Blog break

As regular readers will be aware, I’ve recently been suffering a bad bout of post-stroke fatigue which was compounded by a nasty fall. The fatigue will lift more quickly if I rest up for a while, so I am going to take some time off.  I have old friends visiting from England from the 1st of April until the 8th of April, so I’m taking a break from blogging until my friends go back down south. By then I will be refreshed and hopefully with my energy levels restored, back in time for the local election campaign.

In the meantime I am quite sure that you can keep yourselves amused in the comments section until I return.

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 pathetic desperation of British nationalism

The claims and assertions of those desperate to avoid Scottish independence are getting frankly pathetic in their desperation now. It’s a sign of how lacking in confidence they are in the strength of their case that they are having to resort to people like Dr Jonathan Eyal, of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, who has argued an independence vote next year would be “exactly” what the Russian president would want because it would “weaken” the UK.

Opponents of Scottish independence are currently extremely eager to link Scottish independence to Putin’s aims, it’s a convenient distraction from the Russian money which has flooded into the City of London in recent decades and the oligarchs with links to Putin who have donated large sums to the Conservative party – purely out of the goodness of their hearts you understand. Claims such as that of Jonathan Eyal are only likely to grow in intensity and frequency given that support for independence is often in the lead in opinion polls, as in this week’s poll from IPSOS Mori.

Of course what has really weakened the UK is Brexit, severing the close political and economic ties that bound the UK to Europe. Brexit risked fracturing Europe, and a divided Europe is far more relevant in geopolitical calculations than what happens within the UK.

Eyal’s intervention is particularly risible as it is founded upon the Anglo-British nationalist fantasy that the UK is a world player in its own right and not because of the political and economic ties to other advanced democracies which Brexit has done so much to undermine. It’s almost as though they want us to believe that Putin is only deterred from attacking the UK because of Scotland, as though the Russian army is going to say : “Back lads, they’re using Scottish Bluebell!” Although if that was indeed the case then it would be an argument that Scotland is perfectly capable of standing by itself as an independent nation.

According to David Clark, a former senior advisor to the Foreign Office, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has greatly strengthened the case for an independent Scotland to become a member of both NATO and the EU, thus ensuring that even in the event of Scottish independence, the geopolitically important and strategic North Atlantic sea lanes leading ultimately to Russia’s Arctic ports remain very firmly within the Western orbit. In the uncertain world after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and his decision to assault a neighbouring democratic state, it is very much in the interests of both NATO and the EU to grant accession to an independent Scotland if that is the will of the people of Scotland after independence.

A newly independent nation choosing to join NATO and the EU would greatly strengthen both alliances, indeed it would go a long way to restoring the international confidence in the EU which was damaged by Brexit, and a vindication of the democracy, freedom of speech and liberal values which are anathema to the strongman of the Kremlin. It would also be an explicit rejection of a UK which has decided that its role is to provide money laundering services for kleptocrats, corrupt dictators, and authoritarian regimes around the world.

Of course you could just as easily argue the exact opposite to Eyal and claim that Scottish independence would be Putin’s worst nightmare. A Scotland which achieves independence peacefully and democratically through a referendum and subsequent negotiation would provide an example to the various nations within the Russian state, not all of whom have reconciled themselves to Russian rule.

It’s not often realised that even after the breakup of the Soviet Union and the independence of its fifteen constituent republics that Russia still contains over one hundred different ethnic groups, termed nationalities in Soviet parlance, each of whom have their own unique language and culture, and in many cases an autonomous republic of their own. Since Putin came to power he has greatly curtailed the powers of self-government of the autonomous republics and reduced their linguistic and cultural rights, in many of the autonomous republics there is considerable local resentment towards Russian rule.

Not all these nationalities are numerically small or are greatly outnumbered in their traditional lands by Russians, although many are. The traditionally Muslim Volga Tatars, who speak a language related to Turkish, outnumber Russians in Tatarstan, only two million Tatars live in Tatarstan, but there are over five million of them in various parts of Russia, Tatars also make up over a quarter of the population of neighbouring Bashkortostan, whose titular nationality,the Bashkirs, are very closely related to the Tatars in language and culture. Between them the Tatars and Bashkirs comprise a substantial majority over Russians in Bashkortostan.

Russians make up only a tiny percentage of the populations of Chechnya and neighbouring Dagestan, both traditionally Muslim areas which were conquered by Imperial Russia in the 19th century in a genocidal war which saw millions flee to Ottoman Turkey and where resentment about Russian rule remains exceptionally strong.

Both these areas saw uprisings and rebellions against Russia throughout the 19th century and after the collapse of Imperial Russia were only conquered by the Soviets after a three year long and particularly brutal war that lasted until 1921. Attempts by the Chechens to assert their independence after the fall of the Soviet Union were met after Putin rose to power with military intervention and the destruction of the Chechen capital, tactics he seems to be repeating in Ukraine. In both Chechnya and Dagestan, Putin’s rule is only maintained thanks to brutal and violent oppression and the two republics remain simmering cauldrons of discontent where open rebellion against the Kremlin could potentially break out again.

Further east on Russia’s border with Mongolia, native Tyvans, a traditionally Buddhist nation speaking a Turkic language, make up over 82% of the population of the Tyva Republic, which was nominally independent as Tannu-Tuva between the two world wars before being absorbed into the USSR by Stalin during WW2. The republic’s cultural and historic ties to Russia are not deep. Tyva was never a part of Imperial Russia, being a province of Imperial China until 1914 when it briefly became a Russian protectorate. It was occupied by the Red army during the Russian Civil War which broke out after the fall of the Tsar and declared independence as a Soviet satellite state in 1921. In the early 1990s the remote republic was rocked by a wave of violence and rioting directed against the Russians who had settled in the region in Soviet times.

