News Roundup
Here are three recent newspaper stories. This one’s from two weeks ago:
A wealthy businessman, related to an SNP MP, is alleged to have donated tens of thousands of pounds in envelopes to the party which it is claimed have unlawfully not been recorded with the Electoral Commission.
Here’s one from yesterday:
The SNP has admitted that its 2022 accounts will be accompanied by a statement from the auditors that an unknown amount of money in donations and membership fees has not been properly recorded and that therefore the auditors cannot verify that the accounts for 2022 and other years are correct.
And here’s a story from today:
In which a former SNP councillor – until he was recently expelled from the party for protesting at the cover-up of sexual harassment by the SNP council leader – alleges that the party leadership rigged a selection contest against him in favour of Anum Qaisar, who did not live in the constituency but is the daughter of a wealthy local businessman. Qaisar is now the SNP MP for the seat.
We provide these stories merely for the benefit of readers who for example may have been on their summer holidays and might therefore need to catch up on the major events surrounding the SNP in the last fortnight. We make no suggestion that they are otherwise connected to each other. Enjoy your Sunday.
I don’t know if this is all being done through greed or if it is a wider plan to absoutely turn the electorate off politics for good and stop us voting at all. I’ll always vote but it looks like it will be spoiled ballots until someone comes along who can convince me that they are not just in it for the dosh.
How much does an MP cost the taxpayer? At least £86,584 per a(n)num.
I’ll get my coat.
Anyone thinking ‘just who the hell _is_ Anum Qaisar?’
and who then does a quick web search will immediately find this:
link to en.wikipedia.org
Oddly, her wikipedia entry does not say where she went to secondary school.
It does say that she did work at George Watson’s College – the well known private day school in the comfortably well of Merchiston area of Edinburgh, and that her husband is a doctor.
This from an article in the Scottish Daily Express:
“SNP MP Anum Qaisar branded ’embarrassing’ after being torn apart in gender reform debate”
link to scottishdailyexpress.co.uk
Gives the clear impression of a woman who was prepared to stand in public to promote the nuSNP ruling cliques’ highly unpopular Gender Reforms without being able to articulate how known harms could be avoided.
Admirably understated Stu, and understandably so – Anum Qaisar’s personal relationships prior to becoming an MP are none of our business.
Issued by Yousaf a while back.
Humza Yousaf has issued the following statement about allegations of a sexual affair between him and Anum Qaisar: “There is no truth to these vicious rumours.”
Ian Blackford campained alongside Alba in Skye yesterday. This is the way forward.
Ah Stu, you missed the ones where the SNP MPs are “retiring” before the next WM election. Makes you wonder, deserting the sinking ship?
Reminds me of the practice of a company I once worked for when it came to internal job advertisements. They were committed to a fair selection process by means of a short list of 4 drawn from suitable candidates. Of course, this was just window dressing, in order to get the person they really wanted to have the job it was necessary to ensure that the better candidates never made the shortlist.
On one occasion I applied for a job for which I had 14 years relevant experience. I was told that I hadn’t made the shortlist as I didn’t have enough experience. The job went to a fellow employee who had 18 months experience in an unrelated job.
If it is any consolation to Cllr DiM I am sure she will lose her seat next year. She was somewhat taken apart by a clever barrister during a gender debate at WM. Synchophantoc and stupid – just the ticket for Sturgeon/Murrell/Humza.
Did her daddy donate to the SNP and was annoyed his contributions did not ‘work’ in 2016, causing the powers that be to ensure success in 2021?
I am sure the 3 stories are not related. Just a coincidence.
The first picture article I google the question Who and another name came up, I found it hard to believe given it surface only in one place.
And now a return to Qaisar and Yousaf return to his religion !!!
I rarely read the newspapers anymore and I was not aware of this so thanks for the update.
The sooner more folk join Alba and start putting themselves forward for election, the sooner we can all vote Alba and get people in serious about the cause.
8000 + members, the more the better and the more people that stand for election the better for us all.
The Murrells have a lot to answer for in the way the party was run!
Jamie
As a founder member of alba, i never know what the membership is, so thanks.
Andrew Morton says: 2 July, 2023 at 11:03 am
“On one occasion I applied for a job for which I had 14 years relevant experience. I was told that I hadn’t made the shortlist as I didn’t have enough experience. The job went to a fellow employee who had 18 months experience in an unrelated job.”
I sympathise entirely. …I’ve seen a great deal of this from ‘rote management’ types; in fact it seems to be a standard practice. – Both in the way they staff their little empires and distribute resource…
It’s a major contributing factor to the ‘high levels of fail’ that exist within corporate and public service settings. – Corrupt practice of course; but quite ‘normal’.
Holyrood franchise thriving on self-aggrandisement, thank you very much!
Does the Internal Market Act, threaten to dampen profits, of local shysters?
Scottish voters expected to restore parity of their own exploitation by Holyrood and Westminster, in equal measure.
Symbiotic relationship between SNP and Labor?
Would explain so much of the contemptible conduct.
I believe the official term for this is decolonising the workplace.
There’s experience and there’s intellectual horsepower and this MP has neither. I saw her on YouTube a few months back; several others have referred to it already and she was taken to the cleaners, effortlessly, by a QC.
I feel sorry for the SNP membership, having to see this play-out amid denials from all the usual suspects. What I will say though is that the Labour Party are worse. People have long memories and this sort of stuff finished-off the Labour Part in Scotland.
I speak as an erstwhile Labour voter, but never again.
I wonder what her annual Westminster expenses are?
@ Izzie: “Ian Blackford campaigning alongside Alba in Skye yesterday”
Ian is at the top of the party and knows all about the false allegations against Alex Salmond, will have watched the destruction of party democracy, the financial and membership numbers recording shambles, and has failed utterly to progress independence.
Until he goes through a Truth and Reconciliation procedure we are better off without him.
Yep the SNP books can never be qualified by the Auditors as they are totally FRAUDULENT if they have woven the missing £600,000 through the books as the SNP have said and if they have did the same with the unregistered donations and the membership is totally faked as well.
Well done for what you have done with your website in getting all of this out over the years. As you know I was exposing the fraud etc on my Paisley Expressions blog but they have blocked that because they do not want what I was exposing to be out there – I am working on a new Paisley Expressions just now on a FREE SPEECH host where they cannot shut us down.
But the laugh is according to PhilM we are wasting our time as we should be reading books instead of watching online videos and presumably online websites as well although he spends his time on here and presumably on other websites etc as well. I and I reckon you and most people on here DO read books – I even recommended the BOOKS Virus Mania and also What Really Makes You Ill that expose the FAKE viruses and corrupt scam medical system in one of my last comments that you allowed me to post on here because I bought and read them but PhilM is kidding his self on by trashing people posting videos and people watching them on Youtube etc as it is by these videos and sites like this that most people go look for the TRUTH now instead of the corrupt controlled mainstream media. It is by people using their critical thinking that they can see through the TRUTH in these videos and websites etc and by going and searching out more information on any subject that they learn if it is the TRUTH or DISINFORMATION/PROPAGANDA. Also not everyone can afford to keep buying books these days and lots of books are banned to stop the TRUTH they expose from getting out so are hard to find.
All of what I posted re the Vatican and their scam corrupt LEGAL system is all FACTUAL and I took all of that as well as their Cestui Que Vie Trust SCAM all the way up to the top court in Scotland – The Court of Session – in my court case against the DWP and Government and the Judges did everything to try and avoid the subject, send the over 1200 pages of LEGAL Documents PROVING what I was saying was true that the Governments, Courts, Councils etc etc have NOT existed since 2012 and that they are hiding this FACT from the people all of which I exposed on my video “The Democracy Illusion – Everything Is WAS A Corporation” on my William Woods Youtube channel – you can find all of those LEGAL documents linked under that video for those who want them. You have all been free since 2012 and the UK has NOT existed since then and neither has our corrupt governments but as my video tells you all they are not telling you any of this because they are all too busy trying to bring in the NWO agenda I have been talking about. You are already independent and the people just need to be told this and decide what THEY want to do – I am sure they will not want to go back to this old scam system if they are told about it or the even worst one they are trying to bring in just now that they have already tried out in China only what they have planned is going to be even worst than there.
Heard about this before the leadership election. Surprised that the press didn’t report it then. Or maybe they were happy for humza to win, more damaging for the SNP when other things come out. Wouldn’t be so damaging if Forbes won….
resting in my account
woven through the accounts
loses the VAT
cash deal
envelopes
shoeboxes
nikki likes her asian babes, she has a cute little assistant, pictures of them being in the papers, in stories which the newspapers scrubbed, for some reason
the SNP being funded by the asian mercantile class is a new slant; I always assumed it was billionaire trannies and dodgy oligarchs and their foundations
lets remind ourselves of what’s truly important –
this is a masterpiece of subtle gaslighting and exact-opposite-reframing
link to glasgowtimes.co.uk
read it all, it’s full of choice phraseology, a masterclass in sophistry
one green tranny did this, the moneyshot is –
“Every party backed the Scottish Greens motion without making changes including the SNP, Labour and Conservatives.”
– and if you don’t like your leaders, you can always vote them out … !
A cousin of mine is retired from a high level admin job in higher education; she told me they had a problem with the students identifying – cop this – as DIFFERENT THINGS DEPENDING ON THE DAY OF THE WEEK – and getting very, very, upset if anyone “misgendered” them. One “solution” proposed was for the students to wear little tags or wrist bands to indicate whet they were at the time … this did not go down well. I think she is enjoying her retirement.
So dad and daughter Quaisar were Keen Labour supporters and activists till 2014, so were unionists. Then both had a Damascene conversion to independance a year later. I would hate to suggest this was because they wanted to jump on what appeared to be a more successful political bandwagon. I am sure both jumped for principled reasons. Whither now? Back to Labour before next year?
Have had some fun posting on Anun’s Twitter. I expect to be blocked soon!
She was allegedly playing musical beds with the current FM during indyref & was promised she’d be a shoo-in to WM to shut her & her family up when he went on to bed, oops, I meant wed, yet another staffer.
By-election..
*Cheques in the post – make it happen*
Source – twitter.
By: SNP staffer & whistle blower.
When? Start of her fails in WM as everyone wondered wtf she she came from.
Historic Scotland (Longmore House) used to be terrible for nepotism. I once watched a husband of a female employee come in on a Saturday morning to be shown how to work ‘the computer’. It was like an updated PG Tips advert (old reference…kids). I think even he was too stupid to do any office job.
Again at Historic Scotland…one particular guy in his early 50s (who knew Kirsty Wark at university) on the lowest grade ‘A’ was passed over for a promotion to a new job, instead they brought in a nephew (literally nepotism) of a woman whose actual job I could never quite fathom because she just used to sit around doing very little, well…she made tea a lot…does that count?
Anyway, this nephew now working a grade higher at ‘B’ (JEGS) had to be shown how to do his job by the guy passed over. Absolutely galling to experience something like that. They eventually got rid of the nephew who used to spend a lot of the time in the lav reading comic books. The older guy was bullied and harassed out of his job by people in HR, who were some of the thickest people I’ve ever had the displeasure to meet. Eventually left, couldn’t take it anymore. All that hassle for barely just over a £100 a week.
The board members were fine, the academic types at Historic Scotland were great, the events lasses were really something and good at their jobs but HR? Not all of them but some were utter fucking poison. Clique-ish, sectarian, and did very little for their thirty grand a year (late 90s). People used to say that HS, a tiny little public body, actually had more HR staff than British Gas!
Some of the backroom staff used to take the HS cars away for the weekend as well, enjoy two hour liquid lunches, play civil service football twice a week, and knock off early on Friday afternoons to go to the pub.
This was when I got to understand something about a certain type of Scot…the ‘it wisnae me’ variety, still employed today up and down the land in councils, health boards, all manner of public bodies really.
Maybe Bath isn’t such a bad place to be…
to say you’ve bolted the door after the horse has bolted with the cash wont cut it with HMRC Humza…its not FM Panto.
It’s a measure of how stupid these people are that they are simultaneously awash with dodgy cash and yet the party is skint. I can’t get my head round either. Between membership fees and short money from Westminster after 2015, the party should never have been in a better financial place.
When the Shetland by election was called in 2019, SNP HQ took a levy of £1000 from each branch – that’s £72k, so they weren’t financing by elections, they weren’t organising conferences (when lockdown hit in 2020, they didn’t have to cancel their Spring Conference, because they hadn’t organised one).
Is there a fleet of motorhomes or fridge freezers somewhere?
@Billy Carlin
I’ve got your measure now. The Cestui Que Vie Trust scam. So this stuff about things not existing and being ultra vires. You ARE wasting your time. By all means, live your life down these little conspiracy rabbit holes. You will get nowhere with this. Some people here need to grow the fuck up.
If we’re both still alive in 2040…let’s meet up. Pub of your choice. Tell me how you got on with your CQVT scam and I’ll show you what I did to grapple with corruption in Scottish public life. I’ll even buy all your drinks. We can even crush tiny little heads together because it is fun.
No argument there…
It was very friendly and welcoming to the party that in 2015 the Murrells attended the wedding of someone who had only been a member of the SNP for a matter of months.
Wonder if there will ever be a McHawaii Five 0 Book’em Danno moment…
link to wingsoverscotland.com
How many brown envelopes stuffed with money do the SNP require for my son to be parachuted into a safe SNP seat?
Wasn’t Anum very close to Humza? As in separated only by a thin layer of latex?
If Yousaf is found by the fraud squad to be up to his neck in sleaze, I don’t want him getting the First Minister’s gold plated pension for life.
Fraudsters shouldn’t be getting envelopes of cash.
£667k still not accounted for, and now £envelopes of donations (allegedly) not declared.
This is getting quite serious.
I suspect Yousaf is going to have to make a statement on the public record. And quite possibly give a statement to Police Scotland, under caution, if there’s any sense of those donations being anything he knew about at the time.
William Russell, how dare you suggest that the SNP would accept anything in brown envelopes. The idea is quite unthinkable. They would never, ever do that.
I gather they prefer white envelopes.
“I gather they prefer white envelopes.”
“Humza, how would you like these dodgy donations delivered?”
“Envelopes – WHITE.”
link to economic-times.co.uk
£3.6 Million unaccounted for in Tory Party Accounts at the 2019 general election.
The report is that they have questions to answer.
Why were the Tory leaders not arrested?
Why wasn’t a police tent set up outside the PM’s house?
Why isn’t the story repeated every day across the media?
Always amazed me that no one questioned her dropping her married name just months after her election. The dots could have been joined up long before now…
Will outgoing Chief Constable Iain Livingstone be releasing a statement that the leaked allegations are racist, sexist and misogynistic?
