dead leg’s union units

leaverschoice

hat The Conservatives have realised that Scotland has decided that its future is as an independent country, and secondly that they don’t have the foggiest idea what to do about it. Over the weekend The Times newspaper reported that the big idea is to set up a ‘union unit’ headed by the dead leg of politics, Michael Gove we shouldn’t be surprised since we already knew that the Tories were a bunch of units. What is surprising however is the gobsmacking cluelessness of people who can only succeed in their declared goal of preventing Scottish independence by dint of persuading Scotland that they are more capable, intelligent and clued up than anything that we could provide for ourselves, instead they are delivering a political Masterclass in the dictum that it is far better to keep your mouth shut and risk being thought a fool than to open your mouth and confirm it. Michael Gove may be the insensate dead leg of politics. but he’s still quite capable of putting his foot in his mouth every time he oozes about saving the union. that takes a very special and particular talent for tone deaf stupidity, and unfortunately for th Conservatives it’s the only way in which they are at all outstanding when Better Together told us the UK punched above its weight they were quite right, it’s just that they neglected to tell us that they meant punching itself in the gob. Dead leg Michael has convinced himself that support for independence is on the rise because – get this – the Scottish media does nothing but uncritically pump out ‘SNP propaganda, by which he presumably means that he once witnessed an occasion on BBC Scotland when they actually allowed an independence supporter to speak in a discussion about independence featuring the usual three Tories and Jackie Baillie. But since no one else can recall such a singular event, it may well be that Dead leg’s memory was distorted by some Bolivian Marching powder.

Anyway, risible as it is, DEad leg’s plan to save the precioussss Union with some red white and blue press releases, telling us that the Tories are stealing food from children for their own good, it does at least have the relative merit of not being as far out there in the realms of batshittery as the suggestion from Tim montgomery, the editor of Conservative Home that the best way to get Scotland tofall back in love with the UK would be to set up a ‘Conservative Ministry of social Justice in Glasgow to be headed by baroness don’t call me baroness Rape Clause, Ruth Davidson. apparently Tim was being serious with this idea and wasn’t trying out some of that right wing comedy that we’ve heard so much about of late. although right wing comedy is very much like The positive case for the Union., we keep hearing British nationalists talking about it, but we never actually see it. A Conservative Ministry of social justice is one of those dystopian Ministries that George Orwell would have had in mind if he had lived long enough to write a sequel to 1984. Yesh sure, being lectured to about social justice by an unelected and unaccountable politician who has defended the morally bankrupt rape clause and who represents a party which has just quite literally stolen food from the mouths of hungry children is guaranteed to make Scots who are attracted to the idea of independence sit up and think again, although all it is likely to make them think again is that the Conservatives are vile and nasty hypocrites and the only way that Scotland can make progress to social justice is to put ourselves beyond their grasping clutches for good. The thing is that The Conservatives know full well what they need to do to reverse the rise in support for independence, they need to abandon their extreme Brexit and cease their attacks on th Devolution settlement. But they’re not prepared to do that. There is no place for anything other than a neutered and quiescent Scotland in the Tory vision of Brexit Britain , and because they’re not prepared to budge fom that, they will continue to insult our intelligence by blaming the rise in support for independence on everything except their own selfish and self serving behaviour. These are not political giants here, they are greedy little men and women with no vision, no plan, and no clue. increasingly panicking as they see Scotland slip inexorably out of their grasp. they have made their choices, and now Scotland is making its own. Scotland is choosing a future without the Tories in it, and no number of dead leg’s union units is going to prevent that from happening.

typos, sorry, there’s going to be a lot of them while I learn how to type all over again, please be patient.

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unfair to scum

Oct24 by weegingerdug

it was, I believe, the American author and critic H L Mencken who quipped, in relation to the tabloid press,that no one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public, and likewise no one ever went broke by underestimating the self regarding callow cruelty of a Conservative MP. Having being, rightly, heavily and severely castigated on social media following their appalling decision to vote to deprive the poorest children of free school meals.The Tories have reflected and have decided that it’s them who are the real victims here.the poor things, you can’t even steal food out of the mouths of babies these days without someone calling you out for it. It’spolitical correctness gone mad,after all it’s the duty of politicians to take these difficult decisions so that SERCO shareholders don’t suffer and so that the partners and associates of Conservative MPs can continue to rake in millions in consultancy fees. However since a plea for sympathy from aTory MP who has just stolen a hungry wean’s chance of dinner while he himself tucks into a posho six chip fish dinner that is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer is about as likely to succeed as an attempt to get Ruth Davidson to appear in an interview and answer difficult questions about why her Scottish Tory colleagues voted against free school meals just a week or so after promising to guarantee free school meals, the lunch snatchers have decided to try another tactic to divert the well deserved opprobrium which is currently raining down upon their heads. you see, they had to vote against free school meals because they’d only have been used to buy drugs. Now personally I’ve never pitched up at a drug dealer’s house bearing nothing but a Tesco chicken and mayonnaise sandwich, a pack of dried pasta and a pork pie and expected to depart with a gramme of cocaine. And if it had been anyone else who had suggested such a thing I would have scoffed in disbelief, but who am I to contradict Michael Gove’s lived experience? next time there’s s report of a drugs bust on the news we can expect to be told that the polis have seized heroin with a street value of a dozen Scotch eggs and three sausage rolls.

