The task ahead

On Monday the First Minister addressed delegates on the last day of the SNP’s virtual conference and gave us all some much needed certainty about the timing of the second Scottish independence referendum, or at least as much certainty as is possible when the world is dealing with an inherently unpredictable global pandemic which has taken millions of lives already, and which continues to pose a grave danger.

Given the constraints imposed by the uncertainties of the pandemic, the Scottish Government intends to ramp up campaigning for independence in spring of the coming year, and later in the year will set the process in motion for the referendum to be held in 2023. The idea is that the early part of next year should be spent laying out a renewed case for independence in order to go into the inevitable political battle with a Conservative Government which knows that it is bereft of a compelling case for a union that it itself is destroying with the support of as broad a range of Scottish public opinion as possible, and to enter the referendum campaign proper with a solid platform of independence support which will carry Scotland to assert its desire for independence in the subsequent vote.

The BBC and the rest of Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media is very fond of telling us that support for independence has slipped back since last year when Yes was consistently ahead in the polls and at one point support for independence reached 58%. However what the British media is less keen to point out is that even if support for independence has slipped back, this also means that support in Scotland for staying with the not so tender mercies of the Westminster system is extremely fragile.

While there is a significant and highly vocal minority in Scotland, validated by the media, which is opposed to independence under any circumstances, at least 58% of the population of Scotland – indeed probably more – is not only open to the idea of independence, but is already on the verge of committing to it. They have already toyed with the idea of independence to the extent of thinking about voting yes in a future referendum. The task before us in the coming year is to reach out to this vital segment of the population and to assuage any fears or doubts that they may have in order to turn their wavering support for independence into a solid determination to vote yes. That is a job which ought to be considerably less challenging than attempting to covert a confirmed No voter to Yes.

The questions and issues which face us as we go into this second referendum are different in some key aspects from the issues which dominated the campaign of 2014. Economic discussions will not be dominated by Scotland’s oil and gas resources but rather by the country’s immense potential for the production of energy from renewable and clean sources. Possessing a quarter of the entire European potential for wind energy production, as well as a massive potential for tidal and wave energy production, independence could unlock for Scotland a future as an energy rich nation, Europe’s green powerhouse. And unlike the oil and gas, no one can claim that the wind and tides are going to run out.

Another significant difference is that the experience of the pandemic has proven that Scotland does not require the Westminster Parliament in order to deal with threats and challenges, even those of a global magnitude. Indeed we learned with Johnson’s shambolic, incompetent and chaotic response to the pandemic that Westminster actually endangers Scotland and puts us at greater risk. Furthermore we learned that the priority of this British Government was not the public good but private interests and the corrupt and sleazy handing out of lucrative contracts to the friends and associates of senior Government figures.

The argument that Scotland required Westminster in order to fund furlough payments is a specious one as Westminster had reserved to itself the necessary borrowing powers. It’s a bit like being told that you can’t leave your controlling partner because you need them to pay the household bills after they have refused to give you access to the bank account and refuse to allow you to get a credit card. There is absolutely no reason why an independent Scotland couldn’t do as every other independent nation has done and make its own borrowing arrangements.

However perhaps the biggest difference of all will be the discussion around Scotland’s relationships with Europe and the rest of the world. Brexit has destroyed the British nationalist claim that support for Scottish independence is inward looking and parochial. It has also destroyed the pretensions of British nationalists that British nationalism is inherently non-nationalist and laid bare the ugly reality of British nationalism as reactionary, xenophobic, and founded upon an unshakeable belief in British exceptionalism.

Brexit and the lies, deceit and untrustworthiness of Brexit Britain in its dealings with the EU has ensured that the British state will find it far less easy than it did in 2014 to produce a succession of foreign politicians willing to make statements which are helpful to the anti-independence campaign. Furthermore it has generated considerable international sympathy for an independent Scotland and a much greater understanding in other countries about why Scottish independence is desirable.

It is now unarguable that the quickest and easiest route for Scotland to get back into the European single market and customs area and to restore the rights of freedom of movement that Brexit stripped from Scots, along with everyone else in the UK, is with independence. This of course raises questions about the Scottish-English border for which we need answers. We must act decisively to put to rest any British nationalist claims that there will be passport checks at Gretna. Scotland will remain a part of the passport-free Common Travel Area along with Ireland. Any border checks will apply solely to commercial traffic and can be carried out away from the border itself.

The coming year will be crucial for the future of Scotland. For too long the independence movement has been obsessed with process and what to do if Boris Johnson refuses to consent to a referendum. It seems that the strategy of the Scottish Government is to press ahead with a referendum and to dare Johnson to challenge it. The best way to tackle that eventuality is to work to ensure that there is such a groundswell of support in Scotland for independence and for Scotland’s inalienable right to determine its own future in another referendum that Johnson and the Tories realise that any attempt by Downing Street to veto Scottish democracy will catastrophically backfire on them and will guarantee the political destruction of Scottish unionism. That’s what intend to devote my time and energies to in the weeks and months ahead. 2022 arrives in a few short weeks and Scotland’s time is coming.

Just to let you know, I am currently going through a phase of what my physiotherapist calls neurological hypersensitivity. Nerves and sensation are starting to reawaken on the left side of my body, however because my brain has had no input from the left for many months and because the relevant parts of the brain suffered damage in the stroke, the brain is interpreting these signals as pain.  It’s uncomfortable and exhausting but it is a sign of progress and therefore is good news.  Hopefully my brain will relearn what these signals really mean and the pain will diminish and I will have meaningful sensation.  However in the meantime it’s causing a lot of fatigue and exhaustion as well as pain, so I will be blogging less frequently until symptoms settle down.

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 vote of no confidence in the Westminster system

There has certainly been no time in recent history when the need for Scottish independence has been so acute and pressing. We are now in a very different place from the independence campaign of the 2014 referendum. Back then it was still possible to believe that devolution was safe and that further powers could be granted to the devolved Scottish Parliament. Those opposed to independence could tout the line that support for independence was parochial and inward looking and that it was only thanks to the good graces of the UK that Scotland could enjoy membership of the EU and be respected and taken seriously by the rest of the world.