All these nations could potentially look to an independent Scotland as an example of what could be achieved, proof that smaller nations within a multinational state can achieve independence and then be welcomed by the international community and become members in their own right of international organisations. That would only threaten even further Putin’s already precarious grasp over some of the non ethically Russian parts of the vast Russian federation.

Of course the real point here is that it is just as easy, indeed easier, to build an argument claiming that Scottish independence damages Putin’s interests as it is to assert that Scottish independence plays into the Russian dictator’s hands. However only one set of those arguments is going to get any publicity in Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media, and that is proof of the pathetic desperation of British nationalists in Scotland and the poverty of their case against independence.

I’m doing my best here but I’m afraid this bout of post-stroke fatigue has still not lifted, it can sometimes take weeks.  In the meantime I will keep trying to publish new posts as often as my energy levels permit.

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.

Reason Johnson is unfit for office number 9,999

It’s not like we need any more reasons to tell us why the abandoned serial lying mattress Boris Johnson is unfit for the office of Prime Minister, but just as one reason why Johnson should be deposed starts to drop off the news agenda, Johnson helpfully provides us with another. It was only a few short weeks ago that Johnson was mired in the scandal of his repeated rule breaking during lock down, after it came to light that he had hosted numerous boozy parties in Downing Street while the rest of us could expect to have the polis come chapping at our doors if we dared to go into our granny’s house for five minutes when we dropped off her shopping.

By the end of January, many Conservative MPs were openly demanding Johnson’s removal, and it was widely believed that Johnson’s political life expectancy was numbered in days, not weeks. However Johnson has escaped the consequences of that scandal thanks to public and political attention being diverted by Vladimir Putin’s imperialist attempt to bomb Ukrainian nationhood out of existence. Conservative MPs, members of the same party which fetishes WW2 and Winston Churchill, have collectively decided that this is not the time to depose Johnson, although their party did not have the same qualms during the darkest days of WW2 in 1940 when Britain was facing the threat of an imminent invasion from your actual Nazis but still decided to unseat the ineffectual Neville Chamberlain and replace him with Churchill. Admittedly, amongst the political pygmies on the Conservative benches there is no one of any stature who could potentially replace Johnson. All of them are compromised by his lies, his deceit, and his corruption.

Over the weekend TV reporters attending the Conservative party conference asked activists if they thought Johnson should resign, none of them did, they maintained that he should not resign even if he is fined by the police for breaking the law with his frequent breaches of lock down rules. That is how low the Conservative party has now sunk. The self-proclaimed party of law and order thinks that its own leader should be allowed to break the law and face no political consequences for it. Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Conservative jellyfish, has performed a humiliating U-turn on his demand for Johnson’s resignation. In doing so, Ross has merely taught Johnson that he can continue to hold the norms of political behaviour in a functioning democracy in contempt, and the Conservative party will let him get away with it.

At that same Conservative conference, Johnson again illustrated how he can’t even manage basic human decency, never mind adhere to the high standards of behaviour expected of the leader of a modern advanced democracy. In his rabble rousing speech to an audience of Conservative sycophants, Johnson made a direct comparison between the current agonies of Ukraine with the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, claiming that both are examples of standing up for freedom. Calling his comments crass is a crass insult to crassness. Obviously, hiding in a bunker while the Russian army bombards your house and devastates your cities with long range missiles in an effort to destroy the existence of your nation’s independence, democracy, and right to self-determination while forcing millions of your compatriots to flee abroad, is exactly the same thing as the European Union imposing a directive mandating a 48 hour maximum working week. It’s a comparison that no one with a shred of integrity could make.

Brexit has been an unmitigated disaster, Johnson is resorting to increasingly ludicrous hyperbole in order to cover the gap between the miserable and tawdry reality of Brexit and the false utopia of Great British sunlit uplands that he promised. It is truly shameful that this is the level to which British political discourse has descended in 2022.

That “oppression” of Europe is why P&O was unable to sack its French staff in the same way that 800 of its UK employees were dismissed with immediate effect via a pre-recorded video on a zoom call. The British workers are to be replaced with agency staff from Colombia, who will be paid at a lower rate. The French staff are protected by stricter employment regulations which impose tough conditions on employers who seek to shed staff. The “freedom” that Johnson lauded was the freedom of employers like P&O to sack loyal staff without a period of notice, or the “freedom” of Russian oligarchs to squirrel away their money in the City of London and to ensure that they can do so without fear of having to explain the source of their wealth.

At a time when it is vital that the world maintains a united front, Johnson’s remarks are an insult to our allies and partners in the EU, allies and partners that Johnson has now compared to Putin, they are an insult to the people of Ukraine who are witnessing the devastation of their country precisely because they dared to challenge the great Russian imperialist fantasies of Vladimir Putin by asserting both that Ukraine is its own nation and not merely a Little Russia province to be ruled by the Kremlin, and moreover they see the future of their Ukrainian nation as being intimately tied to Europe and the EU. And Johnson’s comments are also an insult to all of us who opposed Brexit and who seek to rejoin the European Union, whether that’s through an independent Scotland joining the EU in its own right or through the UK as a whole once again becoming a member of the EU.

Johnson’s crass tub thumping for the benefit of the Anglo-British Brexit supporting nationalists of the Conservative party risks undermining European unity at this critical time. It has certainly damaged even further the battered remnants of Britain’s international reputation.

Yet one of Scotland’s leading anti-independence newspapers has chosen to downplay this story, instead giving screaming prominence to an ill-advised tweet about Priti Patel from an SNP member who holds no elected office. Because that’s the really important story here. In its pathetic desperation to find SNPbad stories in order to fend off calls for another independence referendum, Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media is doing Scotland an immense disservice by refusing to scrutinise the quality of the UK that they are determined Scotland must remain a part of, and by allowing manifestly unfit individuals like the corrupt lying Johnson to escape scrutiny. But still, there’s bound to be a story about a Calmac ferry breaking down along tomorrow.