Before he spontaneously combusted following the meeting at Parliament with Nicola Sturgeon when they all resigned?
Daddy might be having to adjust her allowance now that Scottish legal will be knocking on his door because of nefarious, leaked allegations to the press of corruption/bribery.
Just remember though. Nicola says it wisney me, and she can’t speak for the love of her life, hubby Murrell either!
Haha, quote “We make no suggestion that they are otherwise connected to each other”
Brilliant. Should it not have been ended with …”cough, cough”?
Dearie me. When will the party
membersgullible finally wake up to just how crooked these folk in the SNP are? The nuSNP are in it for themselves, and if you suck up/donate hard enough, you can join the gravy train too.Di Mascio in the Daily Record article says Kirsten Oswald was in the act as well.
That doesn’t surprise me one bit. She was the chair at the Indy Pretend convention in Dundee.
They were flicking through the cards and selective on membership speakers asking questions.
PhilM @ 1:15PM
Still showing your brainwashed uneducated ignorance. Where did I say about stuff not existing. The Vatican Cestui Que Trusts are about FRAUD and DECEPTION re TRUST and CONTRACT Law – conning people and ripping them off via CONTRACTS and TRUSTS they do NOT let the people know that they are signing and getting them to think that they are the fake ALL CAPS name that they have created to give up their rights and freedoms. You are obviously clueless about CAPITIS DEMINUTIO which is to do with Roman SLAVERY or loss of status or legal status which is done worldwide by our governments on behalf of the Vatican Mafia when they con our mothers into registering us and everything we have to register handing over OWNERSHIP of us and everything to the Vatican. They have been getting away with this for centuries now because of people like you that do NOT want to give up your cognitive dissonance. Why do you think that government means MIND CONTROL as well and you are obviously well mind controlled – as a matter of fact you sound like a paid shill such as the 77th Brigade that are all over social media etc TREASONOUSLY acting against the people on behalf of the corrupt government.
Funny how the DWP/Government do not want to go through the courts again with me especially as I have put even more EVIDENCE in re this CONTRACT and TRUST scams that they are carrying out on me and every one of you – everything that they are doing is in BREACH of CONTRACT and TRUST Law. They like the Vatican in 2013 cannot rebut those OPPT UCC Filings Legal Documents linked under my video that I asked them to do in my case and that is what caused the Pope to resign back then because their scam had been Foreclosed (SHUT DOWN). Let us see you rebut them since you are such an expert but of course you cannot either as you have shown how uneducated and ignorant you are of what the Cestui Que Vie Trusts and this scam system is all about.
I present the EVIDENCE and let the people with more than one brain cell go check out more EVIDENCE for themselves by doing their own research. I do the same by looking at what people say and then go and do more research for myself. You obviously do NOT or are incapable of doing so. These Mafias rely on the masses being dumb sheep only interested in their petty drivel instead of them keeping themselves educated and up to date with everything that has and is going on so that they cannot get conned by these crooks and other people as well – we are where we are just now because the masses are mostly dumb. Were they like that before they were indoctrinated by our “education” system? Probably and that is why so few people have shepherded them into this system and headed for the slaughterhouse if they do not wake up in time.
Everyone should go and watch the video “Check The World Economic Forum Cult Extermination Agenda” on the SixthSense channel on Bitchute exposing the 5G Directed Energy Weapons, Wi-Fi and EV’s etc and all of that electromagnetic radiation that is killing everyone and how the councils etc cannot get insurance for the LED street lights and 5G because they are so dangerous to human and animal health.
I’m still of the view that 22 months of 20+ detectives in Operation Branchform is rather too much for a “missing” £667k. The most recent allegations of envelopes and undeclared donations (did they go through the accounts?), are more serious, and if proven, likely to end in criminal charges for giver and receiver, and a big fine for the SNP by the Electoral Commission.
I still think the real issue is about public money. How contracts were awarded, to who, and whether there were any inappropriate or conflicted financial relationships. The cops don’t put that much effort into £667k being unaccounted for.
They’ll be gold bars somewhere.
Maybe they could get some advice from Wendy Alexander.
Izzie @10.57.
So pleased you are back. Please tell us how the Convention went. Did you get to ask your question? What was the answer?
Did you see many white envelopes knocking about?
@ASA Follow the money, Ferguson Marine would be my bet.
Modern Scottish politics is a veritable “Who’s That?” of useless people.
“A wealthy businessman, related to an SNP MP, is alleged to have donated tens of thousands of pounds in envelopes to the party”
“The SNP has admitted that its 2022 accounts will be accompanied by a statement from the auditors that an unknown amount of money in donations and membership fees has not been properly recorded”
“alleges that the party leadership rigged a selection contest against him in favour of Anum Qaisar, who did not live in the constituency but is the daughter of a wealthy local businessman. Qaisar is now the SNP MP for the seat.”
I am struggling to see any connection between the three articles.
Perhaps Police Scotland could help.
I am also failing to see any connection in the ethnicity of the First Minister, the SNP MP who was unfairly selected, the wealthy businessman who donated to the SNP and the owners of the English auditing company the SNP found to audit their accounts.
There is a pretty corrupt country in South Asia which is on the verge of bankruptcy but I cannot see any connection with Scotland.
Den,
possibly. Taking my cue from the good Reverend, I make no accusations, and there’s nothing in the public domain that’s enough to do so.
But I have spent long enough working in business, working mostly in the defence and national security sectors, with half a dozen police forces (including Police Scotland), to know how contracts are awarded, and also how the police decide to apportion their investigative resources. On the latter point, it’s all about the scale of the potential crime.
A missing, possibly poorly accounted for, £667k isn’t enough to justify 20+ detectives and 22 months of investigation. No, there’s something much murkier to justify that level of investigation. And the envelopes business is only just now in the public domain. Not 22 months ago. So the envelopes are probably not the factor that started the investigation.
Maybe I’m wrong. it I don’t think so.
Forgot to say, this is investigative journalism at its very best, which has not existed in mainstream media anywhere for a very long time.
Well done, Rev. Stuart Campbell.
I’m surprised by the high level of police resources being devoted to the allegedly missing £600K,yet there’s no mention in Police Scotland’s press releases about requested investigations into the leak of Salmond’s name to the Daily Record or the alleged conspiracies and alleged malicious prosecutions against Salmond and many others.
@QuestionEverything 2:31pm
It’s common practice for ‘professional’ females to retain their maiden name in their career after marriage, especially in academia, law etc.
Whether that is to avoid citation confusion, retaining kudos attached to the name, saving money on new letterheads, or some other convention, I’m not clear, but it is frequently done.
I haven’t taken a great deal of interest in NS’s marital status, but as I believe she wasn’t married until 2010 (or thereabouts) I think it wasn’t so much dropping her married name, as merely not adopting it afterwards.
Was NS actually using ‘Murrell’ as a surname professionally between 2010, and her election as FM in 2014, and then went back to Sturgeon? I wasn’t aware of that, but then I never paid much heed.
I know a thrice wed female who juggles a few surnames, because ‘It’s a pain in the arse, and costly to keep altering everything’.
She must have a good memory – unlike Mrs Murrell – nee Sturgeon
Yousaf has been congratulating himself on his first 100 days:
“We have made real progress for the people of Scotland on our three defining missions, equality, opportunity and community.”
If he was being honest he would have said that his first 100 days as the false first minister have been slippier than the palm of his hand, with a white envelope of undeclared cash.
From a couple of months back.
CTRL F and search Gupta then scroll through various posts.
Scottish Nepotism Party
” how the councils etc cannot get insurance for the LED street lights”
Interesting stuff Bill.
link to highwaysmagazine.co.uk
Doh! It would help if I pasted in a link to the thread…
link to wingsoverscotland.com
Seats in the Westminster Parliament used to be bought.
Lloyd George sold peerages.
Thankfully, those days are past and nothing like that ever happens now.
Who founded the Scottish National Investment Bank?
Plus CTRL F and search Gupta then scroll through various posts on this thread too.
link to wingsoverscotland.com
Andrew Morton says: 2 July, 2023 at 11:03 am
“On one occasion I applied for a job for which I had 14 years relevant experience. I was told that I hadn’t made the shortlist as I didn’t have enough experience. The job went to a fellow employee who had 18 months experience in an unrelated job.”
This is standard practice in Scottish universities – I know from personal experience, particularly for senior management and admin roles.
The mantra was “if you don’t know before the interview that the job is yours – it’s not”
Remarkably, some very posts often went (and probably still go – I’m retired now) to people in horizontal relationships – of various sorts – with senior academic staff.
It had an acronym PBS (promotion by shagging)
It is one of the reasons for the ubiquitous corporate and institutional failure so obviously evident.
@ Cenchos
Re. SNIB this may shed some light on the subject.
link to robinmcalpine.org
I would imagine that the people at the top of Nu-NSP, are all ex-Labour. The stupid student politics they promote tells me this. Out with them, they are political filth. They will NEVER push for Independence. Traitors and, most probably, infiltrated to the core by unionists…
Are you feeling down at the moment? Do you feel that nothing is going right for you?
Cheer up. It could be worse. Imagine being Billy Carlin!
SNP is now a complete liability to the independence movement.
Just imagine SNP decided to join Scotland United, while the party’s in danger of being brought down by the establishment, at short notice, at the most opportune time!
When would the rug be pulled, I wonder?
The party’s finished, it’s just waiting to be buried!
Sarah @12:40pm, no amount of scrubbing at a truth and reconciliation hearing will ever ‘cleanse’ Blackford. The humble crofter presided over the humiliation of Scots by our English colonisers and contributed to it in no small measure! He was and will continue to be a millstone round the neck of the Independence movement. His appalling defence of Yousafs address to the Dundee conference should be a red flag in that respect!!
I’m not sure what you are getting at with 3 unrelated, random headlines. Am I missing some point?
“I’m not sure what you are getting at with 3 unrelated, random headlines. Am I missing some point?”
I guess.
@ Iain Mhor at 4.44pm: I don’t think QuestionEverything’s comment at 2.31pm was about the Sturgeon/Murrell situation, but about Anum Qaisar, previously Anum Qaisar-Javed; i.e. the subject of Rev Stu’s post. If you follow the link posted by aLurker at 10.41am, you will see.
Re Andrew Morton.
I am involved in a branch of the Arts and have stood on the sidelines for over a decade watching a culture of nepotism, cronyism and political, but also ethnic, favouritism which makes the Masons look like amateurs. Wokism of the type which is destroying the West is an in, particularly the ongoing dehumanisation of white people, this can lead to a place on the board(s). The bywords are altruism, inclusivity and equity.
It is a sometimes privately educated middle class playing the victimisation card and punching down onto the white working and underclass. It is a fiefdom for a certain group who surround themselves with other minorities to try to mask how it is them who are in complete control. They are extremely active where I live, Govanhill. There is a web of organisations such as this, all of them registered as charities and all connected to each other which you would not realise until you are amongst them and view their machinations. They have major connections to the SNP/Greens/Labour/SWP etc along with academia, social services, law, publishing and the entertainment industry.
Witnessing this happening around me completely changed my overall worldview. Being vocal about it can lead to the end of friendships and unpersoning via closure of bank accounts etc.
Garavelli Princip @ 5:33 pm
“standard practice in Scottish universities”
….seems to be to employ as few Scots as possible.
Last time I researched this I estimated that only around 11% of academic staff working in Scotland’s ‘elite’ universities were Scottish. Its probably even less than 1 in 10 now. That’s what happens when you advertise all your best jobs in another country with a much bigger population, and have no indigenous national language requirement.
If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck.
It’s usually SNP.
Stu don’y know if you have seen it but Mahyar Tousi on Youtube has included you in his report on his video “Nigel Farage Bank Cancellation ESCALATES”.
Republicofscotland @ 5.06pm You shouldn’t provide FACTS or EVIDENCE like that as it upsets people like PhilM and Chas @6.19pm’s cognitive dissonance or they are both the same person being paid to shill social media and alternative media sites like this.
Our puppet governments are not interested in how safe 5G, Mobile Phones, Wi-Fi etc are because they have an agenda to bring in as per that Check The World video in my last comment and that also includes the EU – Go watch the video “Artificial Light, Chronobiology and LED Hazards” by Dr Alexander Wunsch on Vimeo and his other videos on these subjects where he is exposing how the EU etc are NOT interested in how dangerous the LED lights etc are. Many other doctors etc are also exposing all of this but of course the people like PhilM and Chas will be saying they know better than them and it is all rubbish because they cannot drag themselves away from their trainspotting to research all of these subjects.
@Michael Laing 6:35pm
Ahh, I see, that makes sense – thanks for explaining.
A reading comprehension fail on my part, though I suppose the principle might still apply.
Interesting RTE programme on history of Irish civil war has just started on PBS channel 84.
Viscount Ennui says:
2 July, 2023 at 6:09 pm
lf Baird says:
1 July, 2023 at 7:14 pm
Colonial and cultural assimilation means that even some (bourgeois) Scots clearly prefer to be culturally English/British. Colonialism is always ‘a co-operative venture’ (Memmi; Fanon) and Scotland is nae different.
Alf, this is a genuine question.
If we were to strip away the ‘colonial’ aspects of modern Scotland, what exactly would be left as authentically Scottish?
Not being provocative – just keen to know your thoughts.
[Sorry. Posted on the wrong thread.]
Irrespective of the political debate around self-determination, and because the SNP has done sweet FA to build our nation-building aspirations, I am keen to know what type of nation we aspire to.
A high tax, high benefits Scandinavian type of country, or a low tax high growth nation.
What national ‘values’ will we have?
Where sits the Scottish ideology?
When Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Conservatives and therefore PM, he was elected because the rest of the Conservatives saw him as a winner and it was for no other reason. Pragmatics took over and they had to hold-on, individually, to their seats at Westminster for as long as possible and so they all voted for him.
Max Hastings, who used to be the Editor of the Daily Telegraph and who employed Johnson as a part-time journalist, warned everyone that would listen saying: “This guy is a liar and fundamentally unsuitable to be PM. He will bring disgrace on the country because no-one can stand a liar. He cannot and will not change and so do not elect him”. No-one listened, they elected him and now, a couple of years further down the line, the whole Conservative Party are unelectable.
We have exactly the same situation ongoing here in Scotland and all the rumours that are expressed above can be traced back to either the previous FM or the current FM. No-one else. The way the SNP works is that all power is held and is managed and micromanaged by the FM.
What helped in England was the investigative Press, which was led by the Evening Standard and even by the Daily Telegraph. Nothing like that exists here in Scotland and so everything here is in slow motion. But, there is an inevitability about what is going to happen next. Some of us have more patience than others, but all of us are going to have to wait it out.
