Melting Frost

David ‘Lord’ Frost is at it again. A couple of days ago he appeared on GBeebies News for an interview with Dan Wootton, an economic migrant who’s an oozing toxic combination of nastiness and self-regard doing a poor impression of Tucker Carlson on the Price Drop Channel of right wing politics. A few days previously Frost had published an article in the Telegraph in which he demanded that powers be stripped from the Scottish Parliament should the Conservatives win the next UK General Election. Of course the opinions of Scottish voters on the subject neither matters to him nor does he ask for them.

Frost wants Holyrood to be firmly put in its place as a forelock tugging glorified county council which must be forced to have no doubt about its lowly and subordinate status and prevented from having any ideas about being the parliament of an actual nation. There’s only one nation in the post-Brexit Britain of right wing Anglo-British nationalists like Frost, and that’s a British nation which is functionally indistinguishable from Greater England. The Scottish Tories immediately disavowed themselves of Frost’s suggestion, like a smiling guy reeking of weed telling kids to just say no to drugs before he launches into a disquisition about parallel universes. Apparently in one of those parallel universes the Scottish Tories are stalwart defenders of the devolution settlement, because it sure as hell isn’t this one, which is filled with victimhood claiming Tories who infest the comments sections of Scottish newspapers demanding the abolition of Holyrood, and a Conservative government and party which constantly seeks new ways in which to by pass and undermine a Scottish Parliament whose creation it vigorously and loudly opposed.

Frost appeared on Wootton’s show safe in the knowledge that he’d be getting soft ball questions from an interviewer who fully subscribed to the deluded British nationalist fantasy that the desire for Scottish independence is entirely a product of a scheming SNP using Holyrood to manufacture imaginary grievances and has nothing at all to do with the systemic and structural failures of the failing democracy of the British state which proclaims itself to be a voluntary union of nations but which acts like a highly centralised unitary state. And Frost knew that he would not be asked whether the Conservatives needed to secure a democratic mandate from the people of Scotland for his plan to roll back devolution. For a channel that is constantly railing against so called cancel culture it is striking how eager GB News and its presenters are to collude in the cancellation of democracy in an entire country. Nowhere was there any acknowledgement that the SNP, unlike Frost and the Conservatives, actually win elections in Scotland or that these supposedly ‘imaginary grievances’ can only gain traction if people see that there is substance to them. Frost’s ‘solution’ to political dissatisfaction in Scotland created by the failure of the British state to give meaningful expression to the status of Scotland as a nation is to unilaterally strip Scotland of such expression as it does have.

Frost insisted, and there’s every reason to believe him, that other senior Tories agree the SNP and Holyrood must be ‘constrained’ and claimed that since publishing the piece in the Telegraph he had received many private messages from Conservatives urging him to keep talking about undoing devolution.

But the mere fact that Frost has a platform is in itself emblematic of how democracy in the UK is failing and why so many in Scotland will continue to press for independence. He is an unelected politician appointed for life by a Prime Minister who was massively unpopular in Scotland representing a party which has not won an election in Scotland since before Frost was born who was given his position for his role in imposing a Brexit on Scotland which Scottish voters have consistently rejected at the ballot box both during the EU referendum and at every election since, yet here Frost is, with the arrogance and unmitigated gall to threaten Scottish voters with imposing upon them, without choice or consultation, the system of government he thinks is best for him and his party.

In just about all the reports about Frost’s sickeningly undemocratic plan to reverse devolution without even making a pretence of seeking a mandate from the people of Scotland there has been no mention of the fact that he proposes to do so on the say so of Conservative MPs representing English seats and thus unilaterally overturn a devolution settlement which has been confirmed by the people of Scotland in not one but two referendums, this coming from Tory hypocrites who constantly cite the need to ‘respect the outcome’ of referendums.

These same reports also grant Frost a stature and standing that he does not merit by referring to him as ‘Lord’ Frost. Frost got given his seat in the Lords by his crony Boris Johnson for negotiating a hard Brexit in bad faith with the EU, in the process trashing the reputation of the British government as a trustworthy and reliable negotiating partner and causing damage that will take decades to recover from. Surely it is long past time that Scotland has a conversation about the use of honorific titles bestowed by British nationalist politicians upon their cronies.

Titles are very much like money, they only have value as currency as long as people are willing to accept and use them. ‘Lord’ Frost, ‘Lady’ Mone and ‘Lord’ Foulkes are only lords and ladies if the rest of us are willing to indulge them in the pretendy noble titles that their pals have given to them for time serving, back scratching, or services rendered. They cease to have any value or meaning the moment that the rest of us recognise these ridiculous affectations for what they really are and stop using them.

By continuing to use these ludicrous titles we are colluding in the anti-democratic cronyism and corrupt patronage which has hollowed out accountability in British politics and destroyed public faith in the tattered remnants of democracy in the UK. Frost suffered no ill consequences for his disaster of a Brexit deal which Johnson’s successor is now timidly attempting to unpick. Instead he got a seat in the unelected upper chamber of Westminster and we are all supposed to pretend that he’s a lord.

________________________________________________________________

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.