I’m doing my best here but I’m afraid this bout of post-stroke fatigue has still not lifted, it can sometimes take weeks.  In the meantime I will keep trying to publish new posts as often as my energy levels permit.

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.

Jim Sillars: The ego has crash landed

Jim Sillars, who was once the deputy leader of the SNP and who is a former, with the stress very much on former, leading light in the Scottish independence movement has issued an open letter to that movement that he turned his back on after it failed to accept his own estimation of himself as a powerful and sage seer, in which he asserts that the war in Ukraine has made any talk of another Scottish independence referendum, “foolish”. Jim Sillars’ latest angry and unhelpful intervention in a long line of angry and unhelpful interventions comes after the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens insisted that plans for a second independence referendum next year remain on track and that the Scottish Parliament will shortly approve measures to enable the referendum to be held on schedule.

Jim Sillars now spends most of his time and energy providing Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence press with stories which they hope will undermine the independence movement and weaken the political pressure on the British Government for another independence referendum. In January last year Sillars called on Nicola Sturgeon to “deprioritise” a second independence referendum and focus instead on the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.

In May 2019, Jim harrumphed that it was “impossible” to vote for the SNP in that year’s European elections because of its stance against Brexit. Last year Sillars, a long standing critic of the science behind anthropogenic climate change despite having no scientific credentials of his own, urged the First Minister to eject the Scottish Greens from the Scottish Government and not to give in to what he termed “scaremongering” about climate change, but instead to press ahead with the extraction and exploitation of fossil fuels from the North Sea.

It recently came to light that in last year’s crucial Holyrood elections, Jim Sillars funded the campaign of the Labour candidate, the rabidly anti-independence Jackie Baillie in a crucial Holyrood Constituency contest which was vital for the SNP’s hopes of securing a majority in its own right in the Scottish Parliament. As it turned out, Baillie held on to the seat against expectations, thanks to a concerted tactical voting campaign organised by the British nationalist right, and the financial aid supplied by a man who fancies himself as being influential in pro-independence circles.

Sorry Jim, but you gave up any right to lecture the SNP, the Greens or the wider independence movement on strategy and tactics when you decided that you wanted to deprive the SNP of an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament in order to ensure the election of a woman who is one of the most fervently anti-independence and knee-jerk apologists for British nationalism in the Labour party in Scotland. So if you want to send any open letters on the topic of independence to anyone Jim, send them to Jackie Baillie, because she’s about the only person left who thinks that you have anything worthwhile to say. The rest of us who support independence, whether we support the SNP or not are not about to take advice on how to attain Scottish independence from a man who demanded that a second independence referendum should be “deprioritsed” and who backed the re-election of an anti-independence MSP who rejects the mandate of Holyrood to hold another referendum.

Sillars thinks that the war in the Ukraine and the tide of refugees fleeing the country, a number which now exceeds three million, has radically changed the geopolitical situation, necessitating a complete reboot of the case for independence. The war in Ukraine and the changed geopolitical situation that has resulted from it has certainly shown the foolishness of Jim Sillars’ belief that an independent Scotland should continue in its own version of the British nationalist delusion that is Brexit and should not attempt to forge closer associations with our friends and allies in Europe. It’s the policy of the SNP and the Scottish Government that an independent Scotland should be a member of both the EU and NATO. That gives Scotland the exact same security guarantees as Denmark, Belgium, or the Netherlands.

It’s Jim Sillars’ vision of independence which is now in need of a complete reboot, the existing position of the Scottish Government that an independent Scotland should seek to join the EU as quickly as is practical has been vindicated by the agonies of Ukraine. It’s not the SNP or the Scottish Government which wants an independent Scotland to stand isolated and alone in an uncertain and frightening world, that would be Jim Sillars. It’s not the SNP or the Scottish Government which wants Scotland to increase its dependence on fossil fuels and to deny the reality of climate change, that would also be Jim Sillars. Jim Sillars is a lonely and angry voice, punting a version of independence more suited to the politics of a previous generation. He is hopelessly out of touch with the concerns and interests of that younger generation of Scots, a large majority of whom support independence and whose support is vital if we are to win that second independence referendum that Jim Sillars seemingly does not want to have any time soon.

Jim also demands that there should be no talk of another independence referendum until such time as there is a substantial and sustained majority for independence in the opinion polls. It might be churlish to point out to Jim that we would stand a better chance of building that sustained majority if he were to stop trying to undermine the Scottish Government and the only two pro-independence parties with representation in the Scottish Parliament at every turn. Just a wee suggestion there.

I have no idea why a man who was once a passionate advocate of Scottish independence, whom I saw speaking eloquently about the need for independence in a church hall in Carntyne during the 2014 referendum campaign should have morphed into an angry and bitter contrarian who parrots the anti-referendum attack lines of the Labour party and the Tories. What I do know however is that if we were to act on the advice of Jim Sillars, Scotland would never become independent. Sillars is no longer an advocate of independence, he’s just another source of anti-independence and SNPbad stories for a Scottish media with an unceasing appetite for anything that might help to fend off Scottish independence. Whenever you see a news story telling you Jim Sillars’ latest pronouncement on Scottish independence, it is best filed under “ignore”.

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury, but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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 Tory damage to Scotland’s brand

Michelle Thomson, the SNP MSP for Falkirk East has pointed out that as a part of the UK Scotland’s international reputation is being damaged by the policies and actions of the British Government. It’s a statement of the obvious really, one which has been true for many years, but Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the international response it has provoked has put it into sharp relief.

The vast majority of Scots, whether they support independence or not, are very aware of Scotland’s status as an ancient nation and a country in its own right, one which has its own distinctive culture, history, traditions, and political identity. However that is sadly not always the case for people in other countries, who do not usually bother to make a distinction between the UK with its four constituent nations and England. In Spain, where I lived for many years, people generally refer to the British Government as el gobierno inglés and to the British prime minister as el primer ministro inglés. The formal Spanish name for the United Kingdom is el Reino unido, but in everyday conversation people usually just say Inglaterra.