it was Mark Jenkinson, the Conservative MP for Workington, who claimed on social media that in his constituency people were exchanging food parcels for drugs, only now there’s a veritable convoy of drug addicts setting off for Cumbria carrying Greggs meal deals which they intend to exchange for crack. faced with any normal person would have seen as an entirely predictable torrent of ridicule, Mark has been forced to issue a clarification, pointing out that he’d been taken out of context and had only ever said that it was a tiny minority of people who used supplies of free food in order to buy drugs, But Mark’s ‘ clarification’ has only made things worse , because he has in effect admitted that because of the behaviour of a tiny minority he is going to penalise the vast majority of children who are living in food poverty due to the economic and political priorities of this Conservative govern ment, That’s how it works with this government, poverty is held to be the fault of the poor,who are to be collectively punished for the actions of a few. it’s hard to decide whether it’s poor people or people with a drug habit that Mark is smearing by anecdote, but being a Tory the chances are that he doesn’t distinguish between the two, so in order to help him tell the difference, poor people are folk who go to bed hungry and who struggle to keep a roof over their heads because s this government has gutted the social security system and presided over a proliferation of zero hours contracts and gig economy jobs that don’t pay living wage, whereas a person with a cocaine habit sits in the cabinet as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Mark has so far failed to produce any evidence to support his claims, yet he is prepared to condemn an entire generation on the basis of groundless gossip.but then destroying the lives of tens of thousands on the basis of nothing more than spurious evidence free claims is very much this government’s modus operandi and rationale, That is after all what has brought us Brexit. today Tory Mps are in full on victimhood mode because LabourMP ANGELA raynor called those Conservatives who voted to deprive needy children of a free meal ‘scum’. they’re not scum, scum floats to the top, this lot would need the assistance of a ladder in order to get into the gutter. In response to news that some local businesse were going to step in and help the kids that the government has refused to help. Conservative MP for North Devon, Selaine Saxby, has said that she very much” hopes businesses offering to feed hungry children for free “will not be seeking any further government , because she believes that if they are able to give away ood for free that this must mean that the business doesn’t need help to survive the covid crisis. You could not invent a more perfect illustration of the moral bankruptcy of the Conservatives, not only do they refuse to show compassion for those less fortunate than themselves, but they are determined to punish those who do have a grasp of the concepts of decency humanity and compassion. calling Conservative MPs scum is indeed unfair and uncalled for it is unfair to the single celled organisms which make up pondscum. they are for the most part harmless and innocent snd play a,vital role in the ecosystem you certainly can’t say the same about Conservative MPs. Thatcher starved the miners, this lot of moral vacuums are starving the minors. Meanwhile Priti Patel is set to hand private firms £28 million in government contracts in order to deport asylum seekersfrom m the UK.This government can always find the money to victimise and punish vulnerable, desperate people – especially when that cash goes to line the pockets of their friends but it won’t find the money to feed hungry children ,Cruel Brittania.

typos, sorry, there’s going to be a lot of them while I learn how to type all over again, please be patient.

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coming down with a severe case of the bunting

Oct23 by weegingerdug

the daily telegraph in its wisdom, Well I say ‘wisdom’, has decided to publish a story which exposes an elderly woman to mockery,and which also illustrates the utterly pathetic nature of modern British nationalism and its desperate attempts to weaponise bunting and to make everything about WW2 because that was the last, an indeed possibly the only, time that the British were unarguably the good guys, and even then that was only because the UK was up against the actual fucking Nazis. https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1319342959062622210 according to a woman, Maureen Eames, who was two years old duringWW2 ,we should notpay heed to Covid restrictions because during the war we were bombed in the blitz and we didn’t give in. We didn’t surrender then and we shouldn’t now. We went into shelters then we went back to work. That’s what we have to do now.” opined Maureen I believe that people made quite dramatic lifestyle changes during WW2, or am I missing something? and when they were told to put up blackout curtains and turn out the lights they didn’t take to social media to moan abut health and safety gone mad, although given that the lady in question was only two years old during the blitz, it’s likely that she personally spent the Blitz having a toddler’s temper tantrum when she couldn’t have what she wanted. Not only was Maureen a toddler at the time, but she comes from Barnsley, a town in Yorkshire which wasn’t actually bombed during the war so it is unclear on what basis she is being elevated by the media as a vcoice of authority. she wasn’t in the blitz and she was just a toddler but like a toddler is exactly how some supposedly adult people are behaving right now after being told that they cannae go to the pub, so they are following Maureen’s example after all But just not in the way the bunting fetish ists of the Telegraph imagined. but then the entire purpose of the British media these days, appears to be to find solutions to today’s problems in a war that was fought 80 years ago or failing that in a world cup match played in 1966 . I’m not really getting at Maureen here, Everyone is entitled to say stupid things, however the far greater stupidity belongs to a British media which is as desperate for a hit of WW2 nostalgia as a heroin addict is for their next fix and which uncritically and approvingly amplifies and propagates even the most inane and asinine reference to ‘Dunkirk’ spirit, nd which will not be deterred even when it risks undermining and weakening the vital public health advice which will ensure that as many of us as possible survive this pandemic .Even the most obtuse Telegraph journalist or BBC reporter ought to be able to grasp that the threat represented by coronavirus is not the same as that represented by the pissing LuftWaffe. no one in WW2 went “Oh that Doreen from Number 26 popped down the Post Office and now she’s come down with a terrible case of the Hermann Goerings, coughing up Messerschmidts all over the place so she is. Maureen’s inane Dunkirk spirit opinion is the kind of thing that in a more sensible media evironment would be elegated to the fa rend of Facebook along with the ramblings of your embarrassing racist Uncle, instead in Brexit Britain it gets published in a national newspaper and broadcast approvingly on the BBC whereupon Sarah Smith remarks that Maureen is ‘speaking for the nation. No she’s bloody not Sarah, she’s speaking for a BBC with a WW2 nostalgia fetish and which has a bloody orgasm every time it’s able to shoehorn in a reference to Spitfires. She is most definitely not not speaking for those of us who understand that this is a public health emergency and not an occasion for a WW2 British nationalist circle jerk that undermines vital public health advice. hopefully there will one day soon be a vaccine against Coronavirus, sadly there is no hope of a vaccine against the reflexive British nationalism of the BBC, there is however an off button and a waste bin in which licence fee reminder letters can be dumped. And that’s a remedy which will have to suffice until Scotland has a public service broadcaster of its own,and not one which has as its priotity, ramming a regressive an backward looking British ationalism down our throats, even at the expense of vital public Health information during a global pandemic. they are so desperate to foist their WW2 British nationalist nostalgia on us that they they will be telling us that the inane and asinine witterings of a woman who can’t even remember WW2 elevates her to the status of national treasure, and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson will offer her an OBE in his next honours list in an attempt to distract us from his government’s rank failure to deal with th pandemic and the institutionalised and oh so very British corruption of a Conservative government which spaffs billions of pounds on clueless ‘consultants’ whose sole qualification is that they are married to or are pals with a Tory MP. while at the same time they allow children to go to bed hungry, and they preside over a 12billion quid so called track and trace system which is less effective than throwing darts at a dart board while blindfolded. But never mind any of that becauseVera lynn, bunting, we won the war, you know. I don’t know if it’s possible for a media to go senile, but the British nationalist press is showing all the signs. is lost in a reverie of former days while it ignores the urine dribbling down its leg.it’s a senile media for a senile British state,and the sooner Scotland consigns both to the history books the better we all will be.