Only the SNP can permanently protect Scotland from the Tories

Like it or not, the causes of Scottish self-government and independence are both in intimately linked to the fortunes of the SNP. We only have a devolved Scottish Parliament because the Labour party was concerned to fend off the electoral rise of the SNP. Equally any loss of support for the SNP in an election will be spun by the British nationalist parties and their friends in the media as ‘proof’ that Scotland doesn’t want independence. They will do so no matter what is happening to support for independence in opinion polling or whether there is an increase in support for any other party that backs Scottish independence.

The Conservatives have always been hostile to the idea of Scottish self-government and only refrain from a full frontal assault on the devolution settlement because they fear that if they do so they will boost support for the SNP and for independence. Instead they resort to sleekit attacks on devolution, passing legislation to allow Westminster to intervene on devolved matters and pretending that by doing so they are, in the words of Michael Gove, ‘augmenting devolution.’ Naturally the Scottish media colludes in this undemocratic charade because for the most part its priority is to stave off independence and so it refuses to defend Scottish interests within this UK it is so determined to keep Scotland a part of because it fears boosting support for independence if it criticises the actions of Westminster.

What the Conservatives have refrained from until now is proposing to roll back the powers of the Scottish Parliament and removing powers that Holyrood has and giving them back to Westminster. Although many of them might wish to abolish Holyrood entirely, the Scottish Tories for the most part know better than to admit this in public, as it’s electoral Kryptonite for them. However most Tory voters in Scotland would like to see the abolition of the Scottish Parliament, and there can be little doubt that the Tories would jump at the chance to do so if they thought that they could limit the electoral damage to themselves and avoid creating a boost in support for the SNP and independence.

According to an opinion poll carried out by You Gov in May 2021, only 20% of voters in Scotland would support the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and the reimposition of direct rule from Westminster, but that 20% is not evenly spread across the Scottish population. 34% of those over 65 would like to abolish the Scottish Parliament as would 37% of those who voted Leave in 2016. But by far and away the largest group which wants to see the abolition of the Scottish Parliament are those who voted Tory in Scotland in 2019, a shocking 59% of whom would vote to abolish the Scottish Parliament if there was a referendum on the subject. That figure ought to be deeply concerning to the 80% of Scots who do not want Holyrood to be abolished as the Conservatives have no compunction about using their Westminster majority to impose their will on Scotland even though they are unable to obtain a democratic mandate from the people of Scotland at the ballot box.

It’s no secret that many Tories deny the status of Scotland as a nation. Alister Jack, the Conservative Viceroy of the North Britain territory, said last year that he dislikes the phrase ‘four nations’ to refer to the constituent parts of the United Kingdom as in his eyes the United Kingdom is the political expression of a single ‘British nation’ which has Scotland as one of its regions.

So it should come as no surprise that arch-Brexiteer David Frost, who was Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, has leapt on the current travails of the SNP as providing an opportunity to claw back powers from Holyrood and to reduce it to what he sees as its ‘proper’ status, that of a glorified county council. In an article for the Telegraph, Frost proposes that should the Conservatives win the next UK General Election they should undo important parts of the devolution settlement. In particular he mentions stripping the Scottish Parliament of its limited tax raising powers and ensuring that the Scottish Government can have no international representation.

Naturally Frost made no mention of winning support for these proposals from the people of Scotland, but then why would he, the entire point for the Conservatives of undermining, undoing, or abolishing devolution is so that they no longer have to pretend that they care about the opinions of voters in a country which has refused to give the Conservatives a majority since 1955. The Tories will use every lever at their disposal to undermine devolution and to neutralise a source of power and authority that they cannot control. They will not hesitate to weaponise the current difficulties of the SNP in order to further their centralising Anglo-British nationalist agenda. This will make it more difficult for the Scottish Government to protect vulnerable Scottish households from the damaging effects of Conservative policies and will undermine the legitimacy of a mandate for independence obtained within Scotland.

The Scottish Tories have rushed to disassociate themselves from Frost’s article, something which we can safely file under ‘they would say that wouldn’t they.’ They have denied that they have any plans to claw back powers from Holyrood, but then this is also the party which swore blind that it regarded Scotland as a much loved partner in a family of nations, promised to institute a ‘respect agenda’ and never to make any changes to the devolution settlement without the express consent of the Scottish Parliament only to go on to unilaterally introduce a number of measures allowing Westminster to by-pass or sideline Holyrood. The only reason that the Scottish Tories have disavowed Frost’s proposals is because he has said out loud something which many of them think in private but which they do not want to get out for fear of the electoral damage it might cause them and the potential it has to boost support for independence.

However if the Conservatives win the next UK General Election and the SNP suffers losses on the scale of those it endured in 2017, then the Tories most assuredly will embark on an all out attack on the powers of the Scottish Parliament no matter what they say now. If Labour wins that election and the SNP lose a significant number of seats then Starmer’s already weak proposals for devolution will be watered down even further rendering Holyrood incapable of resisting the Conservatives the next time that they take power at Westminster, as they most assuredly will eventually. But the very best Labour can offer is a respite from Conservative rule, sooner or later England will vote Tory again and will proceed to undo everything Labour did. This is why it is vital for anyone who believes in meaningful Scottish self government to continue to support the SNP.