During the times of the old Soviet Union, the most usual way of referring to that multinational state which was dominated by its largest member was Russia, and its citizens were typically referred to as “Russians” even if they were really Ukrainians or Estonians or Uzbeks or from one of the other 140 or so ethnic and linguistic groups which lived in the Soviet Union.

For the benefit of any harrumphing opponents of Scottish independence who may be reading this in the hope of finding something to feel outraged and victimised by, I am categorically not saying that Scotland in 2022 is subjected to Westminster in the same way that the nationalities of the Soviet Union were subjected to the Kremlin, with its totalitarianism, oppression, forced deportations and deliberate policies of population replacement and Russification. The UK is a democracy, a flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless. We enjoy freedom of speech and expression and freedom of political organisation. Scotland is not a possession or a colony, and it is an article of faith amongst both supporters and opponents of Scottish independence that Scotland only remains a part of the United Kingdom until the people of Scotland decide otherwise in a free and fair vote.

However it remains true that when there is a multinational state which is dominated by one large member country, people in other countries will identify the state and everyone who lives in it with the single largest and most powerful nation within that state. It happened with Russia and the Soviet Union, it happened with Anatolian Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. It happened with Austria and the Hapsburg domains, and it happens now with England and the United Kingdom and Castilian Spanish and the multinational Spanish state.

So Scotland’s reputation and standing abroad is being damaged by the shameful decision of the British Government to refuse to suspend visa requirements for the Ukrainians who are fleeing their war ravaged nation in the hundreds of thousands. Across Europe countries are offering shelter and support to desperate and frightened people who have fled their homes at hours’ notice and yet they see the UK uniquely insist on prioritising its own selfish interests with that inimitable blend of incompetence and vicious contempt which has become the hallmark of the British Home Office. Most people in Europe already looked askance at the UK following Brexit, which they regarded as a supremely narcissistic and harmful act of xenophobic British nationalism. The callous and cruel response of the British Government to the Ukrainian refugee crisis will only have confirmed them in that view. Britain, the mean and heartless man of Europe.

Unfortunately Scotland’s reputation is also being dragged through the mud. Not just by the heartless and compassionless response of this British Government to the Ukrainian refugee crisis but also by the decision of successive British Governments to turn the City of London into a global money laundering centre, awash with the ill gotten gains of corrupt dictators, drug lords, oil barons, oligarchs, potentates and tax evaders the world over. You can’t have clean hands when you are funded by dirty money, money which also fuels the Conservative party. But of course these rich and powerful people give huge sums of money to the Conservative party out of the goodness of their hearts and a surfeit of public spiritedness and expect absolutely nothing in return. Well that’s what Michael Gove and Boris Johnson want us to believe, so it must be true, right?

Putin’s war in Ukraine has turned a spotlight on the extent to which powerful Russians with links to Putin’s regime have flooded the UK with their money and use the UK and British overseas tax havens as a base for their expensive assets, taking advantage of favourable laws which allow the true ownership of properties to be hidden.

British laws mean that Scotland too is dragged into this murky web of corruption. Scottish Limited Partnerships (SLPs) are controversial business arrangements which effectively allow the owners of businesses, often involved in crime, to register their companies while keeping themselves anonymous. Under t devolution settlement the Scottish government lacks the necessary powers to reform SLPs in order to ensure transparency, regulation of SLPs is entirely a reserved matter for Westminster, but despite repeated calls for reform, and Michelle Thomson has been attempting to highlight the issue of SLPs for years, sucessive Westminster governments have refused to take action despite the fact that some SLPs are used to launder money and lend illegal businesses a veneer of credibility, a credibility which is boosted by their link to Scotland.

Is this what Scotland wants, to be tainted by association with the oligarch and kleptocrat friendly policies of the British Government? Our national “brand” and reputation is being harmed by the perception of the UK as a “good place to do business” for the globally corrupt, fot tax evaders and oligarchs, a place that welcomes wealth, no questions asked, matter how ill-gotten, while closing its door to the desperate and the despairing. The UK doesn’t want to open its doors to Ukrainian refugees, but it will give a peerage to the wealthy son of a billionaire KGB agent. The UK is a state where there is a cosy relationship between the Conservative party and Putin’s oligarchs. Scotland is a better place than that, a kinder and more welcoming country, but we can only demonstrate that as an independent state.

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury, but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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 Scottish Conservative puddle of jellyfish

So now we know for certain, although it had been widely suspected beforehand. Douglas Ross is so spineless that he gives invertebrates a bad name. The man who is – for now at least – the leader of the Scottish Conservative British nationalist glee club has changed what passes for his mind and decided that Boris Johnson is not in fact unfit for office after all. Ross has withdrawn his letter demanding the resignation of Johnson which he sent to the chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee of back bench Conservative lickspittles just a few weeks ago. Spare a thought for puir wee Dougie, who has just lost his testicles along with what was left of his self-respect. I would say that he had also betrayed his principles, but it is highly questionable whether he ever had any in the first place. This is the same Douglas Ross who had previously insisted that he would not budge and would not backtrack on his call for Johnson to go and that he stood by the view asserted by the Scottish Conservatives that Johnson was “politically gangrenous” and needed to be removed from office.

Now it turns out that what Douglas and the Scottish Tories could smell was not after all the stench of a politically gangrenous serial liar who is unfit for office, it was really the scent of strong leadership. However it’s not that Ross believes that the serial cheat and liar Johnson has now been proven to be a model of moral probity and personal integrity. Johnson remains every bit as much of a corrupt opportunistic and entitled buffoon as he did when Ross penned his “more in disappointment than in anger letter.” It’s just that he now thinks that the very best person to lead the UK as the world is plunged into its biggest security crisis since WW2 is a man who has cultivated links to Russian oligarchs connected to the Kremlin and solicited donations to the Conservative party from obscenely wealthy Russians while he presides over a UK response to the tragedy of Ukrainian refugees with that special blend of stupidity, vindictiveness and rank incompetence which Priti Patel has elevated into her distinctive political brand.

