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A New Desperation from Daily Mail? - Joe Middleton
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Most papers in Scotland tend towards a certain sceptism towards Scottish Independence and no-one really expects the Scottish version of the Daily Mail to be any different. Nonetheless the paper appears to have plumbed new depths of journalistic bias with the article 'a New Racism' which appeared on the 19th April 2008.
Timed to coincide with the SNP's spring conference, coincidentally the 40th Anniversary of Enoch Powell's infamous rivers of blood speech, the Daily Mail claimed that "Scottish nationalism like every other form of nationalism is dangerous and has its roots in Xenophobia and racism." Now of course this argument is unfortunately not new. Certain unionists would love to imagine that Alex Salmond is another version of Nick Griffin and they regularly suggest that Scots nationalism might just possibly be akin to racism.
In actual fact of course there are two distinct types of nationalism. There is the imperial type where adherents believe in the superiority of their country to others and attempt to assert their superiority by conquering or exploiting other nations. There is also however the civic type where the people of a country join together in a common democratic cause. Mr Grant admits this when he remarks that "nationalism has often been a necessary step on the road to democracy."
It's not difficult to guess what type the SNP belongs to and it is not difficult either to imagine why the Daily Mail is pretending that the exact opposite is the case and accusing the party of it's own xenophobia. That xenophobia is a trademark of many downmarket delusionary tabloids who seem to believe against all the odds that the Empire is not over and that the EU is desperately trying to steal Britain's imaginary status as a world power.
It must be difficult for the Mail to lay an effective glove on the SNP Government. After all the right wing Tory nature of the Daily Mail is hardly in tune with the Scottish people, unlike the SNP’s brand of social democracy which has it riding very high in the polls. Desperate times obviously call for very desperate measures.
Effectively the writer of the article, James Grant, seems to imagine that Scotland does not exist as a political entity at all and that the very existence of a demand for Scottish home rule of any type is an affront to everyone else in the UK. The unionists should change their name to 'humanists' to make clear their refusal to have anything to do with this nationalism of the SNP he suggests.
What Mr Grant forgets is that Britain is a nation and that British nationalism ie unionism is as much of a factor in every UK political party as it is for the Scottish National Party. While as I said before some unionists might like to hypocritically suggest from time to time that the SNP are somewhere akin to the Nazis it is usually done from an anonymous pseudonym on an internet message board!
To put this dubious suggestion squarely in to the public domain based on a pretty innocuous assertion of Scottish popular sovereignty by Alex Salmond and suggest that this indicates any form of racism at all puts Mr Grant's employers in the frame for a potentially very costly libel action.
While the Scottish Government and the SNP are not known for their libelous nature they are very serious about their commitment to anti-racism and stamping on any trace of anti-Englishness. I suggest it might be in the Mails interests to tread very carefully in future and possibly a public apology might be wise if it's not already too late.
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less than a minute ago
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BRING BACK INDEPENDENCE? - John MacCallum
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Someone clever once said “Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail”. Well, we’ve had over 300 years of the inability to plan for ourselves and I for one am sick to the back teeth of having to listen to a less than mediocre annual school report.
Is it time for a ‘Better’ Scotland? It’s certainly time to take a good hard look at our lot in the grand scheme of things and answer one question honestly. That is, as individuals and as a nation could we be doing better? For me there is no need for qualifications in economics, business or science to answer this question but rather a simple belief that if we again have the courage to accept ownership of our own affairs we will certainly perform better individually and collectively – that’s my logic at any rate.
For many years I have tried to understand the reasons why many of my fellow Scots have reservations about returning to a state of independence. In everyday conversations for some twenty years I have mentioned the proposition and listened especially carefully if given a negative reaction – and there were many. However, it wasn’t until studying at Stirling University in my late 20’s that I really understood a basic truth in life. Any change to a routine, comfortable or otherwise, will have both positive and negative physiological impacts. Take the simple analogy of trading your old car in for a newer model. On the positive side many will just accept the car will be better just because it’s newer and therefore should be, for others the fact that it is different and somewhat unknown will occupy their mind with varying degrees of doubt.
Unfortunately for the cause of Scottish Independence the negative impact or effect is usually increased relative to the time the routine has been operating. Oh yes, it’s been over 300 years! But, there is still hope, routines can reach maturity and peak, at which point the negativity is gradually replaced with an appetite for change associated with a reduction of perceived risk. In a nutshell, confidence grows via our experience and improved understanding. In Scotland, and the present UK as a whole, I believe, as I believe many others do, that we are on the right side of this peak and it is indeed now time for innovative and progressive change.