________________________________________________________________

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 reality deniers who cling to the GERS figures

According to Labour MSP Michael Marra, a list MSP for North East Scotland since 2021, whose sole political achievement of note is that he replaced his sister Jenny Marra on Labour’s regional list for the North East after she decided not to stand for re-election to Holyrood, has used his sister’s hand me down seat in the Scottish Parliament to denounce those of us who have the temerity to criticise the GERS figures as ‘sad little men in their bedrooms,’ a very bold move indeed from a man who has only been saved from being a sad little man in his bedroom because his big sister gave him haunners.

I suppose I must be one of those ‘sad little men in their bedrooms’ to whom Marra was referring, although in my defence I feel the need to point out that I am not remotely sad, do not write in a bedroom, am taller than average and manage to maintain a positive outlook even when confronted with personal tragedies and challenges which would crush a lesser man like Michael Marra. Neither have I ever benefitted from any input from my big sister in order to establish my career.

But mostly I am not sad because I know that I am on the right side of history, Scotland is most assuredly on a trajectory which will take it to independence, notwithstanding the current and temporary travails of the SNP, which is merely a vehicle for the independence cause, not its destination. The demographics of independence support in Scotland show that Labour, and the other parties still trying to defend the indefensible Westminster system and pretending in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that British nationalism isn’t really nationalist at all, are fighting a losing battle.

Marra parroted the language of the frothier end of British nationalism on social media by dismissing those of us who critique the GERS figures as ‘GERS deniers’ as though there was some sort of moral and intellectual equivalence between climate change denial or vaccine denial and critically examining a set of highly political figures which were designed and introduced by a Conservative led Scotland Office in the 1990s in order to create political ammunition to be used against those arguing for greater Scottish self-government, a purpose they continue to serve thirty years later. Marra’s use of the phrase merely illustrates his own intellectual bankruptcy.

Anti-independence politicians like Marra, whom one could usefully describe as a ‘British nationalism denier,’ are desperate to maintain the crumbling credibility of the GERS figures, it’s all that they’ve got left. During the campaign leading up to the 2014 independence referendum the anti-independence parties had a number of lines of attack. Firstly, and with the assistance of the overwhelmingly anti-independence media, the Better Together parties were able to frame the debate as being between ‘nationalism’ on the one hand, with all the negative baggage that word entails and ‘non-nationalism’ on the other. That is a tactic which is now so threadbare that it’s all bare and no thread.

In the post Brexit political landscape of a UK whose governments have repeatedly attacked and undermined the devolution settlement and in which both main parties, Marra’s Labour as much as the Tories have denied Scottish democracy and refused to recognise a democratic route for the people of Scotland to exercise their right to self-determination. The Tories have systematically by passed the Scottish Parliament and have even taken to vetoing its legislation. Now some Conservatives are even calling for devolution to be reversed, a demand made by Boris Johnson’s Brexit negotiator David Frost in a column in the Telegraph this week. The claim made in 2014 that Scotland was an equal and respected partner in a family of nations has been revealed as a blatant lie.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are determined to keep Scotland outside the EU, the Single Market and the Customs Union, against the will of the people of Scotland. So it is abundantly clear that opposition to Scottish independence is not opposition to ‘nationalism’ per se, it is support for a British nationalism which is functionally identical to English nationalism.

Another plank of the anti-independence campaign was to argue that Scotland depended upon Westminster to ensure basic standards of good governance, toleration of minorities, and indeed democracy itself. After the Conservative clown show in a storm drain of the past few years, that claim is frankly laughable. Westminster is incapable of maintaining basic standards of good governance within itself, never mind guaranteeing it in Scotland.

The same goes for the Better Together claim that being a part of the state of Greater England that likes to call itself a union enables Scotland to ‘punch above its weight’ on the world stage. It is clear now that all that Westminster offers Scotland on the world stage is invisibility and silence. That has always been true but is made abundantly obvious from recent British government attempts to ensure that Scottish ministers on trips abroad are brought to heel and are followed around by British diplomatic minders whose job is to squash any potential perceptions that Scotland is a nation in its own right and to ensure that Scottish ministers know their place as mere representatives of the northernmost province of the state of Greater England.

And of course by pandering to the basest instincts of right wing English nationalism the Tories, and now Labour too have blown up one of the strongest arguments of 2014’s Better Together campaign – the claim that it’s only by being a part of the British state that Scotland can benefit from membership of the European Union. It is now clear that even should political opinion shift in England and a government in favour of rejoining the EU was elected to government in Westminster, Brussels would be deeply wary about permitting the UK to rejoin. The quickest and safest route back into the EU for Scotland would be as an independent nation. And unlike an English dominated UK, the rest of the EU would welcome Scotland with open arms.

Relying upon GERS figures which purport to show that Scotland is an economic basket case utterly dependent upon a transfer of funds from the rest of the UK is just about all that the British nationalism deniers have got left. If the GERS figures are seen for what they really are, a British accounting exercise with a political purpose which have no bearing at all on the financial position of an independent Scotland, the likes of Michael Marra have got nothing in the tank. They stand exposed as apologists for a failing undemocratic unitary British state which reduces Scotland to the same status as an English region and which has nothing left but delusions of a former greatness. The Labour party in Scotland are reality deniers.

________________________________________________________________

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 last bastion of the Cringe

The Scottish media is behaving entirely predictably about the police investigation into SNP finances. On Sunday on the website of the Sinking Ferry newspaper, sorry, the Herald, no less than four stories were devoted to the police investigation and the negative political fall out. The Scottish media is determined to milk this for every nanogramme of SNPbad that it can.