I understand that the other investigative agencies are involved and it’s not just Police Scotland.
I only hope this is not going to point us all in the direction of a resurgent Scottish Labour Party because there is nothing worse that that. I am a Labour voter and if I am saying that to you, you know they are not the answer.
Sadly, we need politicians and nothing will change without them. It’s just the politicians that we are currently producing that are the problem. I think that a few of them ought to be jailed and that is what is needed to send out a message that this is not acceptable.
Confused says: 2 July, 2023 at 12:53 pm
You could argue that a sign of imminent failure is the mistake of doubling down with even more of the same.
We have Pride month which if it existed even last year wasn’t promoted to the extent it has been this year. We have the Police in London arresting the Just Stop Oil protesters at the Pride march yesterday where they usually stop stand about at every other time where ordinary people’s lives are disturbed and in the case of medical emergencies, potentially putting their lives in danger.
You see this LGBTQ+ people all around with their rainbow flag memorabilia and their dyed purple hair. Nobody bothers with them and nobody cares about what they do.
People are seeing through the BS and while they just went through the motions with these these diversity and inclusive events in the past, they are going to get worked up about it now.
Besides, familiarity breeds contempt. It’s the same old message, repeated again and again. It’s going to get to the point where people become immune to it and switch off.
There will be a tipping point where the message has become so irrelevant and people are numbed to the guilt-tripping that this LGBTQ+ stuff will slowly but surely lose public support.
The problem is though as you mentioned, it is embedded in the political establishment but it’s going to take alternative voices like Alba to root it out.
Viscount Ennui @ 7:30 pm
“If we were to strip away the ‘colonial’ aspects of modern Scotland, what exactly would be left as authentically Scottish?”
Borrowing from postcolonial theory (Memmi; Fanon etc), I suppose we need to remember that a colonized people have been ‘out of the game’ for a considerable period of time. During this period a colonized people can only cling to ‘the dregs of their culture’ and their ‘rusted tongue’. The colonized has been ‘manufactured’ as something else by the process of colonialism, even to the extent of ‘mimicking the coloniser’ and assuming his cultural values. He has in effect ‘become a colonized being’.
Liberation therefore involves a necessary process of ‘self-recovery’ which is suddenly exactly to the reverse of the colonialist accusation which works by debasing everything about the native and his culture; here ‘the colonized, his culture, his country, everything that belongs to him, everything he represents, become perfectly positive elements’. It is nevertheless a painful process but an essential one; for ‘the colonized’s complete cure his alienation must completely cease’.
Stuart, not sure if you are aware of it or not but you have also been mentioned on Infowars:
link to infowars.com
Welcome to the new politics in the SNP’s Republic of Jockistan.
Just leave your fat envelope, stuffed with used notes, on the silver platter by the front door… The Governor will see you now.
SNP Out!
A law should be brought through parly where family members & acquaintances cannot be employed by elected officials unless they have a super duper portfolio that bedazzles everyone else out of contention.
It’d be the only way to stamp this out. Labour were famous for the same shit, they invented it. Everyone’s relative had a job in the council.
As for the shananigans of Sturgeon. It’s a distraction. If ppl & the papers wanted a scandal they’d have a field day with the Tories. BILLIONS given to Bojos mates during COVID. £38 billion to Dildo who is still unable to be tracked lol.
I notice the English papers are crawing about all the £billions in the North sea they’ll be pillaging over the next few years. Funny how it was supposed to be running out. Starmer confirming to his English sheeple it’s going nowhere but straight to the London treasury.
Distractions.
Why aren’t they covering the Salmond scandal? Or who leaked confidential complaints to the Daily Rancid?
The whole Sturgeon affair is a complete farce. A pantomime that’s making Police Scotland look as dumb as fck & can’t find thier own arse in the dark. Branch form – more like Dunce Form. They’ve spent more than £6k on this pish not to mention the Alphabeties & failed court cases. I’ll wager it’ll all amount to hee-haw prosecutions. How can it when the Dark money swishing about the Tory donors is conveniently ignored.
A big fat waste of everyone’s time & keeps the narcissist known as Sturgeon constantly in the papers.
@ Viscount Ennui – I don’t believe that a high tax, high benefits, and high growth administration are necessarily mutually exclusive.
And what does “high growth mean”? A farmer has a finite acreage and so high growth for the farmer means high crop yields. For a financier/investor high growth means share yields – Thames Water an example? . And for Joe Public high growth means inflation.
And so high growth in finance alone may cause damage to the general public sector unless regulations are fairly applied.
An example of high growth – food banks.
Confused and Pacman mention pride.
Check out Celtic FC. A club open to all video on Youtube.
Suzie McCabe, has been chosen to represent the club with the rainbow banner for Glasgow Pride.
And out of all of the lesbian players in the women’s team. They’ve picked Sam – a transwoman, who is the biggest tattoed burly 50 year old male I’ve ever seen.
It’s a humilation to all gay guys out there, who just like to watch their football team.
Alf Baird says:
2 July, 2023 at 8:02 pm
Viscount Ennui @ 7:30 pmLiberation therefore involves a necessary process of ‘self-recovery’
Precisely. That is what I find fascinating. What is the essential and visceral quality of a Scot which separates us from the English (or others)?
The SNP appear reluctant to define this.
Viscount…
Socialism.
@ Viscount Ennui at 7.37pm: I question your assertion that low tax equates to high growth. High growth for whom? Under our current system of free-market capitalist economics, ‘low tax’ just means low taxes on wealth and income, while very high taxes are imposed on ordinary people in the form of VAT, Council Tax, extortionate utility bills, etc.
Besides, it has been demonstrated that the economy performed best and growth was greatest during the thirty-odd years after the Second World War when there was greater social and economic equality and taxation on income and wealth were higher, not only in the UK but in Europe and the USA. The reason for that is obvious: ordinary people had greater disposable income, and that boosted trade, industry and employment.
“Our puppet governments are not interested in how safe 5G”
Bill Carlin.
I like to check claims out, and your above comment appears to hold water.
link to shiftfrequency.com
link to wikispooks.com
Yet no mention from the press about the very close relationship between Anum and Yousaf?
Alf Baird, at 6:57pm,
there’s only one decent university in Scotland, and it’s Edinburgh. All of the rest, such as Napier Tech (which wasn’t even up to snuff as a Poly), are pretty dreadful institutions employing low grade drongoes and people pretending to be intellectual.
Michael Laing says:
2 July, 2023 at 9:01 pm
@ Viscount Ennui at 7.37pm: I question your assertion that low tax equates to high growth.
Sorry. I was not making any assertios but just providing vignettes in a simplified form.
Still puzzled by what Scotland wants to be.
Because an answer might convince the soft middle-ground.
Republicofscotland, and earlier Billy Carlin,
you two are an absolute hoot. Utterly bonkers, and now encouraging each other in serious tinfoil hattery that 5G is a directed energy weapon, and linking to the most fruitloop website on the internet.
Good grief. You are both a stain on the Indy movement. Worse than Sturgeon.
5G for crowd control ?
link to thelastamericanvagabond.com
I refer yooz to this, in case yooz missed it…
link to wingsoverscotland.com
Viscount Ennui @ 8:42 pm
“What is the essential and visceral quality of a Scot which separates us from the English (or others)?”
‘National consciousness’ (Fanon), which is built on our native (i.e. Scots) language and culture, that is what gives us our identity. Oor ain langage comes fae oor verra saul. Without this national consciousness there would be no national independence movement. The first thing a native people grasp upon liberation is their rusted tongue which is perhaps thair maist important differentiation from all other peoples.
Language is a powerful political instrument, which is why Scots bairns dinnae lairn thair ain mither tung in Scottis schuils. The result from this cultural assimilation process is ‘colonial bilungualism’ and a people with a confused identity, i.e. the ‘I’m Scottish and British’ cultural illusion due to colonialism.
Alf Baird,
you don’t appear to realise that there were at least five languages in ancient and mediaeval Scotland, and very many more admixtures in more recent times.
Your badly written and ham-fisted attempts to write low Scots is rather embarrassing, and naïve. It makes you look a bit stupid.
You should probably stick to counting containers and dreaming up utterly nonsense “business” schemes for Orkney. Drop the complete and utter misunderstanding of colonialism, and the cod attempts to sound like you’ve got some inside knowledge of what it means to be Scots. You don’t.
ASA
Yer not Scottish & yer Gaslighting.
“employing low grade drongoes and people pretending to be intellectual”
ASA talking about his time in the Armed Forces again…[rolleyes]
Perhaps Murrell and Sturgeon, when they retire from politics or whatever it is that they spend the next couple of years doing together, could set up a business selling used office furniture. “Cash for Seats” would be a catchy name, don’t you think?
A Brit Abroad isn’t in a good mood today, is they?
Geri,
I’m as Scottish as anyone else born in Scotland of Scottish parents, and I’m not gaslighting. I’m calling out fake pretences, directly.
In reply to a Scot Abroad:
I agree with your comment about the languages spoken in Scotland. I was brought up in Scotland by a Scots father and a Welsh mother. Our language at home was English, however in the school playground it was Scots dialect (my Welsh mother never understood what my friends and I were saying!). On visits up north to visit my grandparents, we spoke English, but Gaelic was the common language on the farm. On visits to Wales to visit grandparents there we spoke English but in the village everyone spoke in Welsh, as did my mother! Back in the day, French was the second language we were all taught in school and it stood me in good stead when I decided to travel the World and work in different countries.
I agree with you that Rabbie Burns wouldn’t be awarding Alf Baird any points for his feeble attempts at Scottish dialect!
Republicofscotland @ 9.10pm & Johnlm – 9.46pm
Yep plenty of experts out there exposing the FACT that 5G is a Directed Energy Weapons System and just like mobile phones wi-fi etc all were developed by the military as weapons and spying systems etc that are being rolled out as part of the One World Government Communist Social Credit Digital Currency System with NO cash – just look what they are doing just now trying to shut people down who are exposing the TRUTH with banks and how much easier it is going to be with their Social Credit Digital Currency.
The video as per my comment above at 3;17pm “Check The World Economic Forum Cult Extermination Agenda” on the SixthSense channel on Bitchute does an excellent job of exposing how 5G is a Directed Energy Weapons System and Barry Trower the ex-Royal Navy Electronics Weapons Expert is on many videos on Youtube etc exposing the dangers of 5G, mobile phones, wi-fi etc.
During lockdown while they kept everyone locked down not only did they continue to flood our countries with immigrants they also kept on putting up their 5G towers everywhere as they need to get them in as part of their agenda as per that SixthSense video and as exposed by others as well.
I reckon A Scot Abroad is either the same person as PhilM and Chas or they are all individuals paid to shill on social media and alternative news sites such as this going by their comments all the time – just poo pooing things all the time and ignoring EVIDENCE to the contrary or just simply slagging people off instead.
Alf Baird 2nd July 10:11pm
Ah wisnae gang tae post agin but yer comment struck a chord.
Ah’ve been ettlin tae get tae grips wi ma ain leid an a wis inspired by yer Doun-Hauden poyam sae ah’ve scrieven doun ma ain.
Whit a braw leid is thon Scots tung.
Every wird o ma poyam is in the Scottish National Dictionary and Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue.
Ma poyam:
ASA
Naw ye urny. Yer a Brit NAT who despises Scotland & wish she’d be English & stfu. Everything & everyone in Scotland is shite.
Another trait of the Britnat is to have an unhealthy obsession with other ppls fcking language. We should all speak the Queen’s Good English eh?
Yer not a Scot. You’d happily see it crushed under England’s jack boot once & for all..
We’re not going anywhere. Get used to it.
Anton Decadent says: 2 July, 2023 at 6:41 pm Re Andrew Morton.
“I am involved in a branch of the Arts and have stood on the sidelines for over a decade watching a culture of nepotism, cronyism and political, but also ethnic, favouritism which makes the Masons look like amateurs.”
I suspect that at the heart of the matter is classism… Division and rule of the grass roots/working classes is now and historically has always been achieved through division. “It’s all the fault of all the {insert outgroup here}”
The underclass need not be white or working… typically one underclass is set against another. 100 years it was the Orange and the Green set against each other; we still live with the tail end of that. The barely-surviving worker is encouraged to resent the barely-surviving disabled or otherwise unemployed person. Divide and rule… One caste is groomed to look down on another. The ‘wrong’ sect or cult is enough to alienate.
When I was a child, growing up in the Red Road in the 70s the the Milngavie Mafia would bus themselves in by volvo estate to provide patronage for us poor wee things… And by patronage I mean the kind that patronises.
God forbid they should encounter anyone with actual ability or talent; what they wanted were poor wee things barely capable of producing whatever artefact was d’jour to ‘prove’ their great white saviour prowess. – The sidelines are where the dangerously competent are held at bay.
‘Twas always so…
“It is a sometimes privately educated middle class playing the victimisation card and punching down onto the white working and underclass.”
It is… but I’d suggest any ‘minority’ they might claim to be part of is rarely genuine. And when you are persuaded to identify an outgroup, their objective is met.
‘It’s the rich that gets the pleasure, and the poor that gets the blame.”
With the recent launch of BBC Virtual it is possible that A Brit Abroad is one of Marianna Spring’s fake troll accounts which she is so proud of.
– grizzled Iraq war vet, Monty’s Batman, white man’s burden, fuzzy wuzzies – all that stuff.
However,, I can’t see Homecounties Marianna using the word pish quite so often.
Billy Carlin,
oh dear. Do you really need educating in the laws of physics?
I’ll give you my credentials. I’ve got a BSc from the Royal Military College of Science, with a specialism in radio control engineering. And an MA from a few years later in Defence Technology from Kings College London.
So I know a bit about the electromagnetic spectrum. Not as much as my professors, but enough to detect your sort of utter bullshit.
For a start, a directed energy weapon has to be directed. As it says on the tin. And directing a beam of energy requires a sensor, to acquire a target, and a control system. Now, standard 5G antennae don’t have either, and are omnidirectional by design. You can see that when you look at them. Omnidirectional, not directional. The antenna types look very different.
Then there’s the power. Directing a beam of energy onto a focussed target even dozens of metres away takes a huge amount of power. And you can see by the cabling to the 5G antennae that there’s not that much power going into them.
Then there’s the lack of targeting sensor. How’s the thing meant to pick up its target without a sensor?
Then there’s the utter insanity of even trying to think that there’s some form of conspiracy to want to kill people using low power EM waves propagated in an omnidirectional manner while calling them directed energy weapons.
