We’ve highlighted some truly gruesome displays of anti-Scottish bigotry on this website over the last couple of years, the large majority of them from right-wing English newspapers. But today sees perhaps the worst case we’ve ever seen, and we’re sad to report that the blame for this one lies squarely at Scotland’s own door.
We hope you have a strong stomach.
It’s funny what people think when they only read the Daily Express.
(Click image for source.)
That doesn’t happen terribly often.
But on this matter, we simply can’t find fault with her logic.
I was introduced to politics at a very young age.
One of my first memories is of watching John Major giving a speech of some kind on television, possibly to do with Black Wednesday. I was only three at the time, so the conversation of the adults around me went somewhat over my head, but I learned early on that words like “government,” “Prime Minister,” and “economy” were important ones.
I was old enough to be aware of the palpable feeling of relief when Tony Blair won in 1997, and I remember celebrating with my mother when the double “Yes” result came in the same year. Devolution, I learned, was about getting the best deal for Scottish voters. But Scottish independence, for most of my life, simply never crossed my radar.
Below is an extract from an article published in the US quarterly Dissent Magazine, entitled “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark”.
We tweeted a link to it yesterday but dismayingly nobody seemed to notice it (not a single retweet last time we looked), and it really deserves reading. It’s an aspect of Nordic social democracy and gender equality that you don’t hear much about.
We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland ahead of tonight’s episode. Now that we have, we rather wish we’d heeded this advice from the PS3 iPlayer.
It’s like it knew.
This is the entrance to the municipal offices of Stirling Council (“Scotland’s Heart”), visible from the monument to William Wallace that looks over the former Scottish capital. The figures guarding the doorway are Wallace and Robert the Bruce.
The building’s flagpole is flying a Saltire (specifically the city’s own modified coat-of-arms version, which features a Lion Rampant and explicitly represents the Battle of Bannockburn), as you might quite reasonably expect it to.
Enjoy this patriotic sight while you can. It might have barely 48 hours left.
As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.
He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.
As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).
Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?
This, chums, is what the Daily Telegraph thinks of as “a house”:
The article appears to go on to suggest that house prices in England would rocket as a result of a Yes vote, while those in Scotland would plummet. We’re not quite sure that the average Scottish voter will reach the same conclusion from that assertion that the Telegraph would want them to.
It’s not directly related to Scottish independence, but we were disturbed to be alerted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray to a piece of recent BBC coverage. A friend of ours has helpfully cut down the video footage in question to just the important parts, and saved it in case of sudden disappearances. You should probably watch them.
The new Scottish Secretary, Alistair Carmichael, in Holyrood magazine in 2010:
Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:
“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”
And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:
“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”
It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