typos, sorry, there’s going to be a lot of them while I learn how to type all over again, please be patient.

the two short plancks length

Oct22 by weegingerdug

Ungrateful Scotland and Wales have, in a development that he says he could never have foreseen, turned him into an English nationalist. Although it’s a development that absolutely everone else could have seen coming from the distance between Douglas Ross and his last self-inflicted instance of oral pedalism, which I am informed by my physiotherapist is the distressing medical condition of sticking your foot in your mouth, Although to be fair to Toby this is not a very great distance at all, as Douglas sticks his foot in his mouth about as often as a social media yoonboot shares a prettily coloured graph which purports to demonstrate that Scotland is poorer than Bangladesh until recently pysicists believed that thes shortest measurable distance was the Planck length or the distance travelled by light in one unit of Planck time , a measurement related to the wavelength of a subatomic particle, thanks to Douglas this has now been replaced in the physics text books by an even shorter distance, the two short planks length, which is the distance that Douglas is able to travel between incidents of oral pedalism I am likewise informed by my physiotherapist that no amount of remedial intervention will ever prevent either Douglas or Toby from making pricks out of themselves on a regular basis nor indeed is there any form of therapy that can stop a dickhead from being dickhead , In any event Toby is quite wrong when he characterises Scotland as ungrateful, Scotland is very gratefulindeed every time that Toby ‘the Celt whisperer’ Young decides to pontificate upon matters Scottish or Welsh, because it saves us the bother of having to organise independence campaigns for ourselves. it is particularly useful for us to steer any remaining soft No voters or undecideds in the direction of Toby’s spittle flecke a nglo-entitlement as it will provide them with a sobering illustration of what those Tory britnats are really thinking when they bang on about the preciousss Union and how much they Love Scotland. This is what a Tory thinks about you. Still Better Together Mind you if given the Opportunity the entire UK would probably vote for independence from Toby Young. Toby is what you’d get if you took Piers Morgan and Surgically removed any Compassion, empathy or basic human decency that you could find.

in today’ example of Douglas smashing the two short planks barrier, it was just a few short weeks ago that Douglas took to Twitter to promise that the SCOTTish Tories promised to guarantee a free school dinner to every child in Scotland who needed one the only thing with a shorter life expectancy than a Tory promise to Scotland are those insects whose adult stage is without any mouth parts and whichh as a life expectancy measured in hours. we canonly dream of living in a universe where the Tories lacked mouth parts, because then at least we wouldn’t have to listen to their lies. The second that Douglas’s free school meals promise was put to the test, theScotiish Tories lived up to their usual standards of hypocritical cant. on Tuesday evening the House of Commons voted on a Labour motion to support th footballer Marcus R ashford’s idea to guarantee a free school meal to every child over the coming school breaks.EVERY Single Scottish Tory MP voted against except for Douglas himself., who bravely abstained. So in future when someone says that the Conservatives steal food out of the mouths of babies, That is a not hyperbole, but merely a simple statement of fact.It is an absolute and unforgivable disgrace that in 2020, in this UK that was sold to Scotland on its supposed security, stability, and decency that tens of thousands of children go to bed hungry and their working parents are forced to rely on foobanks in order to put th most basic of meals on the table. There was nothing inevitable about that, rather it is the direct and deliberate outcome of policy decisions made by a Conservative party which Scotland has consistently rejected at the ballot box. The problem for Scotland is that as long as we remain a part of this benighted kingdom, The Conservatives can ontinue to lie to us with impunity, because they don’t need our votes, they have no incentive to listen to us and no incentive to change their ways.So children will continue to go to bed hungry and Douglas Ross will continue to make glib promises that he will never keep, because currently the only sanction he faces is being shamed on social media, which has no chance of success because you cannot shame the shameless. just like his oral pedalism there is no therapy for that either. All we can do is to strive for an independent Scotland where all political parties can be held to account by the electorate of Scotland. The real reason that the Tories are so terrified of independence is because it means that they will face consequences for their lies, their deceit, and their decision to prioritise the interests ofwealth and greed over the right of a child not to go to bed hungry.

