They’ve got nothing

It is like watching a very cheap made-for-tv film. One that you are almost sure you’ve seen before, maybe late one night, when the pub was shut, you were a wee bit the better for drink, and just finishing off the remnants of a kebab. A film about the twelve months prior to mid-September 2014 in Scotland.

The Union-at -all-costs playbook has been brought back out of the drawer, and all the old tired, worn out, farcical falsehoods about independence are being pushed through the compliant media sausage machine yet again to see how many of the voters of Scotland they can scare away from the perfectly reasonable and normal prospect (anywhere else in the world) of a country being governed by the people who live there this time.

And they still can’t come up with a plausible positive reason for Scotland staying a subsumed subjugate in a Union that is a union only in name. There isn’t one. Further, can anyone in all seriousness on the unionist side say that anything that has occurred in central government, any event, any decision made, any change in leadership in London, any change in relationship with partner trading nations, anything at all, since 18 September 2014,  has strengthened the cause of unionism in Scotland? No.

Is there a clear and factual argument to be made from the side of independence that much of what has gone on during that period has strengthened the case for self-government to the point where it is no longer a hope but is in fact an imperative of vital import? Yes, most certainly.

The Union that exists between Scotland and England in 2022 relies entirely on those with the power, mainly centred in the south of England, being able to continue to convince a section of Scottish society, those averse to politics, in the middle of the road, turned off by the fringe elements of the two polarised camps, that ‘what has aye been’ must continue or disaster will befall us. Frightening pensioners, doomsaying savers, bandying around spurious headlines suggesting that Scotland would lose billions of pounds of investment a year as an independent country, all farcical nonsense. That is all they have.

Now they are starting to ramp up the reprehensible idea that an active Indy campaign equals violence in the streets. The big bad separatists, with their extreme views (simply wanting their own government ,not somebody else’s) are coming to get ye.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the only sign of any violence on show during the last referendum campaign from the Yes Movement, and I’m still a bit dubious that this wasn’t a set-up, a lobbed egg at the bold Irn Bru Crate staunin, kid on man-of-the-people, Jimbo Murphy? Whereas on the Unionist side the sickening events of 19^th September in George Square tell a story in themselves. Imagine what could have happened if they’d lost?

I suppose what I’m saying here is this. We’ve never seen a weaker mob of chancers and comic villains in charge of the power that maintains the Union than the current lot. They have absolutely nothing in the tank to use other than Project Fear.

Let’s get this right. Let’s show them up for what they are. The UK is in its last days of being a real-life version of a Hans Christian Andersen fable. We need to fully expose that the Emperor is indeed strolling along, trying to bluff it out, completely in his birthday suit. When we do it is all over bar the fireworks, tears and hangovers.

A dangerous farce

So, let me see if I’ve got this right, Boris Johnson, possibly the most incompetent leader of the countries which make up the current disunited Kingdom since Waldrid the Ancient married his horse, is keen to stand up for countries who have their sovereignty compromised by larger neighbours, like Churchill on speed, but doesn’t recognise basic and unequivocal democracy when it’s demonstrated in the land on the other side of the River Tweed from the country on the side of the river he attends parties on. That’s a pretty selective approach by anyone’s standards.

I thought we’d all dodged a bullet when the maniacal Trump was dislodged, before he made decisions which would see many of us incinerated and the rest of us passing in the agony of radiation sickness, but Johnson and his comic book character Cabinet getting involved in international squabbles and trying to throw weight that they don’t actually have any more at countries who could swish them away like a coo dismisses a fly with its tail, is giving me the fear.

It’s a bit of a stretch for Johnson, who has spent a lifetime perfecting a smirking naughty schoolboy routine to try and pass himself off as some sort of statesman, but in one last attempt to keep the current generation of ‘grey suited men’ of the Tory party from paying him a visit (the previous lot were known for kicking Thatcher out to the kerb) he’s looking to come over all dogged and unwavering, a leader fully in possession of the facts, a serious thinker across all of the details and nuances of the Ukraine and Russian dispute. Eh naw. That portrayal of him is simply not credible. He’s never been across the detail of anything ever. He hasn’t needed to be. He lives on bluff and bluster.