Obviously the Scottish Tories don’t think it is possible to defend democracy in the Ukraine and in the UK at the same time. Not that they were ever too worried about defending democracy in Scotland. In the view of the Scottish Tories Scotland had its democracy in 2014 and that was quite enough to last it a lifetime.

Ross’s cowardice in fact makes a bad situation even worse, as he has just let Johnson know that he can trash all the rules, and indeed common decency, and he will be allowed to get away with it. That only means that Johnson will be emboldened and not deterred when it comes to similar rule breaking entitled behaviour in the future. He will be more confident that gutless careerist wonders like Douglas Ross will let him get away with it. Ross has just demonstrated that Jacob Rees Mogg’s jibe was accurate, Douglas Ross is indeed a lightweight. In fact suddenly the term lightweight seems positively complimentary. Just how much of a complete and utter waste of the space time continuum do you have to be in order to prove that Jacob Rees Mogg is right about something? Well now we know, you need to be Douglas Ross. Still, never mind, wee Dougie has just boosted his chances of getting a title and some fancy ermine robes one day, just like his pal Ruth, and that’s all that really matters here surely.

The humiliating U-turn came on the same day that Douglas had put his idiocy on display during FMQs when he showed that he struggled to grasp the difference between bringing a new oil field on stream and sticking the nozzle of a petrol pump into your car’s tank. Ross insisted that new oil and gas fields in the North Sea must be brought into production immediately in order to make up the shortfall from Russian oil and gas that is now subject to an international embargo. He either couldn’t or didn’t want to understand that it would take several years for any new fields to come into production, blinded as he was by the need to pursue a cheap political point. The North Sea oil and gas that Ross is now insisting should be brought on stream to supply the UK and generate exports to supply the rest of the world is the same North Sea oil and gas that the Scottish Conservatives and their allies are very quick to tell Scotland that is running out whenever the subject of Scottish independence raises is head. Perhaps he was hoping that we hadn’t noticed.

However it should not be forgotten that it is not just Douglas Ross who has performed a screeching U-turn. There were also another twenty or so Scottish Tory MSPs who had likewise called on Johnson to quit. It seems that all of them have collectively become infected with the spinelessness virus.

On Thursday the Scottish Tories performed a collective humiliating U-turn, so a least Douglas Ross wasn’t alone in his spinelessness, meaning that the entire Scottish Conservative contingent at Holyrood was left on the floor in a formless gelatinous mess, although to be fair that’s how Stephen Kerr usually looks. It turns out that Johnson will after all be addressing the Scottish Conservative party conference, and they will roll out the red carpet and toady before him like they’d always been his biggest fans, while Johnson will smirk and gloat as he does his poundshop Churchill party shtick, knowing that he could break any law, any rule, in pursuit of his own entitled self interests and the puddle of jellyfish in front of him in the auditorium will let him get away with it.

But while we are on the topic of that Churchill and that WW2 that the Tories just love to keep harping on about, it’s not like the UK was daft enough to change its Prime Minister in 1940, when we actually were at war… Oh wait.

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury, but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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.

Referendum 2023

Despite the continuing agonies of Ukraine and the horrifying destruction of that country which has provoked the greatest refugee crisis that Europe has witnessed since the end of the Second World War, a crisis which has already seen more than two million Ukrainians flee the devastation which Putin and the Russian army are inflicting on their country. It is nice to be able to report that the Scottish government’s plan to hold a second independence referendum towards the end of next year remains on track.

The Scottish Government fully intends to fulfill its manifesto commitment to the people of Scotland even though Ukraine is being torn apart by a war. Speaking on Wednesday the First Minister said that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had not changed her view that a second independence referendum should go ahead in 2023,and added : “We, right now, should be reminded, above all else, how lucky we are to live in a free democracy where we can put forward our case for political constitutional change, argue that case passionately, whatever our views on that might be, and trust people to decide.”

Of course some people are never going to be satisfied because they have convinced themselves that the SNP “doesn’t really” want a referendum, and nothing that Nicola Sturgeon says or does is going to shift them from that view, however for the rest of us the First Minister’s statement is a welcome confirmation that an independence referendum will indeed go ahead in the latter half of 2023.

In the meantime there is serious work to be done to convince that part of the Scottish population which remains unsure about the positive benefits of independence. The case for independence will have to be re-framed somewhat in these newly uncertain times, now that we can no longer take for granted the peace that most of Europe has enjoyed for decades.

In my view that means stressing that independence means that Scotland will be able to forge stronger and deeper links with our European allies and neighbours as an independent nation than would be possible as a subordinate part of an aggressively Anglo-British nationalist Brexit Britain. It also means pointing out that an independent Scotland would be able to forge a more compassionate and humane response to an international crisis such as the tragedy of Ukrainian refugees than a callous and heartless British government which refuses to pull its weight in order to tackle the problem and help desperate people in need because it is far more concerned about the potential backlash from the right wing gutter press.

As the First Minister pointed out, independence would allow Scotland to play a more active and bigger role in the humanitarian response to a situation like the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Right now Scotland is internationally shamed because we are seen abroad as a part of the British state’s insistence on not lifting visa requirements for Ukrainians fleeing the conflict and only admitting a tiny number of refugees while countries far poorer than the UK and with far fewer resources open their doors, their homes and their wallets. Meanwhile the only people whom the UK is prepared to welcome are wealthy Russians with links to Putin’s regime who – purely out of the goodness of their hearts you understand – donate large sums of money to Conservative party coffers.