THat is why Toby Young is anggr with us, it’s because we are determined to ensure that this Conservative government keeps its word, that it remembers that Scotland is not its plaything, toy or possession, But for English nationalists like Toby and the Johnson government, Scotland can never be a partner in a union, but only a posession that must do as it is told and which must never assert its right to a voice and which can never dare imagine that it can hold th government of England to account.The UK cannot be reformed because that entails the Conservatives agreeing to a mechanism which will enable Scotland to hold them to account. There is as much chance of that happening as there is of Toby Young learning to understand empathy, compassion and human decency. This evening we witnessed another consequence of Scotland’s powerlessness within the UK when it came to light that the Westminster Government has decided that the extra funding announced today to help English businesses through the Covid crisis would not be reflected in Barnett consequentials for Scotland. so there will be no help for Scotland The Tories don’t need our votes so they don’t care if Scottish businesses go to the wall, taking jobs and livelihoods with them and condemning even more children to cry themselves to sleep on an empty stomach. the pride of a Conservative politician is not worth the tears of a child. It’s time to leave.

he stroke has left me paralized down one side. It is still too early to say whether I will be left with a permanent disability but it is a very real possibility. What worries me most is that I live in a top floor tenement flat which is now totally unsuitable for my changed circumstances. I am doing this crowdfunder to raise money to put towards buying a wee cottage or a ground floor flat that can be adapted to my needs. I hope to raise £50,000 which is around what I would need after selling my wee Barlanark flat. It is a huge amount of money and I really don’t want to seem greedy or unreasonable. I am more grateful than you can possibly imagine for all the love and support, it has fair lifted my battered spirits.

You can donate directly to the crowdfunder on gofundme by clicking the following link, https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-rehab-fundraiser?utm_medium=email&utm_source=product&utm_campaign=p_email%2B2300-co-team-welcome

the way home

Oct20 by weegingerdug

According to a report in the National, the Tories are ‘wargaming ‘to prevent Scottish independence. which probably entails them sitting in their underwear throwing dice at a board upon which sits a brightly coloured miniature army of orcs and trolls otherwise known as The Moray Conservative Association, which Michael Gove painted at university during a depressive come down from a cocaine binge because it was the only way he could find any friends, you get extra points if you can remove theannoying yellow painted one which once appeared an episode of BBC Question time and has been dining out on it ever since although truth be told it is now very difficult to find a Scottish Tory constituency association office bearer who has not popped up in a BBC QT audience posing as a particularly smug and self-satisfied ordinary member of the public the memo, from a PR company which works closely with the minions of Sauron, which is reportedly the official title of the Number 10 Staff who like Bojo the Clown report directly to Dominic Cummings, warns the Tories that continuing to refuse Scotland another indy referendum is doomed to be counterproductive. by which it meant hat when the Tories kept throwing the sixteen sided dice on the no Section 30 order square it didn’t deliver the power of invincibility after all, instead it just led to the section in the gaming manual entitled ‘end of Empire as a horde of very angry Scottish people rose up and flushed all of Michael’ s beloved gaming pieces down the toilet. as a stalling tactic, the Tories are being advised to offer Scotland considerably more powers and to put that to us in a referendum instead. Although unless that also includes the power to tell de Pfeffel Johnson and his Poxy Brexit to Get Tae it’s unlikely that Scotland is going to be interested. but even in the vanishingly unlikely event that the Conservatives were indeed willing to give Scotland all the powers necessary to protect itself from Brexit their fundamental problem is one of credibility. Scotland was promised all sorts of devolution goodies in 2014 which Tories and their allies conspicuously failed to deliver on . So if they are dumb enough to attempt another vow it will only be met with a resounding chorus of ‘why the hell should we believe you this time?

ln a sign of just how out of options they are, the Tories are even being advised to pressure the European Union to reject the idea of Scotland rejoining thehich is way up there in the wishful thinking stakes along with asking your ex girlfriend for the loan of £100 and a lift to Ulapool after you had drunkenly snogged her mother at your engagement party and then shat in the bed. You probably shouldn’t need a very expensive PR company to tell you that at this stage in the proceedings the EU isn’t going to be in the mood to do the Johnson ministration a favour in order to save the British prime minister from the political consequences of his own arsewankery. However it is an indication of just how clueless this jumped up bunch of incompetent turdmonkeys really are that they are unable to work it out for themselves. So while it is never wise to under estimate one’s political opponents it’s not like we are up sgainst political master strategists here. this is a bunch of wannabe wide boys who have just realised that they’re going to go down in the annals of British history along with theapocryphal inhs inhabitants of the anottinghamshire village who one night trawled the village pond with nets in an attempt to catch the moon. and who do not have the foggiest ideahow to prevent themselves being remembered as one of the great face palms of history like that US union general in the Civil war who attempted to rouse his reluctant troopers into battle by riding his horse up and down in front of the ranks while waving his sword at their Confederate opponents and yelling cOMe on lads!. They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dis………….

Finally I have some awful news to end an awful week. I am devastated to tell you that Ginger the dug has gone off to the great big dog park in the Sky. his arthritis had got so bad he could no longer stand. he had stopped eating and wouln’t take his medicine, There was nothing more the vet could do. The end was very peaceful. Peter was with him and Ginger knew he was loved. Ginger arrived in a Scotland that was uncertain and unsure about independence. He leaves a Scotland that is determined that independence is the path we must take. He came into my life as a lost and abandoned Spanish dug and over the course of his life, he showed an entire nation the way home. He was a VERY good boy.