Now we know that devolution is gravely imperilled, the existence of a powerful Scottish Parliament is antithetical to the right wing Conservative vision of a centralised post-Brexit state in which the Scotland Secretary Alister Jack has no qualms about declaring that he dislikes acknowledging that Scotland is a nation in its own right, preferring to subsume it in a single “British nation” in which Scotland is reduced to nothing more than a quaint region with some dialect differences. The Conservatives have traduced their own promises made to the people of Scotland in 2014 when they vowed never to alter the powers of the Scottish Parliament without Holyrood’s consent and have set out to by-pass and undermine Holyrood, giving Westminster powers to intervene in Scotland on devolved issues without even pretending to seek a democratic mandate from the people of Scotland to do so.

However it’s not just the future of the devolution settlement which is at risk under the Westminster Conservatives, the very future of Scotland as a nation and a distinct polity is threatened by them. Alister Jack’s comments, which included the remark that he views the Scotland England border as nothing more than a sign by the side of the road, demonstrate that if the Tories had their way Scotland would be reduced to nothing more than a glorified county council, existing purely in order to allow Anglo-British nationalists like Jack to indulge themselves in the delusional fantasy that their nationalism isn’t really nationalist at all.

The only thing stopping them from a full throated assault on the devolution settlement is the possibility of another independence referendum.

It’s also now clear that it is British nationalism and the Brexit British state which is parochial, inward looking and xenophobic. Scottish independence represents by far the quickest and most secure route for Scotland to re-establish closer ties with Europe and the EU and to regain EU membership. Even if there was a significant change in the political climate in the UK, which is by no means certain, the member states of the EU would be highly reluctant to allow the UK back into the EU, and EFTA countries made it clear during the Brexit transitional period that they would not welcome a UK application for membership. Thanks to Brexit and the serial deceit of the Conservatives, the British state has destroyed any goodwill that it once had. The UK is now viewed as an untrustworthy partner, a troublesome state whose defining characteristic is a belief that it should magically be exempt from the norms and standards expected of other independent European states.

Scotland, on the other hand, would be welcomed with open arms, as was made clear by Jan Jambon, the Minister-President of Belgium’s Flemish community who said last week that Flemish ports should prepare for the possible independence of Scotland from the United Kingdom.

The way that Scotland has been treated by this duplicitous Conservative government would be bad enough if it were even semi-competent, but it cannot even aspire to the heady heights of adequacy. What we have is a shambolic and incompetent British government which lurches from one allegation of sleaze and corruption to another, whose senior figures have a relationship to the truth which is so distant that it’s not even on the same space-time continuum as any recognisable reality in this universe, and which has elevated a callous and cruel disregard for human life and decency into the closest thing it has got to a guiding principle. Following the appalling tragedy of dozens of people fleeing war and persecution losing their lives as they attempted to cross the English Channel, this fundamentally unserious government and Prime Minister used the disaster as an excuse to try and get into a Twitter spat with the French President.

As we brace for the spread of a new and concerning variant of the virus, we learned on Sunday that the Johnson Government has ignored a senior official’s plan to prepare the UK for the possible emergence of vaccine-resistant Covid variants.

Clive Dix, a leading figure in drug development who chaired the vaccine task force until April this year told the Observer newspaper :”I wrote a very specific proposal on what we should put in place right now for the emergence of any new virus that escaped the vaccine. That was written and handed into the vaccine task force at the end of April when I left. I haven’t seen a sign of any of those activities yet.” Johnson has already presided over a UK which has suffered a huge death toll and greater economic damage than any comparable state, but has learned absolutely nothing. Instead he devotes his time and energy into trying to neuter independent scrutiny of MPs’ activities while doing nothing about the scandal of his party’s hoovering up of dark money in donations, allegedly in return for peerages.

The SNP has announced that on Tuesday it will table a motion of no confidence in the Johnson government in the Commons. In the highly unlikely event that it passes, the Government will fall and there will have to be a General Election. However it will be defeated as the Conservatives possess a large majority in Parliament.

The question is whether Keir Starmer’s Labour party will support the motion or whether they will yet again put their tribal dislike of the SNP ahead of doing their job as the official opposition and actually opposing the Tories for a change, because if they do as they usually do, and find some spurious reason for abstaining, they will merely confirm that within the UK Scotland has no protection from the malignities of the Conservatives and the only possible option is independence. Then they will have shown Scotland that we need to pass a vote of no confidence in the entire Westminster system.

Just to let you know, I am currently going through a phase of what my physiotherapist calls neurological hypersensitivity. Nerves and sensation are starting to reawaken on the left side of my body, however because my brain has had no input from the left for many months and because the relevant parts of the brain suffered damage in the stroke, the brain is interpreting these signals as pain.  It’s uncomfortable and exhausting but it is a sign of progress and therefore is good news.  Hopefully my brain will relearn what these signals really mean and the pain will diminish and I will have meaningful sensation.  However in the meantime it’s causing a lot of fatigue and exhaustion as well as pain, so I will be blogging less frequently until symptoms settle down.

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.

Johnson: the perfect figurehead for a corrupt and unreformable Westminster

The performance artiste with the stage name Boris Johnson who is treating the position of the Prime Minister of the UK as the world’s greatest improv gig does not currently have his troubles to seek. The fall out from his disastrously self serving decision to rip up independent oversight of Conservative MPs’ sleazebag side gigs had not abated when he compounded backbench anger with his toe curling, well let’s call it a speech, to the CBI, which contained more hums and haws and vroom vroom noises than actual words in the English language.

