The delusions of Labour in Scotland

There’s delusion, and there’s Labour in Scotland delusion. On Wednesday in the Guardian Katherine Sangster, the national manager for Scottish Fabian and a former Labour Holyrood candidate, penned an article optimistically, or you might more accurately say misleadingly, entitled “This is how Labour can win back Scotland – and achieve a majority UK government.” Link here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/29/this-is-how-labour-can-win-back-scotland-and-achieve-a-majority-uk-government

The piece was subtitled : “With the SNP vulnerable and the union debate stalled, Labour could succeed in Scotland, but it must offer the change people crave.” The piece then went on to fail to say what that ‘change’ might be. Notably it failed to construct a cohesive argument even on its own terms. Sangster noted that Labour could only hope to take at the very most four Scottish Westminster seats from the Conservatives and so must target SNP seats if it hopes to win a majority in the Commons. However seats won by the SNP are seats which also help to deprive the Conservatives of a majority in the Commons. It could be argued that from a Scottish perspective the best outcome at the next UK General Election would be for the Conservatives to lose their majority but for Labour to rely on some deal, tacit or formal, with the SNP in order to form a majority.

We all ought to have plenty experience by now in seeing what happens when a British party achieves an absolute majority at Westminster, English political concerns become paramount and Scotland’s interests are at best marginalised or at worst actively treated with contempt. A Westminster majority for Keir Starmer who pays lip service to the notion of the United Kingdom as a voluntary union of nations even as he denies Scottish democracy and refuses to specify what the democratic route to another independence referendum might be, disingenuously asserting that it’s for those who want to ‘break up the UK’ to set this out.

That’s despite the fact that the pro-independence parties had already operated on the transparently democratic principle that such a route consisted of the pro-independence parties winning a majority in the Scottish Parliament after an election in which a pledge to hold an independence referendum was prominent in their manifestos. However as we all know, when the pro-independence parties did just that, all of a sudden it’s not good enough for Keir Starmer who has shifted the goalposts and invites us to guess where he’s put them now without giving any clues. Which terribly conveniently for Keir means that he can triumphantly proclaim : “No, that’s not it!” should independence supporters labour [pun intended] under the misapprehension that they have demonstrated a democratic mandate for another independence referendum in some other way.

This is profoundly cynical and deeply undemocratic, particularly coming as it does from a man who tells us his mission is to restore integrity and trust in Westminster politics. It was telling that Katherine Sangster does not spell out a route that might be acceptable to Labour, confining herself to saying that Labour must must “avoid the ‘no compromise’ unionism versus independence stances that the SNP and Tories are locked into,” as thought there is a moral equivalence between those who believe in democracy and those who seek to thwart it. Yet she is talking here about a Labour party in Scotland which has been captured by the ‘no-compromise unionism’ of Anas Sarwar, Ian Murray and Jackie Baillie as comprehensively as the Conservatives have been captured by the Brextremist right.

Labour in Scotland is a party which rejects potential candidates deemed to have been ‘tainted’ by sympathies for independence yet has no problem at all with candidates who once occupied senior positions in the Orange Order. That looks very much like ‘no-compromise’ unionism from where this SNP voting former Labour supporter is sitting. Scotland ditched Labour primarily for being too right wing with Reeves, Cooper, Miliband et al in 2015. So which bit of the even more right wing offering now on the table do Labour commentators think is going to appeal to Scotland?

The basic problem for a Labour party in Scotland which seeks to capitalise on the recent turbulence within the SNP and capture votes from disaffected SNP supporters is that much of the dissatisfaction is found amongst SNP voters who feel that the party has not made sufficient progress in attaining Scottish independence, key reasons for which is that it would not only guarantee that Scotland always gets the governments that it votes for, but would also offer the opportunity of a much closer relationship with the European Union and the chance to visit the question of the monarchy. The question which Sangster does not engage with, is that the ‘change’ that Labour offers does not include change in any of these areas.

An opinion poll published on 30 March 2025 found that a mere 14% of people in Scotland are happy that the UK has left the EU and shows a stark division in opinions on Europe between Scotland and the rest of the UK ,yet under Starmer Labour has not only rejected another referendum on EU membership, it has also set its face against rejoining the Single Market and the Customs Union. Labour is as monarchist and as pro-Brexit as the Tories and even a majority Labour government would merely mean a respite from a Conservative government that Scotland did not vote for. The electoral pendulum in England will eventually swing back to the Tories, who will then set about trying to undo everything that Labour had done during its time in office.

Despite Starmer’s lip service to Scotland, Scottish votes can only make a difference when political opinions in England are pretty evenly divided. England always gets the governments that it votes for. UK General Elections are won or lost in England, indeed due to the unfair first past the post system which Labour has no plans to change they are won or lost in a very small slice of English political opinion. The slice which Labour is aiming its pitch at consists of Brexit supporting voters in the so-called ‘red wall’ seats in the Midlands and North of England. Scotland is merely a by-stander. Labour has committed to full on English nationalism as much as the Tories have.

The real challenge for Labour in Scotland is to prove that it values Scotland as much more than as a prop for its English ambitions, because most voters in Scotland, certainly those sympathetic to independence rightfully believe that it doesn’t. There is absolutely nothing in Katherine Sangster’s piece or anything issuing from the mouth of Anas Sarwar, to change anyone’s mind on that. Tell you what Labour, commit to the devolution of broadcasting, the abolition of the House of Lords, to a proportional voting system for UK General Elections, and to giving the Scottish Parliament the power to hold another independence referendum, and if Scotland still votes against independence, then maybe, just maybe, we can talk about voting Labour again.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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A new era in Scottish politics

After a bruising leadership contest Humza Yousaf has won the SNP leadership contest. He took slightly less than 50% of first preference votes, and was taken over the line by second preference votes. Kate Forbes was some way behind on first preference votes while Ash Regan was a long way distant and dropped out after the first round of counting. His election represents the historic moment that a member of an ethnic minority becomes the First Minister of Scotland. Humza Yousaf was depicted as the ‘continuity candidate’ and his main task will be to demonstrate that he is his own man and to put his own stamp on the job and on the SNP, that task will be made easier by the recent resignation of the SNP chief executive Peter Murrell. His accession to the top job in Scottish politics is made easier by the support he got from many elected SNP politicians and the fact that out of all the candidates he was the one who was most likely to ensure the continuation of the deal between the SNP and the Greens.