Much love Ginger I am going to miss you. You’ll never be lost or abandoned again. there’s a place for you in the 5 million hearts that you showed the way home.

this stroke has left me paralized down one side. It is still too early to say whether I will be left with a permanent disability but it is a very real possibility. What worries me most is that I live in a top floor tenement flat which is now totally unsuitable for my changed circumstances. I am doing this crowdfunder to raise money to put towards buying a wee cottage or a ground floor flat that can be adapted to my needs. I hope to raise £50,000 which is around what I would need after selling my wee Barlanark flat. It is a huge amount of money and I really don’t want to seem greedy or unreasonable. I am more grateful than you can posssibly imagine for all the love and support, it has far lifted my battered spirits.

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My new book has just been published by Vagabond Voices. Containing the best articles from The National from 2016 to date. Weighing in at over 350 pages, this is the biggest and best anthology of Wee Gingerisms yet. This collection of pieces covers the increasingly demented Brexit years, and the continuing presence and strength of Scotland’s independence movement.

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Wee Ginger Rehab Fundraiser is now live

Oct19 by weegingerdug

This stroke has left me paralized down one side. It is still too early to say whether I will be left with a permanent disability but it is a very real possibility. What worries me most is that I live in a top floor tenement flat which is now totally unsuitable for my changed circumstances. I am doing this crowdfunder to raise money to put towards buying a wee cottage or a ground floor flat that can be adapted to my needs. I hope to raise £50,000 which is around what I would need after selling my wee Barlanark flat. It is a huge amount of money and I really don’t want to seem greedy or unreasonable. I am more grateful than you can posssibly imagine for all the love and support, it has far lifted my battered spirits.

Please also use this email address if you would like the dug and me to come along to your local group for a talk.

You can order the book directly from the publisher. Ordering directly means that postage is free. You can order here –
https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/rants/barking-up-the-right-tree-2019

The Brexit pinocchio and a very big question

Oct18 by weegingerdug

’

As I painfully and slowly peck at the keyboard trying to teach myself to type again following my stroke I am taking immense pleasure reading articles written by a group of folk who are obviously having a worse time of it than I am, British nationalists desperately facing the realisation that their precious union is, to use a technical geopolitical term, gubbed. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/only-a-good-brexit-can-stop-scottish-independence although when I say facing the realisation what that really means is that they are still trying to blame everyone else and are refusing to acknowledge that they are the architects of their own misfortune, classic in the genre is a piece in the telegraph by guido fawkes refugee the Brexit skelf Tom Harwood who is what you would get if pinocchio joined UKIP

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2020/09/18/blame-labour-not-brexiteers-risk-second-scottish-independence/

Tom maintains that opposition to indy held a commanding and growing lead in Scottish polls through 2017 but things only started to change after the Labour party introduced Scotland the radical notion that if we were unhappy with the failure of British nationalism to deliver on the promises that it made to keep us in the uk then we could demand another vote , because we would never have thought of that for ourselves.
Tom’s big idea for blame shifting is that we uppity jocks would have resigned ourselves to our lot if remain campaigners had not legitimised the idea of re-running referendums, who knew that Jo Swinson was so masssively influential in the indy movement , here’s a wee bit of advice for you tom, save your metrobritsplaining for some telegraph tory boy to splain to. I am beginning to suspect that Tom’s grasp of the nuances of the Scottish constitutional debate begins and ends with deep fried mars bars, as proof of his thesis, if that is what we can call it, he presents us with some graphs – what the hell is it with BRITNATS and graphs? – which purport to show a correlation between Labour calls for a rerun of the EU ref and rising support for independence however there is also a correlation between the rise in support for indy and the number of movies that Nicholas Cage has done in a year but this does not necessarily mean that the desire for Scottish independence is predicated upon Nicholas Cage being spittle flecked and manic onscreen however I could be wrong, because – Yoongraph.

weeTom , who is an expert in all things northern because he went to Durham Uni froths for weeks now the separatists in Scotland have been consistently outpolling the unionists. It’s an uphill road for the pro-Union parties as the SNP, abetted by an acquiescent media, swells in formidability. Curiously this party and its divisive agenda has been able to present its extreme, duplicitous constitutional agenda as if it were politically respectable

ok so that’s it then -it’s because of all those scottish newspapers desperately looking for nice things to say about that ESSEMPEE and a BBC Scotland that never stops banging on about how great it would be if Scotland were independent.I Really hate to say this Tom, well actually I don’t, but I am thinking more clearly and coherently about Scottish politics than you are – and I have just had a stroke.

not to be outdone, Roger Tombs,who unlike the Telegraph Pinocchio is apparently actually a proper grown up tells us in the spectator https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/only-a-good-brexit-can-stop-scottish-independence that only a ‘good’ Brexit can stop Scottish independence however since as far as a large majority in Scotland is concerned the only ‘good Brexit is no Brexit at all it would appear that Robert’s suggestions for stopping Scottish independence were doomed even before he pressed the ‘send’ button to email his colonialist style nostrums to his editor Frayzeur’ irritable vowel syndrome Neylseun. Robert thinks that the current demand for independence is all based on a false victimhood from 1314, when in fact it has considerably more to do with the fact that the UK which was promised to Scotland by the likes of Robert in 2014 is not the UK which has been delivered , it’s like we responded to an advert promising World cup seats only instead of receiving match tickets in the post we got delivered a knackered wooden stool with a broken leg and ENGLAND 1966 painted on the seat in flaking red white and blue paint. Robert is miffed because in his view the UK graciously allowed 5 million Scottish people decide the fate of the UK and having conceded the extraordinary privilege’ that Scotland is a nation naturally it ought to be for British nationalists like Robert to decide who should get to vote in the next indyref. There is absolutely nothing in the article which shows that its author has any grasp at all of Scotland’s view of itself as a supposedly equal partner in a union. instead the piece oozes imperialist arrogance and takes it for granted that whatever England decides is a ‘good’ Brexit is something that Scotland should just have to swallow.