To make matters worse for Johnson, who got the position of leader of the Tory party in part because of his supposed skills as an orator, the meaningful words which the – are we still calling it a speech? – did contain were not strung together in any coherent fashion, and appeared to be mostly concerned with a visit to Peppa Pig land, which Johnson claimed was his kind of place. This must come as a surprise to those who have seen the programme in the company of some under fives and had failed to realise it was actually about a compulsively lying serial adulterer who tries to get a journalist beaten up and who would privatise the NHS if he thought he could get away with it.

Still it’s nice to know that even the supine jellyfish on the Conservative benches in the Commons do in fact have a limit to their toleration of Johnson’s appalling behaviour and manifest unsuitability for public office. However it speaks volumes about the lack of morality, or indeed basic human decency in the Parliamentary Conservative party that the limit was reached, not with a callous incompetence in handling the pandemic which has left the UK with one of the highest per capita death tolls in the world, not with one lie after another. It was not even reached with Johnson’s naked assault on the democratic norms of the UK which the Conservatives effect to be so proud of – up to and including lying to the Queen in order to unlawfully prorogue Parliament in an effort to evade Parliamentary scrutiny of his Brexit deal.

The Tories have been just fine with all of this, just as they have been fine with the corruption, the sleaze and the flouting of the lockdown rules which the rest of us must adhere to. Johnson once again flouted official requests to wear a mask as he watched a performance of Macbeth at a busy theatre in north London on Monday night, according to witnesses, just days after he refused to wear a mask on a visit to a hospital in the north of England.

No, what finally did it for the Tories was a stumbling and shambolic speech about Peppa Pig. The Tories knew exactly what they were getting with Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, they knew all about his total lack of concern for anyone other than himself, the fact that he occupies a principle and moral vacuum, his rank opportunism, and his laziness. But despite all that they chose him as leader anyway, because they cynically calculated that his carefully contrived shambolic “Boris” shtick with his deliberately rumpled appearance and purposely unkempt hair would appeal to a certain type of voter in England who would be swayed by the alleged charms of an upper class patrician type whose persona is based upon not giving a shit. A significant minority in class obsessed England confuse this act with authenticity, enough to give Johnson and the Conservatives the victory they craved in the General Election of December 2019.

Now however the novelty has well and truly worn off and the public in England is starting to show signs of tiring of the Boris performance. Even the robotic and bland Keir Starmer, who would make a bowl of unsalted and unbuttered mashed potatoes seem dangerously spicy by comparison is starting to make inroads into the Conservatives’ lead in the UK-wide opinion polls. As Leader of the Opposition Starmer is assiduous and energetic in attacking his political opponents. Luckily for Johnson and the Tories, the great political opponents of the Parliamentary Labour party are other parts of the Labour party.

There is now widespread disquiet on the Conservative benches as Tory MPs fear for their second jobs and start to doubt Johnson’s ability to get them re-elected. There are rumours of moves being made against him and even that some Tory MPs are sounding out their colleagues about a potential leadership challenge. Downing Street has been forced to go on the defensive, with Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab, himself a selfish incompetence who owes his position entirely to Johnson’s patronage, asserting that Johnson’s speech to the CBI was an example of the prime minister being “ebullient”, in the process giving us yet another example of senior Conservatives using words in entirely novel and unexpected ways, such as when Michael Gove described the Conservatives by-passing the Scottish Parliament and intervening directly on devolved matters as “augmenting” devolution.

It is unlikely that Johnson will be unseated by his party in the short term, the anonymous briefings to the press from unhappy Tory MPs and the rumours of leadership challenges are more likely an attempt from within the party to deliver a shot across the bows of the Johnson ship of state in the hope of getting a few concessions.

However what recent developments within the Conservative party do signify is that for the time being we will not be hearing any more talk from the Conservatives and their allies about a snap General Election in the Spring in order to take advantage of the ineffectiveness of the Labour party. The Conservatives know that they need to get their own house in order first. Their problem is that what they are getting with Johnson is precisely what they should have expected they were going to get. He’s incapable of change and as such is a perfect figurehead for a corrupt and shambolic Westminster which is incapable of reform.

That means we are going to be stuck with Johnson for the time being. He’s possibly the best recruiting sergeant the Scottish independence movement could wish for and the longer he remains in office the more obvious the need for Scottish independence becomes to the undecided and the switherers.

Just to let you know, I am currently going through a phase of what my physiotherapist calls neurological hypersensitivity. Nerves and sensation are starting to reawaken on the left side of my body, however because my brain has had no input from the left for many months and because the relevant parts of the brain suffered damage in the stroke, the brain is interpreting these signals as pain.  It’s uncomfortable and exhausting but it is a sign of progress and therefore is good news.  Hopefully my brain will relearn what these signals really mean and the pain will diminish and I will have meaningful sensation.  However in the meantime it’s causing a lot of fatigue and exhaustion as well as pain, so I may not blog every day until symptoms settle down.

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.

Not building bridges with the UK : making connections with independence

It was reported today that the “Boris Bridge” has been definitively cancelled. Most of Scotland was about as shocked and surprised at this development as it was at the revelation that bright orange is not in fact the natural skin colour of the cast members of The Only Way Is Essex or that there’s been considerable and expensive cosmetic dentistry in the creation of Rylan’s impressively white and gleaming teeth, which ensure that he’ll never be stuck for a job because all he needs to do is to stand on a cliff and open his mouth so he can double up as a lighthouse.

Of course Johnson’s ludicrous plan was never going to be realised. Building a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland would have to deal with the strong currents, frequent winter storms, and great depths of the North Channel, not to mention the thousands of tons of conventional munitions and chemical weapons that the Ministry of Defence has dumped in Beaufort’s Dyke, because as far as the British state is concerned Scotland is nothing more than a conveniently remote location for dumping the dangerously toxic and explosive implements of British imperialism that Westminster wants kept as far away as possible from places that it actually cares about.

Even if a bridge were built, poor weather would ensure it was frequently closed for days at a stretch during the winter months. A tunnel would be more feasible, even if ruinously expensive to construct, but it would still have to overcome some formidable engineering challenges and given the British state’s atrocious record in major civil engineering projects, which invariably come in very late and considerably over budget, there is no doubt that it would end up costing a great deal more than the £20 billion budget which Johnson and his supporters were bandying about.