However Kate Forbes gave him a very close run and it will be important for the new leader to ensure that both she and Ash Regan are offered important posts in his new government. That is vital in order to begin to heal the divisions within the SNP and the wider independence movement. The first preference votes were as follows :

Humza Yousaf: 24336 (48.2%)
Kate Forbes: 20559 (40.7%)
Ash Regan: 5599 (11.1%)

The second round of voting went as follows:
Yousaf: 26032 (51.6% / 52.1%)
Forbes: 23890 (47.3% / 47.9%)
Didn’t Transfer: 572 (1.1%)

Humza Yousaf picked up 1696 second preference votes, Kate Forbes won 3331, second preference votes from those who backed Ash Regan in the first round broke heavily in favour of Kate Forbes, but not by a big enough margin to take her over the line. Humza needs to avoid the mistake made by Liz Truss, who won the Conservative leadership by a narrow margin and then set about rewarding her own supporters and excluding and marginalising those who had backed her opponent Rishi Sunak. In the interests of party unity both Kate Forbes and Ash Regan and their supporters need to be offered prominent positions in the new administration. However it is clear that the social media warriors whose support for Ash Regan was vituperative and bilious enjoy relatively little backing amongst the membership of the SNP, and undoubtedly even less amongst the wider population, although it is important to stress that the candidates themselves are not responsible for the bile and bitterness of those whose aim is to make toxic social media even more toxic that it already is.

A UK General Election is in the offing, it is critical that the new leader engages with that wider movement and restarts the grassroots independence campaign. He will need to reach out to his critics within that wider movement and to demonstrate that ‘continuity candidate’ does not mean stasis and stagnation and more kicking the can down the road. There is going to be a UK General Election, most likely sometime next year, and the SNP is going to need a better pitch to the public than asking nicely yet again for a Section 30 order for a referendum.

There is considerable suspicion about Humza Yousaf amongst some of those who left the SNP during Nicola Sturgeon’s time at the helm, some of whom are already touting their conspiracy theories. However hopefully the more reasonable amongst them will be willing to give him a chance to prove that he is his own man and that he is not merely a creature of the previous leadership. He must seize the opportunity presented by Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation and stake out a new course for the party with independence firmly in its sights. Continuing the bitterness and divisions of the past few years will only benefit the British nationalists. He can do that by centring independence in his administration and by building arguments for independence that can reach across party divides. One possible route to that lies in developing a replacement for the discredited GERS figure which provide British nationalists with an annual carnival of too wee too poor.

On the plus side Humza Yousaf’s election avoids accusations that the SNP is moving to the right, he promises to continue the progressive politics of social justice which appeal to younger voters who are overwhelmingly more likely to support independence. He is also the leader who is most likely to ensure the continuation of the Bute House agreement with the Scottish Greens which guarantees a pro-independence majority government at Holyrood. His election means that the new leadership will not immediately come into conflict with certain elected SNP politicians who, perhaps unwisely, had spoken out in strong terms against one of the other candidates. We have avoided the potential for a damaging split in the SNP and for an unstable minority government at the mercy of Conservative mischief making.

Humza is also the only leadership candidate who had promised to take legal action to challenge Alister Jack’s unprecedented use of a Section 35 order to veto legislation passed by Holyrood. No matter what your views on the Gender Recognition Reform bill are, Jack’s use of a unilateral veto to stop it from passing into law is a dangerously anti-democratic step which threatens the very basis of the devolution settlement and which must be challenged as vigorously as possible to make sure the Tories don’t think that they can easily take such a step with future Scottish legislation that they disapprove of. If theTories are allowed to get away with this without a fight, they will certainly do it again and Scotland’s Parliament will find itself effectively neutered, able only to pass legislation that meets with the approval of a Conservative party that has not won an election in Scotland since 1955.

It is also important to recognise that we now have a pro-independence First Minister who is a Scot of Asian heritage. That is something to celebrate as it helps to prove that the campaign for Scottish independence is inclusive and outward looking and is not motivated by the regressive politics of ethnic nationalism, an accusation often hurled at Scottish independence supporters by those who themselves rail against immigration and who demonise asylum seekers and refugees.

We are in a new era now. All of us who support independence, no matter which candidate we preferred, must give Humza Yousaf the benefit of the doubt and allow him the space to put his own stamp on the highest office in Scottish politics.

 

 

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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The foreign parliament

We have now had the last media debate in the SNP leadership contest, and satisfyingly it has ended with the Scottish Tories clutching their pearls in one of their regular bouts of performative outrage. One of the topics that came up in the debate, as might be expected from a Scottish media in search of an SNP divided headline, was the Gender Recognition Reform bill which was vetoed by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack, thus preventing it from passing into law. Humza Yousaf noted, quite correctly, that if Scotland were an independent country it would not be possible for a foreign parliament to veto its legislation. Cue histrionics from the Scottish Tories, with perma-smug Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie calling the comment ‘idiotic’ and plaintively asking how Westminster could be a ‘foreign parliament’ given that he is a Scot, a government minister and represents a Scottish constituency at Westminster. It’s pretty rich of six chips Bowie to call anyone else idiotic when he cannot even wrap his head around a simple if-then conditional, one of the simplest and most basic commands in computing. What Humza Yousaf stated is absolutely and unarguably true,*If* Scotland were an independent country *then* Westminster would indeed be a foreign parliament incapable of vetoing legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament.

But that simple conditional statement does not compute with Andrew Bowie, a man who could keep his smug look during a zombie apocalypse because if he were to happen upon a horde of ravenous zombies looking for human brains to feast on, then they would shuffle right past him. But that’s a joke which depends upon an if-then conditional so it’s a safe bet that Andrew will need someone to explain it to him.

Indeed there are many of us, myself included, who would argue that notwithstanding the presence in it of a handful of Scottish Tory MPs who collectively have less computing power than an abacus with half its beads missing, Westminster is right now a foreign parliament to most people in Scotland. That is doubly the case when we look at the largest parties in that parliament, which espouse values and principles which are not merely foreign to the majority of people in Scotland but which are actively alien and alienating to most people in Scotland. Most people in Scotland believe it should be for the people of Scotland to decide whether Scotland has another independence referendum. Most people in Scotland do not want to heap more pain and misery on desperately poor asylum seekers trying to reach safety by taking the extreme and dangerous step of attempting to cross the English Channel in a flimsy inflatable boat. Most people in Scotland are either profoundly apathetic about or actively hostile towards the institution of the monarchy. Most people in Scotland want to be a part of the European Union, or at the very least to rejoin the European Single Market and Customs Union. But none of these majority Scottish points of view are reflected in the two largest political parties at Westminster, both of which are now to all intents and purposes parties of English nationalism and are hell bent on imposing policies dictated by that English nationalism on Scotland whether the people of Scotland want them or not.

