This should be good
Those of you who joined us in watching some of the six-hour Nat-Bashing Festival in the House of Commons yesterday will be aware that it set a high standard of jaw-dropping “Did he/she REALLY just say that?” televised democracy. (Some edited highlights.) The first couple of hours can be viewed here, with the rest here.
Speakers who supported independence were given around 30 minutes in total of yesterday’s “debate”, with the second being cut short in order to allow more Labour and Tory MPs to line up and explain their heartfelt hatred of the SNP, in case anyone hadn’t picked it up from the previous five hours of contributions.
Later today the House of Lords, which has no SNP representation at all, will discuss the same issue. You should be able to watch it live at this link from after around 4pm. It ought to be entertaining. We’ve made this post so people can discuss it in the comments without having to commandeer another article. Have fun.
I’m going to lay down a prediction, that Rifkind and Forsyth will be more temperate and erudite in their contributions than Sarwar and Davidson were (in fact they might even sound sorrowful, as if they know the game is lost already), but that Foulkes will be unable to resist a dig at the bogeyman.
I think this is a fine idea, although it’s going to be 5pm when it starts here in Hamburg and I’ll be leaving work, probably for the pub. Otherwise I would contribute to the discussion!
Bummer. 6pm in Athens and I’m out to dinner at 7…I wonder if watching the first hour will affect my appetite. Probably.
Oh can’t claim to be anywhere other than Glasgow, however have just watched Politics Scotland on BBC2. Other than comments from S Maxwell and S Hosie (not picked up on), no discussion of yesterday’s 6 hour marathon, shame on the BBC.
Rev Stu, your link is to the HoC rather than the intended HoL coverage on the BBC’s Democracy Live.
An alternative link to the HoL’s chamber is at link to parliamentlive.tv
Today’s session began at 1505. The S30 debate is on now.
Lords debate is on now…Sorry unable to link
So what exactly are these political consequences Wallace is referring to?Michael Moore mentioned the same thing yesterday.It sounds to me like a threat to abide by the electoral commission.Is this an accepted democratic principle that Holyrood should make its decision under the barrel of a gun.It seems unfair to expect Holy rood to adequately represents the people if it has to make its decisions under the shadow of a threat.
I very much doubt that anyone cares how much gas a collection of bumptious old toads use up in such a self-congratulatory glut of lies and rank hypocrisy. No thinking person could plough through that contradictory clap-trap and not be put off by the whole Westminster way of doing things. They just don’t seem to learn that the only way to win the argument is to present a real reason why we are better off as part of the UK. They have been using these dirty underhand tricks, lies, deceit etc and all that has resulted is the rise of the SNP and the swift propulsion of Scotland toward that dreaded independence. Nobody believes a word they say and not just here but all through the UK. And their surfeit of hot air was not even worth reporting by their own tame media (aka the Scottish press) they would much rather go with horse burgers and London helicopter crashes because the inane whiterings of Westminster politicians would depress their sales to zero.
Forsyth “The Scottish Parliament is one man”.
Forsyth is as incredible as those numbskulls yesterday….
What’s his amendment….electoral commissions advice MUST be taken maybe?
Watching Lords, do you think Mr M Forsyth has visited a local watering hole in recent hours?
wow. he’s ripping into the EC now….
Anyone done a headcount on these unelected Lords and Ladies in this ‘debate’, as others have pointed out no SNP peers.
How can someone speak for so long and not say anything? I’m sure someone more exciting will be up next…right?
Oh for FFS, Forsyth resorting to quoting Darling, whatever it takes, now Quebec, does he just get to witter on for however long it takes, and they tell us this is democracy, oh mercy hailing the Crofters Commission now.
Mickey Moore gettin’ it noo!
Jesus wept!
Want to comment on everything Forsyth says but I can’t keep up with the flow of sheer lies and drivel.
F****** Forsyth says ‘Salmond the gambler’ now on to the stars who don’t live in the country
and now Foulkes saying ‘supine Scottish media’ claiming they don’t question Scottish media, ????? the idea this is anything other that a horribly expensive powerful pile of bollocks, yes I’m boiling of blood.
Yup Embradon, it’s quite something!
Salmond this, Salmond that, Salmond the next thing. When will they realise I am Salmond, we are all Salmond. They decry and insult us all.
Now rancid Reid takes the floor, so Forsyth not pushing his amendment to a vote, as if we didn’t know that, but hey the BBC bought it and F******* Forsyth has sat his arse on many a media sofa.
Albalha –
It really is a blood boiler! I’m for the off switch and a lie down in a darkened room…. soon.