But you only know things are really serious when you get a Broontervention, and as reliably as a BBC Scotland debate about independence without any actual independence supporters, up the gordosaurus pops in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/18/we-need-a-new-way-to-run-a-truly-united-kingdom-gordon-brown
to tell us how important it is to do all those things that he vowed he was going to do on faux parchment style newsprint just before the indyref in 2104 except once he got the no vote in the bag he was quite happy for Labour and the Tories to play devolution Jenga in the Smith Commission. What he conspicuously fails to address is why the hell Scotland should believe him or even listen to him, this time. Because we all know that when the time comes for Gordie to deliver on his vows to Scotland he will disappear as quickly as Boris Johnson does after one of his girlfriends tells him the pregnancy test was positive. It’s going to take a whole lot more than a suggestion from Gordie Broon that we’ve heard two dozen times before that the Uk needs to start discussing decentralisation. But so far that seems to be the best that they’ve got. The UK is out of ideas and it is rapidly running out of time. For millions around the globe the British Empire was a tale of tragedy, it is ending as a circus headed by a clown.

Typos, there’s going to be a lot of them, sorry, as I am having to learn to type all over again, please be patient. (Peter Here, I went back and cleaned it up some, but my writing skills are not why he married me so there still some mistakes I am sure.)

An important question. the stroke has left me paralized down one side. It is still too early to say whether I will be left with a permanent disability but it is a very real possibility. What worries me most is that I live in a top floor tenement flat which is now totally unsuitable for my changed circumstances. So my question is , should I start a crowdfunder to raise money to put towards buying a cottage or ground floor flat that can be adapted to my needs. I would probably seek to raise £50,000 which is around what I would need after selling my wee Barlanark flat. it is a huge amount of money and I really don’t want to seem greedy or unreasonable. What do you all think?

Please also use this email address if you would like the dug and me to come along to your local group for a talk.

You can order the book directly from the publisher. Ordering directly means that postage is free. You can order here –
https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/rants/barking-up-the-right-tree-2019

Getting used to it

Oct11 by weegingerdug

getusedtoit

Tory Boy Andrew Bowie, who has never knowingly managed to look as though he’s not smug despite having nothing to be smug about, has declared that the Johnson administration’s internal market bill which undermines the devolution settlement is just the start. Get used to it, he smugly declared on Twitter where his account is bedecked with a photie of himself looking smug. You couldn’t read that comment without realising that it’s finished by an implicit “or else”.

It’s an attitude which might play well with the staunch mob who comprise the dwindling base of Tory support in Scotland, to the rest of us it smacks of a rank arrogant colonialist mentality. “The UK Government is back in Scotland. Get used to it,” he declares, not even pretending to hide the triumphalism and the fact that this bill represents an assault on the devolution settlement and an assault on Scotland itself. Eat your cereal, Scotland.

What he really means is that England’s choice of government is determined to overrule and override the democratic choices made by the people of Scotland. Screw you, Scotland, and screw your devolution. We won’t be getting used to that, Andrew. And we won’t be lectured to by a smug over promoted and pompous six chip pretentious fish supper from a Conservative party students association.

In an article for Scotland on Sunday, the smug MP smugly wrote that the Internal Market Bill was good for Scotland. It’s been rejected by the Scottish Parliament. It’s been condemned by the Farmers Union, the General Teaching Council for Scotland, and the Scottish Council for Development and Industry. Theresa May – with whom a smug looking Andrew pictures himself in his tweet – cannot bring herself to support this bill, which threatens to break international law. She described it as reckless and said that it damaged the UK’s reputation. Is she one of those “separatists” that you castigate too, Andrew?

This bill unilaterally makes far reaching changes to devolution despite the promise made by the Conservatives themselves that they would not meddle with the devolution settlement without the express consent of the Scottish Parliament and despite the fact that they lost heavily in Scotland in the General Election of December 2019. The only people who think this bill is a good thing are those Tories who seek to destroy the devolution settlement and who have no respect for the promises that they themselves made in order to keep Scotland as a part of the UK.

The Tories haven’t won an election in Scotland since 1955, but they still think that they have a god given right to tell Scotland what’s good for it. In the space of just six years we’ve gone from “We love you Scotland. Lead us don’t leave us. Let us deliver the most powerful devolved parliament in the world” to “Suck it up. Do what you’re told. We own you.” Despite what Andrew Bowie so smugly claims, this bill will not save the UK, it is another reason why it’s being destroyed. And it’s being destroyed by those who claim to love it the most. Keep up the good work Andrew. That smug grin of yours is the smugness that comes from self-delusion. It’s as hollow and shallow as support for the UK in Scotland.

What is truly astonishing is that at this juncture in Scottish history, the Conservative branch office in Scotland believe that this is the correct tone to take. He represents a minority party, led by a wildly unpopular leader, and clearly doesn’t care that the attitude he displays will only alienate most people in Scotland even further. He displays that classic case of mistaken identity commonly found amongst Conservative politicians – the difficulty in remembering that they are not gods. There is no egoism more insufferable than the Scottish Conservative belief that they are untouchable. It has been said that complacency is the biggest struggle that we all have to fight. The Scottish Conservatives gave up that struggle a long time ago. The biggest problem of the Scottish Conservative elite is that it is neither smart, nor competent, nor capable. In fact they are not an elite at all. They’re simply what floats to the top in a barrel of rot and decay.