The main event at that foreign parliament on Wednesday was the latest instalment of the Boris Johnson Show, Westminster’s long running work of fiction. Johnson made a three hour long tetchy appearance before the Commons Privileges Committee which is investigating whether he ‘recklessly and knowingly’ misled parliament – spoiler alert, he did – when he repeatedly assured MPs that no rules had been broken even though anyone with a handful of functioning neurons, so that’s you excused Andrew Bowie, would have known that having forty people gathered in a room for a booze fueled karaoke sesh was very clearly stetching the definition of an essential work event way past breaking point and as such not permitted during lockdown. The guy whose actual job was setting the lockdown rules and explaining them to the public ought to have known that better than anyone else.

During his appearance before the committee Johnson expressed his incredulity that anyone should dare to attempt to hold him to account for lying repeatedly as he tried to cover up his law breaking life as a party animal while he was imposing strict lockdown rules on everyone else. How dare anyone imagine that Johnson should be bound by the same rules as everyone else. After all, it is a core principle of that foreign parliament that important and powerful upper middle class men like Boris Johnson never ever suffer any consequences for their actions.

The most likely outcome is that Johnson will be found to have misled Parliament and will be sanctioned, but the sanction will fall short of being excluded from the House for more than ten days, a punishment which could potentially trigger a recall of Johnson by his constituents leading to a by-election which the Conservatives would find embarrassing and challenging. This is an eventuality which the Tories are desperate to avoid. Sunak just wants the whole story to go away and for Johnson to receive as much press attention as the Prime Minister’s tax returns, which entirely coincidentally were belatedly released on Wednesday, a day when media attention was elsewhere. Johnson will effectively have got away with it again.

You will not be surprised to learn that Sunak is obscenely rich, raking in – the word ‘earning’ implies he’s done something to deserve it – over £5 million in the past three years thanks mainly to gains from his US investment fund. There’s your man of the people who understands the struggles of ordinary households on low incomes which have to choose between heating or eating. However there are still unanswered questions, the published information contains no details about Sunak’s ‘blind trust’. The tax statement does not explain the detail of the arrangement that governs Sunak’s financial interests and arrangements. Neither do we know anything about Sunak’s tax returns to the American authorities during most of the period when he held a US Green Card while he was an MP.

A government headed by an obscenely wealthy man who pays for upgrades to the National Grid in order to heat his private swimming pool better even while his government slashes funding for public swimming pools is a government which is profoundly alien, not just to most people in Scotland, but to most people anywhere in the world. Maybe Andrew Bowie should stop whining about Westminster being called foreign to Scotland and work to ensure that it properly represented and cared about Scotland’s concerns and interests. But if Westminster was really representative of Scotland, Andrew Bowie wouldn’t have a job.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

A new era in Scottish politics

It has certainly been a torrid week for the SNP with the sudden resignation on Saturday of the party’s Chief Executive Officer Peter Murrell, the husband of out-going party leader Nicola Sturgeon, amidst disagreements about the handling of the party’s leadership election. But the excited claims of sections of the British media that it is all over for the Scottish independence movement are hyperbole born out of wishful thinking. As this blog has pointed out more often than I care to remember, the SNP is not the creator of the widespread desire in Scotland for independence, its dominant position in Scottish politics is a creation of that desire, whatever issues the party faces, the underlying drivers of the wish for an independence will inevitably reassert themselves.

I am not privy to what has been going on within the National Executive Committee, which on Saturday gave Peter Murrell an ultimatum to either give a firm date for standing down from his post or face an immediate vote of no confidence, but it is clear that for some time there has been considerable unhappiness about how the party was being managed, with allegations of control-freakery, secrecy and the rumbling police investigation into the handling of party funds. However looked at from the outside it seems that the last straw for the members of the NEC was the sudden resignation on Friday of the party’s press officer Murray Foote who claimed that he had been given false information about the SNP’s membership figures by senior sources within the party when he issued a statement strongly denying a newspaper report, which turned out to have been accurate, that the SNP had lost over 30,000 members. Peter Murrell has been blamed as the individual who gave the false information to Murray Foote.

Peter Murrell had been the Chief Executive of the SNP since 1999, he presided over the mushroom growth of the SNP from a few thousand members to a party with more members than all other political parties in Scotland combined and he was instrumental in turning the party into a formidable election winning machine, but in recent years it became clear that his management of the SNP was becoming a source of division and dispute. The concentration of power within the party in the hands of a married couple was always going to be problematic and with the departure of Nicola Sturgeon, his position as the party CEO became an issue which the next leader of the party was going to have to tackle sooner or later. Peter Murrell’s resignation means that whoever wins the leadership election will be able to establish a clean break with the Salmond-Sturgeon era and put their own stamp on the party and to signal a new phase in the party and the wider independence movement.

Although there are plenty of supposed independence supporters online whose bitterness leads them to rub their hands with glee at the prospect of the police investigation into the alleged mishandling of party funds resulting in charges being brought, politically this would only benefit the opponents of independence. The only political beneficiaries would be Labour and the Tories. However the resignation of Peter Murrell means that should that unfortunate event come to pass, and it’s important to note that the party strenuously denies any wrong doing, it will be easier for the new party leadership to wash its hands of the entire sorry business and to point to the fact that the SNP is under new management.

I previously said on this blog that I was not going to make a public statement about who my own preferred candidate might be. I’m still not going to. That’s for two reasons, firstly because I do not want to inhibit debate and discussion amongst those who use the comments section of this blog as a discussion forum, but more importantly because one of the declared candidates is going to win at the end of this leadership election and whoever that is all of us who support independence need to put the divisions and disputes behind us and unite behind the new leader whoever that may be. Peter Murrell’s resignation makes it easier for that process of healing and unification to take place. We can hope that the new party leader presides over an organisation which listens more and is more responsive and open to the views of its members and to the wider constituency of independence supporters. Under its new leader the SNP must put an end to the secrecy and top down controlling which has been an unfortunate characteristic of recent years and truly become a party which is owned by and answerable to its grass roots membership.