I chose to duck out of this pantomime. I admire your perspicacity for sticking with listening to these unelected numpties.
@Embradon – Indeed but one has to listen, Reid now echoing the Battle of fechin Bannockburn as they say in other parts wtf? Foulkes ‘isn’t he also riding on the back of Ryder Cup etc’, Reid ‘ we may have a fox in charge, but we don’t have chickens voting’ ……in another life I met Reid up close and personal, odious is too generous, truly not pleasant to deal with.
The Reid, Forsyth Love In ………I’ll take bets on that not being a headline anywhere in the MMS tomorrow, though that’s what’s happening ……… Reid ‘Anyone can spot a fly man, certainly in Glasgow’, aye John you’d damn well know.
Lord Steel looking rather glum to say the least. His wife Judy is of a YES persuasion however.
Ah – He went to the Lords, did he? Thought he was away for glue.
Let’s see now…these are the honourable people who are trying to convince us to stay in the Union?
I take it that they are soft soaping us?
Jolly Jack now …… ‘ for over 30 years, for the first time I agree with M Forsyth’, says it all
Embradon – good post. We could have a Spartacus moment. I’m Salmond. I’m Salmond, etc. Every single person who voted for him. Because quite a few people did.
@Ysabelle
I’m most certainly not Salmond, I will vote YES but let’s for goodness sake not get all hung up on an individual. While I will challenge those who attack the leader of the SNP for partisan reasons, I most certainly do not want to fall into their trap. My hope is that we secure a YES vote and then see a post SNP Scotland, however that shapes itself, I’m no fan of the monarchy nor NATO.
Is it only elderly men that are making comments?
Still trying to rewrite the rules, even at this late point.
Embradon says:
16 January, 2013 at 4:36 pm
Salmond this, Salmond that, Salmond the next thing. When will they realise I am Salmond, we are all Salmond. They decry and insult us all.
Great stuff.
Embradon
It’s the other way round. Salmond is us. Without us he is just another ordinary Scot.
What a bunch of boring old farts these people are.
Salmond is the enabler; the conduit for our hopes and dreams.
Without his vision and guts we would still be scrabbling around in a Labour dominated hell.
Adrian B
What a bunch of boring old farts these people are.
Absolutely.
No one of them speaks to me or what I aspire to for myself, my family or my country.
With all this scaremongering (maybe in Scotland that should be fleg mongering) about the Electoral Commission, I’m looking forward to the Commission making perfectly reasonable advice on the question, the Scottish Government accepting it, and the Scottish Parliament agreeing.
In the meantime, The two campaigns will have been well established in the public mind as “Yes” and “No”.
Henry the Eighth was not a King in Scotland -whats this man on about?
Now we’re hearing about Henry 8th powers, I kid you not.
Dipped my toe in. I soon came out. I seemed to hear one of our noble Lords raising again the spectre of a legal challenge of some kind, “If the Scottish government didn’t adhere to the Edinburgh accord” or some such. WTF? Of course our noble Lord did not want that to happen, but …
I gave up with the contribution about Henry VIII. No doubt “Bloody Mary” will be in there next as a warning to the rUK!
Enjoy it my dear co-commentators. But I will rely on the redoubtable Rev. Stu for a palatable synopsis tomorrow.
Another old coffin dodger thinks that Scotland has been a dearth of a country going back to Flodden. Saved only by the Union. Much of this nonsense is burgeoning on the racist.
How many HOL members does it take to pass a section 30?
@AdrianB
Very few, though well paid for all that
A sensible bit of input from a Plaid Cymru Lord. Friendly voice in a sea of negativity.
God bless this Welsh gentleman for speaking up for us.
Lord Cormack on now, not quite up to speed with the ‘you get a 2014 vote if you live in Scotland’ …….. shoot me now, turns out his son lives in Scotland, well he gets a vote, ok, not that bloody complex
The voice of reason from the Noble Lord from Wales. Courteous, incisive and absolutely right!!
On Welsh Lord Wigley, the interesting points surely for Scots are the John Reid interventions?
The Welsh Member of HOL handled the John Reid interventions very well – got a big cheer from me. Reid had to back peddle a bit as he was embarrassed of pushing his agenda.
Lets not forget 2 things
1) how many people are watching this?
2) how many of THOSE people even care?
1970’s Tactics in the 21st century. i have one word for them . INTERNET !!!!!!!!!!!
