are.
Ignore what SNP say, watch what they do.
@ Breeks
Aye, those couple of big AUOB marches in Glasgow and the first one in Edinburgh were quite something to be in amongst. As you say you could just feel the energy buzzing from the vast crowds.
The Glasgow ones in particular were amazing, buses full of folk from all over Scotland brought huge crowds for as far as the eye could see. The big Samba band playing as we marched, and I also mind the saxophone being played out a window in Glasgow and the crowd joining in. We thought we were near the front, but when we made it to the point you could look about 1/4 mile down the hill into Glasgow city centre it was chokka full of folk and Saltire flags in front of us.
It took almost 2 hours to complete the march, and when I arrived at Glasgow Green I asked a copper about the numbers, he had just been radioed to say that the last of the folk had only just started the march route!
I marshaled on buses put on by YES groups to numerous other AUOB events across Scotland, and also went to many others riding with the YES Bikers. Sounds like those running today’s event could barely muster 20 percent of what grassroots AUOB managed to do previously, and that was with all sorts of obstructions trying to stifle AUOB’s success.
And on that last point, when was today’s event first proposed, as seem to recall AUOB had months of administrative processes to get their events officially organised and ticking all the required boxes prior to being allowed to run.
I no longer care what the SNP sheep do. I will never vote for them again and I hope many more people take that position. Our FM is only pro Cult, pro money and prob Humza.
@ Dan re your last para on whether this march had any problems getting permissions, they were allowed their speeches on Scottish Parliament ground, apparently. I seem to remember AUOB had a battle to be allowed into the big park below Arthur’s Seat – they should have asked the Parliament instead!
Chic Macgregor above said Lorna Slater, Humza and Jamie Hepburn gave “excellent” speeches. I am stunned and look forward to hearing views from others.
I also thought the speeches by Lorna Slater, Jamie Hepburn and yes, even, Humza, were excellent.
Chick McGregor.
Words mean SFA, action is what’s needed are you seriously now saying that after a decade of lies and deceit and carrot dangling by the SNP, that this one poxy march has somehow changed the very same people from destroying independence to actually wanting to achieve it?
This march means nothing, the SNP are trying to co-op the indy masses/marchers and fool them into re-electing them firstly at the next GE then again at Holyrood in 2026.
The SNP are no longer a part for Scottish independence, currently its a party of grifters and careerists, the last decade has show that.
I’d still vote Yes.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand have all gone insane in the name of troonery, but you still don’t see any of them offering to be ruled by Westminster.
James Che 5:46pm
Yep these fires in Maui were done with Directed Energy Weapons as people there are exposing and how many of the roofs of the buildings, especially those of the rich and famous, being covered in blue sheeting – lasers burn through all colours but NOT blue as many are also showing as well.
Of course people who are incapable of using their own brain cells or whose cognitive dissonance are extremely strong such as Michael Laing at 4:20pm will think people like us who actually use our brains are “nutters” as he says – he should stick to his trainspotting and maybe he will get a badge for the most train numbers he will amass and it will save him from taxing his brain cell.
Got to laugh at people like him who are clueless as to the difference between Fractional Reserve DEBT Banking and National CREDIT and the difference between Legal and LAWFUL and totally clueless about Contract and Trust Law and how everything that our governments and political parties and courts/legal system is total FRAUD and AGAINST Contract and Trust Law in this corrupt scam Cestui Que Vie Trust Bonded SLAVE System that were are born into when they con our mothers into REGISTERING us handing over OWNERSHIP of us and everything that we will ever own to the MAFIAS that own and control this planet as per my video via that all caps name – the Capitis Diminutio Romans SLAVERY that Michael and most others are clueless about and yet he and other call ME nutters because I actually use my brain to do my own research and sift out the DISINFO etc.
Of course the Stockholm Syndrome kicks in when people are told about their slavery – wanting to remain slaves of their masters or being “independent” under another of their masters Private Corporations they created to replace their old ones.
As per my video The Democracy Illusion we have all been FREE since 2012 when all of these MAFIAS Private Corporations were Foreclosed (SHUT DOWN) causing the Pope to resign back then because their Cestui Que Vie Trusts were collapsed and replaced by the OPPT Peoples Trusts but as per my video the corrupt puppet governments and political parties have not told the people any of this as they try and bring in this NWO agenda as per my last comment.
People are clueless as I said about Contract and Trust Law and how the legal system is corrupt and NOTHING to do with Law and is there to protect this SCAM Slave System. You are almost on the ball re Treaties etc James – Go search for “No Treason No VI The Constitution Of No Authority (1870) Lysander Spooner pdf” on the oll.libertyfund.org website that excellent exposes how NO Constitution, Treaty, Magna Carta etc relates to anyone in any country because it is totally against Contract Law etc and only relates to those who have signed them – even back then this guy is exposing the men behind the curtain that really run the governments etc only the Rothschild’s like the Royals/Kings/Queens etc work for the VATICAN as per my video and also exposed on the video CORONAGATE on Richard D Halls site which also exposes how the Vatican owns and controls Switzerland hence why the banks are controlled from there and how the WEF etc operates from there as well.