You are far too delusional to engage with further. Fruitloop to the power of nine.
Geri,
you are quite right. Scotland isn’t going anywhere. It’s going to remain a part of the UK, because the Indy movement hasn’t done enough, and the latest iteration in the SNP has utterly fucked Indy for several further decades. Which is a good thing for Scotland.
You’d better get used to it.
“A Scot Abroad says:
2 July, 2023 at 10:30 pm
Alf Baird…”
I break my own rules…
Belittle, belittle, belittle. That’s how the trolls work. Away an’ shite, you.
David Hannah @ 2 July, 2023 at 8:38 pm
I’m painting a positive picture in my assessment of how this Trans is heading and I sincerely believe that. However, I’m not naive in thinking that the overall woke ideology which the Trans is part of is going to disappear any time soon. I know people don’t want to here this but IMHO it’s here to stay. The best that we can hope for is that it’s excesses like the cancel culture including withdrawal of banking services is curtailed.
As I mentioned the Trans stuff is going to be end because people are just being subjected to the same rhetoric time and time again. The power of it diminishes each time but simply these types of messages need to be freshened up to regain interest and to stay relevant but it’s just the same guff, served over and over again as seen in article that Confused supplied.
The other thing about the inevitable demise of Trans is what exactly is a Trans person?
Nobody can answer that but the best that anybody can come up is those individuals who have went through rigorous and extensive medical assessments and have been determined that living as the opposite sex is the best option for them.
However, that isn’t happening as we are virtually having people self-id’ing as seen with for example Eddie Izzard who is now living as a woman and taken a female christian name.
This is only going to increase and when it impacts on peoples lives as seen with your mention of the woman’s female Celtic player who is Trans but in no way looks like a woman.
People are going to see this and realise some things are not adding up and then start looking into more and know that some things are not adding up. Once that starts, the end of the Trans ideology and the middle class fascination with that and the overall Queer movement will be over.
@Galloway Lass 11:01
Good post.
It’s a bit much to expect native Gaelic speakers to be forced to speak Scots on pain of being disqualified from Scottish employment opportunities.
Some would categorise that kind of thinking as the harshest kind of colonialist oppression!
pacman – adam graham got transphobically hatecrimed in the jail – this is your fault, bigots like you and me, the BTL …
ASA, the squaddie with 10 wikipedia tabs open is no authority on anything – this fallacy, this “argument from authority” he punts, “I was in the army so I know stuff” – well maybe some of us have been in more interesting places … it smacks of Ellis “I know international law because I have a phd” (incoherent nonsense) so you should listen to me.
– military men are taught to obey orders, not to think, and any information they receive which complicates matters is to be avoided; good guys, bad guys, go here, go there – “go slot a raghead”, shout “naked bar”, spend hours discussing the merits of types of boots, or what calibre the NATO main battle rifle should be …
Talking of incoherent, we have a new player
billy carlins – he has claimed the glorious revolution was a takeover of england by the vatican and “the protestant church” (which one, there’s a lot, like 40000) a front, again for – the vatican. Oh, and the city of london … the vatican; sounds like a sevco fan huffing glue – I mean rangers went bust down to a vatican conspiracy you know.
england being virulently anti-catholic since henry 8 being a mere ruse and the looting of the monasteries a “false flag” (the most expensive in history) ?!
– the weird thing about bringing in the vatican like this is that usually we have the switch around – the pope is not catholic but a freemason, and the vatican is freemasonry via the jesuits and 1963 Vatican II, and John Paul 1 was murdered because of this and the last pope quit because of it …
that’s like jumping the shark, over the rainbow, through the looking glass
as for 5G
link to youtube.com
billy seems to be doing mashups now – immigrants and 5G; this might seem funny but it does piss in the punchbowl for serious discussions.
Guardian reporting Orkney is exploring her options to get out of the UK and out of Scotland too.
It’s the MSM, so must be all lies, in the eyes of some regulars on here, at least.
Haud oan though, isn’t this thread headed up with MSM snapshots?
Maybes a bad idea to claim everything in the MSM is shite. As for Orkney, good luck to them if they choose to clear off and take their assets with them, as long as they pay their share of the debt before they go.
A Scot Abroad says:
2 July, 2023 at 10:57 pm
Geri,
I’m as Scottish as anyone else born in Scotland of Scottish parents, and I’m not gaslighting. I’m calling out fake pretences, directly.
######################################################################################################################################
No you aren’t troll. You are yet another anti Scottish bigot who just hates that he wasn’t born English. You know like that Brit-English Nationalist prick Neil Oliver.
A Scot Abroad says:2 July, 2023 at 11:45 pm
Fruitloop to the power of nine.
Quite so.
I’ve not heard of this Horton Woman before; but she surely cannot actually have any kind of degree in any aspect of Physics?
At Oxford, Dr. Horton worked as a research fellow at St John’s College, a position that allowed her to expand her research from particle physics into medical physics and the physics of complex human systems. As part of the latter, she conducted systems analysis research of the English legal system, economies, the financial system, currencies, as well as white collar crime and organised crime.
I simply do not believe a word of this. – What professional locus would someone working in Physics have to explore those latter topics? What academic scope?
As for ‘5G’… in reality it uses frequencies ‘pinched’ from the TV and entertainment industries which were in use for decades. – A few years ago there was (for example) a great wailing and gnashing of teeth as we had to basically ‘dump’ many radio mics because the 700Mhz band was sold off…
The 8GHz ‘5G’ band? Well let’s put it this way; if you have an ordinary ‘Sky’ type satellite dish on the side of your house, it receives a signal in the 10.7Ghz – 12.75Ghz ‘Ku’ band… Those ‘EM waves’ have literally been ‘raining down’ on Britain since the early 1980s …And there are others. I believe the Irish Hailsat system uses the Ka-band at 26–40 GHz.
Alfred Lambremont Webre – (AKA ‘Labradoodle-webfoot’) is a well-known grifter on the conspiretard exploitation circuit. He targets people with a very low educational level; often leveraging pseudoscience. Misdirection and weasel-words are the order of the day. For instance from that link…
“For example when they brought up 3G and 4G, everybody assumes that 5G is just a better 3 and 4G” – Uh-huh; that’s because in this context it simply means ‘5th Generation’… of a particular set of communications techniques and means exactly that. The term actually tells you precisely nothing about the particular frequencies involved in any given system.
The terminology is also used in different ways in different contexts…I have a ’12G’SDI interface board fitted to my video editing suite; ‘3G’ and ‘6G’ happened years ago along the way; similar sort of name, completely different meaning.
It’s pretty rare that I would agree with A Scot Abroad… But this is pure ‘wibble wibble’ territory and is laughable!
Nah its not a Celtic player that’s a transwoman. It’s someone that works in their HR department.
It just upsets me how they’ve jumped onto the rainbow bandwagon. Suzie McCabe lecturing Celtic fans, if “we don’t sign up it gives the wrong message”. An empty threat.
Celtic have a lots of lesbian female players. They like football. They play football. It’s the same with the fans. They go to the pub with their mates. Sing the songs.
Why they’ve chosen the rainbow warriors as the face of gay and lesbian representation of the club I’ll never know.
Its embarrassing.
Johnim @ 11.43 pm
Is that sexy new BBC Department called Verify rather than Virtual? Apologies if wrong
PacMan
People thought it was Body dysphoria but that was just the Trojan horse every deviant Pedo was hitching a ride on to get it’s foot in the door to society.
Now trans can be anything it likes & now falls under the trans *umbrella* where no body dysphoria is needed. Anyone can join the club.
I don’t think it will end soon. It’s fast approaching fascist where only thier voice is to be heard, inventing their owns clangers type language as well as cancelling thier detractors & insisting we must all want to sleep with them.
They’re in every level of everyone’s everyday life. Police, healthcare, government, schools..
I’d have thought parents would have knocked it on the nut by now but they’re just as eager to have thier weans mutilated as the crazy.
Confused says: 3 July, 2023 at 12:12 am
this might seem funny but it does piss in the punchbowl for serious discussions.
It does… and maybe that’s the purpose it serves. Along with the other unhinged, non-credible dross that is regularly trotted out; it provides an excuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
@Roger Gough 12.49am
Thanks! You’re correct. – Verify, not virtual
Have I just been ‘fact checked’?
Good grief!
John Main
You really should read the Wings website. It’s a treasure trove of information. Especially the failed Brit NAT bullshit from the Better Together era.
Orkney can go it alone but they’ll be taking fck all with them.
They’d become an enclave situated in Scotlands territorial waters. International law would grant them 7 miles out to sea & that’s where thier dreams would end.
The Brit Nats have had Orkney & Shetland leaving Scotland since oil was discovered. It won’t be into the arms of the Brit nats that’s for sure!
LMAO @ confused re military men. There’s always the Walter Mitty types who’ve probably only seen battle on an X box..
Iain More,
I’m not what you describe.
I’m a Scot, by all reasonable definitions.
Don’t project your own bigotry upon me. I reject it.
ASA @ 21.46
Sorry, this time you really have exceeded all bounds of human decency in an unwarranted, nay virtually obscene, insult on two fellow poster.
In my wee world at least, absolutely no one is worse than N Sturgeon, who is equalled only in the depth to which she has debased herself by her husband.
I don’t know an awful lot about linguistics, excepting for a passing academic interest (and it is very interesting) In saying that; what language, or languages are spoken in Scotland (or anywhere else) and whether they are languages, or dialects, is a perennial question, and no linguists seem particularly invested in arguing the matter one way, or another.
Language is what you speak, nothing more, or less, the pinning of languages to a board like some etymological specimen to be preserved is futile – language is myriad, and evolves.
I would consider myself a Scots speaker, but wouldn’t incorporate all of the ‘Scots Language’ in my vocabulary as it is currently codified and preserved in the fusty tomes that are the ‘Dictionars o’ the Scots Leid’ – I wouldn’t be using Leid for a start, unless I was roofing, or down the burn.
Were I to hear such ‘Scots Leid’, or see it written with precision, I’d probably pronounce “There goes a scholar of the tongue, not a natural speaker of it” for many of the entries are already archaic in spelling (if not pronounciation) and naturally there are many variations of words also.
A giveaway of the erstwhile ‘Scots Scholar’ is the inability to discern which Scots word spellings belong together, and the erstwhile Scotticist substitutes the first entry their grubby finger falls upon, and strings together what is invariably a mess of geographical nonsense, which is apparent to any natural Scots speaker – whatever airt they hail from.
I tend to write BTL as close to ‘Received English’ as my meagre education permits, purely for universal communication – the application of an ironically termed ‘Lingua Franca’
However, at times I will type as I speak (and do so often in txts between family, and friends) it is invariably onomatopoeic in style – it is nothing which is taught, or was ever taught in living memory, even if it may be found codified somewhere deep in a ‘Dictionar’
I certainly wouldn’t argue the toss over dinna, dinnae, or dinny, canny, or cannae, when I see it written by others – I understand the words, and phrases regardless, and more importantly, I understand them as ‘Scots words’ (din nae, or can nae on the other hand…)
I may stab a guess at a speakers geographical origin, or lineage, by particular phrases such as bairns/ weans, and the like, but I certainly wouldn’t put a shiny sixpence on it until I hear the speaker.
Whether someone BTL is really attempting some form of ‘Fake Scots’ for reasons of subterfuge, or actually speaks in that fashion, I wouldn’t like to say; certainly some grammatical markers and spellings stick out like a sore thumb, but it’s beyond difficult to be certain.
‘Code-shifting’ is a very real thing, and most people I know in Scotland do this daily to varying degrees – shifting between ‘Received English’, their native tongue, and the tongue, and idioms of whomsoever they are speaking to – perhaps it is manifesting in the way they are typing BTL (I think I used ‘airts’ earlier for a start)
One thing most Scots tongues are not, is ‘Received English’ and especially not RP – Received Pronunciation; for the simple fact that RP is Non-Rhotic, and no linguist would argue much with that at all – for Scots tongues are predominantly Rhotic in nature – we don’t drop “R’s”
There are a some English dialects (languages if you like) which are Rhotic also, so even some English, English speakers do not speak ‘RP English’
Well, I suppose I’d better bring this rambling verbosity to a close by getting to some point, or other:
I think the concept of teaching a ‘Scots language’ is actually the teaching of yet another Scots language (even if an universal vocabulary could be agreed upon) for Scots already speak a variety.
If we need a Scots ‘lingua franca’, we have one – it’s ‘English’, I’m not sure there is a requirement for a Scottish one as well.
If there were to be an ‘Official’ Scots language, that’s fine, it will probably be precisely that – the language of ‘Officialdom’ only to be adopted in ‘Officialdom’ much as classical Latin, was a language of officialdom, and the proletariat spoke varieties of ‘cod’ latin.
I’m not even mentioning the Gaelic yet, which is if course an ‘Official Language’ even if the Rev. Stu dislikes it for his own reasons.
To what end is an ‘Official Scots Language’? Is it to beat children who speak any other tongue in the classroom until they are proficient, and eschew all others? Because we’ve been there already – you can shove that idea right up your hoop.
At best it is an affirmation of one small part of ‘Scottish National Culture’ I doubt many would heed it much in their daily discourse.
Perhaps we are to have a Scottish version of the “Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France” – or DGLFLF for short – though I imagine it is more like DILLIGAF to the French people.
In fairness, that esteemed Gallic institute (or is it Garlic?) is more for seeking French alternatives to Anglicisms, than actively extirpating them from society, by beating anyone who goes for ‘Le Burger au Chips’ with a stick – they aren’t winning either way.
As for who is at the kiddy-on BTL with their ‘Fake Scots’, it would take a better man than I to affirm it, and a better yet to prove it.
I’ll end with my favourite Scottish linguistic ‘slang’ phrase; for is there any other example, which code shifts, and eschews rhyme for grammatical distinction, as sublime as:
“Shot the Craw”
*Shoot the Crow – to go
Shot the Craw – went.
Iain mhor says:
3 July, 2023 at 2:00 am
I would consider myself a Scots speaker, but wouldn’t incorporate all of the ‘Scots Language’ in my vocabulary as it is currently codified and preserved in the fusty tomes that are the ‘Dictionars o’ the Scots Leid’ – I wouldn’t be using Leid for a start, unless I was roofing, or down the burn.
I agree, but only to a small extent. For me, the hardest thing to swallow about seeing Scots language written down is just seeing it written down. Straight away, it jars, and creates issues for me, whereas if I’d heard the same thing spoken to me, I’d never have given the language a second thought. It might be that’s just a simple lack of familiarity.
Is it important to be a language? Yes, it absolutely is. It matters as a token of ownership and origin if nothing else.
