Now when I listen to Leonard and Sweeney and Co. prattling on about the working-class it means nothing. Their insincerity and lack of authenticity no longer upset me. Council housing area vermin (CHAVs) like me stopped caring about their hypocrisy years ago. Most of us gave up on politics altogether, thinking no doubt that David Cameron was at least honest about his loathing of us as a class without aspiration. As we awoke during the 2014 independence referendum campaign, after a long sleep, we saw up close how Labour campaigned against us.
National Pride
Cat Boyd – writer and “internationalist” – gave us another horrifying example of this pitiful self-loathing attitude at the weekend when she posted to her Twitter page a short video featuring an ad by the Scotland Is Now campaign, a campaign designed to attract tourism and foreign investment to the country, with her own comment: “peak nationalism.” As small-minded, xenophobic, and potentially violent supporters of Brexit were marching through the streets of London trailing effigies of hanged politicians behind them, Boyd was doing her best to smear an effort to project Scotland...
Independence Road
The vision of independence is one of a through road on which power is brought back to Scotland, enabling us to tackle the problems neither Westminster nor Scotland’s unionists have any interest in addressing. The bottom line is that we can do nothing to better Scotland without first returning state power to the country. We may be able to see the problems we face. We might even see the causes of these problems. But there is precious little we can do to change things without first winning independence and in so doing taking the power we need to effect the change we want.
Reading a Troll’s Playbook
Recently, I have attracted the attention of such a troll. This person, as is to be expected, has an anonymous profile and uses that anonymity to bully and intimidate social media users who happen to disagree with his “radical” political opinions. Over the past couple of weeks pro-independence bloggers have been putting out fires started by an accusation by Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard and the leadership of the GMB Labour-affiliated trade union that a blog published by the pro-independence blogger Gareth Wardell was an anti-Semitic attack levelled at GMB activist Rhea Wolfson.
Did You Just Cross Yourself?
Sectarianism is a serious social problem in our country, for sure, but there is little we can do about it when it happens outside institutions. We can’t police people’s homes to stop parents poisoning the minds of their children. The best we can do here is improve diversity awareness and education in schools and hope some of it sticks. But racism, prejudice, bigotry, and sectarianism thrive in institutions where such cultures have gone unchallenged and allowed to fester.
Hugging the Hateful
Gillian Martin MSP published an article on her personal blog eleven years ago that has returned, as these things often do, to bite her on the bum. She described transgender students – people over whom she was in a position of power – in the most disgusting way imaginable. She reduced some of the most personal and treasured truths of their beings to worthlessness and shame. Since then she has deleted this horrible post and two years ago she made a full and unreserved apology for what she had written.
Scotland’s Grievance Politics
It gets worse for unionism, however, with individual unionists clutching at straws in their efforts to delegitimise the independence movement’s grievances and invent their own. Examples of this abound, and we are well familiar with them: The claim that the Scottish government’s baby boxes will only result in the incineration of our wee bundles of joy, that Scottish infrastructural investment – lauded everywhere else in the world – is here nothing but a “vanity project,” and that independence will only hasten an invasion by space aliens (yes, they said this).
Hatred Rising: Britain’s Real Toxic Nerve Agent
People the likes of Labour’s Jim Dempster, Hugh Gaffney, and Davie McLachlan, and the Tories’ Robert Davies and Alastair Majury ought to be held personally responsible for their racism and bigotry, but we must acknowledge that this is all part of a much larger thing. I can do as I usually do at this point and remind people that this stems from ideas of racial supremacy at the heart of British nationalism – which it does – and that these passions are being stirred up by politicians for political purposes – which they are, but it is bigger than this.
Random Public Journal 