Now I am categorically not saying that this is not an important story which should not be given any media attention, of course it should. What I am questioning is the obvious double standards of Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media and its failure to devote even a fraction of the same zeal and energy into the pursuit of stories involving allegations of Conservative wrong doing and a complete disregard for the meltdown in public services in other parts of this so-called United Kingdom which that Scottish media is so determined to keep Scotland a part of. This week BBC Scotland decided to treat the viewers of its news programmes to an exposition of campervan toilet facilities in a transparently desperate attempt to find another angle to exploit about the story of the police seizure of a campervan as part of its investigation into SNP finances.

The Scottish media gave far less prominence to the confirmation by the party that it owned the campervan, which was bought for campaigning purposes during the pandemic when the need for social distancing was paramount, than it did to the story of the seizure, no doubt leaving many with the false impression that someone had diverted party funds in order to buy themselves a mobile holiday home. If you relied solely on that Scottish media that wanted to tell you all about campervan toilets, you’d never have heard that due to Conservative mismanagement, rivers, waterways and beaches in England are literally open sewers.

Consider the difference in the Scottish media’s coverage of these allegations about the SNP, which involve the sum of £600,000 with its coverage of allegations that the Westminster government lost £58.8 billion in fraud and error in 2021 alone, a figure which does not include nearly £16 billion in covid related fraud or the public money lost as part of the PPE scandal. That’s a total of some £75 billion of public money that the Conservatives have lost due to fraud, a sum of money an eye watering one hundred and twenty five thousand times greater than the money involved in the SNP investigation.

Yet the Scottish media has practically ignored it, even though we are talking about a sum of money many billions of pounds greater than the entire annual budget of the Scottish Government, which is £59.7 billion for the financial year 2023-24. This is public money which has been lost due to criminality and to the sheer incompetence of the ruling Conservatives, that same party to which the Scottish media regularly gives a platform from which to pontificate about the supposed incompetence of the Scottish Government, like telling us that the Kray twins can take the moral high ground about someone’s parking ticket. If the Scottish media paid even one hundredth the time and attention to the fraud that happened on the Tories’ watch as they do to supposed SNP wrong doings, they’d have enough material to keep Reporting Scotland fully occupied for years to come, with no time at all for the murrders, the fitba, the wee cute kittens, or ‘helpful’ explanations about cludgies in campervans.

Over the weekend Sir David Greene, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) director from 2012 to 2018, said there had been warning signs about £16 billion lost due to fraud in covid loan schemes that should have been picked up on by government ministers. But the Tories were too concerned with demonising benefits claimant to bother about white collar fraud.

A considerable proportion of the public money lost by the Conservatives has been diverted into private pockets and bank accounts. Some of these allegations involve senior figures in the Conservative party, but Scotland’s media turns a blind eye. Scottish Conservative peer Michelle Mone is currently facing allegations that she and her children secretly received £29 million in profits on a PPE contract which Mone’s company was awarded after she used the so-called ‘VIP lane’ to get preferential access to government ministers. Tens of millions of pounds of profits were later transferred to a secret offshore trust of which Mone and her adult children were the beneficiaries. Millions of pounds worth of the PPE received from Mone’s company was later rejected as unusable after her company allegedly failed to provide the right certification to show the items had been reliably sterilised for medical use. Mone vigorously denies any wrong doing, but this entire saga has been dealt with in a couple of paragraphs in the Scottish media. Compare and contrast with the acres of newsprint and hours of airtime which the Scottish media has already devoted to the SNP’s finances, and they are very far from being done yet.

Meanwhile it’s being reported that incompetence on the part of the Labour party has put the personal data of millions of voters at risk, the potential data breach in the Dialogue system, used by Labour activists to make calls to the public, potentially compromising the sensitive information of millions across the UK. There is silence from a Scottish media which would have given wall to wall coverage of this story had it involved the SNP.

The Scottish media is overwhelmingly dominated by a small clique of British nationalist supporters of the status quo, who see their primary job as being to keep Scotland within the UK at any cost and never examine or criticise the UK and the Westminster system that it is so determined to keep Scotland a part of. The risible Scottish press awards are an annual exercise in British nationalist mutual back slapping as the Scottish media congratulates itself for stories about broken down ferries even as it ignores the meltdown in public services elsewhere in the UK, the continuing descent of Britain into authoritarianism, the collapse of accountability at Westminster, and the travesty of democracy that Scotland suffers at the hands of the Labour and Tory parties.

I am not, and I cannot stress this enough, demanding that the SNP get a free pass from the Scottish media, the party of the Scottish Government must of course be scrutinised and examined by the media, that is a fundamental prerequisite of democracy, and we have a Scottish media which is champing at the bit to do so. However the Scottish media effectively gives a free pass to the Conservative party, and by doing so it is endangering democracy and political accountability in Scotland. That is doing an immense disservice to that Scottish public which the media in Scotland purports to represent and to serve.

The Scottish public is force fed a diet of negativity and miserabilism by its media, which is determined to undermine and minimise Scotland at every turn. It’s a media which is obsessed with ferries but which turns a blind eye when the Conservatives hole Scottish democracy below the water line. The anti-independence media in Scotland is the last great bastion of the cultural and political cringe that civic Scotland has struggled so hard to shake off for the past few decades. Scotland is striving to grasp a better future, Scotland’s media wants to keep us trapped in the past.