Despite everything that has happened in recent years the SNP remains a formidable political force and still has many more members than all other political parties in Scotland combined. The underlying factors which have produced the desire for Scottish independence remain very much in play : the corruption and lack of accountability of Westminster, the democratic deficit of the British state, Brexit and the rise of English nationalism, the failure of devolution to protect Scotland from Conservative governments it did not vote for, a weakening British identity and demographic patterns of overwhelming support for independence among younger generations of Scots. All of these remain unaltered by developments internal to the SNP, or even the wider independence movement, and once this current period of turbulence has passed, as it assuredly will no matter how much Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media tries to keep it going, those underlying systemic factors will reassert themselves.

We are in a new era in Scottish politics. The new leader is going to have the task of rebuilding unity and confidence in the SNP as the leading political vehicle for Scottish independence and drawing a line under the divisions and in-fighting of the past few years. The new leader and the independence movement need to focus on persuading those as yet unconvinced of the need for Scottish independence. The resignation of Peter Murrell increases their chances of doing so well before the big electoral test of the next Westminster General Election.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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The real cancel culture is Tory cancel culture

To absolutely no-one’s surprise, emails and WhatsApp messages leaked to the Guardian newspaper show that the BBC “regularly” bows to pressure from the Conservative Government over the wording of its headlines and the framing of its stories. The whistle blower claims that among other instances of the BBC pandering to the demands of the Conservatives, Downing Street was demanding that the Corporation’s reporters refrained from using the word “lockdown” in relation to the lockdown ordered by Boris Johnson on 23 March 2020. Perhaps Johnson was hoping that if the BBC did not call the lockdown a lockdown then no one would notice all the parties going on in Downing Street. As a result of the pressure from Downing Street, the BBC website and broadcasts that day spoke about ‘restrictions’ and ‘curbs’ whereas other broadcasters and outlets such as Sky News were referring to a ‘lockdown.’

Even the Daily Mail, not noted for its critical stance towards the Conservative party, had LOCKDOWN BRITAIN in block capitals across the greater part of its front page on its edition published the following day. Another leaked message showed a senior editor congratulating news staff for staying away from the subject of Jennifer Arcuri after the American tech entrepreneur had given an interview to a newspaper in October 2020 which confirmed that she had had an affair with Johnson, following allegations that he used his position as London mayor to secure favourable treatment and financial payments for her. This is worth considering when we look at the otherwise inexplicable way in which the BBC avoided reporting on the allegations levelled against the Conservative peer Michelle Mone, allegations which were deeply embarrassing to the Conservative government, until the story was dominating the news agenda and had become impossible to ignore. This was markedly different from the treatment the Corporation meted out to SNP Michelle Thomson, who was hounded and doorstepped by BBC reporters over allegations – later found to be without substance – which led the BBC’s Scottish news day after day relating to a sum of money a tiny fraction of that involved in the allegations levelled at Michelle Mone, allegations which the Tory peer continues to deny.

A BBC insider told the Guardian : “Particularly on the [BBC] website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.” They added that the messages seen by the Guardian represent only a small snapshot of what was going on, because most pressure was applied verbally rather than written down.

It is clear that this behind the scenes pressure is pervasive and it causes the Corporation to self-censor in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of the snowflakes of the Conservative party. In any case the BBC is primed at its highest levels to be sympathetic to Conservative messaging. Not only is Richard Sharp, the chair of the BBC’s board of directors a Conservative party donor and personal friend of Boris Johnson, who helped to facilitate an £800,000 personal loan for Johnson, he was also Rishi Sunak’s boss when the current Prime Minister was making millions at Goldman Sachs. Tim Davie, the director-general of the BBC, in charge of the day to day running of the broadcaster, is a long standing Conservative supporter. He was a Conservative party council candidate in the 1990s and was once deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Association.

When criticised for its perceived pro-Conservative bias, the BBC generally retorts that it also receives complaints about ‘pro-left wing’ bias from Conservative supporters and therefore it must be impartial and unbiased. There are certainly many such complaints from right wing figures in the wake of the BBC’s humiliating U-turn on Gary Lineker.

1970s ‘comedian’ Jim Davidson, who is to comedy as Jurassic Park is to wildlife management, has joined the long list of right wing figures who rail against ‘cancel culture’ by demanding that the entire BBC be cancelled. Davidson took to that notably unbiased publication the Daily Express, AKA the Beano for fascists, to call for the TV licence fee to be scrapped, claiming that BBC stands for Bring Back Communism and called for everyone to watch GB News ‘all day long,’ because apparently a channel which touts extreme right wing conspiracy theories is unbiased. Davidson was once the favourite comedian of the famously humourless Margaret Thatcher, which tells you all that you need to know, claims that the BBC has ‘lost the public.’ And indeed Jim Davidson is something of an expert in this respect, as he lost the public sometime around 1982.

There is however a fundamental difference between the criticisms levelled at the BBC by Scottish independence supporters and those on the left on the one hand, and those of the likes of Jim Davidson and the frothing right wing conspiracy theorists of G Beebies News on the other. I am a long-standing critic of the BBC, but I do not want it to be abolished and the news space given over in its entirety to privately owned and funded news outlets and broadcasters where right wing views are overwhelming dominant, I want a public service broadcaster which genuinely reflects the range and diversity of opinion in the population which it serves. The left and Scottish independence supporters want fairness, impartiality and an equal platform, however that is not what right wing Anglo-British nationalists want, what they want is complete and utter domination of the news space and the media environment. They tolerate no opposition or different points of view. We can see this all too clearly in the reaction of British nationalists to the very existence of The National, the sole newspaper in Scotland out of 38 daily and weekly newspapers which supports Scottish independence in a country where more than half the population is sympathetic to the idea of an independent Scotland. Its very existence is a huge affront to right wing British nationalists, who seek a return to the days when there was no Scottish Parliament and no Scottish newspaper advocating independence.

This is why there is no equivalence between the criticisms of the BBC from independence supporters and the liberal left and criticisms of the Corporation from the Conservative right. The two sets of critics seek very different things, the first want fairness and impartiality, the second want complete and total domination and the silencing of views that they disagree with, and in pursuit of this aim they gaslight us by falsely claiming that this is the goal of those who want a BBC and a wider media which truly represents the population that they purport to serve.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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The BBC : enablers of British nationalist authoritarianism

The BBC has always insisted that it is politically neutral and unbiased, even as it broadcasts a debate programme from the independence supporting predominantly working class city of Dundee with an audience that seemed to be mostly composed of middle class Brexit supporting Conservatives with English accents. Allegations of pro-government and anti-Scottish independence bias in the BBC are even more numerous than the allegations of Conservative sleaze to which the Corporation pays remarkably little attention. To give just one example, the BBC ignored the allegations about the business dealings of Conservative peer Michelle Mone until they were headline news in various newspapers and were dominating the news agenda. Compare and contrast with the BBC’s hounding of the SNP’s Michelle Thomson over allegations of sharp business practices which were later proven to be unfounded.

