Accuracy, fairness and context? Naw

My goodness it doesn’t take much to remind anyone of an independent Scotland mind, paying any sort of attention to fairness, impartiality, accurate context and perspective of the farce that is the British state’s media’s reporting of Scottish affairs. We all recognise it, we are accustomed to its long-term deeply entrenched actual, deliberate and occasionally unconscious unionist propaganda bias, but sometimes we feel we still need to point it out, if only just to let off a bit of steam.

If it isn’t the Herald and the Not the Scotsman trying desperately to fill an entire front page of their news sheet bastions of the red, white and blue with the foul dastardly behaviour of Scotland’s First Minister it’s the bizarre running order of stories that the editor of the main BBC News (the news where everybody is) decided to treat viewers to last night.

This was a running order designed to emphasise to those where everybody is the order of priority and importance they, as viewers, should consider placing on their current news content. A sort of helpful British Broadcasting Corporation guide to the fine folks of Essex, to assist them, with as little actual fact or context as they can get away with, in deciding whom they should consider to be the good guys and bad. How helpful eh?

Right behind the excellent Clive Myrie and the latest harrowing reports from the war-ravaged Ukraine, with its unjust deaths of many innocents, destruction of life and towns and cities, its mass displacement of people, a humanitarian nightmare, yes immediately after these reports, the main news of the day in the UK being beamed to where everybody lives, what is the main first headline, a headline surely so important that it must come up top of the list? It really has got to be a big one, it’s the main news across the UK so it should be a huge story of some kind, surely?

‘Scotland’s First Minister apologies for failing to wear face covering just days before the rules there changed’.

Yup that’s the one. Clearly an earth-shattering headline. The very construction of the headline itself devised, either deliberately or otherwise, in a manner to just about confuse the viewer enough to be able to be understood in more ways than the actual facts of the matter (if you are wee Jeremy the estate agent in Middlesex just tucking into your last plate of Easter leftovers for supper, with his glass of sherry and no knowledge of Scottish politics other than the media brainwashed idea that the SNP are bad and why don’t the Scots still vote for Labour) misconstruing the facts to reflect that the dastardly separatist harridan had been caught flouting the rules, her rules, and therefore may have changed those rules to escape censure.

Then when the story itself unfolded we had the new reader tell us that the polis had been in touch to warn the First Minister about her behaviour and caution her about the danger she had put the fine folk of South Lanarkshire in during the couple of minutes in which she had forgotten to put her mask back on.

This before James Cook telt us, over the top of footage of the First Minister, wearing a mask, jovially cutting a guy’s beard off for him in a barber shop, to the amusement of those in attendance on her local election campaign trail, that ‘this is the image Nicola Sturgeon likes to project, caution in the face of Covid. Instead it was this maskless moment (a grinning Nicola Sturgeon in a selfie video with a couple of the customers of the barbers) which went viral.’

Wee James then obviously again had to point out that the polis had been in her ear about not wearing a mask, in case any viewers missed it the first time, and mentioned, startlingly, that the First Minister has apologised. Wow, what a scoop. Surely up there with Woodward and Bernstein breaking Watergate. Sensational stuff. It’ll no doubt be in line for a Pulitzer.

With the arse falling right out of the story, and a few minutes to fill before the next story, the report moved on to the lifting of covid restrictions in Scotland with a yay and nay interview, including a poor unfortunate mother of two who has lost her husband to the virus on the continued wearing of masks, and some strange stats which seemed to be there to support a view that although Scotland has had less overall covid fatalities than the rest of the countries of the UK our government is still really shite at it. Wee Jeremy, viewing from Middlesex’s, head was starting to hurt at that point.

Just to totally confirm that we are living in an alternative universe the very next story, clearly less important than the huge expose of the demonic Scottish nationalist-ist-ist leader, we then had Nick Eardley, a dead ringer for a young Stanley Baxter, at Westminster, give us a wee rundown of how he thinks the current UK Prime Minister (a proven and compulsive teller of untruths, an individual who has broken the law and been fined for doing so, with an expected number of additional fines for other breaches of the law still to come, and more fines to come, who lies to parliament, a man who has just given a poor and volatile African nation a bung of tax-payers money to allow the UK to punt   vulnerable traumatised human beings into squalid concentration camps, out of sight, out of mind, a creature who was sacked from previous employment for dishonesty) will get on upon his return to the House of Commons today. Will he be under pressure to resign, will his party turn against him? The general consensus is, naw, he’ll do just fine.