________________________________________________________________

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.

SNP down but not out

First off, I’d like to thank everyone who left kind and supportive comments about my mother following her recent operation. She read them and was very touched and heartened by them and said that it meant a lot to her that so many people were wishing her well, even people that she has never met. She had a rough time of it in the days after the operation as she had a very bad reaction to the general anaesthetic, but thankfully she’s doing much much better now and is well on the way to being back to her old self.

While I have been preoccupied with my mother’s health crisis, the SNP has been experiencing a crisis of its own. The first thing to say here is that it is best not to comment on an on-going police investigation which may or may not result in charges being brought, so I urge anyone who comments here to refrain from speculation about any of the individuals involved.

However there has certainly been considerable and often glee filled speculation in the British media that the recent developments mean that it’s all over for the SNP and for Scottish independence. These predictions are, to put it politely, premature. There’s no denying that the police investigation has been shocking to those of us who have put our trust in the SNP as the only credible vehicle which can deliver Scottish independence, and I am sure I am not alone in feeling deeply disappointed and let down by the party leadership. But despite everything that has transpired in recent weeks, and everything that will come out as a result of this police investigation and the massive attention it will attract from an exultant British media which pays far less attention to Conservative financial scandals involving far larger sums of money which have been diverted for personal gain, the SNP remains the only credible vehicle for delivering Scottish independence.

That said, it is imperative that the new leadership takes urgent steps to ensure transparency and openness in the running of the party and restores control of the party to its membership. The SNP must be a microcosm of the new independent Scotland the winning of which is the party’s raison d’etre. A top down centralist SNP which invests all power and control in a single dominant leader is definitely not the model of an independent Scotland which we should be aiming for, yet that is the model embodied by the SNP under both Alex Salmond and his successor Nicola Sturgeon. That may have been a model which was successful electorally, but it is absolutely not the template to emulate in an independent Scotland.

However the SNP remains the only credible show in town, not just for the winning of Scottish independence, but also for ensuring that democracy in Scotland is respected. Alba supporters were ecstatic recently at an opinion poll which appeared to show that the party could win as many as five MSPs at the next Holyrood election, but this was a poll conducted by Panelbase, which has significantly over-estimated Alba’s support in the past, unless these findings are consistently replicated by other polling companies, they should be taken with a bucket load of salt. There is no evidence that Alba is able to appeal to voters who are not hard-core independence supporters or that it is able to convert soft no voters and undecided voters to support for independence.

Alba supporters hate to hear this, but their party labours under the massive disadvantage of being widely regarded as a political vehicle for Alex Salmond, who is regularly found by polls to be one of the least popular figures in Scottish politics among the wider public. Until such time as the party can come out from under his shadow and assert an identity independent of its founder, and demonstrate that it can rein in the toxicity spread by some of its more unpleasant online supporters, Alba has little chance of replacing the SNP as the major political force of the Scottish independence movement.

So Alba will not become the major political beneficiary of the SNP’s current travails, it may enjoy a boost in support on the back of the present situation, but that will come from those already committed to Scottish independence, Alba is starting from a very low baseline and has a very long way to go before it can present itself as a serious contender for power. The SNP will remain the dominant pro-independence party for the foreseeable future.

It is the Labour and Tory parties which are salivating the most about the SNP’s problems and it is Labour which believes it stands to gain the most. However Labour has effectively given up on appealing to independence supporters and to those who oppose Brexit so it is really hoping that Scottish voters will hold their noses and vote Labour despite its support for Brexit, Starmer’s wholehearted espousal of Conservative policies and his refusal to identify the democratic route to another independence referendum in the hope of getting rid of the loathsome Conservatives. But that is not a strategy likely to restore the dominance Labour once enjoyed in Scottish politics. Labour has written off a large chunk of the Scottish electorate, a strategy which merely confirms the inability of the British state to accommodate Scotland’s distinctive political culture.

Meanwhile Humza Yousaf is proving that he is not afraid to take the fight to the Conservatives and has announced that the Scottish Government is to take legal action to challenge the unprecedented use by Alister Jack of a section 35 order in order to veto the Gender Recognition Reform Bill which was passed by Holyrood last year with a large cross party majority. Certain prominent SNP figures, who not coincidentally were opposed to the legislation in the first place, have spoken out against the planned legal action, saying that it has little chance of success.

However the point here is not the likelihood of success of any legal challenge but that the Conservatives must be shown that there is a political consequence to making use of undemocratic veto powers to overturn Scottish legislation that does not meet with Tory approval and that the Scottish Government will resist this to the fullest extent of its ability. The use of the veto was especially egregious given the refusal of the Conservative Government to engage with Holyrood in order to ensure that the Scottish legislation did not impinge upon UK equalities law.

The political risk of not taking legal action is that the Conservatives will be emboldened to make greater use of Westminster’s veto powers in future, effectively neutering the Scottish Parliament and undermining the entire raison d’etre of devolution. A legal case, even one which the Scottish Government ultimately loses, will highlight the inability of devolution to do what it was sold to Scotland as being the solution to – the problem of Conservative governments that Scotland didn’t vote for imposing their will on Scotland despite the inability of the Tories to win an election in Scotland since 1955. Labour, the self-declared party of devolution are refusing to stand up for Holyrood even though the vast majority of Labour MSPs voted in favour of the bill that the Tories undemocratically vetoed. This is no longer about the narrow issue of the GRR bill, but rather about the right of the Scottish Parliament to pass legislation that the Tories dislike.