However in recent weeks the BBC has lost the plot and its claims to political neutrality have been left as credible as Boris Johnson’s protestations of honesty and moral probity. We can begin with the BBC’s claim that there is nothing untoward with the appointment of Richard Sharp, a Conservative party donor and friend of Boris Johnson to the position of chair of its board of directors just days after he allegedly helped to facilitate a personal loan of £800,000 to the former Prime Minister. This positively reeks of cronyism and if it had happened in any other country the press in the UK would have no hesitation of calling it out as corruption. But Sharp appeared before a committee of MPs and pointedly refused to apologise for what the committee described as ‘significant errors of judgement’ and continued to insist he had not ‘facilitated’ any money changing hands in the weeks before his appointment was announced in February 2021, nor had he gained from it, saying he had instead ‘ensured due process was followed’. To which an outside independent observer can only retort that if this is ‘due process’ there is something seriously awry with the process.

Last week it came out that not only did Johnson nominate his pal as the chair of the board of the BBC, he has also decided to give a knighthood to his father Stanley Johnson, who was alleged by his ex-wife, Boris Johnson’s mother, to have assaulted her and broken her nose. If nothing else this proves that Boris Johnson bases his decisions on personal considerations and not on the individual’s appropriateness. When the subject of Johnson giving a knighthood to a wife beater was raised during last week’s edition of BBC Question Time, host Fiona Bruce, who is rapidly gaining a reputation as a shameless apologist for the worst excesses of the Conservative party, replied : “Stanley Johnson has not commented publicly on that. Friends of his have said it did happen, it was a one off.”

It’s like complaining about being called a cannibal and protesting that you only ate human flesh just the one time. It’s hard to believe that Fiona Bruce or any other prominent BBC presenter be so quick to excuse an alcoholic on benefits living on a council estate who had broken his wife’s nose ‘just that one time’. In fact Stanley Johnson’s ex-wife alleged that Stanley Johnson had a pattern of violent, controlling, and abusive behaviour throughout their marriage.

Last week however, the eagerness of the BBC to placate the worst behaviour of the Conservative party was most clearly illustrated by its response to a tweet by sports presenter Gary Lineker condemning the cruel and inhumane asylum policy of the government which trashes international human rights laws and heaps further misery upon already poor and desperate people, all in order to pander to the worst racist instincts of the right wing press and the frothing British nationalist wing of the Conservative party. Lineker had denounced the policy saying : “This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ’30s.” He was not wrong, the language used by Suella Braverman is cruel and dehumanising, but his tweet was immediately followed by the performative outrage we have come to expect from the Conservative party and its apologists as the people who habitually rail against ‘cancel culture’ sought to have Lineker cancelled. In Conservative Britain it’s a far worse sin to call someone out for taking a leaf out of the fascist playbook than it is to actually act like a fascist.

Of course the BBC bowed to Conservative pressure and took action against Lineker. The Corporation notably took no action against The Apprentice presenter Alan Sugar who regularly uses his Twitter account to rail against trade unions and who recently dismissed the majority of people who work from home as ‘lazy gits.’ It’s only Conservative sensibilities which need to be protected and platformed.

An analysis of Laura Kuenssberg’s flagship politics and current affairs show and the guests on BBC Question Time backs this up. In the six months that Kuenssberg’s programme has been broadcast the show has followed the same pattern as BBC Question Time in disproportionately featuring right wing figures. Tory MPs are twice as likely to be invited on as Labour ones and commentators with right-wing connections are also much more likely to feature than those with links to the left. A count of panellists on BBC Question time finds that 29 right-wing media figures compared to 4 left-wing media figures have appeared on the show since the start of last year. There have been 14 employers but only 6 representatives of trades unions. It’s all drearily predictable, and that’s before addressing the issue of audiences seemingly composed of G Beebies viewers.

Last week the Guardian alleged that one episode of the upcoming David Attenborough series on wildlife and nature in the British Isles will only be available online and will not be broadcast on terrestrial television along with the rest of the series because the BBC fears that the episode, which deals with the destruction of nature in Britain will provoke a backlash from the Conservative right. The BBC has denied the report, claiming that only five episodes were ever intended to be broadcast on TV and the sixth was only ever going to be available online, which sounds very like special pleading and the same kind of ‘due process’ that Richard Sharp follows. Why is it that an episode focussing on issues which are likely to attract the ire of Conservatives was, uniquely in the series, ‘never intended’ to be broadcast on BBC1? The BBC doesn’t say.

The truth is that the BBC is an agent of the British state and is too timid to stand up to the political party that governs in Westminster. The Corporation has been on this tajectory for some years, giving Nigel Farage a platform out of all proportion to his importance and creating an Anglo-British nationalist monster which now demands to be regularly fed. The BBC is now a creature of the right wing forces which have captured a British state with few effective democratic checks and balances. Every inch that the BBC concedes to the forces of anti-democratic right wing anglo-British nationalism only emboldens them to push even further. Fascism does not march up on a country proclaiming itself to be fascist. It sneaks in, in smart suits, proclaiming itself to be the friend of the ‘common man’ against a demonised and stigmatised minority which is depicted as a threat to decency and our way of life. It claims like Suella Braverman does, to be decent and law abiding. And the BBC will not only let it tell its lies, it will give it a platform to do so.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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The urban myth of the GERS figures

Recently The National newspaper had a week long series looking at the infamous McCrone report and Scotland’s energy potential, which successive Westminster governments have sought to minimise and downplay. As anyone who has paid even passing attention to the Scottish independence debate know, the McCrone report was commissioned by the British government in the 1970s and examined the economic potential of Scotland’s North Sea oil and gas reserves. The report found that Scotland’s fossil fuel reserves would give an independent Scotland almost embarrassing wealth and cause its currency to be one of the hardest in the world. But Westminster hid the report for decades and spent the ensuing years lying to the people of Scotland about this country’s true wealth. Then they squandered Scotland’s resources and now have the unmitigated gall to insist that Scotland has an unsustainable deficit which makes it too poor to be a successful independent nation.