People like Reid are, of course, notable in only one respect. Their personal concern for the people of Scotland, and the pied-piper-like hold they claimed Salmond had over them, was never strong enough to get them to stand for Holyrood. After all, if they wanted to confront the man directly in the political arena, that was the place. They wouldn’t even need to give up their peerage.
In that respect, Foulkes is actually a more worthy individual than Reid, Forsyth, Wilson et al. Now, when someone like Foulkes can be more highly thought of than you, you’ve got a real problem…
Screw the Electoral Commission.
I thank you all for this thread. We are amused
Yes it is amusing, but what really is the relevance of all this to the People of Scotland?
I was one of those who thought last year that the YES campaign should be getting stuck into the unionists “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” in response to their constant barrage of scaremongering lies and smears.
However I am now convinced that the YES campaign have been playing a blinder all along by allowing the unionists and their MSM lackeys to have enough rope to hang themselves.
I think we now have firm evidence of this happening judging by the vile diatribes of the unionist MP’s at their “debate” yesterday and at today’s Lords “debate” in Westmister. Davidson may think he is a wind up merchant but what he has really succeeded in doing is to peel away the thin skin covering what we now see is a deep rooted hatred at Westminster against Scotland and our values that led us to vote in a majority SNP government – something that will come back to haunt Davidson and his ilk as it will definitely not go down at all well with the voters of Scotland no matter what their political persuasion.
We may have witnessed a watershed moment in the referendum campaign where the unionists ran riot to the point that they self-destructed in their own hate and bile.
Their misconduct has now made it all the easier for the majority of MSP’s at Holyrood to justify introducing extremely tight rules for the conduct of the referendum.
The YES campaign is about to gather pace judging by Nicola Sturgeons blog yesterday and Alex Salmonds piece about having a written constitution for an independent Scotland, and I fully expect that they will gradually take the initiative during 2013.
Forsyth needs to visit a hairdresser. He looks more like Monty Burns with every passing day.
I think I did quite well and sat through the whole thing apart from a brief interlude when the appearance of Stalin’s Granny required a quick relocate to the loo (scary woman). Just caught the end of Empey – did he come out with anything deranged?
Sad, but the two most temperate contributions came from non-Scots; the Welsh PC chap, unsurprisingly, and some Tory whose name I missed but looked like a version of Geoffrey Howe after he’d been over-inflated.
Slightly o/t – use of the word “separation”
I used to get annoyed when the term “separation” was used in the debate – many MP’s used it yesterday and it was used extensively today. However, isn’t that exactly what we are arguing for?
I can only assume that these members of the two Houses of Parliament know that this, in relation to the debate on independence, is a technical term and are using it as such. No doubt they are taking their lead from the chairman of the Scottish Affairs Committee, Ian Davidson MP, and his committee’s report entitled “The Referendum on Separation for Scotland”. Mr Davidson, no doubt on top of his brief and with the support of the Westminster infrastructure is aware of the significance of the word.
link to eutopialaw.com
[The article linked to above summarizes the three scenarios identified by the HoC researchers and links to the original HoC publication]
Listened and occasionally looked in while doing real life stuff. (Unelected House of Lords definitely is not real life!)
Some unbelievable guff from Lords FF and others, once again portraying Alex Salmond as some dictator – they fail to see, or at least to acknowledge that Alex Salmond has a stronger democratic mandate to be the FM of Scotland than David Cameron has to be PM of the UK. (The SNP have an absolutely majority in Holyrood, with 45% of the popular vote, the Tories do not have an absolute majority and only something like 35% of the popular vote. Why isn’t Cameron called a dictator?)
Apart from the usual suspects, two speeches stood out in their viciousness and misinformedness. The only woman to take part in the debate, Helen Liddel (or Baroness Liddel of somewhere or another as she is now, the noble lady) and the Earl of Caithness, a hereditary peer.
Dafydd Wigley, the Plaid Cymru peer, was a breath of fresh air in that noxious smog of British Establishmentariaism. Oh, and a slightly hippy-looking 40-something bearded hereditary peer (sorry, didn’t catch his name) made a friendly, albeit confused speech.
The main tenor seemed to be that how dare the Scottish Parliament and Scottish Government and the House of Commons and the UK Governement do these things without allowing the noble Lords proper debate and say in these things. It really is the house of dinosaurs.
Privy Council will now pass S30 and at some point Holyrood will debate the referendum and we can expect more of the same from the unionist party MSPs, especially Labour. (Tory policies might be nastier but at least their politicians are a bit more polite. And the LibDems are shellshocked and trying to be nice to everybody while trying to figure out what exactly they stand for.)