Auld Scots is considered as Northumbrian English, which BritNats in particular seem to believe gives England claim on the title of the language. But “Northumbrian” simply means North of the Humber estuary, and England didn’t become the land of the Angles until 5 / 6th Centuries. So the auldest languages we now call “English” existed a long time before the concept of Angle-ish.
It isn’t an English language, it is a common ancient “root” language adopted by both Scots and Saxon England. Calling it English at all is somewhat “presumptuous”.
It like saying dogs are evolved from wolves, when the pedantic truth is that wolves and dogs have a common wolf-like ancestor. Modern wolves are evolved from that common ancestor by the same number of generations.
I believe Scots should be respected as a language in its own right if only to rebel against it’s misappropriation by subsequent generations how seem driven to Anglicise everything they touch.
But credit where it’s due, there must be “something” about the language spoken North of the Humber which saw it thrive as a common parlance, and ultimately become so firmly ensconced throughout the length of Britain, yet do so based upon communicability and understanding, not conquest. There’s a power to it that is atypical amongst languages.
That’s not to say Gaelic, Norse, Pictish, Celtic, or any other language for that matter, were in any way inferior, but when “confronted” with the Northumbrian language, these other languages commonly retreat to the periphery, and English frequently claims the common ground. Argue about it if you want, but it does.
It is arguable that English language holds the global dominance it does through the proliferation of the British Empire, however I don’t think that’s the full story. There is “something” about the language itself. It’s highly communicable.
I’m not sure it’s because English is easy to learn. Reputedly it isn’t, but I think you can be understood with even a few badly spoken pigeon words of English. I think a little goes a long way, if you follow me. But I don’t know.
So do I object to Auld Scots being written down as a Scottish language? No I don’t. Nor do I get po-faced about apparent discrepancies with the Scots of Rabbie Burns in the 18th Century. There’s always something discordant about words which fall out of common usage, but you should still know what they mean. They might come back into fashion.
Auld Scots needs a revival and a huge re-evaluation, and occasionally maybe by necessity it will be a bastardisation of what went before, but I’m ok with that. My own speech was bastardised by a “Scottish” education which taught me my own Scots tongue was crude and lowly and a lesser form of communication than “proper” English. How fkg dare they.
Things are changing believe it or not. I have friends who went to private schools, and I believe they’re a wee bit jealous of my “rough” tongue, and frequently ask me what a particular word means.
Truth be known, I think “modern” English is enhanced with a liberal application of Auld Scots, and a lot of the time, I think the English think so too. They’re the ones who find it evocative of a fictional past. I just see it as “my” language wearing traditional attire.
Thing is… don’t just look at Scotland. Look at Scottish communities in Australia, NZ, America and Canada. Hasn’t their “Auld Scots” lost it’s prevalence and adopted a more common form of English? Auld Scots has only held on in stubborn parts Scotland. Yeayyy. Let’s hear it for the stubborn!
And special congratulations to Alf Baird. Keep doing what you’re doing Alf. It seems to get right under the skins of the resident Proud Scot-buts and tickle their derision glands. You can just see their puffy red faces getting worked into a tiz. Ee fair nip thur heids Alf. Ha! Ha! Ha!
ASA at 11.45
With all your extensive knowledge and puff can you tell me if a nuclear bomb is directional or omni directional.
Breeks and others… Scots is easiest spoken for sure but surely more could be done to promote it in written and spoken form? Why not use the correct Scots spellings for place names on signage? Why not have classes in Scots for new Scots? Why not have local councils and other institutions positively encourage the use of Scots in meetings. Where are the Scots language films and documentaries?
The BBC of course are totally opposed to Scots language. I recall John Beattie on Drive Time refer to Scots as ‘slang’. There is no question that British nationalists use language to promote their agenda …. and is a primary weapon of colonisation.
Globalisation will see an end to diversity and the death of local languages. Many see that as inevitable, many sadly as desirable. But we diminish humanity when languages die. Local culture and language are not threats to peace and harmony… quite the opposite in fact… they promote respect for self and for others. Without local culture and language our humanity will degrade and will in time only serve Mammon.
Geri @ 3 July, 2023 at 12:53 am
The reality is that the more people are exposed to this Trans idealogy in their day to day lives and see it for what it is as well as it negatively impacts their lives, the pressure to get rid of it will rise.
I know people are taken in with these slogans of love is love. I know, I was one myself but the reality of the version of Trans that is being pushed now is very sexually sordid and that is going to turn a lot of people off to the point where they turn against it.
It is going to be hard but as the saying going, it is the darkest because it is nearly dawn and all that.
As the days pass we gradually learn more and more about A Brit Abroad.
Was he in signals?
– or just in the British Forces Post Office (BFPO)?
– it would be hilarious if his expertise was in envelopes.
“you two are an absolute hoot. Utterly bonkers,”
Hmm….
link to army.mod.uk
I believe the US has them as does Russia, the latter used a DEW or something very similar against the US warship the USS Donald Cook whilst it was in the Black sea. I think the Russian name for the weapon is a Khibiny.
Northcode @ 11:17 pm
“Yer hert, yer saul…yer leid”
Braw wirds.
Breeks – “fair nip thur heids”
Disnae it juist. Thon colonial creenge is deep ruitit efter chree hunner o bein doun-hauden.
@ Confused
” billy seems to be doing mashups now – immigrants and 5G; this might seem funny but it does piss in the punchbowl for serious discussions. ”
Great post as per 🙂
Aye Billyboy comes across as one of those ( well meaning ) people who think they’ve cracked the hermetic code of , well , EVERYTHING , because , y’know * research * . I’m all for people actually checking things out for themselves , looking below/beyond the surface of received opinion and * consensus * worldviews – particularly re Politics and it’s new Weapon of Mass Deception ..ie * THE * Science .
The problem arises when people – like Billy – discover a couple of deception/distortions , or even anomalies , in historical narratives and then * forge * them into some grand , inflated overarching pseudo- explanation of , as stated previously ….EVERYTHING . A * problem * compounded when the one/s who think they’re the possessors of arcane insight become contemptuous of those they deem lacking in such ..eg ..using terms like ” Sheeple ” .
Cognitive Dissonance is real – for sure , check the Sturgeon Cultists , for example – but that doesn’t mean anyone who disagrees with another’s * unconventional * views is suffering from that condition .
Can any of us say with certainty what constitutes Reality ?
” There are more things in Heaven and Earth , Horatio ( Billy ) / than are dreamt of in your philosophy ( Science ) “
RoS,
Directed energy weapons certainly exist.
They need lots of power, sensors, control systems, and are manpower intensive.
What they aren’t are 5G antennae.
Has anyone thought of the implications of king charly declaring
himself trans and demanding to be known as queen charlene?
…i have!
Thanks to Dan for those links. The Sinking Feeling BTL was especially informative.
This latest business of the white envelopes and the rigged selection process (gosh where have we seen that before) is really indicative of a culture and mind set that is corrupt from top to bottom and at all scales.
The Murrells IMHO have no boundaries other than the one defined by what they think they can and cannot get away with. For example the only boundary Sturgeon has when it comes to lying is not getting caught in one and even that is pretty loose.
Look at the corruption of the SNP as a political party by the Murrells. They have literally ruined it versus pre 2014. Deliberately hollowed it out and turned into a woke abomination, Sturgeon’s Frankenstein creation.
Does anyone think this corruption stopped with the SNP as a party. Of course not it has to be all the way through Sturgeon’s government this last 8 years. Has to be…
The foul attempted stitch-ups of Salmond are now being seen in their true light. A bent government full of horrendous individuals trying to send a political rival to jail on trumped up charges.
This is the thing that is so damaging is that corrupt people can and do waste hundreds of millions, billions, of taxpayer money in order to enrich themselves by relatively trivial amounts / favours.
The whole business around the Gupta’s absolutely stinks at this point and the stench of it deepens as the ‘practices’ of the SNP and SNPG are gradually exposed to more sunlight.
There was a reason the Murrells and the Gupta’s gravitated towards each other.
The sales of the renewable energy at bargain bucket prices absolutely stinks.
The ferries… stinks. It goes on and on…
Someone needs to compile a comprehensive list of the SNP ‘failures’ post 2014 as many of them should be reexamined. Hopefully the police are doing exactly that but I won’t holding my breath.
Laced through all the corruption we will also find huge seams of incompetence. Where you do not find one you will find the other but mostly together.
And of course Yousless is entirely part of the same corrupt cosy cabal. Now we can see why they had to rig his election. It was never about selecting the best leader to lead us to independence and all about covering their own arses. It is like Sturgeon never stepped down…
Dodgy white envelopes full of cash that go missing, cash purchases of motorhomes, resigning auditors, are relatively trivial. But it is the same people doing the relatively trivial shit were making routine decisions involving what must amount to hundreds of billions of taxpayers funds over the last decade. The scope for corruption in all of that is huge.
If you catch someone stealing small stuff and they were also in charge of big stuff you would be an absolute moron to assume the stealing was limited to only the small stuff, right?
Then you look at the waiting times at A&E… the carehome deaths… the excess deaths… these are not trivial matters anymore.
Incompetence and Corruption. The hallmarks of Sturgeon’s and Murrell. We have carpet baggers and grifters for a government and the damage done is enormous.
It is right there in that thinkscotland piece…
thinkscotland.org/2021/03/how-the-snp-government-helped-mr-gupta-to-help-himself-at-the-expense-of-the-scottish-taxpayer/
“In the 2017/18 Audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts the Auditor General stated: “There is a need for the Scottish Government to be more transparent about its overall approach in providing significant public funds to support private companies….. there is no framework in place to support the Government’s decision making or approach in providing loans to private companies.”
This was ignored by the SNP. A year later, in the 2018/19 Audit the same recommendation was made. Again it was ignored by the SNP. Once again, in the latest audit of the Scottish Government relating to 2019/20, the Auditor General repeated the recommendation. Again it has been ignored by the SNP.”
Why is nothing ever transparent when it comes to Nicky and Peter. It is always the same…. every time.
Iain mhor @ 2:00 am
“Language is what you speak, nothing more”
You could not be more wrong there Iain. However you are right when you say that you “don’t know an awful lot about linguistics” but then again neither does the SNP Scottish colonial administration appear to, or the many thousands of ‘professionals’ delivering our colonial ‘education system’. Here are a few pointers from postcolonial theory and other sources I have studied:
Colonized participates in two psychical and cultural realms,two tongues in conflict;
Colonized’s tongue is least valued, is given no stature, is discarded (subordinate/racist base of colonialism);
Language is the means humans claim diversity and define their identity (Shaw);
Language defines and unites a nation (Scots-English Dictionary);
Scots language is a crucial and integral part of Scottish culture and identity (Open University);
Language determines national attachment (Medeiros);
Scots have an identity with and loyalty to Scots language (Kay);
Language and culture give us our national consciousness (Fanon);
Language is the common rationale for self-determination of peoples;
Language and culture intersect to form our identity (Lipski);
Linguistic Imperialism marginalises and destroys indigenous language;
Aim of Linguistic Imperialism is linguistic genocide/linguicide (Phillipson);
Loss of language undermines our sense of identity and belonging;
The Establishment’s aim is to destroy the Scots language (Kay);
Language policy in Scotland deprives Scots of the Scots language;
In colonial societies the language of my education (English) is not the language of my culture (Thiong’o);
Native tongue is neither written nor read, leading to poor oral development and lack of confidence;
Entire bureaucracy hears and uses only the colonizer’s language;
Elevating the colonizer’s language leads to a cultural division of labour favouring the settler;
The most urgent claim of a group about to revive is the liberation and restoration of its language (Memmi);
The crushing of the colonized, including his language, is included among the colonizer’s values;
Torn away from his past and cut off from his future, the colonial condition cannot be adjusted to, it can only be broken;
Recovering his autonomy and separate destiny he immediately goes back to his own tongue;
For self-recovery, he must find the tool with the shortest path to his soul, his language, because it comes directly from it;
Regaining possession of himself, passionately demanding the return of his language, essential for self-recovery.
ASA @11:45pm
Some (most?) 5G antennas are directional. They use beam forming to improve the connections to phones. Here’s a description of the technique that Verizon, link to archive.ph
In general, beamforming is a particular processing technique for signals that allow for directional transmission or reception. 5G beamforming allows Verizon to make 5G connections more focused toward a receiving device.
Before everyone runs out and stocks up on tin-foil the power involved is less than other cell technologies. However these are not directional. So are directional antennas a health risk? Unlikely.
Search on phased-array antennas if you want to find out more.
Its now the Scottish will with over 50% want Independence so England should give us a section 30. If Orkney citizens don’t believe they are Scottish citizens then we should allow then to leave Scotland but islands remain Scottish territory. I fail to see what the problems the UK is having whats has that got to do with your identity. I’m proud to be Scottish I’m not British, so if people of Orkney don’t believe they are British or Scottish and they are Norwegian then allow then to go lets set up free flights to Norway.
Alf Baird, at 8:21,
you are getting ridiculous now. A parody of somebody trying (badly) to write in the Scots language.
Wow just reading that other thinkscotland piece and this really stands out. This was the grift right here or at least one of them.
thinkscotland.org/2022/11/theres-not-just-a-ferry-fiasco-the-gupta-scandal-is-even-bigger/
“The true scale of Scottish Government-Gupta dealing did not come fully to light, however, until the journalists at the Financial Times (FT) successfully battled to force the Scottish Government to come clean.
In 2020 the FT was digging into a taxpayer backed “guarantee” that Ms Sturgeon’s government had offered Sanjeev Gupta to enable him to buy the last remaining aluminium smelter in Britain at Lochaber, near Fort William – and two hydro plants nearby in 2016.
This deal involved the SNP government providing Sanjeev Gupta with a 25-year guarantee of power purchases by Sanjeev Gupta’s company from another company … which just so happened was owned by Sanjeev’s daddie. This allowed the now-collapsed finance company Greensill Capital to transform this contract into £295m of debt, which carried the same credit rating as UK sovereign bonds, ultimately providing the funding for Gupta’s acquisition.
If this looks utterly dodgy to you, you are not alone. After all, when the FT probed Ms Sturgeon’s government as to the true scale of this “guarantee” in a freedom of information request, it refused to answer.”
So reading that it seems the guarantese issued by the SNPG allowed Greensill to convert a contract (for power) essentially between Gupta and Gupta’s daddy into a debt worth 295m. Which can then be sold in specialist markets for such financial instruments… and as the obligations were guaranteed by the SNPG is has the same rating as sovereign debt.