Only the SNP is able to appeal to a wide cross section of Scottish society and take the role of the spearhead of the independence movement. It remains the only mass membership party in Scotland. A relative of mine who is an office holder in his local SNP branch tells me that his branch has gained 68 new members since the news of Peter Murrell’s arrest broke, so while the SNP certainly does not have its challenges to seek at the moment, it is very far indeed from being a spent political force. It was reported this week that Sunak intends to hold off on a Westminster General Election until Autumn 2024, which gives the SNP invaluable breathing space to get its house in order, to identify a plausible path to independence, and to restore the trust placed in it by independence supporters. It’s a tall order, but an achievable one. Those who underestimate the resilience of the SNP do so at their peril.

________________________________________________________________

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.

Thank you NHS Scotland

The NHS in Scotland is a political football, scarcely a week goes by without Douglas Ross or Anas Sarwar mounting an opportunistic attack upon NHS Scotland even though the NHS services in England and Wales, which are run by the Conservatives and by Labour respectively, consistently performing more poorly than NHS Scotland. This week in England junior doctors are taking unprecedented strike action leading to the NHS Confederation warn that up to 250,000 medical appointments and operations could be postponed. The four days of strikes are due to begin on Tuesday after the end of the Easter bank holiday.

The British Medical Association, which represents doctors and medical students, has said the strikes could still be avoided if the Conservative government makes a credible pay offer, something it has refused to do, claiming that there is not enough money, although the Tories managed to find the money in Jeremy Hunt’s recent budget to give a lucrative tax break to the richest pensioners. The Tory health minister Steve Barclay, is refusing to meet with the BMA until the strikes are called off. Dr Mike Greenhalgh, a deputy chair of the BMA’s junior doctors committee, told BBC One’s Breakfast: “It’s hard to negotiate when only one side is doing it and we’re not getting anything back from the government.”

Scotland is not affected by this week’s junior doctors’ strike,and although junior doctors in Scotland are currently balloting on strike action, relations between the Scottish Government and the BMA have not broken down to the extent that they have broken down in England, so it is still possible that strike action in Scotland will be averted.

With so much bad news about the NHS dominating the headlines you could be forgiven for thinking it’s all doom and gloom. As regular readers of this blog might be aware, my mum, Martha Mosson was recently diagnosed with a cancerous lesion in her left eye, which required surgery to remove the affected eye. Although she is still recovering from her operation, feeling weak and nauseous from the pain killing medication she is on, and is coming to terms with the fact that she has just had a major operation and now only has one eye, she insisted that I write this piece. And of course you can’t say no to yer maw. My mum is 83 and although she has been dogged by health issues, the woman is a force of nature. So this piece is far more important than anything else that might be happening right now. It’s for my mum.

My mum has two reasons for wanting this to be published, the first is because she wants to thank all the NHS staff involved with her care, who at all times treated her with the utmost professionalism, care, and compassion and ensured that she received all the necessary procedures and interventions promptly and without undue delay but also because she wants to reassure anyone else who has the misfortune to receive a similar diagnosis that they too can be sure that they will receive the similar high standard of care that she did. Even now, just days after a major life altering operation, she’s thinking of others.

Getting that reassurance is vital because receiving a diagnosis of cancer is terrifying, both for the patient and for their loved ones. The last thing that’s needed is to have to worry about whether the NHS is going to give you the proper care and treatment that you need, in sufficient time to ensure that the cancer can be treated successfully. So my mum wants people to know that if her experience is anything to go by, they will. She added, and was most insistent that I put this line in : “That Douglas Ross is an arse.” This comes directly from the mouth of an 83 year old retired deputy headmistress of a Catholic primary school.

My mum’s cancer was discovered when she was admitted to hospital for an unrelated condition. She has suffered from recurrent debilitating bouts of severe dizziness for some time and additionally is being treated for macular degeneration. In February she experienced an especially bad bout of dizziness which badly affected her balance and left her very nauseous and she was admitted to the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow. There it was discovered that the dizzy spells were due to Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, which is caused by tiny crystals of calcium carbonate crystals becoming dislodged and entering one of the canals in the inner ear. A simple procedure was able to treat this successfully and she has had no further problems with it.

However when on the ward the eye specialist treating her macular degeneration wanted her to have a scan of her eyes in order to ensure that visual problems were not contributing to her dizziness and nausea. The scan revealed a lesion at the back of her left eye which required further investigation. To cut a long story short, the surgical team soon determined that it was a malignant tumour. Unfortunately as the lesion was situated right next to the optic nerve it was not possible to treat it with laser, which could have saved the eye. The only possible treatment was to remove it surgically, which necessitated the removal of the entire eye. Her main concern was whether she would still be able to drive, and was greatly relieved to learn that she can. Only six weeks elapsed between the discovery of the cancerous lesion and the operation to remove it, a timescale which is not at all atypical in NHS Scotland, despite the hysterical scaremongering of the likes of Douglas Ross, whose party presides over the meltdown we currently see in the NHS in England.