The McCrone report was commissioned decades ago and Westminster has burned through most of Scotland’s oil wealth. We are now in a very different era where the energy future lies not in fossil fuels but in renewable energy, and yet again Scotland is blessed with a massive potential for energy production which opponents of independence do their utmost to minimise and trivialise. Yet the McCrone report retains a real and important relevance to the independence debate, because it proves that Westminster has a track record of lying to the people of Scotland in order to paint the economic prospects of an independent Scotland in as poor a light as possible. They still have the same motivation for lying, as they did when the McCrone report was commissioned, arguably more so given Scotland’s enormous potential for renewable energy production and the fact that the independence debate is now not only mainstream and normalised but dominant in Scottish political discourse in a way that it was not in the 1970s. Diminished as it is by Brexit, the stakes for the British state are so much higher now, and with it the motivation to lie about the true economic potential of an independent Scotland.

Opponents of independence base their economic arguments against independence on the Government Expenditure and Revenues Scotland (GERS) figures, which purport to show that Scotland is burdened with a massive deficit and is supposedly dependent on a huge transfer of funds from Westminster. As has been pointed out on this blog on several occasions in the past, the GERS figures were introduced by Thatcher’s Conservative Scotland Secretary Ian Lang in the early 1990s as a political tool to use against those who were arguing in favour of greater Scottish self-government. 30 years later they are still fulfilling the exact same political purpose. GERS forms the bedrock of anti-independence economic arguments despite the fact that even the most vociferous opponents of independence have been reluctantly forced to concede that the GERS figures tell us nothing about the financial position of an independent Scotland.

However new research threatens to destroy British nationalist claims that the situation depicted by GERS represents the economic starting point of an independent Scottish state and to dismiss the deficit claimed by GERS for Scotland as an ‘urban myth.’ There is a similar set of figures for Wales, which as in Scotland are used by opponents of independence to claim that Wales is an economic basket case which is too poor to flourish as an independent country.

Last year, Dublin City University Professor John Doyle, the Vice-President for research at the university was commissioned by Plaid Cymru to examine thr true financial position of an independent Wales. He found that the fiscal gap – the difference between raised revenue and government expenditure – in the early days of an independent Wales would be a small fraction of what has previously been cited for the country by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Figures from the ONS are often quoted as suggesting the deficit in an independent Wales on day one of independence would be £13.5bn, a huge sum for a country with a population of 3 million. However Professor Doyle – who looked at the figures for the financial year 2018/19 – found that the true deficit of Wales upon attaining independence would actually be £2.6bn when taking account of the fact in that a few central UK costs, such as UK debt charges and historic pension liabilities, which are typically lumped in with the Welsh equivalent of the GERS figures, would not be transferred to an independent state.

Leading Welsh economist Dr Edward Jones, a lecturer in Economics at Bangor University’s Business School, said he was surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the ONS figures and Professor Doyle’s findings but added that it supports the growing evidence that Wales is neither ‘too small or too poor’ to be an independent country.

Speaking about his findings Professor Doyle said: “It is not for me as an Irish academic to advise the people of Wales on their future constitutional choices, but the figure of £13.5bn, frequently quoted as representing the UK government annual subvention to Wales, is a UK accounting exercise, and not a calculation of the fiscal gap that would exist in the early days of an independent Wales.”

You can read the full report by clicking HERE

What he says about Wales applies equally to Scotland.

Now the methodology used by Professor Doyle in his study on Wales has been applied to Scotland. Robin Thompson – who worked in economic development with various Scottish councils has applied the same methodology to the GERS figures for the same year of 2018/19 in order to look at whether an independent Scotland really would inherit the gigantic fiscal burden that opponents of independence like to claim it would. The GERS figures for 2018/19 suggested the deficit in Scotland was £12.6bn, or a huge 7% of GDP, but Robin Thompson concluded that in reality an independent Scotland could inherit a surplus of £2.7bn. Even in what he regards as the “worst-case scenario” – where Scotland had to pay 100% of pension costs – he concluded the deficit would still only be £6.3bn or 3.4% of GDP, this is not too far off the 3% deficit which is a prerequisite for Euro membership.

Professor Doyle’s methodology assumes that historic public sector pension liabilities would be the responsibility of the government that made the commitments to retired and current employees and so would not be an inherited liability of a newly independent state, which would only bear the cost of future pension commitments. Scottish workers paid National Insurance to the UK in expectation of a pension and the UK does not get to simply walk away with these funds without compensating those who paid into the system. This figure is therefore not included within the estimate of the post-independence budget deficit.

The methodology also concludes the UK’s national debt would be a matter for the UK Government and cannot be assigned to a newly independent state. The UK Government itself accepted this point in January 2014. The methodology notes that defence expenditure post-independence is a decision for a future government to make and is not an inherited liability. It is vanishingly unlikely that an independent Scotland would choose to maintain spending on nuclear missiles or ruinously expensive aircraft carriers.

Whoever wins the SNP leadership contest should commission Professor Doyle to do a similar study for Scotland and to publish this annually when the GERS figures are published. We must stop allowing the British state to hide behind its lies and deceit

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

The UK : a world beating embarrassment

The bloviating man-child Boris Johnson, has gone full Trump over the preliminary findings of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, which has reported that there is credible evidence that the former Prime Law-breaker misled Parliament on at least four different occasions, and in the process demonstrated that he can indeed drag the tattered credibility of the standards of behaviour in public office to even lower depths. Johnson and his supporters – and quite remarkably he still has supporters are now trying to discredit the Parliamentary committee by claiming that it’s all a Labour stitch up because senior Civil Servant Sue Gray, who conducted the original investigations into the series of lock down busting parties held at Number Ten Downing Street during the height of the pandemic, has accepted a post as Keir Starmer’s chief of staff. Johnson’s supporters are now taking to G Beebies News to claim that Sue Gray was not independent and that partygate was all a Labour conspiracy to ‘bring down Boris’ and that there has been nothing in the story all along. There is no law or precedent to stop civil servants going to work for a political party – David Frost was a civil servant too, and Johnson gave him a peerage and made him a government minister. The same Conservative apologists who are now clutching their pearls about Sue Gray had no issue with that at all.

Johnson and his delusional supporters now want to make this a story about the alleged ‘constitutional impropriety’ of Sue Gray and the Labour party rather than the fact that the Parliamentary Privileges Committee has reached some damning conclusions about Johnson, including stating that it beggars belief that Johnson did not know that the parties in Downing Street were a flagrant breach of the lockdown rules in force at the time. Yet for all their whining and greetin faces, none of Johnson’s supporters has identified any part of the Sue Gray report as inaccurate. Johnson held parties during lockdown, he got found out, he was fined by the police, he lied repeatedly about it, and he still refuses to take responsibility.