Speaking to an Irish friend a couple of weeks ago (a Dubliner in her mid-40s) she was saying that she has long-standing Scottish friends and whenever they’re together they’ve always enjoyed getting stuck right into the politics. But lately, she said, the Scots have always steered the conversation back to NI politics because, although it’s hellish complicated, the Scottish scene is just too embarrassing. They can’t even agree with one another about what’s happening let alone explain it.
The headlines on the radio news this evening give us a clue as to why it’s such a mess – a wee blurb about today’s Edinburgh gathering is followed by an excerpt of Yousaf shouting his head off about a ‘cost of union crisis’ followed by a statement (for ‘balance’, obvs) that Scottish opposition parties have accused the FM of being obsessed with independence.
If you even try to start unpicking that for the benefit of folk who aren’t as nerdish about the scene as we are, it soon becomes tortuous: ‘The SNP doesn’t actually want independence but if the opposition parties don’t go along with this charade then it turns out that the Holyrood parliament really is just the parish council that Blair reassured jittery critics it would be.’
And then, when asked why the SNP doesn’t support independence and why ALBA does but isn’t winning elections, it has to be explained that it’s led by Salmond and he’s ‘damaged goods’ and that’s why there’s so much acrimony within what used to be called ‘the Yes movement’, yada yada…it’s no wonder folks’ eyes just glaze over and they start clamouring to get back to analysis of Sinn Fein’s current problems with wokery.
“Let me tell you ladies and gentlemen, the people of this country are not suffering from a cost of living crisis, they’re suffering from a cost of the Union crisis.”
He said: “All the suffering that people are having to endure at the moment, there’s the cost of living crisis,”
——————————————–
Maybe he should make his mind up.
Ian Brotherhood @ 7:53 pm
“although it’s hellish complicated, the Scottish scene is just too embarrassing.”
For sure. Though predictably so, given our ‘condition’, and our experienced adversary, and what we know about colonial societies and relevant theories.
Yet our predicament and its solution is fairly straightforward once we become aware of the three essential elements in the decolonization process, viz:
1. Colonialism – the realisation and understanding of our ‘condition’;
2. Liberation – as the only remedy for the colonial condition; and,
3. UDI – as the means to achieve liberation from the colonial condition.
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2023/09/01/the-new-thinking/
Unfortunately the SNP and much of the independence movement has yet to arrive at number 1 – its understanding ‘remains rudimentary! Which is why it has yet to find the remedy or the means.
chic mcgregor at 4.31
Eh?? If you honestly think that that band of chancers who haven’t attended a single indy march in a decade are up there doing anything other than trying to con gullible numpties into keeping SNP arses cosy in Holyrood and WM then you really need to seek help.
Just look at the job that has been done on Salmond and Salmond’s SNP since 2014. Full scale assault from within and without. That is telling us something we do not know…
I am very apathetic to Indyref2 for the simple reason I have come to the conclusion we either won Indyref1 or it was much closer than we are led to believe and they simply cheated it. They do ten times worse every day… before and since 2014.
And then they quietly went mental. Tried to stitch up Salmond and went full trans woke to ideologically poison the ‘consensus’ well and salt the fields of the SNP.
Who is they? Same folks who run the world, same folks the UK government grovels to on a daily basis, as does most of the EU, them.
So put yourself in my shoes and ask if you believed Indyref1 was cheated would you give a f**k about Indyref2 or 3 or 4 or whatever? That is the definition of insanity.
There is a simple solution way to get rid of the grifter, career politician, fake indy parasites:
Never vote SNP or Green. Encourage other people to do the same.
Alex Salmond is wrong, wrong, wrong, when he tries to keep the SNP millstone tied round the neck of independence supporters with his united for indy crap.
Will someone please remind Alex, this isn’t 2014: The SNP don’t want independence. They capitulated and settled for British political careers.
@Alf Baird (8.44) –
Thanks for response.
I’d intended ‘hellish complicated’ to refer to the NI situation but I see now that my phrasing was clumsy. No matter – it applies to our predicament all the same, especially when viewed by others.
If there was any genuine goodwill/solidarity/intellectual curiosity in the independence movement right now then we might expect some effort to address the whole ‘colonialism’ issue but it’s safer for them that it be avoided. And so we are subjected to an endless conga-line of careerist airheads and C-list ‘celebrities’ larping as politicians, taking turns to just bleeuurghhh the same rhetoric we’ve been hearing since Sep 19th 2014.
When I started reading Rev’s post today I really believed it was building up to an announcement of imminent closure. Thankfully, it didn’t. But a lot of folk must surely be feeling that we’ve pretty-much run out of road. Who would blame them?
Pete Wishart claimed, last night, that ‘all eyes’ were on Edinburgh in advance of this historic gathering. As usual, he didn’t read the room. The eyes in the heids of those who really care about the cause are not distracted by the First Activist doing his Very First Activism in front of an adoring throng. We remain focused on Operation Branchform, the whereabouts of the Murrells, the imminent legal action by AS against Lesley Evans, and the walls closing-in around Women ‘H’.
There’s a lot to look forward to. And thanks be to all the gods that we have still this place, to help make sense of it all as and when it unfolds.
😉
Ian Brotherhood…
Not forgetting Craig Murray turning (hopefully) the UN’s attention to the sorry state of so-called ‘justice’ in Sturgeon’s Scotland.
