Here’s the thing; the door is open. It has always been open. All this time we have been free to leave whenever we want. But we have been conditioned to believe, like a herd of sheep, that only the landowner can take us through the gate. Thus, we have become our own gaolers. This is how power operates, this is how it enslaves. It imprisons the mind of the dominated, and produces in the dominated mind the will of the master. Scottish independence can and must begin only in the realisation that we are free when we want to be free.
Bodyguard: The BBC and Soft Power
In spite of his obvious intelligence, his quick-wittedness, and his natural ingenuity, ‘the Scot’ is slavishly obedient to the point of servility. In fact, this is made quite explicit in a scene – after the first attempt on the Home Secretary’s life (played by Keeley Hawes); after saving her life almost at the cost of his own a uniformed officer points him to the service entrance of the hotel where she is staying. Take the backdoor Jock! As always, ‘the Scot’ gets ahead in the world by being perfectly obedient to his betters. He cannot be the hero of the story unless he knows his place.
Ireland is a Key to Understanding Scotland
Given the lies and the deliberate distortion of the narrative by the BBC and the rest of the British media throughout the Troubles; making the IRA, Sinn Féin (painted in the British press as the “political-wing” of the IRA), and the wider Irish Republican movement out to be the aggressors, it is understandable that the independence movement in Scotland would not want to be linked to this story. This is why the false narrative of Ulsterisation worked.
Conflict and Independence
Listening to people in the “grassroots” of the independence movement, as opposed to those who have styled themselves the political, cultural, and intellectual leadership of the movement (the kites and the crows), we hear other objectives. There are those who want independence “for their children and grandchildren,” “for the future,” “to end austerity,” “to put power back in the hands of the Scottish people,” and so on. This is not the independence envisioned by Sarsfield, the leaders of 1798, nor indeed Ireland’s campaign for Home Rule.
Gerry Hassan’s House Divided
What Hassan is doing, in effect, is imposing the political division he would prefer to see realised – the class division. There are those with education who know what they are doing because of where they were born into in society – “the more pragmatic,” and then there are those who are emotive, driven by passion and blind faith in a charismatic leader. This is why I have described his comment as both superior and sneering. Hassan’s “philosophical” gripe is that the movement appears to have transcended his class-based assumption...
The Prose and Cons of Union
Every confidence trick has its mark, and every mark has to be reeled in with a story – this is the prose or the narrative of union. Over time the prose of the union has changed but the purpose has always been the same, to keep us in the game. It was once about benefiting from England’s other colonies. Yes, we benefitted alright. We got progress: The Clearances, emigration, industrialised poverty, a metropolis in London that soaked up our best and brightest. If being bled dry was our objective, we did alright out of the union.
Baby Box: Shock and Awe
Taking the fight to the Scottish National Party with the spectre of dead babies is the nuclear option of scare tactics. No fear will strike parents so close to the bone as this threat will. Every parent – every decent human being – who reads it will get it. They will understand the warning: That they will be complicit in the deaths of defenceless little babies if they lend their support, their votes, to the SNP and to the independence movement. Like the dull ring of a funeral bell, the message is unmistakable.
Westminster is Sovereign. Holyrood is Not.
When the Advocate General says Westminster is sovereign and the Scottish parliament is not he is presuming a definition of sovereignty which is fundamentally foreign to the Scottish national constitution. More than this, he is assuming a unicity – a singular notion of sovereignty and power in a singular British state – that has never before been made explicit. He is giving England’s idea of sovereignty priority over that of Scotland. This engenders a worrying logical problem; unicity renders the heretofore existing duality of legal understandings impossible.
Random Public Journal 