However it is worth bearing in mind that Sue Gray played no role in uncovering partygate, it was the press which broke the story. Sue Gray was only called in to investigate after the allegations had been dominating the news agenda for days and one damaging photo and story after another was being published in the media. Gray’s was not the first investigation to conclude – that was the Met police who found PM broke the law. Or are we to believe that the police are also party to Keir Starmer’s evil plan? It’s also important to remember that Sue Gray’ report played no role in Johnson’s departure. He brazened her report out even though her findings were backed up by the police who handed out 126 fines, including fines that had to be paid by Johnson and by then chancellor and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. It was Johnson’s mishandling of the Pincher scandal that finally caused 57 Conservative ministers to resign, setting in motion a train of events that gave us the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss, followed within weeks by her being turfed out and Sunak, the man who had just lost a leadership contest in his own party, being anointed as Prime Minister. Yet now those same Conservatives see fit to lecture us all on constitutional propriety. That’s like Harold Shipman lecturing us on the care of the elderly.

But for Starmer to announce this week that he’s offered Gray a job was a massive own goal which has only bolstered Boris Johnson just when we thought that the abandoned mattress of British politics had been finally been consigned to the dumpster fire of ignominy where he rightfully belongs. But now we have an outbreak of faux outrage from the Johnsonettes because they think it’s a way back for him to become PM again, using the classic Trump whinging line of “it was a witch hunt”, “It’s fake news.”

Giving further proof of his unfitness for the position of whelk stall manager, never mind Prime Minister, in his long delayed resignation (dis)honours list Johnson is reportedly seeking a knighthood for his father Stanley Johnson, presumably for services to upper class middle class boorishness. Johnson Senior who has six children, and whose son has an indeterminate number of offspring once took to the airwaves to pontificate about how the ‘black and brown and yellow races’ have too many children. Stanley Johnson also took out French citizenship so that he could continue to enjoy the freedom of movement that his son was removing from the rest of us. He was also accused of inappropriately touching up Tory MP Caroline Noakes.

Johnson giving his father, whom Boris Johnson’s mother alleged was a violent and abusive husband who once broke her nose, is like a child giving its parent a grubby crayon scrawling which gets pinned to the fridge with a fridge magnet alongside the menu from the local Chinese takeaway. It might make Johnson Sr. very proud of his wee boy, but it is utterly meaningless trash to everyone else. All it achieves is the further debasement of an honours system which has already lost all credibility and completes it descent into rewards for cronyism. On the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire show in 2019, the elder Johnson claimed in 2019 upon being told that a viewer had called his son Boris ‘Pinocchio’ retorted : “That requires a degree of literacy which I think the Great British public doesn’t necessarily have.” Be that as it may, Stanley, but we do have the requisite degree of literacy to spell W.if.e. B.e.a.t.e.r.

The honours system is nothing more than a means for British party leaders to reward their donors and supporters, it is state sponsored patronage which bears the same relationship to the recognition of true public service that Elon Musk’s subscription service blue tick on Twitter does to public notability. Anyone can get it if they pay enough to the right people.

On Tuesday the Conservatives unveiled another inhumane and cruel bill which heaps yet more misery on the desperate people attempting to cross the English Channel in small boats. The proposals, which aim to pander to the basest instincts of the Daily Mail, will strip those who cross the Channel in small boats of any right to asylum in the UK, and seeks to deport them to third countries, barring them of any right to enter the UK or ever to apply for British citizenship, the bill is almost certainly unlawful under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the extremists in the Tory party , which is most of them these days, have renewed their calls for the UK to exit the ECHR, joining such human rights abusing states as Russia and Belarus. In 2014 Scotland was urged to remain a part of the ‘world beating’ UK, but nine years on we see all too clearly that the UK is only world beating in being a disgrace and an international embarrassment.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Feeling special

Are we all feeling special? Rishi Sunak is currently even more unbearably smug than his base state of resting smug face because the wheels have not yet come off his Brexit deal. This is something of a novelty for Sunak, because when he was Chancellor the cracks typically started showing in his budgets within hours of him standing at the dispatch box to announce them. Boris Johnson and the DUP are both keeping uncharacteristically quiet about the deal which has replaced the serial liar and expensive wallpaper aficionado’s oven ready deal which turned out to be half baked. So Sunak is currently in that glorious phase when he thinks that everything is going to plan, a phase that is invariably followed by the dawning realisation that something somewhere is going terribly terribly wrong.

The DUP has not yet made an announcement about a deal whose success Sunak has said could be measured by whether it leads to the restoration of devolved government in Stormont. But some senior figures within the DUP have already voiced their unhappiness with the new deal. The truth is that the DUP backed Brexit in the first place because they wanted to bring down the Good Friday Agreement and restore a hard border on the island of Ireland. They failed spectacularly in that goal and so are highly motivated to ensure that any EU deal does not work. They are also desperate to avoid a devolved government in Stormont which is led by a First Minister from Sinn Fein, an utter humiliation for the DUP which would highlight both that support for Brexit is very much a minority position in the North of Ireland and more importantly signal the Unionist loss of control of a statelet which was only carved out of Ireland in the first place in order to ensure a Unionist majority. The DUP are highly motivated to find some reason, however spurious, for rejecting the deal. If they do so their enablers on the Brextremist frothing wing of the Conservative party will also be more likely to reject the deal as well, meaning Sunak could find himself in the humiliating position of relying on Labour support in order to get the deal through the Commons.

When you get to my age, and I am quite a bit older than Sunak, you learn that smugness is always a hostage to fortune. That has not happened to Sunak yet, insulated as he is by his wife’s money, but one day, probably sooner rather than later, he will follow the path taken by all Conservative Prime Ministers in recent years and get to the point where the only thing that motivates him to get up in the morning is his bladder.

Sunak gushed about his Northern Ireland deal and how it put Northern Ireland in the advantageous position of having unfettered access to the European Single Market. Sunak described access to EU markets as exciting and good for business. You know, that unfettered access that Sunak and his party ensured that the rest of us were deprived of. But hey, sovereignty and blue passports eh?

Today at Prime Minister’s Questions the SNP chose to focus on the deal and why Northern Ireland, which voted against Brexit, is being given a special status allowing it full access to European markets but this status is being denied to Scotland which likewise voted against Brexit in the 2016 EU referendum and which has voted for parties opposed to Brexit at every election since then.