Despite email, I’ll wager Scotland’s legal system remains the world’s biggest consumer of plain brown DL sized manilla envelopes!
This place is as always, delightfully bonkers.
Just remember, the Scots have been the world’s greatest colonisers in human history. Not Doun Hauden at all. Up and at the world since 1707, turn a profit from it.
Hey, I’m not saying I buy the ‘show’ just that it was very professionaly done, the speakers and speeches were well rehearsed, the music was good.
Lessons can be learned.
I’m pretty certain that undecideds watching would be nudged away from the dark side. Which is a good thing.
Whether it is being done for evil motives, i.e. only to gain votes for the SNP at the next election and then discarded immediately thereafter or for genuine pro indy reasons, time will tell.
I will certainly NOT be rejoining the SNP unless there is clear, evidence of a genuine change of priorities like welcoming Alex Salmond back into the fold or at least working with Alba, Salvo and other pro indy actors. And I do not expect that any time soon.
I also believe and have done for a very very long time, longer than most of you here, that the SNP has been infiltrated by British agents.
Ian Brotherhood @ 9:31 pm
“We remain focused on Operation Branchform, the whereabouts of the Murrells, the imminent legal action by AS against Lesley Evans, and the walls closing-in around Women ‘H’.”
Thanks Ian, and yes, much to anticipate. There must be a few good people left in what is a mankit colonial system in the process of collapse.
@robertknight (9.47) –
Aye, good shout.
It’s quite a shock, sometimes, when you’re reading stuff by people you admire, like Craig Murray, then remember that you’ve met them, seen them in real-life. There must be thousands of us who’ve met Craig.
And then you remember that he actually spent, what, four months (?!) in prison, most of that in ‘solitary’, when his wife was dealing with a newborn child and his health wasn’t great…
And then you remember why we was incarcerated…
And then you recall wee snatches of the discourse here, the MSM treatment of Alex Salmond’s trial, the appalling ‘Harassment Inquiry’ proceedings, Sturgeon’s 8-hours of sheer brassneckery, the disgustingly high-handed behaviour of Dorrian, the thwarted witches in the Edinburgh cafe…
We have every right to be spitting-mad and Humza’s antics today have done nothing to heal or help in any way. It’s plain that they’re intent on digging-in and will continue to exploit witless/desperate supporters for as long as they can.
We can’t let these dirty evil bastards win.
We just can’t.
A tour de force. Chapeau!
jeez Stu, your writing abilities are without peer.I salute you sir.
Every single one of these clowns will be gone one day, gang.
Scotland the nation will still be standing.
Don’t let the fuckers get you down
@ASA
You might think some people on here are bonkers (I do as well but I’m certain they are all sincere in their beliefs), however you are just as much of a crank as anyone posting BTL.
If you really were the person you say you are, with all that experience you claim, I really think you could have managed more than 22 signatures for your wee bit petition in over 3 months.
So, to make you feel a bit better about yourself, to stop your spleen exploding from hatred of your (alleged) fellow Scots, I’ll help you out a bit. No need for thanks. I’m that kind of a guy.
Here’s a link to the petition for all the unionists who have turned up in today’s comments…
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/638166
Let’s see how many more signatures Our Crank in Norfolk can get with a bit of free publicity.
As for Scots being the greatest colonisers in history…it’s cranky, crazy statements like that one which might explain your 22 signatures and does explain your persistent bullying of oor Alf.
You seem desperately in need of a hobby, I’m sure there’s a Flodden re-enactment society somewhere. A 30-second search online found this guy who does toy soldiers and everything,
http://camisado1500s.blogspot.com/2018/09/1513-flodden-tudor-english-and.html?m=1
…looks exciting…for a military fella like yourself anyway…maybe he’ll sign your petition as well.
What do you have to lose?!!
I hear your last point that, it’s noticeable that it’s figures on the right wing of politics who have been respectful and not tried to witch hunt, your opinions.
If we zoom out from Indy and we look at the madness perpetrated world wide on civil liberties in the name of protecting us peasants from covid, again I noticed that the more supposedly defining as left wing, the government, the more draconian and illogical the lockdown rules & the nonsense around face rags. Meanwhile, it was almost exclusively the more traditional right wing intellectual voices who were describing the assault on liberties and on common sense.
During the pre Musk twitter era 2020 to 2022, I saw about 30 scientists & intellectuals removed or heavily censored. I found that I frequently tried to share something and twitter warned me if I did so, my account would get temporarily suspended too. There was a very clear Orwellian control of one official (nonsensical and frankly unscientific) narrative. No one who actually was qualified to discuss the risks eg of the experimental jags or of where covid sars2 arose from, was permitted to speak freely.
The latest fear mongering is around climate change being anthropogenic versus natural cyclical change. If you dare to even challenge presumptions, you get called a climate denier. There is an entire climate change industrial complex worth hundreds of billions with maybe tens of thousands of jobs which depend on perpetuating the climate alarmist worldview. Then there are many extremely qualified and credible atmosphere physicists who do challenge the narrative but if you listen to the BBC and to any political party, all you will hear is this claim that the science is settled and there is consensus- but the only consensus is among politicians and those who sell the news.