Andrew’s smugathon came on the very same day that an opinion poll was published showing that 64% of people in Scotland believe that this country will vote for independence at the next referendum. 53% are currently in favour of independence according to the same poll, and 56% believe that a pro-indy majority in the next parliament provides Scotland with an absolute right to another referendum. What these figures mean is that there is a significant number of of people within Andrew’s own support base who believe that the precioussss union is already lost. Not even his own supporters believe that what this Conservative government is doing is good for Scotland. They’ve given up on the precioussss union just as Andrew and his colleagues have given up on the battle against complacency. Get used to it, Andrew tells us, as Scotland tells Andrew that it has no intention of getting used to his party’s arrogant contempt.

There is now a strong and consistent majority support in Scotland for independence. There’s a growing expectation that Scotland will soon leave the clowns and the balloons of British nationalism to their own sad and squeaking devices. If there was a time for tact and conciliation from the British Government, this would be it. Instead what we get is an adolescent triumphalism from a Tory boy who can’t even manage to stand out in a field of six. A word to the wise Andrew, if you’re going to be triumphalist it helps a lot if you first do what’s needed to make sure you’re going to win. Instead all that your government is doing is to drive ever more people in Scotland into the welcome arms of the yes movement. It started as a trickle. It’s now a torrent. It will become a flood when your Brexit strikes. We refuse to get used to your party’s lies, its deceit, and its incompetent chaos.

Scotland will soon be out of here. Out of the grasp of Johnson and Cummings. Out of the malign cage into which Westminster has imprisoned our aspirations and dreams. Out of the sinking ship of British exceptionalist nostalgia. Your party, your Brexit, and your xenophobic regressive bunting-fest that passes for politics are finished in Scotland – get used to that, Andrew.

The purpose of this blog is to make a positive case for independence, to attack the pretensions of British nationalism, and to formulate arguments which will help to persuade no voters, undecideds, and soft yes voters to support independence. It’s also to boost the morale of those of us who are already involved in this campaign. I do not provide this platform to allow people to attack others in the movement with whom they disagree. Other people might choose to use their platforms to do so, I don’t.

So if you want to share your favourite conspiracy theories about Nicola Sturgeon or anyone else in this movement – you can go elsewhere. I am past caring whether you think that this means you are being censored. You have no absolute right to use this blog and you most certainly don’t have the right to abuse my hospitality by insulting me personally.

Please also use this email address if you would like the dug and me to come along to your local group for a talk.

GINGER2cropped Gaelic maps of Scotland are available for £15 each, plus £7 P&P within the UK for up to three maps. T-shirts are £12 each, and are available in small, medium, large, XL and XXL sizes. P&P is £5 for up to three t-shirts. My books, the Collected Yaps Vols 1 to 4 are available for £11 each. P&P is £4 for up to two books. Payment can be made via Paypal.

newbook My new book has just been published by Vagabond Voices. Containing the best articles from The National from 2016 to date. Weighing in at over 350 pages, this is the biggest and best anthology of Wee Gingerisms yet. This collection of pieces covers the increasingly demented Brexit years, and the continuing presence and strength of Scotland’s independence movement.

You can order the book directly from the publisher. Ordering directly means that postage is free. You can order here –
https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/rants/barking-up-the-right-tree-2019

CROWDFUNDER: A third Scot Goes Pop poll on independence as No Deal looms

Oct10 by weegingerdug

Click here to go straight to the fundraising page.

Hi, I’m James Kelly, and I write the pro-independence blog Scot Goes Pop, which has a particular emphasis on opinion poll analysis. Earlier this year I crowdfunded two exclusive Panelbase polls on independence, and although they both showed exactly the same result (Yes 52%, No 48%), they were both landmarks in their own ways. The poll in January showed Yes at the highest level of support since the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum in 2016, suggesting that the general election result had been a gamechanger. And the poll in June was the first to show that, entirely against the initial expectations, the events of the pandemic had pushed Yes back into the lead after a slight dip. It turned out to be the first in an unprecedented string of seven polls showing a pro-indy majority.

With your help, I’d like to commission a third poll before the year is out. Once again, we’re in a new environment, and public opinion may have moved on as a result. The Internal Market Bill has trashed both international law and the devolution settlement that was so overwhelmingly endorsed by the Scottish public in the 1997 referendum. A No Deal Brexit appears to be moving closer. On the other hand, there have also been recent high-profile events that may have worked against the Yes side. So there are no guarantees of what a poll will show, but I firmly believe that polls on independence are good things in themselves. At this stage our opponents would dearly love the issue to be forgotten about, which perhaps explains why around half of the indy polls this year have been commissioned by Yes-supporting alternative media clients. If we weren’t doing the job ourselves, it’s almost true to say that it wouldn’t be done at all. The mainstream media have all but given up on indy polling.

To be clear about what you’ll get for your donations: if the target is reached (or close), I’ll commission a poll from a firm affiliated to the British Polling Council at some point between now and Christmas. It will ask the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?”, a party political voting intention question, and a number of supplementary questions of interest to the Yes movement. Bear in mind, as always, that there’s no way of knowing whether there’ll be a Yes lead or a No lead. It’s always a bit of a gamble, but with the right result and the right timing, the impact can be considerable.

Click here if you’d like to donate.

Whatever happened to the positive case for the union?

Oct10 by weegingerdug

There are few certainties in life, just death, taxes, and a Labour party that promises that it’s going to listen to the people of Scotland when it’s out of power. There’s also a Conservative party that keeps claiming to be speaking for the majority in Scotland despite the fact that its vote share has been stuck in the 20th percentile for the past couple of decades, but that’s not so much a certainty as it is a delusion and a failure of basic arithmetic.