So there will be a referendum on the timetable that was promised last year, unless that is, World War Three does actually break out, in which case most of us will have been evaporated along with the Central Belt in the thermonuclear blasts and will no longer be in any position to care about the constitutional status of Scotland, while the few heavily irradiated survivors who eke out a miserable existence amongst the rubble in the permanent darkness of the nuclear winter will be far more concerned about fending off an attack from the cannibal mutants with rolled up copies of the Daily Express, which like cockroaches, is likely to survive unscathed – well, it is a post-apocalyptic nightmare after all – what did you expect? But you can be certain that should that civilisation ending apocalypse actually transpire, there will still be some erstwhile keyboard warrior fuming in his bunker that it’s still all just an excuse for Nicola Sturgeon to avoid a referendum, even as the Daily Express crows that the reduction of 80% of the population of Scotland to radioactive piles of dust is a “nuclear BLOW for STURGEON’s SEPARATIST BID”.

The other group which is decidedly unimpressed by the First Minister’s statement is of course comprised of those British nationalists who are equally convinced that everything that Nicola Sturgeon says or does is all part of her evil master plan to bring about Scottish independence and put all English people into detention camps.

Alex Cole-Hamilton fulminated that the First Minister had “lost all sense of perspective”, which is pretty rich coming from a self-important nonentity whose false perspective tells him that he’s actually politically relevant. I mean, really. How very dare that Nicola Sturgeon insist that Scotland is still a functioning democracy in which elected governments have a political and moral obligation to deliver on the commitments that just over a year ago they were elected to fulfill. But then as far as the uncompromising opponents of independence are concerned, Scotland had its democracy in 2014, and having given opponents of independence the answer they were looking for, the democracy shop should be closed for good, just in case voters come to a different conclusion once they reflect on the multitude of broken promises and trashed vows which Scotland has experienced since 2014.

The world is an uncertain and often frightening place. The question in front of the people of Scotland now is do we want to face that uncertain and frightening world with a government which is answerable to the people of Scotland alone and which the people of Scotland can turf out of office if it does not perform to our liking, or do we want a government which has repeatedly shown that it has no real interest in responding to the needs and concerns of Scotland, and which we can only get rid of if our neighbours happen to oblige and vote it out of office for reasons of their own. It’s a no-brainer. In 2014 I was a Yes. Now I am a Yes! Yes! Yes!

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury, but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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.

Trident has to go

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine getting more destructive with every passing day, and Vladimir Putin’s sabre rattling threat that he has put the forces responsible for the Russian nuclear arsenal on high alert, Conservative MP Laura Trott has said she thanks God that nuclear weapons are kept in Scotland, claiming that the Trident missiles and nuclear warheads on the Clyde make her feel “a lot safer.”

Trott’s comments were made during a discussion on BBC Politics Live about weapons of mass destruction in an independent Scotland. SNP defence spokesperson Stewart McDonald said during the programme that the current crisis merely reinforced the SNP’s existing position that there can be no place for weapons of mass destruction in an independent Scotland and noted that the only way to get the nuclear weapons removed from where the currently based on the Clyde and transferred out of Scotland is with independence. He added that with the reality of the makeup of the British Parliament being as it is with both the Conservatives and Labour supporting the maintenance of Trident, it is vanishingly unlikely that Westminster would ever vote to remove the UK’s nuclear weapons from the Clyde.

McDonald then rhetorically asked : “But who can honestly put their hands up and say they feel safer now with these types of threats coming from the Kremlin with nuclear weapons?”

Trott then interrupted to say : “Me. I do. I feel a lot safer because of our nuclear weapons, I really do. I thank God for them. ” At which point Jesus wept.

Trott is the MP for Sevenoaks in Kent which is almost 500 miles away from the Gareloch, about as far away as it is possible to get from the Clyde bases while remaining within the UK. Leaving aside the highly questionable theology of Trott’s assertion – what monster of a god wants to be thanked for weapons of mass destruction that have the potential to wipe out most life on Earth? Of course Trident missiles make Trott feel safer, who isn’t going to feel safer when you have ensured that people 500 miles away from where you live are the ones who have been made the prime target? If Trott really felt so safe with weapons of mass destruction then let’s move Trident to Kent and see how safe she feels then.

The discussion was prompted because Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader this week confirmed the party’s commitment to getting rid of nuclear weapons from Scotland after independence, saying that the weapons are a threat to the world and adding : “The idea that having nuclear weapons provides a deterrence that removes that threat is far-fetched, to say the least.”

The SNP leader also strongly rejected the assertion of UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace that Scottish independence would mean that an independent Scotland would become more vulnerable to terrorism threats and to potential Russian aggression if it became independent.

He pointed out that Wallace was trying to create the misleading image that an independent Scotland would be left friendless, lonely and isolated in the world. It’s the Conservative delusion of Brexit that sees the UK as standing alone in the world, buoyed up only by the exceptionalism of the Anglo-British fantasy that the UK is still a global superpower. Scottish independence is about forging stronger and more robust connections between Scotland and the rest of the world, especially with the European Union and the rest of Europe.

It is also current SNP policy that an independent Scotland would seek membership of NATO, and while there are many of us who support Scottish independence, myself included, who would prefer that an independent Scotland was formally neutral like Ireland or Sweden, it is worth pointing out that the overwhelming majority of NATO members do not have nuclear weapons.

In any event, the decision about whether an independent Scotland should be a NATO member or not is one for the people and government of an independent Scotland to take once the fact of Scottish independence is established, for now all that matters is that it would be an option for an independent Scotland should it be decided that it was in Scotland’s best interests.

It is also worthwhile to point out yet again, as this blog has done on a number of occasions in the past, that the claim made by opponents of independence that Scotland would not be allowed to join NATO if an independent Scotland chooses to force a Westminster government to remove its nuclear submarine base from Scottish territory is a false one.