Admittedly, most of the public hasn’t taken the time to truly investigate the dissonant voices and what they say. However, once again, apart from a minority of politicians on the right wing, it’s practically heresy for anyone on the supposed left, to raise their head above the parapet and call out, why for example is Germany replacing reliable energy power stations and renouncing nuclear for intermittent and expensive wind turbines which have a very short life span of use.
Sadly, we live in an era, when if you try to simply point out that 2+ 2 makes 4 and not 5, Big Brother calls you a ‘far right conspiracy theorist….even if your primary political values have always been to the left of the SNP and Labour, in terms of redistribution policies to create a fairer society.
We live in a time, where if you don’t follow the majority left of centre middle class Guardian columnists’ prejudices, they will write in their columns about how that makes you just another heretic.
Sciences and politics is not just about perceptions- it should be about open minded debate and challenging the presumptions held.
I also have always wanted Scotland to run its own affairs but it’s also imperative that we don’t replace a kleptocratic and corrupt Westminster for an authoritarian & puritanical equally morally corrupt Holyrood.
Agreed Livionian,
The idea that we should give up on a thousand years of independence because there may may be a few fuckwits calling the shots for a brief moment in history, is to me, egregious short-termism and turns a blind eye to any other wrongs done to us by Westminster meantime.
It’s completely illogical.
I went outdoor swimming. I do have real life hobbies apart from Independence but truth be told I’m really heartened by the number that clearly turned up.
I did my best to disrupt the proceedings on Independence live with my very valid comments about the EU and NATO. And then 8 was cancelled.
I want Independence. I just know that the SNP won’t deliver it but to the British State.
Get it right round you. To Charles and Ugly bastard Riki 2 snacks. At their Balmoral shin dig.
Man the barricades that’s all I can say.
Did you ever get an answer to this?
https://wingsoverscotland.com/the-bullshitter/
I will continue to spoil my ballot until the SNP produce a plan for Independence.
Vote for evil. Get evil. Spoiling my council ballot was one of the fee decisions I’ve ever made.
Graeme George says:
2 September, 2023 at 1:53 pm
I agree with every word Stu except legalising gay marriage was not in my option giving equal rights to homosexuals it was rewriting the definition of ”Marriage” Marriage is the joining together of a man and a woman in matrimony and same sex adoption is rewriting the meaning of the word ”Family” Family comprises of a Father (male) and a Mother (female) and if that makes me a homophobe then that’s what I must be otherwise I believe homosexuals should enjoy the same rights as any other member of society
____________________________________________________
John C says:
2 September, 2023 at 3:06 pm
Family” Family comprises of a Father (male) and a Mother (female) and if that makes me a homophobe then that’s what I must be otherwise
You’re a homophobe.
_____________________________________________________
WOW it only took an hour for the usual slurs to appear with the usual intent to marginalise , denigrate and silence any other opinions or beliefs, any dissent or disagreement from the civic progressives mantra and you are an outcast and labelled
It is this very inability to LISTEN rather than label that has led us to the very position we are in
THIS automatic labeling of people who have opinions about homosexuality contrary to the woke progressive ideology is just to shut people up
IT is no different to the trans activists labeling ANYONE who disagrees with their feels as terfs
What you’re observing is what I call political busy work. It’s what all governments do to pretend that they’re doing something, while they fail hopelessly on the stuff you and the majority want them to do. It’s not limited to any political body. It’s driven in part by those not truly in power – activists, media, lawyers, judges, civil servants, etc. Because the stuff we all want (national prosperity, low criminality, housing, etc) is very hard to deliver, politicians look for small victories and those not in power have a long list of small things they want done. So instead of a small efficient government that concentrates on the important stuff, we get a hideous construct of bolt on ideas that dangerously destabilize the basic structure. Ministers forgive themselves for not delivering the priorities because they have delivered a pile of things, albeit things you didn’t want. The EU is a master of busy work. The UK government is no better. Why would the SNP government be any different?
The trick is to ditch the busy work and return to the big issues. To start giving the majority, more of what they want… only I’ve no idea how to get a government to do that. Answers on a post card.
I left the SNP when the party took the Greens on board. The Greens are a cult, not a political movement. Look what they did to the German economy, and look what they are going to do to Scots. Forgive them not, for they know what they are doing. The next dictatorship won’t be red, black or brown. It will be green, and it will be as bad as all the others. And the SNP has brought them aboard.
I rarely comment although I read everything here. I think this is the best articulation of what is wrong with the current state of Scottish politics and a fantastic piece of journalism. Can’t disagree with a single word. In 2014 we had “astroturf” grass roots movements. It took the modern SNP nine years t come up with theirs which will be as unsuccessful as Rory the Tory and others. I have always been puzzled that people could embrace hard core intolerance as something remotely left wing. It is as radical right wing as the Christian right of the 1960s.
Lorna Campbell,
It says Daz on the side of buses but they don’t sell soap powder.
Just because someone claims to be x,y, or z means diddly squat. The only relevant question is does something do what it says on the tin? Does it meet the relevant and claimed criteria?
Right now there are biological men walking round insisting they are really actual women and vice versa. Do you believe them? Do you accept that claim and amplify it?
Right now there are Unionists as well as die hard SNP loyalists who will claim in all seriousness – albeit from different perspectives – that the SNP is a danger to the Union/the only vehicle to Scottish Independence. Do you believe them? Do you accept that claim and amplify it?
