We should be interested to note too that the statue of him which was torn down was not erected until 1846 – some 174 years after his death, during the reign of Victoria – ‘the famine queen.’ Statues are rarely set up to celebrate people. Even though it is a person on the pedestal, if it were the case that great people were memorialised in this way simply because of their greatness or their contribution to their community, city, or nation, we would not be able to move for statues. There just is not enough bronze in the world. Such statues are erected to glorify ideas and ideals...
The Mackay Affair
Behind this propaganda front, behind the open door between a compromised media and the state security services, is active intelligence – the spooks. Britain makes a habit of knowing its enemies, and the SNP is an enemy of the British state. We know MI5 surveilled and infiltrated groups of environmentalists and tiny Trotskyist political parties. So, to think for a moment the SNP is not under constant and intrusive close surveillance is just plain stupidity. It can be taken for granted that every single text sent by SNP politicians is seen by someone in British Intelligence.
Normal Rules Don’t Apply to Them
Call it prejudice or a chip on my shoulder – I call it common sense, but here’s my take: The admission that these people [used to?] use coke is a window into a bigger picture of their reality. What is for millions of people around the world the root cause of their suffering is to these privileged upper class shites a mere recreation, a good buzz that accompanies all the other privileges their wealth and social position affords them. Not even hiding it from their peers, they organise exclusive get-togethers in the most luxurious hotels where they can hire in all sorts of fleshly delights.
Why Are We Still in Westminster?
Westminster no longer benefits Scotland. Westminster never benefitted Scotland. What is meant here is that Westminster, so long as we remain there, functions to impede the further growth of the independence movement. The problem this causes us has become so glaring, so obvious, that it has become a source of shame. Independence presupposes a nation’s freedom, and Scotland can never and will never be free until it has rejected its slavish place in England’s parliament.
Independence: There’s No Time Left
Realpolitik is the business of practical politics, based on the ever-changing conditions of the political weather than on idealised notions and ideas based on ideology. We may have independence as our immediate political goal, but the weather systems in which we must navigate a course to that end are in a constant state of flux – meaning, quite simply, that grand strategies and masterplans seldom, if ever, actually exist. So, we are left to deal with day-to-day contingencies, and, when it comes to the current state of Brexit, those are coming at us thick and fast.
Clair Ridge: Thieves and Gaslighters
To put this is Texas terms: We’ve struck oil. We are rich. We are richer than our wildest dreams! But, wait, we’re not. We are not an independent country. We voted No to independence in 2014, believing we were broke, and that the oil was running it. We bought the lie that what oil we had left wouldn’t be worth a pittance. The same people who were laughing at us then are laughing at us now; that oil bonanza – which they knew was in the pipeline – will not be coming to us. It will be going right where it has always gone, to London.
Not Quite a State Visit
Britain can’t die like this! For all we – Scottish independentistas – may dislike being “British,” with that identity stamped all over our passports – quite literally for the whole world to see, Britain has been, for the most part, a worthy adversary. Sure, if this is how it ends I’ll take it, but I think it deserves better. The romantic in me wants to defeat Britain in a final bloodless Bannockburn, where we get to see the last heroic charge of the redcoats mown down under the mighty artillery of Scotland’s democratic spirit. We know how much the Brits love their glorious failures.
Power is Never Given
The referendum we were granted in 2014 was an anomaly. We would never have been given the opportunity to vote on independence if those in power in Westminster thought for a single moment that we would elect to leave. They were banking on our defeat, and they expected a defeat so humiliating, so utter and comprehensive it would, in a single blow, send our smouldering hope flying off into the abyss of history and ancient and half-remembered lore. But we took up that gauntlet and we bloodied their nose. Our defeat then was the pallid victory of the swindler...
Random Public Journal 