This looks like the primary con right there. The additional 7m loan from Enterprise Scotland or whoever is just a bonus, a sick joke, he must have been laughing his ass off getting that on top. And as a result I doubt the Guptas put a single penny of their own money into all of this.
Looking again at the auditor statements.
“In the 2017/18 Audit of the Scottish Government Consolidated Accounts the Auditor General stated: “There is a need for the Scottish Government to be more transparent about its overall approach in providing significant public funds to support private companies….. there is no framework in place to support the Government’s decision making or approach in providing loans to private companies.”
Auditors choose their words very carefully when issuing statements like that and the word above that is now flashing brightly is “significant”.
Given the budget of the SNPG we must be talking a lot of money here. 295m for sure but likely far higher…
(This all seems reminiscent of the conjob that was/is PFI. Those highly lucrative contracts were also ‘sold on’ in secondary markets.)
Whatever Sturgeon got out of all of this it will be a tiny fraction of the enormous burden she has saddled the Scottish taxpayer with. Not dissimilar to the Ferries really…
Wee Chid says:
2 July, 2023 at 10:21 am
I don’t know if this is all being done through greed or if it is a wider plan to absoutely turn the electorate off politics for good and stop us voting at all. I’ll always vote but it looks like it will be spoiled ballots until someone comes along who can convince me that they are not just in it for the dosh.
Couldn’t agree more. This erosion of democracy is happening at all levels. We need to turn the phones off and re-engage with our physical communities more often. Ultimately the solution to this is more democracy ie Independence. Good relationships with friends, neighbours and family are whats going to bring this home folks!
Whether any charges result from investigations or not, the Scottish National Party is compromised.
Take stock, just look around. The calibre of those in charge, the underlings and eventually party policy!
What’s left to defend?
Under outside influence or not, party leadership, could not be any worse! Resignation after resignation, tells it’s own story!
Scrapping the party would be the best solution to Scotland’s needs, going forward. Further allegations or police action during an election campaign, not entirely unexpected!
The Scottish National Party is major liability to the cause of independence, that much is absolute fact, from what’s on view!
From intro to superb book:THE MERCAT ANTHOLOGY OF EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE 1375-1707, Edited by R.D.S. Jack and P.A.T. Rozendaal, Mercat Press, 1997 —
“The fact that his [Hugh MacDiarmid’s] opinions were corroborated by Edwin Muir is of supreme importance. Not only was Muir the other major voice of the later [20th century] Scottish Renaissance — he and MacDiarmid disagreed on practically everything except this! When, in ‘Scott and Scotland’, Muir also lamented the loss of a ‘homogeneous language’, he approached the ensuing authorial dilemma from a psychological and post-Romantic perspective, defining it as follows: ‘Reduced to its simplest terms, this linguistic division means that Scotsmen feel in one language and think in another.’ His remedy — to opt for ‘English’ — was diametrically opposed to McDiarmid’s search for a form of Synthetic Scots. Inescapably, however, they were agreed on the nature of the illness.[…] If one assumes that the ‘prerequisite of an autonomous literature is a homogeneous language’ (Muir) then the creation of a national tradition and evaluation within it will reflect that tenet. Nor is it an unusual idea. Today, minority groups often rally behind a linguistic banner — French for the French-Canadians, Basque for the Basques. Whether the same may be assumed in the case of Scotland the Nation, centuries ago, is another question. Was ‘Scottis’ the accepted, homogeneous literary language of Scotland in earlier times? Once the historical dimension to the question is opened up and one looks at origins, it becomes clear that the answers is ‘No’. The dialect known as ‘Scottis’ has no claim to be the original national tongue. In fact, if there were any politico-linguistic ‘treachery’, it was that which resulted in ‘Scottis’ gaining dominance over the native Gaelic. At the end of the thirteenth century Malcolm Canmore and David I had intentionally ‘driven back Gaelic to (virtually) the present Highland line’. Scots originated in Northumbrian English and only grew later into proud distinctiveness, because of the positive sociolinguistic forces inherent in nationhood. Unsurprisingly, therefore, lowland Scottish writers from the fourteenth century until the seventeenth almost always claim to be composing in ‘Inglis’ and seek their poetic origins south of the border. Dunbar eulogises his master, Chaucer, in ‘The Goldyn Targe’, posing the rhetorical question ‘Was thou noucht of oure *Inglisch* all the lycht,/ Surmounting eviry tong terrestriall,/ Alls fer as Mayes morow dois mydnycht?’ Only in two instances do the writers of that time call their language ’Scottis’.
Breeks says:
3 July, 2023 at 5:14 am
Iain mhor says:
3 July, 2023 at 2:00 am
Good post, Breeks. I think the only reason people denigrate the English language is because it is called the ‘English’ language. Of course, English does include words from Scots and many other languages and it continues to evolve because it is allowed to, unlike French.
I’m starting to think it’s all about the money after all.
Suggestions that the people of Orkney should just fuck off, leaving Orkney to us Sovereign Scots, certainly point that way.
Orkney was nicked by Scotland in 1472, quite a bit later than some of the other historic events we are told are critically important by some on here. You can bet that not one Orcadian was asked or supported that transfer at the time.
Usually I write all of this stuff off as ancient, irrelevant guff. But we have to be consistent: either all of it matters, or none of it does.
So, if all of it matters, Orkney was colonially nicked by Scotland, an ancient wrong crying out to be reversed. If Orkney now wants to pursue her own destiny, wish them well.
Maybes we can watch them and learn how it’s done!
robertkknight @ 10:39 pm
“ASA talking about his time in the Armed Forces again…[rolleyes]”
I’m surprised he/she gave the game away so readily. Members of ex-service associations are some of ‘the most anti-independence of native groups’ and the colonial power ‘makes good use of them’ (Fanon).
Republicofscotland @ 8.18am
Yep Directed Energy Weapons are a FACT and as I said before were used to turn the SEVEN buildings of the Twin Towers Complex mostly to DUST on 9/11 – the excellent 9/11 videos on the Math Easy Solutions Youtube channel totally expose this and the FACT that they are using FREE Energy for weapons instead of for FREE Energy for the people – the same FREE Energy discovered by Nikola Tesla.
The military, health system and governments know the damage and harm that these 5G, wi-fi etc WEAPONS etc cause because they have the documentation from the harm etc caused to the soldiers etc that have been harmed when they were developing these – Barry Trower that I have already mentioned the ex-Royal Navy Electronics Weapons Expert has THOUSANDS of these documents pointing out the harm and DANGER from these WEAPONS. Again the video as per my comment above at 3;17pm “Check The World Economic Forum Cult Extermination Agenda” on the SixthSense channel on Bitchute does an excellent job of exposing how 5G is a Directed Energy Weapons System.
A Scot Abroad @ 11.45pm and 8.43am is definitely showing he is a paid shill with his drivel – the usual online “expert” when talking about something no matter the subject he is an “expert” in that subject. He has shown how much he is clueless with the FACT that he thinks that 5G is low level when all of these REAL experts are exposing high it really is. Also you had better tell that Mark Steele in that SixthSense video that he is talking rubbish with regard to targeting with the 5G when he was involved in all of the technology with the military, governments etc – plus it is NOT just the 5G towers they are putting up they are putting it on buildings and on street lights all over the place – the RADIATION from all of that alone is enough to kill us and everything else off.
Cell towers, mobile phones, wi-fi and all “smart” devices need to be banned for the sake of our health and FUTURE and get back to wired in phones and computers etc and plenty of experts with EVIDENCE out there exposing all of this so if you care about your kids and animals then you had better educate yourself to all of this and then you will be able to spot the paid shills like A Scot Abroad a mile away.
Just going to say that in some cultures, politics is entered for two reasons: to make money, and to cement a network of power, influence and obligations that makes it likely that the money, once made, can be retained. In these cultures, this is universally known and accepted, so that the humblest citizen takes it as a given, asking for what other reason would anybody ever enter politics?
Conversely, in some cultures, there is the concept that politics is entered from a more altruistic motive: to improve society through more equitable application of laws or policies, or through fiscal redistribution.
Some countries, reaping the manifest, manifold benefits of multi-cultural ism, retain populations who struggle to accept or comprehend how these different worldviews can co-exist within a single polity.
It makes for interesting times.
John Main @ 10:42 am
“Orkney was colonially nicked by Scotland”
Wrong again. Orkney was Pictish like most of the rest of Scotland when the Norsemen invaded and colonised the Northern Isles and Caithness etc.
Alf Baird says:
2 July, 2023 at 6:57 pm
“standard practice in Scottish universities”
“….seems to be to employ as few Scots as possible.
Last time I researched this I estimated that only around 11% of academic staff working in Scotland’s ‘elite’ universities were Scottish. Its probably even less than 1 in 10 now. That’s what happens when you advertise all your best jobs in another country with a much bigger population, and have no indigenous national language requirement.”
Can’t disagree with that – but it doesn’t mean that they DON’T employ and promote their mistresses, wives, husbands, paramours and prospective paramours on the basis of their sexual relationships.
I have worked in the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow (as well as London and other Scottish institutions) and have witnessed all of this.
In Edinburgh in particular it is virtually impossible to hear a Scottish voice among the staff – and only slightly less impossible in the student body. But I have to say, in my experience promotion by shagging was much more rife in Glasgow – or maybe they were just better at covering their traces in Edinburgh!
Once systemic of corruption is in place, all forms of corruption inevitably follow!
Where Sturgeon’s rancid SNP are concerned, the phrase “follow the money” would appear to lead in the direction of south Asia.
The following extracts are from the Introduction to ‘DUANAIRE NA SRACAIRE: SONGBOOK OF THE PILLAGERS, ANTHOLOGY OF SCOTLAND’S GAELIC VERSE TO 1600’. Edited by Wilson McLeod and Meg Bateman, Birlinn Ltd, 2019 —
“Gaelic is often described as Scotland’s oldest living language. […] Gaelic culture reached its zenith in Scotland during the eleventh century, when the borders of the kingdom were extended southwards, reaching the Tweed and Solway, and Gaelic was the language of the court and government, of the aristocracy, clergy, and intelligentsia, used throughout the royal territory. […] New trading centres from the early twelfth century onwards…were populated largely by speakers of of Germanic speech varieties — Scots/English, Flemings, Germans — and Scots eventually became the predominant language of commerce. […] By the early thirteenth century, Gaelic had probably disappeared from the core of the kingdom in the Lothians and the Forth valley; by 1400, the language shift seems to have extended to the entire east coast, including Buchan and the Moray littoral. At the same time, Gaelic probably remained in use in some upland areas of Fife well into the fifteenth century and in Carrick and Galloway until some point in the seventeenth century. As late as 1500, Gaelic was still spoken by about half the population of Scotland, a proportion that has dropped steadily since, especially since c. 1750.”
(Wilson McLeod, Professor of Gaelic at the University of Edinburgh, and Meg Bateman, poet and academic who teaches at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Skye).
Orkney like everybody else has to have not only Westminster consent. but also Holyrood. I wonder if Holyrood will see it as democratic deficit to themselves deny a referendum for Orkney?
Alf Baird @11:21am
Indeed. I’m looking forward to southern England being handed back to the French and large chunks of the east coast to the Danish. However I think the Italians probably get first refusal.
No issue with Orkney, or Shetland, or Caithness, or Sutherland, or the inner/outer Hebrides, or Isle of Arran going back to Norway, just so long as the rest of Scotland gets to come along too this time.
Join with Norway and ditch the UK? Where do I sign?
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh 10:30am
A very interesting post – cheers for that.
Wether you are Scottish or not seems to depend on a number of factors,
Quite rightly it depends first and formost on where you were born and perhaps generational, and on language.
However the loyalty to own your birth right ( for some) appears to be tradable for financial income.
When you study those Scots people protesting the strongest their income and pensions are often connected and tied to being British,
Wether in the Army, in politics, in MSM, or on TV,
No Scot is so quickly converted to being British than those whose rely on British money.
Mr Oliver and Mr Galloway, mr ASA are all in that Catagory, along with the members whom thought they could sell the Country of Scotland they did not own for English gold,
There bodies may have been born in Scotland,
but their soul, their minds, and their purses is not loyal to the rest of their Country men, for they find it is free to be bought buy the highest bidder,
Avarice has the strongest connection to their soul, before being a Scot,
Acceptance that SNP is finished, is the first step to independence.
The party should not linger, as a distraction to voters.
Voluntary dissolution, of the Scottish National Party, is now best for all concerned with independence.
Internal rebuild of SNP, is no longer viable option, while compromised by outside influence. Party policy being incredulous nonesense!
Scotland awaits a new era.
A Scot Abroad says:
2 July, 2023 at 10:57 pm
Geri,
“I’m as Scottish as anyone else born in Scotland of Scottish parents, and I’m not gaslighting. I’m calling out fake pretences, directly”
“fake pretences” = Everything and anything that veers from your rudimentary understanding of contemporary Scottish culture and society, as selected then filtered through your colonialized world-view. I can well believe you’re not “gaslighting” and that you genuinely believe every word you write to be heartfelt thus unassailablely true.
John Main re the islands..
Did you sleep walk through the entire indyref?
They were asked by Salmond if they wanted to leave, at the demand of Unionists bleating how unfair it was that *we* were having an indyref & may vote Yes – they said NO.
Go check Holyrood archives of Salmond & the agitators – the lib dumbs under Carmichael & Tavish Scot. He was fully on board with them having a choice.
They’re not stupid. They’d become an enclave, surrounded on all sides by Scotland’s maritime boundaries but Thier choice.
IF they were to leave they’d most certainly fck off in the other direction tho. Little England keeps pushing the envelope. Ironic innit that the UK government thinks it can give them a choice to fuck off but Scotland cannot lol!
No one is stopping them but they only take 7 miles with them under international law. Little England would have nothing of value other than a glorified helipad to wave at Scotland’s Turbines & Rigs..
& Scotland *stole* nothing. Wasn’t it a wedding gift? A Princesses property?
Confused @ 12.12am
What a rambling comment of drivel – putting words into my mouth I never said. No wonder you are ignorant, uneducated and brainwashed as your comment shows.
The Vatican has always owned and controlled England and Scotland as I have said in my previous comments – why do you think that the Kings/Queens always had to go to the Vatican for their blessing for everything major they wanted to do. Why do you think that the Scottish Barons had to go to the Vatican to get their GRIEVANCE document The Declaration of Arbroath approved and the Pope gave his approval. Why do you think that the English Barons had to go to the Vatican to get their GRIEVANCE document The Magna Carta approved and he refused by annulling it etc.