Johnson has form for backing pie in the sky projects. He has a childish need to attach his name to massive infrastructure developments, in what is clearly a reflection of his narcissistic insecurity. Of course rather than getting therapy, Johnson expects the public to pay billions of pounds in order to assuage his fragile ego and ensure that he will be remembered for something other than his constant lies, his deceit, his corruption, and the way he has wrecked democracy.

There is of course the infamous Garden Bridge proposal for a pedestrian bridge over the Thames in central London which Johnson enthusiastically supported when he was the London Mayor. The failed project ate up £43 million in public money before being cancelled. Then there was the plan for “Boris Island”, a scheme to build a new six runway airport on an artificial island in the Thames estuary. The architect and urban planner Sir Terry Farrel likened the plan to the grandiose and unrealistic projects devised by Adolf Hitler and described it as “mad”.

The fixed link between Scotland and Northern Ireland was never going to be built. The political purpose of the equally mad, grandiose, and unrealistic proposal to build a bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland was to throw a bone to the staunch mob in Scotland in the run up to the crucial Holyrood elections and to persuade the equally staunch mob in Northern Ireland that the British Government actually cared about them after throwing the DUP under the Brexit bus the moment that the Conservatives no longer relied on them for their majority in the House of Commons. In the exact same way, once the formerly Labour seats in the so-called Red Wall in the north of England were in the bag for Johnson and the Tories, the plan to build an eastern arm of High Speed Rail to Leeds was scrapped as was the proposal for a high speed rail connection between Leeds and Manchester, northern England’s largest cities.

While other countries get on with extending and developing the high speed rail networks that will be essential as a replacement for short haul flights in a carbon zero age, we can forget about the British Government ever prioritising a high speed rail connection between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Under Westminster, Scotland is forever condemned to the slow track, while the rest of Europe speeds by and wonders why a resource rich and highly educated nation like Scotland continues to tolerate the second rate status to which it is consigned by the British state.

The reality is that if Scotland wants meaningful connections, physical or otherwise, with other countries, it can only do so as an independent nation in charge of determining its own priorities. There is no doubt that other countries would be eager to have Scotland as a partner in a way that they are not with a UK which has become a by-word for perfidy, deceit and untrustworthiness.

In an article published over the weekend by Finland’s English language newspaper the Helsinki Times, professor of politics Anthony Heron argues that Scotland would be an ideal candidate for membership of the Nordic Council. This is a view shared by Finnish politician Mikko Kärnä, who represents Lapland in the Eduskunta, the Finnish Parliament. Kärnä congratulated Nicola Sturgeon on the SNP’s victory in May’s election and said that he was confident that Scotland will vote for independence once the pandemic is over.

In the meantime he announced an initiative to grant Scotland observer status of the Nordic Council. The Nordic Council is an interparliamentary organization comprising the five Nordic countries, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, and the Nordic Region’s three autonomous territories, the Åland islands, The Faroe Islands and Greenland. Full membership of the Nordic Council is open to the independent nations of Scandinavia. The Åland islands, the Faroe Islands and Greenland have membership with limited rights. The Saami Council, the Sámiráđđi, a voluntary, non-governmental organization of the indigenous Saami people made up of nine Saami member organizations in Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden has formal observer status.

The choice for Scotland is clear, make our own connections and determine our own priorities, or forever keep on being fobbed off with Westminster’s pie in the sky lies.

Just to let you know, I am currently going through a phase of what my physiotherapist calls neurological hypersensitivity. Nerves and sensation are starting to reawaken on the left side of my body, however because my brain has had no input from the left for many months and because the relevant parts of the brain suffered damage in the stroke, the brain is interpreting these signals as pain.  It’s uncomfortable and exhausting but it is a sign of progress and therefore is good news.  Hopefully my brain will relearn what these signals really mean and the pain will diminish and I will have meaningful sensation.  However in the meantime it’s causing a lot of fatigue and exhaustion as well as pain, so I may not blog every day until symptoms settle down.

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.

plus ça Westminster change, plus c’est la même chose de Westminster

There’s one thing that Westminster is very good at – you might even say that in this respect the UK really is world-beating. It’s just a shame then that what Westminster is world beating at is in finding ways to appear to be dealing with an issue while not actually changing anything at all. This is how the UK has managed to make it into the 21st century with a parliament with an essentially unreformed second chamber. Membership of the House of Lords is no longer exclusively for members of the aristocracy who inherited their seats and or bishops of the Church of England, but CofE bishops still have a seat in the Lords as do 92 hereditary peers.

There’s no pretence of democratic accountability for the 720 members of the Lords. The vast majority are life peers who were appointed by the Prime Minister. It is a system which reeks of blatant and naked patronage and it ensures that politicians who have been rejected by the voters can continue to make laws and influence public policy. Tony Blair responded to public demands to reform the unelected House of Lords by abolishing the right of most hereditary peers to sit in the Lords and to replace them with peers appointed due to the patronage of the Prime Minister. He thus did nothing to make the Lords more democratic or accountable, and increased the power of his own office while appearing to respond to calls for reform of an unaccountable and undemocratic second chamber.

We have seen similar tricks in Scotland, widespread demand in Scotland in the 1980s for a Scottish Parliament and assertions of the sovereignty of the people of Scotland were met with “devolution”, a formulation designed to ensure that sovereign power remained with the Westminster Parliament – as the phrase used by Labour politicians at the time to signify that in the view of the Westminster Parliament, it was merely permitting the new Scottish Parliament to administer powers on Westminster’s behalf.

Although a considerable part of the drive for a Scottish Parliament in the Thatcher/Major era came from a desire in Scotland to ensure that Scotland was protected from the policies of Westminster Conservative governments that Scotland didn’t vote for, the limitations of devolution have become painfully apparent since the Brexit vote in 2016.