For a while we were not sure if the surgeon would have to remove part of the eye socket as well as the eye itself, which would have been even more disfiguring. Thankfully that has proven not to be necessary. The operation took place a week ago and my mum is now home. There was the possibility that during the operation to remove the affected eye the surgeon could insert a prosthetic eye and attach it to the existing muscle. This prosthetic eye would have moved naturally along with my mum’s remaining eye, but unfortunately some muscle tissue had to be removed so this was not possible. The operation was carried out last week at Gartnavel hospital in Glasgow. The surgeon is confident that they caught the cancer early and removed it before it spread. My mum wants to thank all the staff on ward 1C for their care and attention.

My mum has been told that when the wound heals she will be fitted with a glass eye which will match her good eye, so the aesthetic impact of the operation will be limited. In the meantime she will have to wear an eye patch, much to the delight of her four year old great-grandson, who thinks his great-granny is a pirate now.

My mum is still very tender and sore, she’s not as young as she used to be and recovering from this operation is going to take time, but thanks to the prompt intervention of NHS Scotland, time is what she has, and she will be with us for a good few years yet. Sadly she is not recovering as quickly as she’d have liked and is suffering from dreadful nausea, severe headaches and an upset stomach, although she’s putting the same brave face on things that she has always done. She’s never tolerated general anaesthetics well and it’s going to take some time for it to clear out of her system. She is still very poorly, and all the family are worried about her, but she is a determined and stubborn woman who has set her mind on getting back to normal and living life to the full. If anyone can do it, she can. Thank you NHS Scotland, for ensuring my mum will still be around.

________________________________________________________________

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.

Today’s news

The only news in town today is of course the reported arrest of the former SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell as part of Police Scotland’s investigation into the party’s funding. The first thing to stress here is that with an arrest this matter is part of an active criminal investigation which means that we all must respect Contempt of Court restrictions. This means that everyone must refrain from speculating about the guilt or innocence of the arrested person and may not do anything which could lead to the identification of anyone that the judge has allowed to remain anonymous. It is also against the law to share any evidence or facts about a case that the judge has said cannot be made public. This means that extreme caution must be used when commenting about this case, because this is a live police investigation and it is imperative to avoid prejudicing any possible court case or prosecution that may result from the investigation. However given the likelihood that certain individuals will attempt to use the comments section of this blog in order to mouth off about Peter Murrell, and social media is currently full of the usual suspects who are taking unseemly glee in this development, I have reluctantly decided not to permit comments on this story until more information is available and there is greater clarity about what is or is not legally permitted to be discussed in public.

However it is permissible to talk about the wider political ramifications of this story. There can be no doubt that the SNP, the Scottish Government, and the wider independence movement are in for a torrid time over the coming weeks and months. The British nationalist parties and their media allies will weaponise this story in order to attack the entire idea of Scottish independence. There will be massive and wall to wall coverage of the story and British nationalist commentators will rush to pronounce that it’s all over for the SNP and for Scottish independence. In the short term the only political beneficiaries will be the Labour and Conservative parties who will spin any gains they may make at the SNP’s expense as ‘proof’ that Scotland has gone off the idea of independence and that there is ‘no demand’ for another independence referendum.

However, as I have pointed out in the past on numerous occasions, the desire for Scottish independence is not a creation of the SNP, it is a product of deeper structural shifts within the nature of the British state, the failure of devolution to protect Scotland from Conservative governments which is what it was sold to Scotland as being able to do, the unwillingness or inability of Westminster to reform itself in any meaningful way, the decades long erosion of a sense of Britishness as a shared identity, and the rise of English nationalism. None of these factors are affected by any internal developments within the SNP, and once this legal case has passed they will reassert themselves. Scottish independence is bigger than any individual no matter how powerful or influential, and it is bigger than any single organisation or political party. The campaign for Scottish independence survived the massive media attention of the Alex Salmond case and subsequent developments, and it will survive this too. In the meantime it remains crucial that someone continues to make the case for independence and to focus on that bigger picture about why independence remains crucial for Scotland’s future and that is what I intend to do.

Unfortunately I have had some personal issues, the timing of which could not be worse given today’s news. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I had received some worrying family news. My mum has now given me permission to mention more details about this in public. She was recently diagnosed with cancer in her left eye. We had originally hoped that the lesion the scan had identified was not cancerous, but sadly it turned out that it was and we were told that the only way to treat it and to prevent the tumour from spreading was surgery. This week she had an operation to remove the tumour, which entailed the loss of her eye. For a while there was the possibility that the surgery would have to remove part of the eye socket and the surrounding bone as well, which would have been quite disfiguring, but thankfully this proved not to be necessary. The surgeons are hopeful that they caught the cancer early and have dealt with the tumour before it spread. The operation was successful and my mother is now recovering. However she is in her 80s and has just had major surgery which has left her without an eye, and she has experienced issues with her other eye, and has recently had other health problems, unrelated to the cancer in her eye, which caused her to be hospitalised for a week, so naturally it’s a deeply worrying time for the family and of course I am preoccupied with this and not really able to concentrate on political matters like I should. My mum is expected to get home from hospital today, so I want to spend some time with her and will be taking a few days off.

________________________________________________________

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.