The best of it was, when the main news ended (and wee Jeremy in Middlesex was now safely tucked up in his bed suffering a slight case of roast beef and mustard reflux whilst reading House Prices Monthly)and shifted over to Reporting Scotland (the news where you live) the Nicola Sturgeon mask story was relegated to the second headline, after the mention of the end of restrictions, and dealt with in a few seconds, before moving to actual news.

George Orwell must surely have had a time machine hidden away in that bothy on Jura.

We’re all Jock Tamson’s Bairns

The Tories have, over the last number of years, consistently acted shamefully in their treatment of the vulnerable in the countries of the UK and in their foreign policies abroad. They are now out of any sort of control, perhaps even beyond the excesses, whims and punishing social experiments of Thatcher.

They’re actions during the height of the pandemic, never mind their partying, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of many thousands of innocents should be being treated as criminal negligence and in some cases serious fraud in taking advantage of the suffering of others to make profit.

In the last few days, and clearly and transparently obviously an attempt to divert attention away from a Prime Minister and Chancellor who have broken the law and should therefore resign without giving it a second thought, they’ve kicked the arse right out of it. Their decision to send asylum seekers thousands of miles away to Rwanda, a volatile and poor country, which as recently as the 1990’s suffered horrific tribal genocide, should make those of a fair and open mind sick to the stomach.

In my late 50’s, and decidedly more knowledgeable on such matters now, I was brought up with the notion that the UK was supposed to be some sort of a symbol in the world that represented doing the right thing, a beacon for giving those in need a fair shake. As an island originally and continuously occupied, re-occupied and built by immigrants, welcoming to others who choose to come to live in Britain and equally as welcoming to those desperately fleeing human suffering who need our help.  I was led to believe we were the good guys.

That’s clearly pish. The vision of the monstrously cruel-hearted grinning bullying ghoul that is Priti Patel trumpeting this ‘world leading’ policy angers me as well as further confirms the fact that If Scotland remains shackled to the sham that is the Union we will be thrown into the mix of a new age of exceptionalism, exploitation and misery on a scale unseen in modern times.

The enlightened Scots-born (born in Camelon, not far from my own home-town of Denny) Canadian politician of the mid last century, Tommy Douglas, said “Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.”

Well folks, if you haven’t noticed yet, we’re rapidly moving past that point in the political journey of what is currently the UK.

This withering policy will not harm the organised crime gangs who fleece the vulnerable in France. Not at all. They will simply re-group and find another way to exploit others.  No, this drooling Daily Mail reader vote winner is cruel and will result in many vulnerable women, men and children, whether through forced separation or otherwise (does anyone really believe that this plan will be enforced against single males only?) being trafficked like human cattle.

Human beings like us experiencing yet more suffering to add to the unimaginable inhumanity many of them are they are trying to escape from.

Australia has tried a similar offshore scheme for a number of years with the island of Nauru, which has been a complete humanitarian disaster. Held in prison camp-like conditions ‘inmates’ have been raped, murdered, beaten and exploited. If money means anything when it comes to dealing with being decent and humane to others it has also been a financial money pit, throwing good money after bad. Johnson, Patel and their gang plan to simply pay off a poor African country to make these people disappear, out of sight, out of mind.

Brexit little Britain isolationist right-wing me-me selfish bastard policies I can just about stomach. I see you, we see you, we know what you are. I’ll defy you and do everything I can to overcome you until my dying breath, but this, this is disgusting. The menacing right-wing bile of the 1930’s and 1940’s is here and it comes with an Oxbridge accent.

When you look at the likes of the spineless wimp that is Douglas Ross, (a sycophant so sucked up into the stinking corrupt hole of the established order, a man who over the last year has been held in so much contempt by those he wishes to be like, when his beloved Prime Minister forget his name and then the self-serving ego-maniac who gives everyone with any warmth in their blood the fear, Rees-Mogg, described his opinion, as the leader of the Scottish Tories, as worthless) still passively supporting such a horrific policy I can only reaffirm the following. 

When Scotland has a second and final referendum to decide whether its people wish to return to the perfectly normal arrangement of governing themselves, and it is coming, I will knock on doors until my knuckles bleed, I will write and speak in support of independence tirelessly and  if I have to carry people on my back to the voting booth to vote Yes I will.