Despite the fact that one of the key promises of the Better Together campaign in 2014 was that the powers of Holyrood would be protected and that no Westminster government would ever make changes to the devolution settlement without the express consent of the Scottish Parliament, this was hedged about with the weasel word “normally”, giving Conservative Governments a loophole to exploit, and which they have exploited in full, allowing them to claim that they had to make changes unilaterally to the devolution settlement due to the “exceptional” circumstances of Brexit, a Brexit which Scotland rejected at the 2016 referendum and which it has continued to reject at every election since by voting for political parties which oppose it.

We now see that devolution cannot protect Scotland from the malignant effects of Conservative governments which Scotland didn’t vote for – that was the problem that a Scottish Parliament was supposed to solve. Westminster made sure it couldn’t. To add insult to injury this Conservative Government is now using the Brexit that Scotland didn’t vote for either in order to traduce and by-pass the Scottish Parliament. They even have the unmitigated gall to insist that in doing so they are “augmenting devolution” which is a bit like chopping someone’s legs off at the knees and then saying that you have augmented their mobility because now they can use a wheelchair.

The only thing that prevents the Conservatives from embarking on an all-out destruction of the devolution settlement is the prospect of a second Scottish independence referendum. They know that neutering Holyrood and openly attacking the devolution settlement would put rocket boosters under the case for independence. But make no mistake, if Scotland is foolish enough to vote No again in that second referendum, that is exactly what the Conservatives will do. Devolution has no future with a Westminster which will stop at nothing in order to see off any challenge to its power and the way it has always done things.

The latest example of Westminster making a big show of purporting to respond to a political problem but in reality not doing anything of substance which will actually effect the needed changes that the measure is supposed to bring about is Boris Johnson’s response to the on-going scandal about the second jobs of Conservative MPs and their often extremely lucrative outside interests.

The scandal broke because of Johnson’s decision to abolish independent scrutiny of MPs’ activities and replace it with a sham committee with a built in Tory majority in the wake of the decision to suspend Conservative MP Owen Paterson after he had been found to engage in inappropriate lobbying on behalf of companies he was employed by. The scandal soon widened to cover the issue of second jobs for MPs,Conservative MP Geoffrey Cox earns hundreds of thousands a year working for a legal firm. 90 out of 360 Conservative MPs have second jobs compared with five of Labour’s 199 MPs and two each from the SNP and the Lib Dems.

Earlier this week Johnson announced a plan which would supposedly tighten the rules on the outside jobs and financial interests of MPs. On Wednesday MPs voted 297 to nil to back Downing Street plans to restrict outside work to “reasonable limits” and prohibit parliamentary advice or consultancy. Johnson was hoping that this would draw a line under the affair. However an analysis of the register of MPs’ interests soon found that fewer than ten MPs would be affected by the rule change.

According to the Guardian newspaper, the proposed prohibition on MPs being parliamentary advisers appears to be so narrowly worded that only two Tories out of the 48 Conservative MPs with consultancy jobs fitted the description and would be affected by the new ban.

The phrase plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the more it changes the more it remains the same, looks as though it was invented for Westminster. The only way Scotland will ever see any real and meaningful change is with independence.

 

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.

One million arguments for independence

If you read The National you will be aware that the paper is about to embark on a major initiative along with Believe in Scotland and the SNP to print over one million copies of a special eight page pro-independence newspaper and deliver it to homes across the country.

I’m not involved with this project but it’s a fantastic idea which I wholeheartedly support. There isn’t a writer in the country who wouldn’t give their eye teeth to see one million copies of their work printed off and delivered to people all over Scotland, but this is a high profile publication and it will feature contributions from people who are considerably better known than a random blogger with a cute dug. Amongst those who will be penning a piece for the special free newspaper are Gordon Macintyre-Kemp, author of Scotland the Brief, and of course the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon herself, along with other senior figures from the SNP and the Scottish Government.

The special newspaper is being designed and edited by fellow Ayrshire resident the estimable Richard Walker, who you may remember was the editor of the Sunday Herald when it came out for Yes during the 2014 referendum. He later went on to found The National and is now editor of The National’s Sunday sister publication. As an award winning newspaper editor, you can be sure that the special free newspaper will be of the very highest quality.

Believe in Scotland, the campaigning arm of Business for Scotland, have done sterling work debunking the scare stories and alarmism of the British nationalist opponents of independence, who would have us believe that Scotland is an economic basket case which couldn’t afford to fund basic public services as an independent nation. If you haven’t already done so, you should get a copy of Believe in Scotland’s excellent Scotland the Brief and get it into the hands of your friends and relatives who are still undecided about the merits of independence. It details the immense resources and potential which this cold, damp and heart-achingly beautiful country of ours possesses and how they can be harnessed to improve the lot of the people of Scotland. You can order a copy here https://www.businessforscotland.com/scotland-the-brief/

The immense advantage of a free newspaper with an enormous print run is that there are enough copies of it to allow it to be delivered to half of all the households in the country, according to the most recent available census figures, the 5.5 million people of Scotland live in around 2.3 million households. That means that potentially a half of the entire population of Scotland could see a copy of this special newspaper. Many of those households and individuals will not have engaged with the arguments for independence and this could be an invaluable way of reaching out to them.

Not everyone engages with or is interested in politics, and even if they don’t sit down and read this special edition of The National from cover to cover, its mere existence in their letterbox and its delivery to a large number of households where they have friends and relatives tells them that the independence movement in Scotland is a lot more than a few people trading snark on social media, it is large, well organised and influential in the real world. That is particularly important in a country like Scotland where the traditional media is overwhelmingly opposed to Scottish independence and goes out of its way to criticise and attack the Scottish Government and to magnify and promote any news story which can be spun as bad for independence while minimising and diminishing news stories which are positive for Scottish independence.

