Lead in their pencils

I note, not greatly with interest (the excruciatingly boring prolongation of Brexit talk at Westminster must surely have just about all of us at the stage of semi-coma by now) that Members of the House are to attempt a new, and somewhat radical, way of making any sense at all of any of it.

This they will endeavour to achieve by perusing lists of various options that might be available to them (cancel the circus, send for a plumber, turn back the clock 100 years and pretend your important, etc) and utilising A3 pencils and ballot papers to attempt to communicate amongst themselves, coming out of their little silos to determine whether there is the slightest chance of any consensus on any way forward at all. Bits of paper and pencils to the rescue.
 
I fear however, as a result, and going on recent history, that the only feasible answer they’ll  come up with is that Colonel Mustard did it in the conservatory with a candlestick.
 
Somebody please bring this to an end. What a laughing stock. For the love of goodness, one way or the other, get it stopped or get it done, and let’s get back to the job in hand, returning Scotland to its rightful self-governing status.

On the prize

It looks like it’s time for the sandbags and the tin hat tae come oot again. There’s been yet another outbreak of the EsEnPeeCivil War, an on-off conflict which has the makings of reducing the Hundred Years’ War between the Houses of Plantagenet and Valois to a minor disagreement over the last remaining rouleau de saucisse at an early Greggs street stall in medieval Calais toon square.
 
Down in London to lend her support to the mass demonstration seeking the option for the ordinary citizens of the countries which make up the UK to get another shot at making their minds up about Brexit,Nicola Sturgeon, in amongst dozens of selfies she ends up in most working days, had her phoatie taken with Malcolm Tucker’s alter ego, the fictitious character known as Alastair Campbell. Light the blue touch paper and stand well back. Cue wailing, gnashing, calls for her to resign and loads of those drawn out ‘I’m leaving and never voting SNP again’statements on social media, sometimes from folk who ironically would rather vote for the party Campbell is associated with anyway, if only Jeremy Corbyn would stop pretending he is Ernie Wise with a beard but no chin.
 
Indeed Campbell, in his guise as fixer-in-chief and puppet-master of the ‘Things can only get better’ roadshow, during a period of time which entirely destroyed what was left of a once great movement for social change, a ‘modernisation’ where many personal former socialist nests were feathered, an era when it wasn’t entirely clear which of the political parties involved in the two-party Westminster stranglehold was the most neo-liberal in their policies, in a centrist orgy of the well –off getting better off (the less well off, they had Honest Tony’s cobra-like grin, tea and sympathy to console themselves with, when he could find a space in his diary to grudgingly empathise between acquiring prime city real estate and a vast wealth) is an unsavoury character.
 
His involvement in the smoke and mirrors spin leading up to, and into, the Iraq War is unforgiveable. That must surely sit heavily on his conscience. He is a man whose personal battles with his own demons have been well publicised over the years. He must live with his decisions, for surely they were his. We are all responsible for our own actions.
 
Lately Campbell has been very much involved, and vocal, in the campaign for a ‘People’s Vote’ on Brexit. Getting his photograph taken during a mass demonstration about that campaign with the only real plausible political leader around in the UK at the moment, a leader who agrees with him on this subject, and that is important for us to note (on this subject) I’d imagine from his point of view, and very possibly the First Minister’s too, helps raise the profile of that campaign, a campaign which is looking to bring about a second vote, a vote aimed at keeping the UK in the European Union, which, remember, is the democratic will of those who Nicola Sturgeon, as First Minister of Scotland, serves, the people of Scotland.
 
Her appearance at the march in London, and her speech, where she was honest in making it clear that she believes the future of Scotland is as an independent country but also made it known that she cares about the future of the remaining UK, as our neighbours, once we’ve gone, can only have won her friends in a country where ordinary people usually hear anything about Scottish independence through a filter of British nationalist media portraying us all as sinister separatists who don’t like them.
 
Politics is like that. Sometimes a political leader doing the ‘day job’ has to set aside her own feelings, her own views, for the sake of the bigger picture. Eyes on the prize folks. It’s coming, but only if we stick together. Don’t do the British state’s dirty tricks division’s job for them.

The laughing clowns

The mind indeed boggles. The current goings-on, and the reportage of those goings-on, in the crumbling seat of government of the former imperial power of which it was once said that the sun never sets, are heading towards being compared to a nostalgic tribute to early 1970’s psychedelic experimental comedy. Farce involving swirly lights, go-go dancers, sudden loud humming noises, and the odd clown face popping up and laughing hysterically.
 
Amid the chaos and disarray of the Brexit disaster it appears that the very sight of the leader of the third largest party at Westminster results in a mass evacuation of the Commons Chamber.

It’s worse when he gets up to speak. Prime Ministers suddenly remember they’ve left an egg on the boil in the cabinet office, pretendy socialist messiah’s bustle off to spend quiet time underlining sentences from ‘Das Kapital’, and crammed benchloads of political free-loading pond life scuttle off to the bar or that nice little bistro up the road, to escape.

Ian Blackford let out an involuntary belch the other day and 36 Tories ran screaming from the room thinking he was about to make a point.

It is said that if he is caught short and strolls off for a comfort break in one of the Commons toilets, which by the way, are still stacked high with the thousands of little glossy square sheets of paper that used to be hard copies of the Scottish government document ‘Scotland’s place in Europe’, (their repurposing being the result of giving former Brexit Minister David Davis’s team something to do for a few months, folding and ripping rather than using scissors which they might hurt themselves with) a handpicked cross-party group of LabTors are dispatched to covertly switch the bog light off once he’s in there.
 
The media, if anything, are worse. The State broadcaster has stealthily placed an electronic pressure pad under his seat on the party which represents the democratic majority in Scotland’s benches, which automatically switches its’ live feed to old episodes of the Magic Roundabout and Mr Ben when Blackford even as much as shifts a buttock in anger.

Heaven forbid they should ever broadcast the man speaking live. Why would he need to be heard in this great and wondrous precious union of equals, the mother of parliaments, the finest example of democratic partnership that the world has ever seen? Who would listen? What he has to say and the views of those who elected him and his colleagues to that place are irrelevant. Scotland does not matter.

The imperative of Scotland once again becoming a self-governing country is really that simple.
 
Honest to goodness, if you really do think that you are receiving balanced reporting of the most significant political event that has taken place since WW2, and its potential consequences, you must be living in that psychedelic world of laughing clowns mentioned earlier.