SNP MP Joanna Cherry asked Sunak at PMQs, after wryly noting that both he and the SNP had been left to clear up the constitutional mess created by Boris Johnson, asked Sunak why if Northern Ireland could have a special status could Brexit phobic Scotland not have the same special status too. Sunak smugly smugged that Scotland already has a special status as part of the UK. He undoubtably thought he was being terribly clever in that patronising posho English private school debating society sort of a way. But the truth is that Scotland does indeed have a special status as part of the UK, just not in the way that Sunak intended.

Scotland is special because it is the only constituent nation in the UK which has consistently voted against Brexit but whose concerns about being ripped out of the EU, the Single Market and the Customs Union have equally consistently been ignored by the Conservatives and by Keir Starmer’s Labour party, both of whom are far more interested in pandering to the English nationalist prejudices of Brexit voting constituencies in the Midlands and north of England than in making the slightest accommodation to the genuine concerns and interests of Scotland.

Scotland is special because it is the only constituent nation of the UK where Labour and the Conservatives deny the democratic will of the people and vie with one another to Anglo-splain away the outcome of Scottish elections to the people of Scotland because apparently they know better than we do what the people of Scotland really voted for when we chose to elect a Scottish Parliament with its largest ever pro-independence majority in an election which was overwhelmingly dominated by the single topic of whether there should be another independence referendum.

Scotland is special because Westminster politicians insist that it is a constituent nation in a voluntary union of nations even as they refuse to tell the people of Scotland what the democratic route to another independence referendum might be. They assure us that such a route exists, but it’s just that it is super top secret so they are not going to tell us.

Scotland is special because it has a devolution settlement which Westminster tells us it respects, even as the Conservatives introduce legislation which allows a party which has not won an election in Scotland since 1955 to by-pass the Scottish Parliament and which wields a veto over Scottish legislation that it does not like, as it did with the GRR bill and as it threatens to do with the deposit return scheme. And yet they tell us that Scotland within the UK is a democracy. It’s clearly a very special kind of democracy. With independence Scotland could be a normal democracy, not the UK’s special sort of non-democracy. I don’t want to be special, I just want to live in a normal European country.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Escaping the vicious circle

I’m finally back blogging, a few days later than planned. Our visitors stayed longer than they had originally intended to and then I got some upsetting family news which meant that my head was just not in the game at all. However there has certainly been plenty to keep you all occupied in my absence with the SNP leadership contest. Like certain other independence bloggers I am not a member of the SNP and therefore do not get a vote, but unlike them I am not going to express a preference about who the next leader of the party and the next First Minister of Scotland should be. All three candidates are able and capable politicians, all have their positives and their negatives, but whoever finally emerges triumphant, all of us who support independence need to unite behind them and work together to build the case for independence so that it becomes the settled will of the people of this country that we all love and care for

Of course I have my own private opinion on who I would like to see as the new SNP leader and First Minister, but in the interests of unity I will be keeping that to myself. If it is not my preferred candidate who emerges victorious it will be harder to rally support behind the new First Minister. I will work to support whoever wins the leadership race. That person needs to be the candidate who is best able to appeal to the varied factions within the SNP and the broader independence movement, but more importantly to make a plausible case for independence which will resonate with that not insubstantial part of Scottish public opinion which is yet to be convinced that Scotland can only have a future as an independent nation if it wishes to retain a distinctive political culture and identity.

The direction of travel within the British state should be painfully clear by now. All Westminster offers is a future in which Scotland is subsumed in an increasingly aggressively English nationalist nation state, reduced to a historic region with no greater political relevance than Wessex or Northumbria. Keir Starmer’s Labour offers no permanent change from that, merely at best a brief respite before the pendulum of English politics swings the other way, and the Conservatives return to power to undo whatever Labour have done, just as they are currently subverting and undermining the devolution settlement. It is a salutary fact that Scotland has not voted Conservative since 1955 but in the 68 years since then Scotland has had Conservative governments at Westminster for over half the time, 38 years, and when Labour does take power it is only by aping Conservative policies, as we saw with Tony Blair in the 1990s and we are seeing now with Keir Starmer. Only independence offers Scotland a permanent escape from this vicious circle.

Unfortunately there has been far too much division , sniping from the sidelines, and back biting within the SNP and the broader independence movement over the past few years, divisions which have at times descended into sheer nastiness, these divisions have been instrumental in causing the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon.

I’d be lying if I said I had not thought about doing what she did too, and walking away from it for the sake of my mental and physical health and sanity. Over the past few weeks, prompted in part by the decision of Nicola Sturgeon, I have been thinking very seriously about whether I should throw in the towel and leave campaigning for independence to a younger and fresher generation. The recent short break gave me some much needed time to reflect. As regular readers know, I have my own personal challenges in terms of my health and disabilities which will be life-long. These are challenges which mean that I simply no longer have the physical, mental, or emotional stamina and resilience which I once did.

But I am far too gobby and opinionated to give up. Someone who supports independence needs to look beyond the obsession with process which has dominated the narrative for far too long and talk about the systemic failures of the British state which mean that democracy in Scotland can never be respected as long as Scotland remains a part of this dysfunctional polity which laughably calls itself a united kingdom. Someone who supports independence needs to shift the narrative from culture war topics that only benefit the Conservatives and focus on arguments which can appeal to undecided voters and those who are open to persuasion, arguments which demonstrate why the people of Scotland would be far better served by a Scottish government with the full powers of an independent state.

It is all the more important that these arguments are made and these discussions are had because the media in Scotland is woefully unrepresentative of the range of political and constitutional opinion in Scotland. As the BBC is very fond of telling us, Scotland is divided on the question of independence, the media in Scotland on the other hand, is anything but divided on the question of independence. It is, with a tiny handful of honorable exceptions, united in its opposition to independence. This is a media landscape which is extremely unhealthy and inimical to the functioning of democracy.

I do not pretend that this small blog has massive importance or impact, but I do believe that it’s vital to keep it going, and so within the constraints of my health and stamina, that is what I am going to keep doing, however I do need to recognise that my limitations are greater than they once were and that maintaining the pace and output that I managed with ease before the stroke is simply no longer possible. So instead of trying to post a new piece three or four times a week, I will instead aim for two or three and give myself time to recover over the weekends.

Over the next few weeks the focus will naturally be on the leadership contest, but when someone emerges as the winner from as process which the anti-independence media is determined to use as an opportunity to sow more division and rancour, we must come together and work to build an unstoppable movement that will take Scotland to that independence which this country so badly needs and escape the vicious circle of Anglo-British conservsatism which dominates Westminster.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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