Hostages of English nationalism

Over the weekend, travellers trying to catch a ferry to France from Dover faced delays of up to fourteen hours as the port struggled to cope with the increased traffic of holidaymakers over the Easter break, which came on top of the increased customs and passport checks necessitated by Brexit. Last year the British government rejected a £33m proposal to double passport booths at Dover, instead choosing to blame the French for delays at the port, that traditional stand-by of the rabid English nationalist – when there’s any issue at all, blame the French. Of course if the French are indeed responsible for the mess in Dover, it does tend to trash any claim that Brexit means that”we” have taken back control. The lengthy delays which we are seeing this weekend happened last year too during the holiday rush so it’s not like the British authorities can claim that they were unexpected. Instead the Conservatives have preferred to prattle on about ‘taking control of our borders’ blaming the French, and demonising asylum seekers. Anything rather than admit that Brexit has been a disaster from beginning to end. It’s not even as if the Tories can pretend now that Brexit is a good idea which has been implemented poorly, not that they’d want to go down that path anyway, since they are the ones responsible for the implementation.

In an interview on the Laura Kuenssberg programme on BBC One this weekend the Home Secretary Suella Braverman denied that the delays have anything to do with Brexit, instead blaming a ‘particular combination of factors’ including the weather, but not Brexit, oh no, not Brexit. She claimed that the delays were it was “ultimately an issue for the ferry companies.” So not her fault at all then. Glad you cleared that up for us Suella. We are now in a place where Conservative government ministers go on TV and shamelessly and blatantly lie, while the broadcaster which is supposed to be holding power to account instead acts to amplify and spread the lies and self-serving delusion. Brexit has become the sacred cow of British politics, it cannot be questioned or challenged, no matter how self-evident the harm that it causes. In order to distract from Brexit’s many failures, the Conservatives have turned to a grotesque theatre of cruelty designed to pander to the basest instincts of the English nationalist right and the tabloid press and burgeoning right wing broadcast media which feeds it and nurtures its imaginary grievances and conspiracy theories against ‘Europe’, against asylum seekers’ against ‘the woke’.

Suella’s credibility lacking denial that the long queues have anything to do with Brexit came as the Home Secretary embarked on a round of media appearances with the aim of promoting her sick plans to ship asylum seekers off to an authoritarian dictatorship in Central Africa. When reminded that only five years ago, 12 refugees from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo were killed by police in Rwanda during protests about their treatment. Braverman denied that she was familiar with the case, but if you plan to make shipping asylum seekers off to Rwanda the cornerstone of your migration policy you might think that you’d start by having a wee look at how the Rwandan authorities treat asylum seekers and refugees. But not if you are Suella Braverman, obviously. She has no more interest in how Rwanda treats refugees than she does in how her local authority treats rubbish once she has dumped it in the bin, because that is exactly her attitude to vulnerable and desperate human beings. To her they are just so much problematic trash and Rwanda is merely a convenient bin into which they can be discarded and forgotten about. The Conservatives are no longer even pretending that there is any need for basic human decency.

The Tories’ much vaunted Levelling Up programme will not have any marked impact. The government has spent less than 10% of its £4.8bn levelling up fund since it was launched in 2020 and many projects have not started, but they do nothing to alleviate the cost of living crisis and falling standards of living for which Brexit bears a large part of the blame. So instead the Conservatives turn to kicking the most vulnerable and to demonising the poor, the low paid and minorities. This isn’t just confined to asylum seekers. There is a clear pattern of identifying groups which are unable to or unlikely to vote (or which, are less likely to vote Tory and ‘othering’ them and positioning them as scapegoats. Creating a demonised group – young people and rough sleepers fall into this category, as well as asylum seekers – and then announcing a crackdown on them is a cheap way to send a dog whistle to the core Tory vote. It’s the politics of moral bankruptcy. Human decency and the Conservative party are mutually exclusive.

Meanwhile Labour is as shamelessly complicit as the Tories in its refusal to face up to the damage of Brexit and to challenge the moral depths which the Conservatives are plumbing. Starmer knows that his route to Downing Street depends upon pandering to those same victimhood seeking instincts of the English nationalist right. If he does win a majority in the Commons at the next Westminster General Election he will make no concessions to a Scotland which is already resented by the English nationalists upon whom he depends for power. Labour is far too concerned about rebuilding the so-called red wall to point out, never mind commit to reversing, the insanity of Brexit and the cruel excesses of the Conservatives. We are all of us being held hostage to the delusions of English nationalism but the majority of the Scottish media is far more interested in scoring petty points against the SNP than in highlighting the moral and political collapse of that British state which it is so desperate to keep Scotland a part of. What Starmer is trying to do now is exactly the same trick that Blair and Brown pulled off in the 1990s, making the Labour party electable by turning it into a version of the Tories. In Scotland the Labour and Conservative parties are propping one another up in local authorities and there are reports that the Tories will urge their supporters to vote Labour in key constituencies in order to “end nationalist dominance” in Scotland – in order to maintain Anglo-British nationalist dominance in other words.

Asked about the reports SNP Westminster leader Stephen Flynn said : “Neither Labour nor the Tories are “even pretending to care about Scotland’s interests anymore. Quite frankly, it’s a struggle to spot the difference between the Tories and Labour – the pro-Brexit, pro-cuts, anti-Scottish democracy Labour Party is a pale imitation of the right-wing Tories.” Scottish independence is a moral imperative.

________________________________________________________

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.