You are obviously clueless about everything – Freemasonry is run by the Vatican via their Knights of Malta – why do you think that Freemasonry is HQ’d in the Vatican’s City of London and Washington DC Private Corporations that are NOT part of the UK and US just as the Vatican City Private Corporation is NOT part of Italy. Freemasonry/secret Societies are the Vatican’s useless idiot clubs – cultists that will do anything for their cult.
All Religions and Secret Societies are the EXACT same OCCULT and all owned and controlled by the Vatican Mafia. Why do you think that none of the other Religions and the Secret Societies expose this Vatican Cestui Que Vie Trust Scam System based on our FAKE Birth Certificates etc as per my video The Democracy Illusion on my William Woods Youtube channel.
Jesus was 33 when he was “crucified” in 33 for a reason – same reason that the top level in the Freemason’s is 33 and all to do with the number of vertebrae in the human spine – all Religions and Secret Societies are ripped off ASTROTHEOLOGY and the ZODIAC, NUMEROLOGY etc and Jesus was created to represent the Age of Pisces – the FISH, Jesus means FISH and that is why his “birth” date is EXACTLY the start of that Age and why the Romans/Vatican who created him restarted the calendar from then. Jesus is the SUN on the Zodiac. There are silly Christians all over the world that think the ends times are coming who are clueless like you about all of this but it is only coming to the end of the Age of Pisces where the Vatican is creating at this moment the new “saviour” and Religion for the soon to be starting Age of Aquarius and that new saviour is going to be Lucifer or the planet VENUS on the ZODIAC and the new Religion that they are setting up as the One World religion in Abu Dhabi is going to be Chrislam. “Jesus” is even telling you all of this in Luke 22:10 Where you have to watch out for the MAN BEARING A PITCHER OF WATER – and – to follow him into the HOUSE he enters into. The Bible is a book of ASTROTHEOLOGY and the ZODIAC etc as well.
The people are clueless about all of this especially them in the Religions all created as divide and conquer and you can see how successful they are with this is Scotland, Ireland and in the Middle east etc keeping the sheep fighting each other while these Mafias carry on bringing in their agenda and you have shown how much you are clueless as well. Jordan Maxwell does an excellent job of exposing all of this on Youtube etc as do many others.
Re the islands..
It proves one thing tho..the folk btl can’t be living in Scotland because they seem to have zero knowledge this was offered by Salmond during indyref so I dunno why anyone could miss it & eejits on here think it’s a brand new shiny idea lol!
When it fact it was settled in 2013/14 through the very public parliament at Holyrood.
& Unless the UK furnishes a shit load of money to make losses for Brexshit – I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
They sent a mentally ill man there to drum up support. It was a no.
Scottish sovereignty requires 50%+ votes to end the Union. The Scottish National Party incapable of implementing that concept.
‘Scotland United’ is willing to try.
Enough said.
David Hannah says: 3 July, 2023 at 12:48 am
I didn’t realise it wasn’t a football player you were referring to.
This is an example of what I was talking about of ordinary peoples lives getting affected by Trans before it gets stopped.
As well as scumbags like the Double rapist complainging of Transphobia in the prison he is locked up in, there is also the element of Queer/Trans becoming fethisihed by the middle classes.
You see this with Kirsty Blackman claiming she is Queer even though she is a heterosexual married mother of two (I think). This type of behaviour is only going to get worse as the Woke agenda becomes even more worse and for middle class white heterosexual individuals are going to have to find ways to be seen as being more diverse where being Queer is the only route they can go down.
It’s all going to end up bloated with it’s excesses and meaningless to the point of triviality as the middle classes exploits it for their own gain. Once Queer is no longer fashionable, the middle classes will move on to their next pet obsession.
It’s not going to end up well for those who are genuinely Trans or identify as Queer but there is not much that can be done about it.
“Directed energy weapons certainly exist.”
And I bet even you who are part of the English military/security forces don’t know the extent of what they can and can’t do and what applications they can be used for and in.
Referring to Kings College London.
“the links to the highest levels of power were so profound and so manifold that it often seemed harder to find someone in the department who was not linked to military or intelligence communities. Thus, one could be forgiven for mistaking the Department of War Studies for a department of war mongers”
Billy Carlin says:
3 July, 2023 at 12:49 pm
Confused @ 12.12am
Thanks for the laugh. What a load of nonsense! I hope you get better soon. You make Alf Baird and James Che appear sane.
orkney independence is something which does not become a “thing” unless indy has seen some surge
I think it is run by an english guy who moved there 10 years ago
given orkney has been scottish for double the time the union has existed, it sets a dangerous precedent for territories moving away, no?
I think indy Scotland should support independence for the isle of wight, see it become a freeport and get rich on shipping transit fees from its territorial waters
then there is mercia, wessex, northumbria to consider
london has fancied itself a freemarket city state, a freeport (pirate haven) but an independent London will become the new Wakanda; an independent midlands will become a state of a federated pakistan, the call to prayer calling out all across bradford, leeds, oldham.
– inshallah
My understanding is that the property on the surface of the land is owned by you anything underneath the property belongs to Scotland.
Just because Islanders live on Shetland or the Orkney I fail to see how they can just declare autonomy regarding these Islands when the Island belong to the Scotland.
If people want a better live then vote for it, its funny they want to leave the UK but they want Scotland to remain?
The Lib-dems want to get themselves to Norway for a better live then buy your plain ticket and fuck right off. The the cost of living in Norway 20-30 times more than it is in Scotland and you’ll have to pay for your hospital treatments.
People don’t know then they are better off.
Geri says:
3 July, 2023 at 1:12 am
Orkney can go it alone but they’ll be taking fck all with them.
They’d become an enclave situated in Scotlands territorial waters. International law would grant them 7 miles out to sea & that’s where thier dreams would end.
—————————
don’t think so……The UN won’t get involved in UK territorial waters and have already ruled on it and won’t accept the case being reopened. At best orkney and scotland will only be allowed to rent the seabed from the u.
billy carlin seems determined to post about every topic on whale.to in some overarching grand synthesis; he takes subjects of genuine interest, often discussed here, like the strange status of the city of london – then he just connects everything to everything else in a grand mishmash, like he has read a great deal, but then failed to provide any critical faculty to any of it. Transnational power blocs which override national, democratic institutions? – why that’s interesting, but start with the CFR.
Are you delving into gnosticism now? I have probably read every “conspiracy theory” out there, and most of it is disinformation, to hide genuine matters of concern.
Your obsession with the vatican is just -silly- because … this thing … what’s it called “the reformation”; read william cobbet on the subject. You seem to be reading Dan Brown and failing to realise it is fiction.
I am wondering where you will go –
everyone knows 911 was done by holograms
you can shield yourself from 5G rays by taking colloidal silver
– you haven’t mention the cabbalah yet, is this next?
link to archive.is
There’s the start of pushback in America.
Ppl are finally realising this is a fetish & deviant movement that has nothing to do with body dysmorphia & everything to do with porn addiction & fetish extremes including pedos.
Pride is already being boycotted because they’ve been pushed out of thier own movement. Typical that the bullies picked on lesbians first. They’re pathetic bullies who start greeting about not feeling safe yet it’s them who are the bullies who turn everything absolutely toxic & demand everyone complies to thier warped ideology.
If you think the six year shit show of Brexit is bad enough to deserve Scotland another referendum, you have to give a decades worth of omni-incompetence and gender woo-hoo under Sturgeon/Yousless as cause for Orkney to have another shout.
House Jock and long time gravy trainer Pete Wishart hedging his bets as the next GE gets closer, Wishart will be hoping that we reelect him.
Vote Alba, Join Alba, get Wishart and his troughers out.
“A senior SNP MP has cast doubt on whether his party’s independence plan will have the desired effect on the UK Government.
In an interview with Holyrood magazine, Pete Wishart said the leaders at Westminster would “probably not” respect the Scottish Government’s plans to reboot negotiations on the constitutional issue if the SNP wins the general election in Scotland.
First Minister Humza Yousaf set out his desired plan to party delegates in Dundee where he said securing an agreement to hold a second referendum would always be plan A.”
I have absolutely no sympathy for Greene a Fifth Columnist.
“A senior Tory MSP sacked from the front bench by Douglas Ross claimed he was “singled out” for supporting the Government’s gender recognition reforms.
Jamie Greene said he was told he was fired for taking the opposite view to most of his colleagues and described his firing as “disappointing”.
The Scottish Tories opposed Holyrood’s gender law, but allowed their MSPs a free vote.”
I’ve been reading Scots and Its Literature, a collection of essays by J. Derrick McClure, M.A. (Glasgow), M.Litt. (Edinburgh), who retired in 2009 after over forty years in the Department of English, University of Aberdeen.
One of the essays in the book is entitled ‘What Scots Owes to Gaelic’ in which he says:
And this from another of his essays:
There’s no UK territorial waters once Scotland votes to leave.
Breeks 5:14am
A fair comment, I think you hit the nail on the head re: the jarring when seeing written Scots (Scottis?) I’ll agree it’s probably its rarity, coupled with the fact, that it’s not specifically taught, and ‘Scots’ spellings vary wildly, so the same word may jar more, or less depending on how you would mentally ‘spell’ it yourself.
.
eg: Alf Baird may use “juist”, but I’d favour “jist’ – so in that regard, it is no different to the jarring when reading badly spelled English – excepting of course, that neither of those Scots words are badly spelled, they just haven’t been used enough for a specific spelling to take preference, and enforced by generations of dominies wi’ a tawse.
Of course there could be a deep cringe effect, it would be unusual not to expect that after generations of extirpating the Scots tongue at the hands of said dominies – in the days when a stingin rebuke was literal, and not metaphorical !
English itself, owes it’s richness to the fact it freely borrows from whatever language floats through it’s transom – synonyms, and antonyms abound, thereby lies it’s apparent difficulty to learn as a language, probably. (“How many words for chair are there? There are other meanings too? Good God!)
Perhaps the French do themselves no favours with their ‘Language Polis’, but I’d hesitate to suggest French does not have a richness of it’s own of course.
As for pronunciations;; If you ever manage to hear a record of ‘Cockney’ speakers throughout the ages, you’d be surprised how far the language and pronunciation has shifted around the Thames.
Today’s ‘Estuary English’ bears little resemblence to that spoken at the turn of the last century, which was far closer to England’s ‘Northern’ tongues’
(It’s on Youtube somewhere, but buggered if I know where)
*
I think I may have referred to ‘Code shifting’ and the phrase is more commonly ‘Code Switching’ I believe (there’s no edit function, so I let it stand)
I must have a mental preference for ‘shifting’, because ‘switching’ implies something sudden and binary, whereas ‘shifting’ suggests a gradual progression. eg: Anglo Scots, will shift more into their native tongue while home visiting the rellies – they don’t instantly switch.
Anyway, just a semantic difference, and a minor correction of my ‘improper’ use of the phrase, if any linguists want to call me out on it – maybe it jars them to read it.
@Northcode 1:50pm
An interesting read there, thanks.
As an aside, the wife – a nursery teacher, sorry, Early Years Practitioner – assures me that spoken Scots rhymes, and stories are part of the wee yins curriculum, so someone thinks it’s still important for them to hear their native tongue early.
Mind you, native tongue is a stretch, as there are of course numerous ‘incomers’ not versed in the Scots tongue, and sadly I’m told, not a few Scottish children, and even other ‘practitioners’ – my better-half often gets the job, because she is more naturally proficient at it than her fellow Scottish colleagues!
Well, all the better for the weans to hear it early I suppose, so kudos to someone in Scottish Education for facilitating it.
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh @ 11:40 am
“Gaelic is often described as Scotland’s oldest living language”
This relates to the period when Gaelic speakers first arrived in Argyll from Ireland from the 500s. Prior to this the population of what is today Scotland comprised of the various Pictish tribes as descendants of the Neolithic.
The Scots language spoken throughout most of Scotland was developed for over one thousand years and was spoken by most of the population during that period. There were still 1.6 million Scots language speakers according to the 2011 census (50,000 Gaelic speakers), this despite a century or more of Westminster’s intensive Anglicisation monolingual educational policy in Scotland, i.e. Linguistic Imperialism.
A observation from a Syriac
BREEKS
Re English language, a French linguist opined that it was «an easy language to speak badly» being itself a pidginized/créolized i.e structurally simplified form of Old English so correct form was a matter of personal taste, unlike his view of French; What is not clear, is not French etc.
The language of Lowland Scotland shares many structural characteristics with Modern English but it does have unique features of a distinct «language», phonology being one. Contemporary English lacks the full range of word building capabilities of Old English having largely discarded the function in favour of multiple word borrowing from Latin, Greek and French. Similarly the «Scots» of the early and middle periods although the borrowings may differ owing to political and cultural contacts.
Seeing the language written in unfamiliar contexts is the key to survival and restoring the interrupted process of the language’s development. In use and through translation from foreign languages it will regain strength. At the moment Scots seems to be living off its Anglo-Scottish dialectal fat and can appear more like English syntax with an admixture of «auld Scottis wirdis howkit frae dictionaris». Nothing «wrong» with that as at least the leid/tong/langage is in action. Personal taste and imagination count in that respect as it does in orthography, orthografie/orthographie/orthografi/orthographi etc. *Neu Scotis* can play with the medium.
Language revival entails language planning, experimentation and imagination. Rather dry and academic though that may sound it is an important ingredient in the process. Leaving matters such as grammar, lexis, syntax etc to mere chance is amateurish. There is a linguistic logic at work. There is also a rich well of classic texts to be explored from which «a standard» may be forged.
Scots/Lallans/Doric/Shetlandic or whatever will inevitably require an official, state supported *Academie fir dhe outset o dhe Scottis Leid* or an Academy for the development of the Scots language. A comprehensive English-Scots dictionary is also necessary, people need to know what goods are available in store.
Modern Greek, Israeli Hebrew, Afrikaans, Catalan, Finnish etc have gone before on the road from marginal to mainstream, from that looks odd, to that looks perfectly normal.
Scots (and Scotland) only needs to get its act ready, accompanied by the political intelligence and will.
«A lang viage begins wi ane step» or «Obair latha, «tòiseachadh» a day’s work just starting, take your choice.
Talking about swords. Ask Humza Yousaf about the sword of Damocles!
I’m pretty sure, he will be the last leader of the Scottish National Party. SNP’s only legacy being their enablement of a genuine push for independence, by others filling the gap caused by dissolution of the party!
50%+ of the electorate, already on standby, waiting to place their vote, for end to the Union!