Course you don’t.
Why?
Because both of these claims do not do what it says on the tin. They don’t meet the claimed and recognised criteria of what they claim to be.
Right now there are millions of people who are convinced that a bloke in white cassock and hat residing somewhere in Italy who is complicit in the persecution of Eastern Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe is a ‘Christian’ who represents the values and meets the criteria of ‘Christianity” – just like the medieval crusaders in the Holy Land or the Jesuit Inquisition:
There is every likelihood that the original head of the Christian Church would strongly disagree on the basis that this ain’t what it says on the tin.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2022/05/13/banning-the-russian-orthodox-church/
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2022/12/17/is-the-pope-a-catholic-or-just-another-nato-stooge/
Right now there are millions of people who seriously think de-industrialising your economy and basing it on fiat money and parasitical rent seeking financialisation (the FIRE sector) is actual died in the wool capitalism.
If they were alive today the likes of Adam Smith, David Hume et al would be arguing that it is nothing of the sort on the grounds that the operating criteria and philosophy has more to do with feudalism than Capitalism.
Self-id etc has bugger all to do with the Class based criteria of the political left and lesson one of undermining 101 – which is exactly what has happened here – is to get people to believe the opposite of the criteria at the heart of what they claim to stand for.
Dog whistle nonsense tropes about “cultural Marxism’ is merely part of this smoke and mirrors approach. I would suggest a few hours watching Alan Bleasdale’s “GBH” would be time well spent.
Nowhere in the world has an 89 year old independence party gained independence. Successful votes have been typically gained by “new” movements, and won by massive majorities. Arguably the Constitutional Convention to 1997 referendum (73% Yes) was such an event.
That said, it’s not clear where, or when such an opportunity will arise for Scotland, as regards full independence.
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/366
As I’ve said previously, there is no way back from where the Twitler Youth, the wokeratti and all the other assorted pathological narcissists have dragged the SNP, making it a personality cult – Saint Nicola’s Party.
The brand is FUBAR.
It’s a turd that cannot be polished further and will go the way “Scottish” Labour went.
Don’t waste time with them, they are the past desperately trying to remain relevant.
On one thing the Rev is right: we cannot become an independent country and increase the powers of any Scottish institution while these deranged narcissistic sociopaths have captured them.
What we must defeat is the apathy of the disillusioned Scots, light up a beacon of hope and gather them in huge numbers to tip the scale.
A show of strength, so overwhelming that this small minority of extremely vocal and violent misogynists will crumble in fear and hide back in the round of hell they crawled out of.
@Dave Hansell says:3 September, 2023 at 9:32 am
the original head of the Christian Church
I read that phrase with some innarest.
Who was the “original head of the Christian Church” then?
I’ve racked my brains and applied all of my knowledge of history and theology and I’m stumped.
Accepted it’s quite a bit O/T, but hey, you started it.
David Hansell, Lorna Campbell
Dead thread so maybe we will get the peace to discuss this.
Lorna, I mostly agree with your assessment of the origin of the gender project – billionaires with establishment connections funding uprooted marxist gunslingers who detect a common cause. I don’t agree with your negative views expressed on Wings sometimes of those green policies aimed (perhaps not that well) at restricting those economic activities which damage climate or nature.
My understanding of Cultural Marxism is that it’s the post Gramscian outlook on what the revolution needs to be, as elaborated by Marcuse and such. I’ve not read this in depth for much the same reason I’ve not read Protestant theologies in depth – my poor catholic brain can’t make sense of it. The CM term has of course been seized by the US oil-funded usually WASP propaganda outlets which some folk posting here think are better sources than the MSM. The site you linked to is an RU outlet, far as I can tell.
The Scottish Green Party has a group of marxists, notably Maggie Chapman of the Democratic Left Scotland, at it’s centre. DLF is the descendant of CPGP. CPGB was Hard Left. SWP also support gender self-ID, which means they also must take Queer Theory seriously.
So, Davis Hansell, how is the activism for gender self-ID not a marxist project? Admittedly the marxists involved aren’t the brightest. Is there another hard left that lampoons gender politics or do they restrain themselves to ridiculing Pope Francis.
To save you reading through my previous posts, I self-ID as atheist but am cultural catholic, which may hold the answer to the question I’ve posed you!
Wings resonates with my feelings on nuSNP exactly.
At the next general election, a lifelong SNP voter, who desires only independence, I will never vote SNP. The thought repulses me.
I hope for the SNP’s annilation at Rutherglen and all elections. A political ‘trip to Switzerland’. Scotland must quickly put SNP’s cancerous body, feeding off false hope, out of its misery.
Ireland had false dwawns, which held back independence for years, until the people realised the painful truth.
In the last Holyrood Election, I only voted SNP1 because Alex Salmond (strategic genius) requested it, to destroy tory legitimacy in Scotland.
The SNP howled against such radical intervention. It chose, instead, its current protracted, wasting death, obvious in today’s bloated, thrashing body political.
I bought the SNP one-way Swissair tickets long ago.