Again I would like to reiterate that my own personal preference is for an independent Scotland to be both free of nuclear weapons and neutral like independent Ireland, however it is vitally important when we all have this discussion that we are in possession of all the relevant facts. One of those relevant facts, a fact that Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media does not seem keen to publicise is that another country has done precisely what certain anti-independence campaigners categorically assert would be impossible – for a country to get rid of the nuclear weapons and submarines of a NATO power from its territory and then go on to join NATO.

Spain did this after the death of the dictator Franco. The newly democratic Spanish government negotiated the removal of the American submarines and nuclear missiles from the American military base at Rota near Cádiz, and then went on to join NATO. The entire process from the death of Franco to the removal of the nukes took only a couple of years. A couple of years after this the government of Felipe González reneged on an electoral promise to maintain Spanish neutrality and took Spain into NATO. The important point here is that getting rid of another country’s nukes, even American nukes never mind the strategically far less important British nukes, is no bar to membership of NATO.

One thing is quite certain. Scotland is not made safer by hosting the UK’s nuclear viagra on the Clyde. It just makes us a target, sacrificial lambs to delusional Anglo-British nationalist exceptionalism. Scotland and the world would be better off without Trident. Now more than ever, Trident needs to go.

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury, but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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.

Labour: the demotivational poster of Scottish politics

Not that anyone really noticed, what with the destruction of Ukraine and the imminent threat of WW3 and everything, but the Jockoland Safari Park branch of the not-quite so Tory “we’re not nationalist because we’re British” Brexit supporting Party held its spring conference in Glasgow over the weekend.

Branch office manager Anas Sarwar delivered his keynote speech, which despite being over seven thousand words long managed to be completely void of anything of substance, or indeed of anything meaningful or even coherent. It sounded as though someone had raided a skip full of those trite motivational posters put up by middle managers in crappy companies in lieu of any actual employee benefits and cut out the slogans before pasting them together in random order.

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow a mystery and today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present” : “Live. Laugh. Love” : “You have to look through the rain to see the rainbow” : “keep calm and carry on”, and so on and so on for a quarter of an hour of mind numbing inanity. The only ones that were missing were the most accurate: “You don’t have to be mad to vote Labour, but it helps.” and of course, “live every day like it was your last,” which in the case of the Labour party in Scotland isn’t so much a hypothetical inspirational quote but more a prediction of the party’s inevitable doom, a doom which Anas Sarwar’s tenure as branch manager looks like it’s doing absolutely nothing to forestall. Then there is of course “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.” Which is not a whole lot of use for a party that has been experiencing a drought of votes since 2014.

Labour in Scotland knows it has a problem, but the leadership has been captured by a hardline unionist faction which would rather see Labour moulder away in the electoral doldrums than adopt a stance that was not viscerally opposed to Scottish independence. There are still those in influential positions in the party who have fully bought into the delusion that a full throated embrace of British nationalism is a magic talisman that wards off the evils of nationalism.

The speech spoke a lot about how the Labour party in Scotland needs to reconnect with the voters it has lost to the SNP and the Greens and how it needs to demonstrate that it’s a party which offers a welcome home for everyone in Scotland, although it was remarkably light on any concrete suggestions about how that could be achieved. However to be fair, in recent weeks the Labour party in Scotland has started on this by demonstrating that it is a party which offers a welcome home to former leaders of the Orange Order. Independence supporters however, not so much.

In a party in a country where opinion polls consistently show that half the population supports independence and where the Labour party only enjoyed its former electoral dominance because of its ability to hoover up votes amongst working class Scots in the Central Belt with an Irish Catholic heritage, showing that the Labour Party is a comfortable home for grand masters of the Orange Order is possibly the worst tactical move that Labour has ever made since it got into bed with the Tories in the Better Together campaign and got itself into the electoral zone of death in which it has languished ever since. It’s a bit like deciding that you can best recover from a nasty stroke that left you partially paralysed in the left leg by hacking the affected leg off with a rusty saw and beating the bloody stump with the amputated limb.

Anas Sarwar has refused to condemn the decision of the constituency Labour party in North Lanarkshire to channel a polyester clad flute band and has insisted that it is nothing to do with him but was a decision for the local party, which doesn’t say much for his supposed leadership. So Anas isn’t so much the leader of the Labour party in Scotland as he is the guy who chooses the motivational posters, perhaps in the hope that if we see the image of a fist bumping puppy over a logo saying “Who’s awesome?” we will overlook the fact that the puppy has been known to march cheerfully along to the tune of sectarian songs.

Meanwhile Anas’s boss Keir Starmer has been looking for some motivational posters of his own, in this case to disguise the fact that he has been busily backtracking on his previous demands that Boris Johnson should resign over partygate. Now Keir wants everyone to unite because of the crisis created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine because the best guy for us all to rally behind when Vladimir Putin threatens world peace is a Tory leader with a lengthy record of lies and deceit whose party is hopelessly compromised by the hundreds of thousands of pounds in donations it has accepted from wealthy Russians with links to Putin’s regime.

Starmer added that “trust in politics is now at an all-time low”. In that much at least he is absolutely correct, although he obviously didn’t want to acknowledge that in no small measure that’s because the Labour party consistently fails to follow through on its criticisms of the Conservatives and colludes in allowing rule breaking corrupt Tories to escape any consequences for their misdeeds, and under Starmer and Sarwar Labour displays as much contempt for the democratic choices of the people of Scotland as the Johnson regime does. Starmer is of course entirely wrong, it is now more important than ever to get the corrupt lying Johnson and enabling idiots like Liz Truss out of office, Truss appears quite capable of starting WW3 all by herself with her incendiary and undiplomatic language.

However the opportunity is now lost. Tory MPs have been briefing the right wing press that this is not the time for a leadership contest. Johnson will remain in Downing Street to smirk another day, and we can forget about the Labour party protecting us from the Tories, they are far too busy recruiting former grand masters of the Orange Order. Everything about the Labour party in Scotland is a massive demotivational poster.