I try in this blog to keep the focus on attacking the true opponents of Scottish independence, the anti independence parties which are apologists for the British state and British nationalism, while at the same time formulating arguments and articles which have a chance of getting through to the soft noes and undecideds whom we must persuade of the case for independence if we are to win the independence campaign that is coming in the next couple of years. I don’t always succeed but I try to write in a style that is amusing and entertaining in the hopes that this will help to get through to those all important but as yet politically disengaged people whose votes will be crucial in deciding the outcome of the next Scottish independence referendum. However I’m not kidding myself on here, this blog, just like every other Scottish politics blog, is to a very large extent preaching to the converted.

I don’t say that as a criticism of anyone else’s blog, it is simply a reflection of the nature of the blogging beast and the Internet in general. People tend to seek out online resources that confirm their own views whatever those views may be, and once they discover them, tend to keep revisiting. The online echo-chamber phenomenon is very real. In order to reach out to the people whom we must convert to support for independence, it is vital to break out of that reinforcing but closed loop of opinions and to take arguments for Scottish independence to people who are not already convinced and who do not realise the true extent of the harm that the Conservatives are doing to both Scotland and the UK as a whole, and to democracy in general, people who are unaware of the realities of the depths of Westminster corruption and the impossibility of meaningful change within the UK.

The great value of this joint initiative from The National, Believe in Scotland and the SNP, is that it has the potential to do just that. It has the potential to take the message of independence to people who would never consider searching online for a pro-independence blog ,who prefer to use Facebook for swapping recipes and keeping up with family news, and who very sensibly restrict their use of Twitter to what it should really be kept for, which is tweeting gifs of cats being cute. One million copies of a pro-independence newspaper mean one million arguments for yes which can reach precisely those people that we need to reach if we are to restore Scotland’s rightful place among the independent nations of the world.

 

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 moral vacuum that is Johnson’s Westminster

As the Conservative sleaze scandal and the controversy surrounding second jobs for MPs, or in the case of Douglas Ross, third and fourth jobs, rumbles on, it has come to light that the Conservative MP for Moray, list MSP for the Highlands and Islands, leader of the Scottish Tories, and linesman for the SFA managed to “forget” annual extracurricular earnings of over £28,000 a year which he failed to declare to the Westminster register of financial interests. In total his annual additional earnings on top of his MP’s salary of £81,932 before expenses is £32,835.

This would be the Douglas Ross who recently claimed that he and his party were more authentic and in touch voices for working class people in Scotland than the First Minister and the SNP. There are not many working class people in Scotland who manage to forget about annual earnings of over £28,000. Those are people who struggle to do without the £20 a week in Universal Credit that Douglas Ross voted to take away from them while he was forgetting about an extra £540 per week that he receives on top of his weekly income of £1575from his MP’s salary.

There certainly are not many working class people who bring home well over £100,000 a year. However when you represent a party led by a man who once described the £250,000 a year he earned on his side gig as “chicken feed”, your understanding of the financial constraints that working class people are under is probably as warped as a Conservative MP’s grasp of what constitutes moral and financial probity in public office.

The real issue isn’t the fact that Douglas Ross has a side gig as a linesman for the fitba, it’s that many of his colleagues in the Conservative party have extremely well paid side jobs representing financial and commercial interests which potentially conflict with their duties and privileges as legislators who are supposed to be speaking up for the interests of their constituents. Public confidence in the institutions of the British state is not helped by the fact that the Conservative party is far more assiduous in taking steps to neuter independent oversight of MPs’ outside financial interests than it is in ensuring that MPs are kept to the high standards that the public has the right to expect of people who make our laws and shape public policy. And all the while the allegations keep piling up.

Over the weekend here were fresh allegations that leading Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg failed to declare director’s loans totalling £6 million that he received from his company Saliston Limited between 2018 and 2020. Additionally Labour is demanding that new information from American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri about her relationship with Boris Johnson while he was mayor of London should be investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct. Earlier this year Johnson avoided a criminal investigation into his relationship with Arcuri after the IOP ruled there was no evidence Johnson had influenced the payment of thousands of pounds of public money to Arcuri or secured her participation in foreign trade trips he led.

The disquiet created by Boris Johnson’s attempts in the wake of the Owen Paterson lobbying scandal to abolish the independent Parliamentary Commissioner’s role in investigating allegations of wrong doing made against MPs in order to replace it with a sham committee of his chums is compounded by the many recent scandals about alleged wrong doing in the awarding of lucrative government contracts. A number of senior government figures including former Health Secretary Matt Hancock, Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Michael Gove have been found to have been in breach of the ministerial code or to have acted unlawfully. None of them have faced any consequences as a result.

There is now a widespread and entirely accurate perception that members of the British Government and the Conservative party operate in a moral vacuum where they will never have to answer for their actions and behaviour.

All this came to a head during the COP26 conference which this sleazy and corrupt British Government shut the Scottish Government out of. The eyes of the world saw a British Government desperately trying to evade democratic scrutiny and oversight as it helped to water down vital resolutions on the future of the planet in order to benefit the same kind of business interests whose shilling Conservative MPs are so eager to accept.

They also saw a Scottish Government which despite being shut out of any official role by that same British Government, showed itself to be the face of an honest, co-operative, and sincere nation, willing to deal fairly with other nations. It was a very far cry from the British exceptionalism, lies, and deceit of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, a man who can’t even be honest about his own given name.

With her face to face meetings with other leaders, the First Minister still managed to effectively wield Scotland’s soft power, despite the best efforts of a jealous and insecure Johnson to keep her as far away from the limelight as possible. They all know that she believes in Scottish independence, it didn’t need to be explicitly spelled out just, as it didn’t need to be explicitly spelled out that an independent Scotland would be a much more reliable and trustworthy partner than the Brexit Britain of the Tories. The lesson was plain to see and all the more effective for being made implicitly and subtly.

During the 2014 referendum there was a lot of ignorance internationally about why Scotland sought independence. Many in other nations were perplexed by why Scotland sought independence from what they believed to be a well governed and stable democracy that was at the heart of the EU. The Conservatives and the Better Together campaign capitalised on that in order to rustle up a series of European and world politicians who were happy to do the British Government a favour and make a statement which was helpful to the anti-independence cause.