Sending the clearly bewildered and totally out of her depth Liz Truss to Moscow to be comprehensively humiliated by Russian diplomats wasn’t a smart move either, although I’m guessing she hardly noticed, as she comes across as being as intuitive and in touch with the moment as a discarded plastic spoon. Where do they find these people?

Meanwhile in Scotland? We’re back in the latest cycle of what currency will you use? You’ll no’ get the pension that you’ve paid into for the last forty years if you vote Yes. Who’ll protect you from the Chinese tanks rumbling past Hogganfield Loch? You’ll never see your English granny again once we’ve built a wall bigger than Trump’s imaginary monolith on the border with your foreign Scotland, the banks will all leave you, Nessie will retire to Windermere in disgust, Scotland will be the poorest country in Europe and we’ll get flung out of the EU… Oh wait, we done that one………….. and still some of us fall for it.

I sometimes wonder if the words Irvine Welsh’s placed in the mouth of his fictional character Mark Renton in ‘Trainspotting’ were right. But then I look at how thing have changed generally in Scotland over the years, since the re-opening of our parliament, with regards to confidence and attitudes to self-government, and I truly feel that although the campaign is often stumbling, halting, edging forward, then back, and fraught with barriers as we navigate a constitutional maze, the momentum is still taking us in a direction where independence is inevitable.

Smoke and mirrors

Ah the dark arts are being summoned up against us once again. The hardly shifting indie-ometer must be starting to register a faint threat signal down Whitehall way as good old darkness, our old friend, otherwise known as Project Fear, has come to meet with us again. 

It’s the pensions again (sigh) a subject about which there have been more scare stories since 2012 than the Daily Mail has had front page disparaging headlines about migrants taking the jobs of right-wing belters wae one Standard Grade prelim pass in itchy STD recognition.

Our not-yet-convinced folk are supposed to believe, according to the usual Union draped suspects, that no matter that they may have worked their whole life, paying their taxes and their national insurance, into the coffers of the British State, they are getting zilch, the middle of a doughnut, zero access to a retirement pension (which incidentally is currently one of the worst in Western Europe anyway, but that is for a different day) if they tick the box which returns their country to its original state of independence. 

We’ll be a different country, you see, and paying you your pension in a different country, when that country is right next to theirs, and called Scotland, would just be too hard. It’s easy enough if you are in Spain. Australia or anywhere else you care to mention, but just not Scotland, oh no.

Is there anyone left in Scotland who actually believes all of this nonsense?

I saw another Project Fear headline today, or perhaps it was yesterday, saying that the people of Scotland won’t vote for independence because the SNP will seek to re-join the European Union, and that is a bad thing. What a pile of drivel. The unionist argument in 2014 was don’t vote for independence because Scotland will get thrown out of the EU, now their argument is don’t vote for independence because Scotland will get thrown back into the EU, which is it?

Is part of the Unionist wildly skewed logic some sort of Orwellian argument that the magnificent efforts that Boris Johnson and his crew of comic singers, Hen and Horace Broon lookalikes and chancers have put in to vastly improve the lives of the people of the countries of the UK since Brexit surely must have persuaded the 62% of Scots who voted not to take a pistol and shoot themselves in the foot in 2016 to change their minds about their country’s continuing membership of the largest tariff-free trading bloc in the world? Really? 

It’s all just propaganda. It’s their thing. Kind of like the 12 million quid (which would cover the cost of a fair amount of tinned foods in various foodbanks) they are spending to try and brainwash the next generation of schoolkids that being considered ‘subjects’ of another human being, who by accident of birth should be considered as your superior, and have godlike qualities to be worshipped, and an entitlement to untold buck-shee wealth, is a good thing in the year 2022.

Let’s get moving on this independence campaign. It’s the only thing for it.

Bewitched and bewildered

The scene is a typical ubiquitous TV studio somewhere in London. The female breakfast news presenter speaks, to camera.

‘The Prime Minister continues to be under pressure following a succession of what seems almost daily mishaps.  Let’s go over to the Minister for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, Nadine Dorries, to discuss this further. Nadine Dorries. Good morning. Do you think Boris Johnson is doing a good job?’