I’m afraid updates to the blog will be a bit intermittent this week as I am battling a bout of post-stroke fatigue which isn’t being helped by the fact that I fell a couple of days ago and injured my right arm, which is the one that works. It wasn’t a bad fall or a bad injury but it was a reminder that I need to be more careful. I tripped on the steps because I wasn’t paying attention. I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot is, and have to look at it to know where it is. I wasn’t looking. I thought it was securely on the step but it turns out that it wasn’t, so I fell and hurt my arm when I put my right hand out to break my fall.

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.

Putin’s death blow to the Russian language in Ukraine

We are all transfixed in shock and horror by the dreadful news coming out of Ukraine as Vladimir Putin pursues his war of aggression against a democratic nation which has refused to bow to his will. The war is entering its eight day and shows no sign of coming to an end any time soon. The UN says that one million refugees have now fled Ukraine for the safety of neighbouring countries, a number that seems likely to rise as the Russian assault on Ukrainian cities intensifies.

The tragedy of Ukraine is rightly dominating the news schedules, pushing everything else to one side. For thirty years we have enjoyed a period of unprecedented peace in Europe, and the dread of imminent nuclear war that those of us who are a bit long in the tooth remember from the 1980s had receded into an unpleasant memory. We are now back in those frightening times, appalled by the agonies of Ukraine, but desperately hoping that it will not escalate into a wider conflict that could destroy us all. We sit powerless to alter the course of events, heartbroken by the suffering of a nation in torment.

As someone who is keenly interested in the politics of language and sociolinguistics, it seems to me that Putin’s actions, ostensibly taken in defence of the Russian speakers of Ukraine, will in fact have the opposite effect and lead to the marginalisation of the Russian language in Ukraine and a catastrophic decline in the number of Russian speakers from which the Russian language in Ukraine may never recover.

It appears that Putin had believed his own propaganda and thought that the Russian speakers of Ukraine would rise up against the government in Kyiv, allowing a relatively easy Russian advance such as happened in Crimea in 2014. That hasn’t happened in part because most of the Russian speakers of Ukraine are Ukrainians who happen to speak Russian, a language closely related to and partially mutually intelligible with Ukrainian. The language a person habitually speaks is not always the same as the nationality which they identify with, a situation which we in Scotland are very familiar with. Most of us in Scotland habitually speak English, but that doesn’t prevent us from having a strong identification with Scotland.

A similar situation obtains in most of Ukraine,unlike Crimea where the overwhelming majority of Russian speakers identify as Russian by nationality, or Donetsk and Luhansk where a majority of local Russian speakers also identify as Russian by nationality. In most of Ukraine’s majority Russian speaking cities like Kharkiv or Kyiv, a substantial majority identifies as Ukrainian, not as Russian, and they have no desire to come under the rule of the Kremlin. Putin’s miscalculation was to believe that these Russian speakers would rise up against Kyiv, instead they have risen up against him.

Putin’s actions are likely to destroy the widespread use of Russian in Ukraine, and paradoxically he will achieve what he has accused the Ukrainian government of plotting. As noted above, Ukrainian and Russian are closely related languages and it is easy for Ukrainian speakers to switch between the two, indeed many in Ukraine speak an informal mixture of Ukrainian and Russian called Surzhyk. This war has only been going on for a week but I have already seen a number of anecdotal reports of Ukrainians vowing that after the experience of this war they will no longer speak Russian. During a recent BBC report from a Russian medium school in Dnipro which was being used as a distribution centre for supplies to local people taking shelter in bunkers, one of the teachers remarked that many parents had vowed not to speak Russian any more. In another report from the front lines near Kharkiv a Ukrainian soldier yelling abuse in Russian at Russian soldiers swore that this was the last time he would ever speak Russian.

You don’t need genocidal policies such as those falsely claimed by the Kremlin to be happening in Ukraine in order to destroy a language. It can happen surprisingly rapidly when a generation of speakers become alienated from it for political or social reasons. Putin is generating this kind of alienation and rejection of the Russian language amongst the large number of Russian speakers in Ukraine who identify as Ukrainian by nationality.

The Russian language in Ukraine is now at serious risk of going the same way as Breton in France. On the eve of WW2 Breton had over a million native speakers, and in fact had more first language speakers than all the other Celtic languages put together. However during the Nazi occupation of France the Germans sought to divide French resistance by promoting Breton nationalism and the Breton language. The result was that after liberation the use of Breton came to be seen as unpatriotic at best, and at worst as a sign of sympathies with the Nazi occupiers.

This caused an entire generation of Breton speaking parents to refuse to pass on the language to their children and the Breton language underwent a demographic collapse which saw the number of speakers fall precipitously from over one million to around 200,000. It is only in recent years that there have been signs that the collapse in numbers of speakers may be being halted.

Putin’s aggression could easily create a similar situation in Ukraine, leading to the current generation of bilingual Ukrainian-Russian speakers who form a large majority of the Ukrainian population simply refusing to pass Russian on to their children, and refusing to speak Russian in their daily lives, just as the bilingual Breton-French post WW2 generation in Brittany ceased en masse to pass Breton on to their children. This is a serious risk as it was the existence of a large Russian speaking population in Ukraine which was Putin’s causus belli, and the Ukrainians are now more likely to see speaking Russian as an unpatriotic act which puts the existence of Ukraine in peril.

Putin embarked upon this war with the self-declared aim of protecting and defending Russian speakers in Ukraine, but the tragic irony is that his actions are likely to lead to a catastrophic collapse in the number of Ukrainians speaking Russian, and the end of Ukraine as a country with a large Russian speaking population. Putin has not defended the use of the Russian language in Ukraine, he may have dealt it a death blow from which it never recovers.

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.