Iain mhor @ 2:00 am
“Language is what you speak, nothing more”
LITERATURE ON COLONIALISM AND THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE
Language and culture intersect to form our identity (Lipski). Linguistic Imperialism marginalises and destroys indigenous language. The aim of Linguistic Imperialism is linguistic genocide/linguicide (Phillipson). The loss of language undermines our sense of identity and belonging. The ‘Establishment’s aim is to destroy the Scots language’ (Kay). Language policy in Scotland deprives Scots of the Scots language. ‘The language of my education is not the language of my culture’ (Thiong’o). Native tongue is neither written nor read, leading to poor oral development. The entire bureaucracy hears and uses only the colonizer’s language
The colonized participates in two psychical and cultural realms,two tongues in conflict. The colonized’s tongue is least valued, has no stature, is discarded, deemed invalid as are those who speak it. Yet, language is the means humans claim diversity and define their identity (Shaw). Language defines and unites a nation (Scots-English Dictionary). The ‘Scots language is a crucial and integral part of Scottish culture and identity’ (Open University). Language determines national attachment (Medeiros). Scots have an identity with and loyalty to the Scots language (Kay). Language and culture give us our national consciousness (Fanon). Language is the common rationale for self-determination of peoples
The most urgent claim of a group about to revive is the liberation and restoration of its language (Memmi). The crushing of the colonized and his language is included among the colonizer’s values. Torn away from his past and cut off from his future, the colonial condition cannot be adjusted to, it can only be broken. Recovering his autonomy and separate destiny he immediately goes back to his own tongue. For self-recovery, he must find the tool with the shortest path to his soul, his language, because it comes directly from it. Regaining possession of himself, passionately demanding the return of his language, essential for self-recovery.
BILLY CARLIN
Dan Brown, overdose of?
Illuminati, Jews, Masons and Jesuits conspiring to take over the world, all a little old hat.
The same nonsense as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a mashup of themes from fevered brains with «issues».
Also, very dangerous to health.
You would better spend your time looking into the activities of the secular organizations and their sociopathic «messiahs» such as Gates, Zuckerberg, Musk, Schwab and co.
Too «cultic» for comfort.
Joseph Atwill would contend that, in order to subjugate Judaea and deify Vespasian, at the end of the first century CE, all Jewish texts, which could be found, were destroyed and the gospels written to show Rome in a better light and to portray the prophesied messiah (Jesus) as a pacifist.
In that way all western religions and secret societies could be said to have the same root.
The gospels are the foundation of Western politics, law and morality.
My first attempt at poeming posted @2nd July 11:17pm contains a lot of Scots words I ‘howked’ from a dictionary. Mainly because that’s where words and what they mean are found.
Now, I know that Rabbie Burns’ status as Scotland’s bard probably won’t be threatened in any way by my effort – but you never know, I might get better.
My poem basically says I was beaten as a kid for using the Scots language and conned into thinking that English was the ‘real’ indigenous language of the Scots. But then I cottoned onto that waghorn’s (what a brilliant word) ruse and realised that, at least partly, the speaks of my early childhood were still kickin aboot in ma heid.
I had a lot of fun patching my poem together just throwing in Scots words from all over Scotland into the mix.
But more than that, poking around the fustyless auld digital tomes of the Scottish National Dictionary helped me understand a wee bit more about the rich history of the Scots tongue.
You can play around with the Scottish National Dictionary (1700 onwards) and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (pre 1700) here:
Scottish National Dictionary Online
It’s a fantastic resource and well worth a rummage.
Alf (2.29pm & 2.44pm), as always I agree with so much of what you say about the importance of language as such. However, with respect I yet again must point out that P-Celtic Pictish was very closely related to Q-Celtic Gaelic, and not at all to Teutonic “Scots”. You persistently mislead in this regard, determined as you seem to be to persuade people that Gaelic is foreign while Scots is uniquely native. When you trumpet comparative numbers of residual speakers you obviously miss the grievous point that your frequent (and welcome) imperialist-colonist quotes clearly apply even more fully to Gaelic than they do to Scots. And indeed I regret to say that you for your own part now arguably (and ironically) stand accused of trying to wipe Gaelic from Scottish history, identity and consciousness. For some degree of ameliorating balance I therefore repost the following authoritative info from my comment on the thread below your joint-post with Lynda entitled: “WHO ARE THE SCOTS?”, on Iain Lawson’s blog —
Extract from intro to THE HIGHEST APPLE / AN UBHAL AS ÀIRDE: An anthology of Scottish Gaelic literature, Edited by Wilson McLeod and Michael Newton, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2019 —
“The conventional view has been that the Gaelic language was brought to Scotland by settlers from Ireland in the early centuries of the common era, but it may actually be most appropriate ‘to imagine Ireland and Western Scotland as a single linguistic zone in which Gaelic evolved’ (Márkus 2017:79). It is therefore not entirely clear how and when Scottish Gaelic came to evolve separately from Irish. It was once thought that no significant distinctions between the two varieties emerged until c. 1300 but, more recently, scholars have challenged this model, arguing that differentiation probably began as soon as Gaelic speakers began to settle in Scotland.
“[…] Gaelic is one of the oldest written languages in Europe, with the earliest writings dating back to the seventh century or earlier (although the ogam system of notched lines, found on short stone inscriptions, goes back to the fourth century.
“[…] Scotland in the first millennium was a land of many languages and ethnic groups. The Picts and Britons, dominant in the north and south of the country respectively, spoke Celtic language varieties that appear to be fairly closely related to each other, if rather more distant from Gaelic. Both languages had gone out of use by about AD 1100. From the seventh century, Germanic speakers became established in the southeast of the country, eventually becoming dominant in Scotland from the late Middle Ages onwards, when their language variety became known as ‘Scots’, distinct from its sister English, which developed as the language of the English kingdom. From the end of the eighth century, Scandinavian settlement began, concentrated in the far northeast and along the western seaboard, and Norse speech survived in Shetland until the eighteenth century. Gaelic was thus only one of several languages spoken in Scotland, and has never existed in isolation.
“By the eleventh century Gaelic had spread throughout almost all of what is now mainland Scotland and had become established as the language of the first unified Scottish monarchy, the kingdom of Alba that emerged from the ninth century onwards. Gaelic was briefly the dominant language in Scotland, the language of institutional power, but language shift in the south and east of the country during the late Middle Ages, driven by a range of political, social, and economic factors, meant that from the fourteenth century onwards Gaelic became largely confined to the mountainous north and west (the ‘Highlands’ or *Gàidhealtachd*).
“Beginning in the late 1300s, commentators from the Scots-speaking ‘Lowlands’ (or *Galldachd*) began to develop strongly negative attitudes towards Highlanders, whom they had come to consider backward, violent, even barbarous. These prejudices intensified in the later sixteenth century, when the Reformation transformed Lowland Scotland into a bastion of reformed Protestantism, and new ideologies of kingship and government gave new impetus to the imposition of ‘civility’ on the Gàidhealtachd. Increasingly repressive measures were adopted, notably the Statutes of Iona (1609), which placed strict controls upon Highland clan chiefs and required them to educate their heirs in the Lowlands. Extracts given in this anthology from writers such as John of Fordun and King James VI, and from the Statutes of Iona, illustrate views of this kind.
“The vexed question of whether Gaelic should be understood as a national language of importance for all of Scotland, as a regional language, or as the language of a distinct quasi-ethnic minority within Scotland has been important ever since.”
Geri says:
3 July, 2023 at 1:51 pm
There’s no UK territorial waters once Scotland votes to leave.
————————–
The UN says different, the region of scotland doesn’t own it and never will.
from Wiki (must be true)
By the middle decades of the 14th century, the Hiberno-Norman presence in Ireland was perceived to be under threat, mostly due to the dissolution of English laws and customs among English settlers. These English settlers were described as “more Irish than the Irish themselves”, referring to their taking up Irish law, custom, costume and language. The introduction to the text of the statutes claim,[1]
Original Anglo-Norman: … ore plusors Engleis de la dit terre guepissant la lang gis monture leys & usages Engleis vivent et se governement as maniers guise et lang des Irrois enemies et auxiant ount fait divers mariages & aliaunces enter eux et les Irrois enemyes avauntditz dont le dit terre et le lieg people de icelle la lang Engloies ligeance a nostre seignour le Roy Duc et lez leis Engleis illoeques sont mis en subjection et retrets…
… now many English of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies; and also have made divers marriages and alliances between themselves and the Irish enemies aforesaid; whereby the said land, and the liege people thereof, the English language, the allegiance due to our lord the king, and the English laws there, are put in subjection and decayed…
The statutes tried to prevent this “middle nation”, which was neither true English nor Irish,[2] by reasserting English culture among the English settlers.
For those interested to follow up on their interest in the Scotts language:
A free online course in Scots language and culture was launched by The Open University (OU) and Education Scotland.
link to open.ac.uk
Scots language and culture – parts 1 and 2 are available here:
link to open.edu
😉
alurker @ 7:01pm
I didn’t know about this OU course. Thanks for posting the links, alurker.
Highlander
Do you have a link that states the UN has declared Scotland has no maritime boundaries anymore?
Geri,
if Scotland were to become independent, the UNCLOS rules on maritime boundaries would apply. It wouldn’t be contentious, the boundaries would be drawn according to UNCLOS. And yes, iScotland would have a huge maritime resource.
It gets more interesting if Orkney and Shetland were to go their own way, and become in effect the same as the Isle of Man. Because that would change the maritime boundaries map hugely. Much of those great resource areas of wind and fish wouldn’t any longer be Scottish.
ASA -The Isle of Man has a mangement agreement with crown, they pay rent.
Geri- it’s uk waters as far as the un is concerned.
Geri:
As it happens Craig Murray was the Westminsters expert maritime boundaries!
So probably best just ignore what the late shift posting as a Scot, a Sroad
and heehawlander are pushing:
“Scotland’s Stolen Seas: The Technical Explanation”
link to craigmurray.org.uk
😉
“Scotland/England Maritime Boundaries”
link to craigmurray.org.uk
link to craigmurray.org.uk
link to craigmurray.org.uk
link to craigmurray.org.uk
fun reading! 😉
A Scot Abroad says:
3 July, 2023 at 1:23 am
Iain More,
I’m not what you describe.
I’m a Scot, by all reasonable definitions.
Don’t project your own bigotry upon me. I reject it.
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If it looks like a Sassanach and it sounds like a Sassanach and it stinks like a Sassanach then it is a Sassanach like you and Neil Oliver. If not then it is a Quizzer like both of you. The truth will always hurt Quizzers like you. You are a Sassanach or a Quizzer – which is it?
Iain More says:
4 July, 2023 at 3:43 am
If it looks like a Sassanach and it sounds like a Sassanach and it stinks like a Sassanach then it is a Sassanach
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Tell me, what do all sassenachs stink of? Oft have I read here posts proclaiming that Scots are not racists like their hated neighbours. Hypocritical don’t you think.
I deplore Ian More’s racism, but I also deplore his perpetuating of a Harry Lauder type Lowland distortion of what is actually a perfectly non-pejorative Gaelic-language term. It is only as used in Lowland English that the word “Sasannach” becomes nothing but an insult. In Irish the innately inoffensive word is “Sasanach” (one “n”). In Welsh an Englishman is “Sais” and the English language is “Saesneg”. All these anodyne standard terms derive from the word “Saxon”. The words “England” and “English”, on the other hand, clearly derive from “Angle” (hence French “Angleterre” and “Anglo-“, and also the Lowland term “Inglis”.)
In the book ‘GAELIC AND SCOTLAND / ALBA AGUS A’ GHÀIDHLIG’ (Ed. by William Gillies, Edinburgh Univ. Press, 1989), Iain MacAonghais/ John MacInnes writes in his essay ‘The Gaelic perception of the Lowlands’:
“A Lowlander (male) is a *Gall*; a Lowlander (female) a *Ban-Ghall*. The adjective is *Gallda*; and *Galldachd* [Lowlands] is formed from it. The sharpness of the distinction that Gaelic tradition draws between Lowlander and Englishman is not always appreciated to the full by non-Gaels. Their puzzlement may not be altogether surprising. For one thing, as Lowlanders sometimes complain, Gaelic makes no distinction between English and Lowland Scots linguistically. They both speak *Beurla*. But *beurla* meant originally not ‘English’ but ‘speech’: the extended designation *Beurla Shasannach* ‘English (speech)’ is still heard. I must admit that I have never heard this employed to make a contrast with *Beurla Ghallda*, but when I myself use the latter for Scots (in preference to the dreadful neologism *Albais*), all Gaelic speakers understand immediately what is intended. In any event, Lowlanders themselves originally referred to their language as ‘Inglis’.” (pp 92,93)
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh @ 4:31 pm
“as always I agree with so much of what you say about the importance of language as such”
Thanks Fearghas. The Scots language has to be distinct because it was and is developed within Scotland by the people living here, which is not necessarily the case for other languages given authority and ‘national’ status in Scotland today.
My main interest in oor mither tongue also lies in its relevance to, and as the basis of, our national consciousness, upon which any independence movement depends. In other words there would be no independence movement if all we had to depend on was English and Gaelic speakers. Which also explains why the colonizer’s longstanding colonial language policy in Scotland remains focused on linguicide, i.e. the death of the Scots language.
Alf Baird,
get it into your thick head: Scotland has not ever been colonised.
Alf Baird
The Scottish National Dictionary website is brilliant.
It has many examples showing how Scots words have been, and still are, used.
Here’s one:
He’s naethin but a muckle cloyt – Ayr 1928
Scottish National Dictionary Online
Alf writes: “The Scots language has to be distinct because it was and is developed within Scotland by the people living here,”
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That above statement is of course at least as true of Gaelic, the historic “Lingua Scottorum”, the language of the eponymous Scots after whom Scotland is named, not to mention the language of a vast quantity of our placenames. I have quoted and requoted numerous academic sources clearly confirming Gaelic‘s historic credentials. To enable general readers to further weigh the facts for themselves I offer the following link to the “Outline History” page of the DSL (Dictionaries of the Scots Language) website itself —
link to dsl.ac.uk
A Scot Abroad:
“Scotland has not ever been colonised.”
Hhmmm.
The Romans did occupy parts of lowland Scotland for a hundred years or two.
A thousand years later the Normans did so too, for several hundreds of years.
Several hundred years after that the Danish and Norwegian Vikings made a pretty good job of it too.
The only near neighbours who never did do that were the English.
Instead they were ‘colonised’ by the Scots when the Scottish King rode South and took over control of Whitehall and a century later The Estates of Scotland wiggled their arses into comfortable and lucrative seats in Westminster, where they remain to this day. As welcome as farts in a spacesuit.
Scotland is grotesquely over-represented in the Commons. Same population as Yorkshire, which has only 19 MPS, but with 57 fat arses on the green leather benches at the smelly end of the House.