The HoC “debate” in particular was very unpleasant to watch because it was hour upon hour of Scottish MPs denigrating their own country. Don’t they see they’re also denigrating the very people who they depend on for a job = the electorate. Labour, in particular, haven’t woken up and smelled the coffee. They slammed on the snooze button in 2007 and again in 2011. Lalalalala, I’m not waking up to reality, it’s not happening…
I hope Scotland votes YES in 2014, and then Labour for Independence, the SNP, Scottish LibDems and (Murdo Fraser’s) new (not Tory) right-of-centre party, the Greens and a couple of other small parties take Scotland forward. What an opportunity!
Lasting 4 hrs 35 mins, the debate started at 1505 and ended at 1940 after the withdrawal of Forsyth’s ‘foot in the door’ amendments led to it being approved with little appearance of enthusiasm.
I’ll put upt the Westminster ‘parliamentlive’ link to the archived coverage here once the Hansard record is available too, as there are some points to check before commenting further – unless beaten to them.
Meanwhile, Blethering Brian’s take is at:
link to bbc.co.uk
Watching power retention at work was akin to seeing vampires give blood.
Many thanks for putting up the post Stu.
No, I am Alex Salmond….lol
The House of Lords will be worried their lifestyle may be disappearing and how will they be able to fiddle their expenses. This is all them talking bollocks about a very real problem, what are they going to do if Scotland gets independence for most of them will have been telling their electorate how bad it is to be independent and to have to come back after the Yes referendum and start saying how we are all now Better Apart wont go down well as everyone will know for certain they are lying.
So do you go wholeheartedly out there telling them…”All bad, don’t do it” or could be good why not give it a try but whatever they do they better start quick as they have 18 months to get their stories straight
One thing that struck me yesterday and again today, with the HoC and HoL “debates” on S30.
Many of the Scottish debaters refered to Scotland, the Scottish electorate, the Scottish Parliament (ultimately the Scottish people) as “them”, “they”, “their parliament”, “their referendum” etc. The SNP MPs and a couple of the better unionist orators (I think Charlie Kennedy was one) spoke of “we”, “us”, “our parliament”, “our referendum” etc.
I don’t have time to search this thing on Hansard but it is there. Many Scottish MPs talking about Scotland as “them”, “they”, “their”, etc. As if they weren’t Scottish – if they felt Scottish, they’d say “we”, “us”, “our”, etc.
Is it just me, or is Blethering Brian becoming more balanced than he used to be?
lumilumi @ 9:42 pm
A similar example usage of the phrases:
‘ the people of Scotland ‘ and ‘ the people in Scotland ‘
The former is redolent of the top-down UK state and nominally citizens but in reality – without recognition of their own sovereingnty – in reality subjects (possessions, owned) and with a Head of State who represents the state’s sovereignty and that of its agencies, including ‘my people’. Hence ‘Queen of England’ and ‘the people of England’
Whereas the latter reflects a bottom-up view in which we, all the people own the land and the state we establish with our own and founding law, with a Head of State who represents the people’s personally singular and shared plural sovereignty. Hence ‘Queen of Scots’ and ‘the people in Scotland
[ I’ll hack the edit function now I know how I don’t make it work. ]
@indion 10.20
I think you make an important point. It tells a lot about the nation, the national sentiment, whether a person is King of England, King of UK, or King of Scots (or Queen, if the reigning monarch happens to be female.) The English/UK title is about the land, the Scottish title is about the people, who are sovereign. Hence the title of King/Queen of Scots (not of Scotland).
Monarchy is an anachronism in the 21st century anyway. The Cambridges’ baby will not accede to the throne because the monarchy will be defunct by then.
I really am going to have to get buy in normal life, so perhaps a last thought.
Michael Moore said: “All Opposition leaders in the Scottish Parliament have stated their intention to abide by the Electoral Commission’s judgment…”
Mmm, bearing in mind that they too have a duty for the referendum, that’s wrong of them. They too may want not to accept all the EC’s recommendations, or to make small changes to EC proposed changes, for the purpose of having the best referendum possible.
To comment about that in the general spirit of that section 30 debate in the HoC:
“It would seem Davidson and others of his party, in their attempts to pin down the SNP to an improper action, are curiously under-informed considering they’ve had 80 years to research the referendum process. Or could there be an ulterior motive? Can we trust them? Can players also be the linesmen?”
Still smelling a stinky big rat with the Electoral Commission. There’s too much focus on it from the onionists. There’s something in it for them and they’re pushing far too hard to make it happen.