Friday , March 29 2024

Tag Archives: Scottish National Party

To see ourselves as others see us

There is a stuffy consensus in Scotland. There always has been. Perhaps it has to do with the Presbyterian idea of the elect. We are exceptional. We are different. Wha’s like us. It makes our newspapers exceptionally dull, because almost no-one questions the assumptions which are shared even by political …

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My offer is this, nothing

Many Scottish nationalists are impatient and permanently angry.  The hundreds of thousands who joined the SNP after losing the referendum in 2014 are both a blessing and a curse. Of course, they are better than the alternative. Remember when there was the idea that the SNP would somehow fade away …

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It’s time to melt Salmond’s rocks

There is an odd concept in Scottish politics that things that are paid for by someone else are free. The SNP in particular has based much of its populism on providing these “freebies” to their supporters. We now have “free” prescriptions, “free” eye tests, “free” passage over the sea to …

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Gaelic is for nationalists

I was born in a small village in rural Aberdeenshire and grew up speaking both English and Doric. It was natural for me to do so because these were the languages that were used in daily life. My father worked in the oil industry and so for a while we …

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Let the SNP wait….and wait….and wait

How do we respond to the latest threat from the SNP to break up our country? We must respond in a variety of ways. One of them is humour. The gorillas are on the loose again beating their chests and drinking epic amounts of Ribena. This naturally makes them a …

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It’s Scottish nationalism that suffers from xenophobia

Whichever fat fingered BBC technician “accidentally” substituted some film of a psychotic rampaging gorilla for the latest film of Nicola Sturgeon making threats deserves some sort of award. Give that man a Nobel Prize for services to humour. There is a long history in Britain of turning people like Sturgeon into …

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Gone, gone the damage done

There is a reason I’ve been writing so much since the EU referendum and with perhaps a higher intensity than before. I returned from holiday in early July only to find one of my friends and colleagues in absolute bits. I remember that whole period of uncertainty leading up to …

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Scottish nationalism has reached the fundamentalist stage

When I stand at my bus stop waiting to go home I watch the lorries pass by. Nearly every single one has a combination of Scottish flags somewhere in the cab. There is usually a phrase about Scotland being bonnie or being forever. Sometimes there are bits of tartanry dotted …

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A world without work

I am running out of things to write about Scottish politics. Maybe it is just that I have written too much. I certainly imagine that my opponents think this. There is a special place in their hearts for me. Eventually they all blow up and say something nasty even if …

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A “Hard Brexit” will bury the SNP forever

I never thought economics was a subject worth studying until 2008. But suddenly with the worst economic crisis since the 1930s making a difference to all of our lives, I thought it best to try to come to some sort of understanding of what was going on. I didn’t, of …

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Always call a thing what it is

Everyone must respond in their own way to the continual attempts by the SNP to break up our country. We all have different experiences and make different choices based on those experiences. I’ve been in the debate from the beginning. I thought at the start that it was a simple …

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The Disunited Kingdom of South Britain and Northern Ireland

There are an awful lot of British citizens at the moment who are at best indifferent to the fate of our country or at worst hostile. The most vocal of these are Scottish nationalists, but they are not alone. There are Welsh nationalists too who somehow think that Welsh independence …

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Should British citizens pledge loyalty to Britain?

The UK is a country with people from many places. We have no choice but to try to get on with each other. Brexit may enable the UK Government to have greater control over immigration, but lots of people are going to continue to come to Britain from Europe and …

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Scottish nationalists reject what we share and what we are

There is a pattern to conversations with Scottish nationalists online. At some point the same old arguments are repeated. It is these arguments above all that mean that there is very little common ground between Pro UK people in Scotland and those who would prefer that Scotland became a sovereign …

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It’s time to stop spoiling the SNP or the tantrums will get worse

I keep reading stories about how the SNP are trying to block Brexit. Sometimes they seem determined to stop the whole of the UK leaving the EU. At other times they apparently want Scotland to both remain in the UK and in the EU. There have been all sorts of …

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Is the SNP’s “National Conversation” only with itself?

The SNP are planning another so called “National Conversation” on whether Scotland should leave the UK. It was supposed to happen this summer, but has been put off for a while because of the UK’s decision to leave the EU. It’s crucial therefore to realise that even if the UK …

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How to make the SNP’s task still harder

There is a very respectable argument for Scottish independence that surprisingly is rarely made by supporters.  It goes something like this. We want Scotland to be independent because we want Scotland to be a sovereign independent nation state just like all the others in the world and we don’t care …

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You’ve already had your independence referendum

I feel like I’ve been in one long referendum campaign for the past five years and more. I’ve written over two hundred blogs, nearly all of them about Scottish politics. It gets tiring. Now some Scottish nationalists want another referendum. The SNP campaigned for Scottish independence first time round and …

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Scottish independence is a dead issue

I woke up one morning in Spain to find that Britain had voted to leave the EU. I got a shock. I was certain that Brexit would lose. I reacted to the news with some pleasure, but also some nervousness. It would probably have been better for me financially if …

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Only children are scared of a pin-prick

This may be my last bit of writing for a while. I deliberately organised things such that I’d be away during the referendum. I shall not be paying much attention to the news. My guess is that most of the people in the part of Spain I like to go …

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