The Conservatives have now trashed the UK’s international reputation, and those European and global leaders attending COP were left in no doubt that Scotland’s rejection of Brexit and its desire to have a closer and more cooperative relationship with the EU is a major factor driving support for independence. With its constant lies and deceit over Brexit negotiations the British Government has proven it can’t be trusted to act in good faith.

As we go into a second independence referendum the reasons for Scottish independence are much clearer and easier to understand for the rest of the world. There is also, crucially, far more sympathy internationally for the idea of an independent Scotland than there was in 2014. The Conservatives and their allies are going to find it much more difficult next time round to find international statespeople who are willing to do the British Government a favour by speaking out against Scottish independence. Likewise international figures are going to be more willing to speak up in favour of an independent Scotland. And this is all due to the moral vacuum that is the Conservative controlled Westminster.

I’m still a bit delicate here, the fatigue has lifted for the most part but now I’ve come down with a stomach bug. Isn’t life a joy?  I will try to blog as normal but the pace may be reduced this week.

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 short break

I’ve not had a proper break for a while, and I’ve probably been overdoing it of late. I’ve been trying to build up my strength and stamina in my bad leg and walk outdoors without relying on the walking stick.  It has been going well but unfortunately the post-stroke fatigue is rearing its ugly head again so I need to take a few days to rest and recuperate. I won’t be posting anything this week but plan to be back, refreshed and raring to go, next Monday. I am sure that in the meantime you are all more than capable of keeping yourselves amused.

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.

Shining a light on Tory dark money

During the Scottish Parliament elections in May, the question of a second Scottish independence referendum dominated the campaign. It’s a measure of just how important and defining an issue for modern Scottish politics that the independence question has become that it even pushed the covidocalypse off top billing during the campaign. As we all know, the election produced the largest pro-independence majority that the devolved Parliament has ever seen, with 72 MSPs from the SNP and the Scottish Greens (including the Presiding Officer Alison Johnson) elected on a clear and unequivocal platform of support for another independence referendum within the five year term of this Parliament. The anti-independence MSPs combined number just 57 in total, (31 Tory, 22 Labour and four Lib Dem) and are easily outnumbered even when the neutral Presiding Officer, elected as a Green, is taken into account. Indeed the anti-independence contingent is easily outnumbered by the 64 SNPs alone even before counting the Scottish Green contingent, which is in a formal pact of alliance with the SNP in the Scottish Government.

This is the election which the BBC’s Sarah Smith repeatedly told us was on a “knife-edge”. The pro-independence parties between them won 55.8% of the total number of seats at Holyrood, but this is apparently a “knife-edge”. The results of parliamentary elections are decided by the number of seats won by each of the parties contesting the election, there is no other meaningful criterion.

It’s only referendums whose results are determined by the number of votes cast for the respective pro or anti campaigns. Interestingly enough, when the results of the 2014 referendum were reported and it turned out that 55.3 % had voted against independence, the BBC said that this was a “decisive” result even though 55.3% is a decisively smaller number than the 55.8% of seats won by pro-independence and pro-second referendum parties in May. There was no talk of knife-edges then. Funny that.

Of course the Conservatives and their Anglo-British nationalist fellow travellers are now trying to gaslight the people of Scotland into believing that they did not in fact vote decisively and unquestionably for a Scottish Parliament which they charged with the task of delivering another independence referendum within the five year term of the Parliament. This is despite the fact that the Conservatives talked about nothing except their opposition to another independence referendum all the way through the campaign.

The proof that the Conservatives and the other anti-independence parties know now and have known all along that the defining issue of May’s Scottish Parliament election was their desperate attempt to prevent the election of a Holyrood with a pro-independence majority and a majority and committed to delivering another independence referendum, is their tacit collusion in an anti-independence tactical voting campaign for the constituency vote. You could hardly miss the prominent billboards placed in expensively purchased locations urging voters to use their vote in the constituency for the candidate best placed to deprive the SNP of the seat. Although this campaign did secure some significant successes, such as the re-election of Jackie Baillie for Labour on the back of Conservative tactical votes, it ultimately failed, and failed badly.

We now know that this well funded and highly visible campaign was fuelled by an anonymous donor to the tune of £46,000. The donor has no website and is registered to a central London address used by a PO Box provider. The donor, listed with the Electoral Commission as the Centre for Economic education and Training seems to have no existence outwith the Electoral Commission declaration. Despite not seeming to exist beyond a PO Box address at a mail drop, the “Centre” made two donations to the anti-independence from group Scotland Matters totalling £46,000.

In total the spending of seven non party campaign groups was reported by the Electoral Commission, this weekend, all but one are anti-independence campaigns.

Had the anti-independence tactical voting campaign succeeded and between them the Conservatives, Labour, and the Alex Cole-Hamilton fan club had managed to deprive the pro independence parties of a majority they would of course now be insisting that May’s Holyrood election was indeed really all about independence and another referendum, but because their attempts to subvert Scottish democracy with dark money and dodgy donations failed, they are now trying to backtrack.

The episode raises important questions about the integrity of Scottish democracy within the UK. The Conservatives are keen to foster a system where electoral victory goes to the highest bidder. Last year it emerged that the shadowy Scottish Unionist Association Trust (SUAT), an unincorporated association which does not have to report its accounts to Companies House, had handed over almost £22,450 to the Scottish Conservatives in the run-up to the 2019 General Election. In total the SUAT dark money ATM gave the Scottish Tories £318,876 between 2001 and 2018.

The Conservatives have accepted £2.6 million in donations from sources with anonymous funders since Johnson entered Downing Street. In July, the Commons’ cross-party Committee on Standards in Public Life warned that unincorporated associations are a weak point in the elections rules and could be a “route for foreign money to influence UK elections”, The Committee recommended reform of the system. Instead, the Conservatives included a provision in their Elections Bill to abolish the independence of the Electoral Commission and bring it under Government control, giving the ultimate say on whether a political donation is acceptable to the minister for the Cabinet Office. Not only have the Conservatives got no intention of reforming the system to make political donations more transparent, they are introducing measures to facilitate their collection of dark money.