ND: ‘How do you know that I am Nadine Dorrries? Who told you that I am Nadine Dorries?’

‘You are Nadine Dorries. We’ve seen you in the Commons, I’ve interviewed you before. You are Nadine Dorries.’

ND: ‘You are simply surmising that I am Nadine Dorries. You are making assumptions that may not be right and exaggerating the facts, aren’t you? You are even assuming it is a good morning.’

‘There is a sign on the desk in front of you that says Nadine Dorries, Minister for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. You are Nadine Dorries.’

ND: ‘There you go again, jumping to conclusions. This might be someone else’s desk. I might be Nadine Dorries, but you are making assumptions which may not be correct. Am I right?’

‘Nadine Dorries, the public are entitled to an answer. Do you think Boris Johnson is doing a good job?’

ND: ‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Because you are a Government Minister and you are accountable to the people who elected you.’

ND: ‘Tell me which of the people who elected me, or the actual Nadine Dorries, if that turns out not to be me, are interested in whether I think Boris Johnson is doing a good job. Give me their names.’

‘I can’t tell you their names. I don’t have a list of the people who elected you.’

ND: ‘Well, how do you know that they are interested in whether I think Boris Johnson is doing a good job then?’

‘I can see we are not going to get anywhere with that question. Let’s move on. Have you spoken to Boris Johnson over the last few days?’

ND: ‘Why?’

‘The viewing public, whose names I don’t have a list of, and I, me, myself are interested in whether you have spoken to him.’

ND: ‘We may have communicated.’

‘Either you did or you didn’t. Which is it? Was it a face-to-face conversation?’

ND : (lifting a kitchen colander from under the desk and placing it on her head)  ‘I may as well tell you. When I wear my special hat (she points towards her head-top colander) he sends me far-reaching vitally important signals of a substantive nature. Yesterday, for example, he sent me (It came through very clearly) a video clip of himself stripped to the waist in his riding jodhpurs galloping thought a field of hay on a white stallion, accompanied with a message in that gruff, public school rogue and scoundrel voice of his “We will be together soon my dear Nee Nee. That’s what he calls me you know, that and occasionally, in the House during PMQ’s, as my little comely wench……”

On the screen two sets of besuited arms from the right of the screen could be seen slowly dragging the seated figure and the chair she was sitting on, out of the shot.

Running out of stooges

It is the morning after the day of the short goodbyes. There is nae truth in the rumour that following Boris Johnson’s Chief of Staff, Director of Communications, Head of Policy and Private Secretary  all swiftly Joe the Toffing themselves out the door as fast as their well-heeled shoes could carry them, (before Bawheid uses them as cannon fodder to try and save his miserable premiership) that Dave, the long-term polisman on the front door at 10 Downing Street, who somehow managed tae lose his signing in and oot records for the year 2021, has taken early retirement and has his eye on an apartment in Benalmadena recently vacated by two Brexit-voting ‘ex-pats’ fed up with Spanish people speaking Spanish. 

It has however been reported that Violet, the senior cleaner on the Downing Street domestic team, with thirty-odd-years-service, an MBE and several Christmas cards from John Major, has locked herself in an upstairs bathroom (with only a packet of Hobnobs and a flask of tea for sustenance) and is refusing to come out until Boris Johnson has gone.

Larry the Downing Street cat, who really isnae Larry the original Downing Street cat, who unfortunately was accidentally sat on by an extremely blootered Secretary of State for Work and Pensions at one of last year’s lockdown rave parties, (the new cat having been tattooed to look like the old one) has started to leave little presents in all the key rooms of the government residence, as cats will do, mice on the doorstep etc.

Insiders are baffled however as to how Larry the sequel managed to smuggle a thoroughbred race horse’s severed head into the bottom of the Prime Minister’s single bed (a recent arrangement following his latest missus clocking the way Nadine Dorries gazes at her husband in the Commons chamber) a feat indeed.

The way things are going old Bawjaws is going to run out of stooges to blame for his exceptionalism, unchecked arrogance, greed, criminal negligence and incompetence.  It would almost be funny if only, if only so many innocent human beings hadn’t had to pay the ultimate price for his behaviour.

Time to go Scotland.

It’s all politics

It’s all politics. 