The Labour leadership has been making overtures to the Scottish electorate again, in much the same way that you keep getting text messages from your creepy ex telling you that they’ve changed. After taking you for granted during your entire relationship, after ignoring what you wanted and only when you threatened to leave managing the most basic lip service to your needs, Labour now wants Scotland to know that it’s listening to us, and that it wants our trust back.

Speaking at the Labour party’s virtual conference, New Leader Keir Starmer did he mention he’s the New Leader with capital letters and everything and that he’s not Jeremy Corbyn, said that he didn’t think that the values of the people of Scotland had changed. And this would be true. It’s just that the values of the Labour party did. Scotland still sees itself as a European nation, the Labour party now accepts Brexit. Scotland wanted greater powers for Holyrood, whether independence or the devo-max promised to us by Gordon Brown, and we got a Labour party which was even less willing to devolve new powers after the indyref of 2014 than the Tory party was. That would be the indyref when the Labour party stood shoulder to shoulder with the Tories, gleefully grinning outside a branch of Asda in Falkirk after David Cameron leant on his pals who’re the heads of supermarket companies to issue a statement claiming food prices would be higher in an independent Scotland. That one image was Labour’s Scottish epitaph, the physical embodiment of their betrayal.

Labour is now promising to listen, just as they promised to listen and to reflect after their defeat in the 2007 Scottish elections, just as they did following their defeats in 2011, the route they suffered in the General Election of 2015, their losses in 2016 and 2019. Yet here we are with a Labour party still promising to listen and showing no sign at all that it has learned any lessons except a burning resentment that the Scottish votes to which it feels entitled have gone elsewhere.

Meanwhile the Conservatives continue to trash any residual faith that people in Scotland might have had that Scotland’s interests can be met within the UK. Despite the Conservatives claiming that they’re the only ones who are standing up for the interests of the agricultural sector, it has been reported in The Times that the real prime minister, Dominic Cummings, has instructed Conservative MPs not to support any amendments to the Agriculture Bill which is currently passing through the Commons. I seem to recall the Leave campaign during the EU referendum demanding that the UK should ‘take back control’ so that unelected bureaucrats could no longer tell British government ministers and MPs what to do, and here we are with an unelected bureaucrat telling British government ministers and MPs what to do.

If passed with no amendments the bill ensures that ministers will be able to enforce lower food standards in the interests of doing trade deals. The UK doesn’t welcome migrants, asylum seekers, or refugees fleeing wars and brutality amply weaponised by the British arms trade, but it will welcome chlorinated chicken with open arms. It opens the floodgates to food produced to lower standards, which is less safe to the public, and which undercuts domestic agricultural producers. There’s your global Britain for you.

Just a few months ago, in news you may have missed what with the apocalypse and everything, leaked emails from Tim Leunig, an advisor to Number 10 and a close associate of Dominic Cummings, suggested that the UK really doesn’t need an agriculture sector at all. This is the same man who also reportedly once suggested that the British Government should pull all state support from “failed Northern cities” and should encourage their inhabitants to move south.

Agriculture forestry and fishing makes a larger proportional contribution to the Scottish economy than it does to UK’s. Food and drink represent the largest single export sector in the Scottish economy. The Conservatives’ new bill risks significant and lasting damage to that sector. They will happily sacrifice Scotland in order to extract some advantage for their pals in the City of London. The Conservatives have no one’s interests at heart except their own. They represent the politicisation of selfishness, the elevation of greed to a religion.

The performance artiste with the stage name Boris Johnson couldn’t be less popular in Scotland if he’d run naked and maskless down the fresh meat aisle in Morrisons and then done a dump at the checkout while screaming about a post he’d read on Facebook from his uncle that proved that the virus is all a lie. Meanwhile Douglas Ross is far too busy opening his gob and putting his foot in it to be an effective Saviour of the Union™. So now the Tories are looking to Rishi Sunak to save them and their precioussss union – by which they mean Scotland’s incorporation into a unitary Brexitland with its chlorinated chicken, its third rate genuine Scotch whisky made in India, and its union flegs plastered on everything. This is because Rishi has spent the past few months spaffing borrowed money around and the Conservatives are hoping that no one in Scotland will realise that we don’t need the UK Treasury to borrow money for us when we could just as easily do it for ourselves. However Rishi’s reputation as the Tory Santa Claus is about to come to an end when the furlough system ends soon and people start to lose their jobs. And all this just as we reach the crunch point in the Brexit process where the absolute best possible outcome we can hope for is a crappy deal that will still do massive damage to an economy that’s already been battered by the lockdown.

So we have a Labour party that always promises to listen when it’s in opposition but which never seems to manage to do anything about it or to show any concrete evidence that it’s actually heard the voters. We get nothing but repeated mouthings about a federalism fairy that never comes close to flying. We have a Conservative party that’s hell bent on the hardest possible Brexit and which will sacrifice even their traditional support base in Scotland in order to do so. Remember when opponents of independence used to promise us that they’d make a positive case for the union? This is where it is now.

Please also use this email address if you would like the dug and me to come along to your local group for a talk.

You can order the book directly from the publisher. Ordering directly means that postage is free. You can order here –
https://www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/rants/barking-up-the-right-tree-2019

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

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dead leg’s union units

unfair to scum

coming down with a severe case of the bunting

the two short plancks length

the way home

Wee Ginger Rehab Fundraiser is now live

The Brexit pinocchio and a very big question

Getting used to it

CROWDFUNDER: A third Scot Goes Pop poll on independence as No Deal looms

Whatever happened to the positive case for the union?

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