The Conservatives have squandered many of the advantages enjoyed by Better Together in 2014. They have ripped Scotland out of the EU and have destroyed any claims that further devolution or federalism are possible within the UK, indeed they have made it clear that the future of devolution is far from secure. Furthermore with their Brexit, their deceit and their British exceptionalism, they have ensured that international opinion is now far more sympathetic to Scottish independence than it was in 2014.

In the independence referendum campaign to come the Conservatives and their anti-independence allies know that they are on the back foot and will flood Scotland with billboard campaigns and social media advertising paid for with dark money sourced outwith Scotland. They are going to try and buy victory. If they succeed they will buy the death of democracy in Scotland. We must ensure that they fail just as they failed to buy the Holyrood election.

 

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.

Joe Biden’s popcorn bowl

According to a recent article in the Daily Mail, a vile and frothing right wing British nationalist nightmare of a publication whose sole saving grace is that it is not quite as unhinged as the Express (although there’s not much in it), the paper was informed by a senior Tory MP that he Conservatives had three objectives for the COP26 summit. “Save the planet. Save the country. And stop Sturgeon from getting a photo with Biden.”

Interestingly this report failed to make it into the paper’s Scottish edition, although it was prominent in its English edition. It’s almost as though British nationalists are afraid of Scotland finding out what they really think about this (checks notes) much loved partner in a family of nations.

It’s in everyone’s interests to save the planet, but the cracks are already showing in what has been hailed by the British press as Johnson’s great achievement of a deal to halt and reverse deforestation. Leaders of over 100 countries representing about 85% of the world’s forests have committed to halting and reversing forest loss and land degradation by 2030. However Indonesia, home to one of the world’s last remaining great rain forests which is plagued by illegal logging and the destruction of pristine environments for palm oil plantations, decried the deal as “unfair” despite the fact that the country is one of the signatories to the deal.

The Conservative objective of preventing the Scottish First Minister from getting a photo with the American president has already gone the way of the deforested parts of the Amazon basin. Biden met with Nicola Sturgeon and presented her with a glass bowl as a gift to the people of Scotland from the USA. The Conservatives were desperate not to give the Scottish Government any official role in the COP26 proceedings leading to the shameful result that the country which is the location for a meeting which is devoted to measures to combat climate change and promote climate justice – which crucially depends upon the affected communities having agency to make the changes they require – having no voice, no representation, and no agency. Biden’s meeting with Sturgeon was an implicit recognition that she is the head of the country which is de facto if not de jure, the host of COP26, a country which moreover seeks to achieve independence and which the USA wishes to stay on good terms with.

The injustice being perpetrated against Scotland has not gone unnoticed by delegates to the conference, many of whom represent countries which have had their own struggles for independence and their own issues with British misrule. Although she was denied an official role by Johnson, the Scottish First minister made good use of the opportunity to meet with other national leaders and although Scottish independence was not on the agenda for discussion, none of them would have been left in any doubt that independence for Scotland is what she stands for and that she aspires to lead an independent Scotland which will be an honest, co-operative and constructive partner with other nations. There was no need to explicitly spell out the contrast that would make with a British nationalist Brexit Britain led by Boris Johnson. The rest of the world can see it for themselves.

Johnson could have far more effectively undercut pro-independence arguments by giving the Scottish Government a prominent offcial role at COP26, then the Tories could claim that Scotland was enjoying a disproportionate degree of international influence thanks to being a part of the UK. But Johnson and the Conservatives were too vain, insecure, and stupid for that. Instead they tried to cut Scotland out entirely, leading to Scotland being deprived of representation in its own right at a global conference which is taking place in Scotland. All that Johnson has achieved is to make it clear that the only way Scotland can have a voice on the global stage is as an independent nation.

One delegate from the Pacific islands, Joseph Sikulu, speaking on BBC Scotland’s debate night said that climate justice is about self determination and agency. However he had learned from his time in Glasgow that as part of the UK Scotland lacks that agency. He said “[Climate justice] is about our ability to decide what happens to our people into our country. And I’ve learned this a lot being in Glasgow because I have felt the frustration of the people here about COP being here but they have no representation.”

He went on to draw a parallel between the struggles for decolonialisation in the Pacific and modern Scotland, saying : “You have this broader relationship with colonisation, which is what we have, which is what we have, what we carry. And so kind of justice isn’t just about shifting the fossil fuel industry. It’s about shifting the structures of oppression so that we can continue to build our lives in a way that makes sense to us and I know the people of Scotland understand that.”

Equally, ever since Brexit what is left of the UK’s international reputation has gone into free fall. We have a British Government which openly trashes the deals it has struck with other governments, Indeed, one of Johnson’s former senior advisors, Dominic Cummings, a man who looks like Frodo if he’d decided to keep the ring, recently boasted that “cheating foreigners” was one of the most important parts of the job for a British Prime Minister. Both France and Ireland are complaining about the UK’s bad faith and the failure of the British Government to adhere to the terms of the Brexit deal which it struck with the EU.

The world can see what the Conservatives are doing. They can see the corruption and the sleaze, they can see Johnson’s attempts to neuter any independent scrutiny of his government of chancers, charlatans, and sleazebags. They can see that Brexit Britain cannot be trusted to keep its word. They can see the death of democracy in a state which was once a by-word for probity in government.

During the next independence referendum campaign the UK is going to find it very difficult to rustle up world and European leaders to do it a favour and speak out against Scottish independence. That was a very useful tactic in 2014 which produced scores of gleeful headlines in the British press and which were trumpeted by the BBC. That bowl that Biden presented to the First Minister was so Scotland can use it to hold the popcorn as we enjoy the discomfort of the friendless British Government during the next independence referendum campaign.

 

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. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.