There was not a dry pair of een (even of the gless variety) in the hoose, as Lady Freeload of Haven’t-I-Done-Well-Fur-Masel revealed an Oscar winning Channel 4 display of tears and snotters yesterday. A display that would have put even the awkwardly weird former health secretary found guilty of breaking social distancing with someone he shouldn’t have been breaking social distancing with, in a broom cupboard near his office, to shame.

This follows the public release of some of the headlines of Sue Gray’s watered-down report into the hedonistic goings on in the current trendy London nightclub, formerly known as 10 Downing Street, ‘The Club’.

Now, fair play. Wee Ruth, the ermine fashionista, may, for once in her puff, have been being genuine in her concern for everybody else (I know, I know, it’s hard to believe) showing her disgust through tears at the way her former boss has torn the mince as far as mince can possibly be torn right out of the ordinary folks of the countries of the Union during this withering worldwide pandemic. If she was sincere well that’s fine and dandy. There’s hope for us all yet.

However for me, I’m now thinking that following a discrete wee phone call to Ruthie, and several others, whomever it is that is behind the orchestration of the slowly trickling deflation of the hot and fetid air that comes out of Boris Johnson’s various orifices over the last several months, the easing him out the door it seems on some sort of timed schedule that none of the rest of us know about, now owes her a favour, to be cashed in at some future yet-to-be-determined date.

I wonder whether the string puller is the strange creature that appears to be a mix of both Hen and Horace Broon with a posh accent that is Jacob Rees-Mogg, a cratur who is currently as far up Johnson’s ‘ubi rursus’ as it’s possible to get without the mop-headed gonk developing a hump in his back?

“He’s doing a marvellous job, he’s delivered Brexit, his levelling up policies have really levelled up for those that didn’t need any levelling, isn’t that splendid? Have you seen him eat a pomegranate, he doesn’t spill a single seed,” says Rees-Mogg, with an air of sycophancy which surely must mean that old Bawheid better beware the Fakers of February and the Ides of March!

Or maybe it’s the dancing fool, Gove? He’s fly enough I reckon to be in about the demise of Johnson somewhere. Or maybe it’s the old guard. The traditionalists of the 1922 Committee, the cheps and chepesses striving to return to the glories of the imperial past. The men and women in grey suits, as they were once described, who fear no one politically, whose predecessors pulled the rug out from under a leader held in far greater esteem than Johnson will ever achieve, and sent her packing one rainy Thursday in 1990 (they didn’t even let her take her broom with her).

One thing is for sure. This slow political death of the Bullingdon Club clown is being carefully choreographed by somebody.  We’ll have a better idea who that is when the final steps to replace Johnson are made. I fear us, the many advocates for an independent Scotland will historically regret that our leaders couldn’t take more advantage of this period of inept premiership before he was replaced.

Moving over to the House of Commons itself, yes, plaudits, kudos and all that to Ian Blackford for getting horsed out of the chamber for telling the truth about a pathological liar, a point well made, but, and I’ve mentioned this before, very little of the theatrical ritual of pantomime that goes on in that place has anything to do with what government should actually be about, serving the people of our country. That is why Scotland must walk away from it, in fact run away from it. 

That lot, and their fellow troughers, the non-elected ones in the other Chamber, can blow hot air at each other, call points of order, filibuster, and deploy a hundred and one archaic political tactics to make themselves feel important during debates about building overhead nature reserve bridges above Spaghetti Junction, but all of that doesn’t put food in the bellies of the thousands upon thousands of children who rely on the Trussell Trust to eat, or help those living on the very edge of the debt trap, or small business people crushed to the point of desperation by the double-whammy of Brexit and the pandemic, or soothe the minds of the many thousands of grieving relatives who have lost loved-ones. Innocents who, had there been some effective, informed, responsive, honest and competent government in place in London over the last two and half years, (instead of those who have been caught out laughing at the rest of us) may still be alive. That is unforgiveable.

Scotland’s MP’s can continue to sit and play ancient parliament snakes and ladders, it’s all politics, but that does not benefit or further the aspirations of the people of Scotland to any meaningful extent.

Time to go. Let’s get on with the real work. Unhook the shackles from the ghost of government past and get on with some real governance.