Aug 31, 2014 | Uncategorized
I hadn’t planned to return to this topic, and it is probably a bad idea to blog when fizzing. However:
Over on Facebook someone has just commented that anyone voting ‘No’ clearly relinquishes the right to call themselves Scottish. I can’t believe that anyone of sense could say something so profoundly stupid. Leave aside that, if the polls are correct, that means that somewhere over 50% of Scots are dismissed as ‘not Scots’, it veers perilously close to any other ideology that asserts that identity is based on some defining marker of belief, and that if you hold some other belief, well, you’re not really pure are you? Not one of us.
We have had plenty of that over the centuries and it is about the last thing that we should be dealing with now.
Aug 27, 2014 | Uncategorized
I have maintained silence on the subject of the upcoming independence referendum here in Scotland. This was mainly because I believe a private vote is, er, private and we all need to get along after the vote no matter what the outcome. Also, there can be consequences of getting too engaged in the discussion.
Lest you think I’m being unduly cautious, I’ve already been advised elsewhere to fuck off and go seek a welcome with BNP and UKIP scum because I raised a querying eyebrow at some projected costs of setting up a new administration which looked to me, as a former civil servant, to be somewhat understated. A nice chap on Twitter the other day suggested that an encounter with a baseball bat would do me some good. Blowhards, of course, but enough to encourage me to opt for a quiet life.
I’ve changed my mind, though, mainly because the “campaign” and the “debates” have been so crappy, but also because of what seems to me to be a drift towards a form of mass lunacy.
Everything I’ve seen has been focused on some core issues to do with the real or supposed consequences of a “yes” or a “no” vote and a lot of that has been ill-informed junk and special pleading. I’ve seen this from both sides of the yes/no divide, though in the past couple of days the yes camp seem to me to have become particularly shameless and delusional.
For the most part, though, none of the debate has focused on the actual question asked in the referendum, which is not about consequences of independence, or about whether Scotland could be an independent country: the question is whether one thinks that Scotland should be an independent country.
My views on this are not influenced by the intervention of celebrities or politicians or journalists or anyone else – we are all free to make up our own minds and they are welcome to their views.
For all of my adult life (and I’m 55 this year) my answer to the question of whether Scotland should be independent has been no. I have never heard a convincing, or even a good, case made for independence. Nothing over this relentless and dreary campaign has caused me alter my view: in fact just the opposite. I can see no good reason why Scotland ought to be independent: not a single one.
So I’ll come out of the closet: I’m voting no. Naw. Nae chance.
Aug 18, 2014 | Uncategorized
On Friday I was in Glasgow and drifted off to sleep for a short time on the bus coming home on the M8.
I have travelled that road many times over the past forty years or so, yet I woke up to a strange feeling of not having a clue where I was or where I was going. Somehow my consciousness, my awareness, had not caught up with the messages from my eyes and I found myself seeing things that I had never noticed before.
Odd how the familiar can become strange; that you can be disorientated by the familiar.
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