Tricky things, political philosophies, manifestos and such. This one from a century ago
Democracy:
Universal suffrage with a lowered voting age to 18 years, and voting and electoral office eligibility for all ages 25 and up;
Proportional representation on a regional basis;
Voting for women;
Representation at government level of newly created national councils by economic sector;
The abolition of the Italian Senate (at the time, the Senate, as the upper house of parliament, was by process elected by the wealthier citizens, but were in reality direct appointments by the king. It has been described as a sort of extended council of the crown);
The formation of a national council of experts for labor, for industry, for transportation, for the public health, for communications, etc. Selections to be made of professionals or of tradesmen with legislative powers, and elected directly to a general commission with ministerial powers.
Social justice: (they used a different term but same thing)
The quick enactment of a law of the state that sanctions an eight-hour workday for all workers;
A minimum wage;
The participation of workers’ representatives in the functions of industry commissions;
To show the same confidence in the labor unions (that prove to be technically and morally worthy) as is given to industry executives or public servants;
Reorganization of the railways and the public transport sector;
Revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance;
Reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55.
Defence:
Creation of a short-service national militia with specifically defensive responsibilities;
Armaments factories are to be nationalized;
A peaceful but competitive foreign policy.
Finance:
A strong extraordinary tax on capital of a progressive nature, which takes the form of true partial expropriation of all wealth;
The seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics, which constitute an enormous liability on the Nation and on the privileges of the poor;
Revision of all contracts for military provisions;
The revision of all military contracts and the seizure of 85 percent of the profits therein.
John Main: 11:07 a.m.,
“Original head” is simply another way of referring to the founder – which surely does not need a Janet and John?
frutella the hun: 11:27 a.m.,
Which bit of the metaphor of “doing what it says on the tin” is causing problems here?
Self-id etc is all about the individual and is the anti-thesis of the class based politics which is the fundamental base definition and criteria of anything which claims to be left politics. These numpties can call themselves WTF they want but when what they are about is seriously undermining class based politics – as detailed in my first contribution of this thread yesterday – it ain’t what it says on the tin.
A modicum of consistency would be appreciated here.
To repeat whats clear to a blind man on a galloping horse here; you don’t accept that a biological man’s claim that he is really a woman. Nor do you accept the claim that the SNP is serious about delivering independence for Scotland.
And the criteria used to arrive at those two conclusions is that they are not what it says on the tin.
How hard is it to apply that in a consistent manner?
I campaigned for Yes, I spent energy and time on it, missed out on family time and events I can not get back because I believed so strongly in an independent Scotland, but if there was a vote tomorrow I too would be unable to vote yes. Like Stu, I don’t think I’d be able to vote no, but if it has been so easy and taken so little time, relatively speaking, for all the systems, safeguards and almost all of our civil institutions to be corrupted so badly as it has, I am not sure I can honestly say we are ready or able yet to be a fully independent and responsible country. Womanhood comes before nationhood for me and seeing the SNP and others trying to destroy the very notion of womanhood has taken me from both feet in yes to back on the fence.
Are you implying there is no such thing as a Marxist now? It was of its time as an idea, proved impossible, and now anyone calling themselves that – liberators of the working class, agents of History – are just adopting a fashion, perhaps ironically? Trading on the brand to push some perversion?
Because if you are, there’s a few hundred thousand ex-Momentum members wanting a word! They, like other sects, do class AND self-ID. I’ve encountered the Green variety, before they had their current commission. They are, for sure, marxists. They said so, proudly, and I knew some of them when they were in marxist activist groups in the 70s/80s.
There are marxists clinging to the ghost of the Soviet experiment who perhaps have stuck with the one-time sensibilities of an urban proletariat and dodge the ‘middle class wankers” label.- perhaps you are meaning they are the genuine article.
I joined the Ecology Party in the late seventies after uni because the Left was full of silly little sects with no grasp at all of the unfolding world. Who thought they would incubate the Blair leadership? Who thought they would jump on the Gay/Feminist/Environmentalist movements and ride each to destruction? Well they did that, in line with Marx and Engles instructions given in 1848.
We’re still suffering from their delusions and their crass pursuit of a technotopia, carbon capture and “but what about China and India” on their lips. And, for many, the idea that gender is a matter of choice, there’s no such thing as human nature, it’s all a matter of will.
I thought in the run up to yesterday’s march that the organisers were pushing quite a clever new idea -Indy as an identity.
Clever because it plays to the current yoof zeitgeist, where each individual is the sum of a number of chosen identities.
It’s not a rational, worked out, grounded in the real world, point of view. It’s immune to logic, evidence and persuasion. In fact, to question the identity is tantamount to physical assault.
So if the nuSNP can make this work, they’re onto a winner, in terms of their long-term troughing plans.
And, like trans woo woo, it opens up an innarestin line of thought. Does a young Scot, self-identifying as an Indy Scot, already live in his own iScotland? It’s no more daft an idea than one of the other identities he may already hold, that he’s a laydee and to deny that is intolerable bigotry.
“They are, for sure, marxists. They said so, proudly,”
Just as biological men claim to be women on their own, proud, say so.
Do you believe them as well? Do you believe the SNP loyalists when they claim they will deliver Scottish Independence just on their, proud, say so?
Its not bleedin’ quantum mechanics. Class based politics – being collective by definition – is in both logic and practice incompatible with and contradictory to any approach founded on dividing people into ever smaller and smaller individual units in a manufactured hierarchy of oppression.