Scotland has increasingly been held back by the natural bias of the UK to be centrally governed in a manner that puts the interests of the biggest shareholder to the fore and consequently the other regions are compromised in terms of policy relevance, design, effectiveness and efficiency. The fact is that the only way a truly united kingdom would not suffer from this eccentric centralism would be for each member region to have equal parliamentary and administrative representation! And, since this would be an obvious ‘unthinkable’ compromise for the present majority shareholder, needless to say an incredibly inefficient arrangement for all, we must concern ourselves fully with the real task of bringing back a non-dependant Scotland. Another well disguised truth, independence is simply a return to our original non-dependent sovereign state.
So, can a non-dependent Scotland really do better? Just imagine once again having the full range of powers to Plan, Implement and Evaluate (PIE) at the highest level for the benefit of the Scottish people. No more reserved areas of control where Scotland is effectively limited to subservient implementation duties, where the management cycle is controlled by the UK complete with the aforementioned bias and inefficiency. Could it really be as simple as PIE? For myself and many others there is absolutely no doubt that the focused and tailored management of our own affairs will indeed deliver improved economic strength and provide solid foundations for the benefit of the Scottish people for centuries to come.
Forget the recent analogy with performing dwarfs for the real challenge is to awake the sleeping beauty that is our very own S
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36 days ago
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Chris Walker - OF NAOST AND AOST
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From the poem ‘Arabia‘, “He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia / They have stolen his wits away.”
‘Those who have lived among the Arabs discover that granite hard-headedness coexists with romantic sensibilities in about the same proportions as we find, say, in Scotland. The paradox is vivid and defies explanation.’
- Mark Allen.
“Who gave Alex Salmond the right to speak for Scottish soldiers (?),” thunders the Hen Broon of Scottish political journalism, Alan Cochrane. Simple answer: the people of Scotland. He is the First Minister of our government, isn’t he? Has nobody let Mr Cochrane know? Mr Salmond claims that Scottish soldiers - across the spectrum - embody the thoughts and feelings of all Scots. Or doesn’t the play ‘Black Watch’, for example, speak for anybody?
Somebody badly needed to address ‘Iraq‘, given the narrative and credentials of those who have spoken for Scotland hitherto; such as John Reid who once boasted of knowing the IRA songbook from cover to cover. Scotland? Iraq has proved to be the defining issue in the political discourse across the globe, after all. And it has changed Scottish politics, perhaps for ever. It’s the least of it, but in its Imperial deceits and mendacity, ‘Iraq’ has made the writer a Nationalist.
Alex Salmond is often accused of hubris. Well, better a bit of that than the cringe to which our nation has been subjected for so long. Previous Scottish “spokesmen” on Iraq have included Tony Lynton Blair and his boss George Walker Bush. Others will seek to speak for us in the future; more of them later. And what exactly were their credentials? Let‘s have a look at Blair‘s performance for starters.
‘Shock and awe’ was the Coalition’s chosen tactic with Jeffersonian democracy to emerge as soon as we entered through Assassin’s Gate into Baghdad itself. Prior to that, and Blair’s first failure, was to be so absorbed by his favourite ploy - his overweaning belief that he is always right - Not An Obvious Scottish Trait (NAOST). When that policy proved less than successful he produced his disastrous dossiers, central to his plan to convince those most opposed to the war. Although written by a man who can play the bagpipes, Alastair Campbell, it was NAOST again. For the sexy dossiers went down like a burst tartan balloon. Then the biggest mistake of all - making the WMD the “casus belli” and their discovery the litmus test. You got it, and what your granny meant when she warned of ‘baskets and eggs’ therein.….
And so we come to the man with supposed Perthshire ancestry, George Walker Bush, not so much “granite hard-headed” as empty-heided. Since my Grandfather whose name I bear came from Perth (and was in the Black Watch, incidentally), I live with the dreadful thought that we might be related. What’s Dubbya saying now? He‘s “moving on” as Blair would say and he’s saying that the “world is a safer place“, because of the criminal invasion and the removal of the bad guy. But is he flying in the face of the facts? - NAOST again. Now one should never "misunderestimate" George - as he once put it - anent issues such as these. However, and as far as I know, the last objective attempt to calibrate whether or not the "world is a safer place" was carried out by Bergen and Cruikshanks (B&C) last year. Au contraire, they found that danger globally had increased seven-fold as triggered by the invasion and occupation. Could George W. just be wrong, I wonder?
AOST - AN OBVIOUS SCOTTISH TRAIT enters both our thought processes and narrative here.
When I lived and worked in Baghdad (1984-87) I took great interest in epidemiological work focused on water supply systems for which I had major responsibility across the Central Region of Iraq now known as the Sunni triangle. Epidemiology, the study of occurrence, distribution and control of diseases in populations, has much in common and overlaps with death-by-con
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47 days ago
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One only hopes that, somewhere, there is a group called The Union Con...