Self-id has more in common with Ayan Rand than Marx.
Like men who insist they are women it does not matter what such people “proudly” claim. They can believe whatever contradictory and reductive nonsense they want to. Does not mean that anyone has to take their word as gospel as to what they refer to themselves as.
This web site is rock solid on the principle of evidence. And the objective evidence does not support the subjective claim that class based politics and self-id are in any way compatible. Regardless of what a few thousand delusional and careerist Momentum activists ‘believe’.
Indeed, most of the critique is coming from within the left against this right wing based individualist parasitic approach:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jopp.12251
https://umutozkirimli.com/cancelled_theleftwaybackfromwoke/
Meanwhile, there’s certainly a debate to be had about how it has come about that sections claiming the mantle of the ‘left’ have been taken in by such contradictory and incompatible nonsense.
John Main
Don’t feed the troughers!
A stunning article rev you are an outstanding journalist.
Your post exposes how dangerous and useless the SNP are and their almost anti independence stance over the past nine years. With that in mind if we ever achieved indy these are the last people we would want to negotiate the separation.
A frightening thought,
“ They have to go first, then we can talk, and my inbox these days is jam-packed with a queue of lifelong indy campaigners saying much the same thing.”
I’m not a supporter of independence, and would if given the option vote against it. But, like Brexit, I’d accept it and move on with the country if the majority voted for it.
But it’s been obvious for some years now that the SNP loons would screw it up if it happened, and on that basis I think you’d be mad to support it whatever side you’re on. So I’m glad I seem to be on the same coin as you Stuart, at last, albeit on different sides of it.
One way of looking at this is not “what issues do I identify with” but “How do I look at issues”.
One part of conservative thought that you seem to be suggesting is
– “Manage change carefully whilst preserving the best of what we have!”
It’s not a modern idea – Thanks to Burke (1780’s) and Disraeli (1860’s) and others since. Till recently we were the healthiest, wealthiest, freest, most peaceful generation of humans anywhere and any time (and over a generation we still are).
It seems to me axiomatic that preserving that is a good thing so being cautious about changes to how we do things is justified. Same for you too Rev.
It’s the magical thinking that really pisses me off. I’m a grown up. Gonnae No. But they do. I have no idea who to vote for.
I would love an independent Scotland but nationalists ignore any tough problems; money, Barnet, currency, GDP, re-joining the EU, border with England, net zero, sex and gender. They tell us it will all be fine but in reality they canny even stop druggies killing them selves, build ferries or manage the sea or pretty much anything else.
On the wider point of telling the truth most nationalists have a fairly generously wide “Fairy land of belief”. Theirs is just even more fanciful than yours in my opinion. Because no-one in nationalism takes on the hard problems with honesty and humility. They don’t listen. Never solve a ptough problem by wishing it away.
The nationalists will succeed only when they restrict the magical thinking and talk about reality.
And answer the question “How is this no gonnae be a complete load of batshit?” as if it were the very serious question that it is.
@ Dick Wall at 6.01pm: The SNP’s failures have nothing to do with the demand for independence. You are creating irrelevant obstacles. I’ll tell you what the real “tough problem” is: being trapped in a political union and tied to a much more populous country with an entirely different political and cultural agenda, which has the power to outvote and disregard Scotland on every issue, every time. There is a complete absence of democracy. Scotland, so long as it remains in this ‘union of equals’ (Hahaha!) is powerless to do anything about anything. We are stuck with the lunacy of nuclear weapons that we do not want and a warmongering foreign policy that we have no control over. We are being robbed of our wealth and resources. We have to suffer an economic system of gross inequality that a majority of Scots have been voting against since 1955. The issue of democracy, or the total lack of it, is vastly more important than the failures of a particular political party. These issues can only be resolved when Scots have the power which comes with independence to create the kind of society we want, and to dismiss politicians who fail to do what they were elected to do.
Why do people keep mentioning the Barnett Formula as something pertinent to an independent Scotland?
That formula is used to calculate how much cash the Scottish colony gets from Westminster to finance the devolved powers. As all revenues generated by an independent Scotland will remain under Scottish administration, there will be NO Barnett formula.
Why should Westminster send any cash to an independent Scotland?
@Michael Laing says:4 September, 2023 at 6:55 pm
warmongering foreign policy
You had me cheering along up to there.
Beats me what warmongering your are on about, unless you think standing up to expansionist, militarist, murderous imperialism is “warmongering”.
You won’t be alone on here if you do, but you will defo be amongst a minority of decent, rational Scots.
The kind of iScotland you favour will be an outcast among the countries we should aspire to become an equal amongst, the EU and Europe, and the first world democracies.
If that’s your vision of Indy, forget it.
@Brian Doonthetoon says:4 September, 2023 at 7:53 pm
Why should Westminster send any cash to an independent Scotland?
WM sends cash to all former, impoverished colonies.
So, just following the logic arising from the regular claim on here that we are an impoverished colony.
But actually, Brian, you do raise an innarestin point. iScotland really should be prepared to shoulder her share of the burden of supporting the UK’s former, impoverished colonies.
Unless of course, you are going to claim that when it comes to the centuries of British colonialism, it was some English bastards that did it and then ran away.
That’s not a plausible claim though.
John Main @ 7:18 am
Wherever it occurs colonialism is always ‘a co-operative venture’ with native elites. Scotland is clearly no different, and the structure of our society is still colonial today – which is the reason Scots want independence.
Colonial forces were used to destroy many peoples and cultures; The English-as-British in Scotland and Ireland, the British-Indian army in East Africa, African tribes led by British officers against other Africans, and so on. Such ‘colonial procedures’ are well established, even today.
You should learn some real history:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2023/09/04/an-eight-minute-explanation-of-scotlands-occupation/
Alf Baird
“Prosperity to Scotland and no union.”
Yet more hidden history of how the Scots were brutally oppressed by the English.
Thanks for that link, Alf. I had no idea that the English occupation of Scotland was quite so terrible for the Scots people.
I might be wrong, but I suspect this aspect of Scottish history is not being taught in ‘Scotland’s’ schools.
Northcode @ 9:10 am
Yes Northcode, with the words “Prosperity to Scotland and no union” engraved into their swords, even in the early 1700s the Scots knew the ‘union’ was a deceit for the colonial racism and plunder that has since ensued.
@Alf Baird says:5 September, 2023 at 8:25 am
Thanks for your response.
the structure of our society is still colonial today
Defo debatable. I see the Colonialism Trope as no more than a fad or fashion like Trans. Which is why nobody ever noticed the Colonialism Trope as recently as 20 years ago, again, just like Trans.
which is the reason Scots want independence
Naw, Scots want material prosperity, like Norway, and see Indy as a possible route to that – that material prosperity is often promised, but never adequately demonstrated. The “colonialism” you see everywhere is not visible to the vast majority of Scots, again like Trans.
Colonial forces were used to destroy many peoples and cultures
Naw. You’re over-exaggerated language does you no favours. Anything destroyed is gone for ever. I suggest the word you should have used is “damage”, or maybes “retard”.
Such ‘colonial procedures’ are well established, even today
Sure, I have been following the “progress” of the new colonialists in Africa. Weirdly cheered on by some on here.
@Alf Baird says:5 September, 2023 at 8:25 am
Thanks for your response.
the structure of our society is still colonial today
Defo debatable. I see the Colonialism Trope as no more than a fad or fashion like Trans. Which is why nobody ever noticed the Colonialism Trope as recently as 20 years ago, again, just like Trans.
which is the reason Scots want independence
Naw, Scots want material prosperity, like Norway, and see Indy as a possible route to that – that material prosperity is often promised, but never adequately demonstrated. The “colonialism” you see everywhere is not visible to the vast majority of Scots, again like Trans.
Colonial forces were used to destroy many peoples and cultures
Naw. You’re over-exaggerated language does you no favours. Anything destroyed is gone for ever. I suggest the word you should have used is “damage”, or maybes “reetard”.
Alf Baird
As an addendum to my previous post on the hidden history of the oppression of the Scots, I was reminded of another one of Sara Salyers articles. This one on the YoursForScotland website.
From my personal experience growing up in the West of Scotland, I was one of those children Sara Salyers writes of:
from Sara Salyers’s article ‘And It Can Change Everything’
And It Can Change Everything
“This is the source of what Professor Baird calls, ‘the Scottish cringe factor’.” – Sara Salyers
John Main @ 10:13 am
“The “colonialism” you see everywhere is not visible to the vast majority of Scots”
That is because colonialism tends to be ‘obscured’, over time it becomes ‘normalised’, a people ‘conform’, also subject to ‘cultural assimilation’; racism as we know can become ‘institutionalised’, and also ‘internalised’ by the colonized group. The ‘colonial mindset’ is a psychological condition.
But aside from its effect on a subordinate people, there are also ‘colonial procedures’, and postcolonial theory gives us the decolonization template. What is happening to, and within Scotland’s independence movement is nothing new, similar events have played out in many colonial situations. In this we see a rupture between the ‘legal’ tendency that plays by the colonizer’s rules (hence ‘legal’), and the ‘illegal’ tendency that seeks liberation as a matter of greater urgency. As Frantz Fanon explained:
“So we can observe the process whereby the rupture occurs between the illegal and legal tendencies in the party. The illegal minority is made to feel that they are undesirables and are shunned by the people that matter (and) already there is a rift between the two tendencies. The illegalists, therefore, will get into touch with the intellectual elements whose attitude they were able to understand a few years back; and an underground party, an off-shoot of the legal party, will be the result of this meeting. But the repression of these wayward elements intensifies as the legal party draws nearer to colonialism and attempts to modify it ‘from the inside’. The illegal minority thus finds itself in a historical blind alley.”
The illegal minority, according to Fanon, must then look to “the mass of the country… who keep their moral values and their devotion to the nation intact” but whose understanding of the situation remains “rudimentary” because the party has never undertaken “a reasoned study of colonial society”.
Which implies that the march last weekend was by the ‘legal tendency’, whose ‘moral values’ and ‘devotion to the nation’ remain questionable, according to postcolonial theory.
This is a great post.
As an expat Scot I will be sharing this with everyone who asks me why I am depressed about the future of my country under the SNP.
I’ve wondered for quite some time about how democracy would work if the SNP secured independence. By the sounds of it, it wouldn’t.