I am available again for Yes meetings on 15, 16 and 17 September. Invitations welcome through the contact button above. Happy to go anywhere I can do good. My St Andrews speech a week ago has now had 75,000 views on Youtube.
It is symptomatic of the way this campaign has gone that I can find nothing online from the No camp which has had one fifth as many views, with the solitary exception of the PatronisngBTWoman video, which has massive views from people making fun of it.
Miliband was in Blantyre yesterday where his every bodily function was breathlessly reported by Severin Carrell in the Guardian – but even the Guardian could not pretend his audience in the “Labour stronghold” amounted to more than “dozens”. I am told it was under fifty. Better Together support on the ground has simply evaporated. What they rely on is that the massive output of mainstream media and the authority of the Westminster parties will have sufficient impact on their key demographics – pensioners, and housewives in a 1950’s sense – to shore up a residual no vote of the easily scared. My challenge to people to identify any Better Together gathering of more than 300 has been met with resounding silence.
Television has been wall to wall Miliband lately, and the BBC in Scotland seem to have simply abandoned their obligation to give equal broadcast time and treatment to both sides. Presumably many of the New Labour hacks who control Pacific Quay realise that their behaviour has made a Yes win a career threatening situation for them, so at this stage they see nothing to lose.
If independence is achieved it will be down to a popular movement and not to any politician. Indeed, if one person has to be singled out, I would say the Rev Stuart Campbell has made the most decisive individual contribution in the campaign. If Social media has beaten the mainstream media, the central rock around which millions of flowers have bloomed has been the Wings over Scotland website. This has a significantly larger daily readership than any newspaper in Scotland. The Wee Blue Book I found everywhere, including copies already available in pretty well every pub I entered, as I toured the East Coast. Over 400,000 downloads of the PDF have been made and 250,000 copies centrally printed, as well as a number of private initiatives which had already obtained professional printings from the PDF. Conservatively, there are over half a million hard copies out there, as well as all the reads online. In a population of 5.2 million, that is a major impact.
When we close down BBC Scotland and create a new citizen based, cheaper and more arts-oriented organisation in its place, let’s put Stuart Campbell in charge. Some state-funded drama and arts output seems to me commendable. State funding of pap entertainment is not needed – the private sector can do that perfectly well. State funding of “journalism” which investigates nothing and never challenges the establishment must be stopped.
This plebiscite on Scottish independence might be the most important contingency affecting the right to peace. NATO’s threats and mobilizations aren’t nearly as important. The NATO Pact can do nothing about Ukraine except strut behind high fences safe in Wales. ISIS will slowly bleed the US white.
But the dismemberment of the USA’s most slavish NATO satellite would a temblor. Even on bread-and-butter grounds, the guns-and-butter context is inescapable.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/02/warning-world-washington-nato-eu-vassals-insane-paul-craig-roberts-2/
As a victim of Lockerbie and the nation that stood up for justice for the bombing there, Scotland could balance NATO’s great-power confrontation with rule of law against aggression, sexual predation, and torture; with rights, not just the political and civil rights that Britain set aside in fear of terror but the economic, social and cultural rights that Britain once stood for and the Scottish people still respect; and with the pacific dispute resolution of small humanist states.
It’s about time Scotland gave us all another enlightenment.
Craig
“The main thing that makes me comfortable is that it was given at the Frontline Club by a speaker to an audience which contained many who had been there, and nobody questioned it.”
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I find that rather thin as evidence especially when the figure is being used in connection with a point about an independent Scotland and NATO membership. Not disputing he (or she) said it, but I should have thought that it would be difficult for a journalist (or journalists) to establish a reasonably accurate estimate in what were difficult and dangerous, if not chaotic, circumstances. By way if illustration (although it’s not a perfect one), estimates of numbers attending demonstrations or similar can also vary very considerably.
I’ll leave it at that.
If the Yes campaign has often attracted crowds of over 300 in size and the No campaign has failed to do so, that is a telling fact – if the reason is not that No voters are content to stay at home and vote No. Come the 18th, we’ll find out. If Scotland votes Yes, I hope the it will do good to everyone in the UK at present in the long term – and if not, likewise.
H
Well I am very confident it was thousands, and very very confident it was criminally under-reported because the MSM were yet again in full on propaganda mode. I frankly don’t think few thousand either way makes a significant difference. You are entitled to differ on that.
Look at these simpering weasels struggling to ignore uncertainty, adding nothing, jack shit, to the question, just asking and asking and asking with all the passive-aggressive fixation of the tug who gets his head flushed twice a week. Because in their second-class minds, if it’s 16,000 or 14,000, that means you have to vote no, or something. This is precisely the sort of mediocrity that British education extrudes.
Al Milliner his names makes me think of the legendary Alfred Milner of Cecil Rhodes et al fame. In any event whenever he disputes 15,000 he does nonetheless raise a much unreported fact that thousands have died in Libya. He rather shoots himself in the foot there.
Inconvenient truths being consigned to the memory hole, as we speak?
Another much unreported – and by now certainly almost forgotten fact – is that the late unlamented “Colonel” Khaddafi was a big supporter and bankroller of “Field Marshal” Idi Amin, himself responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of his fellow Ugandans.
Craig @ 5.35 I would have thought a four letter word followed by ‘off’ would have been more appropriate than humouring your correspondent.
I am given to understand that “Colonel” Khaddafi also supported the IRA (no cheering in the back there!) with money and matériel, thus ensuring that a good many died unncessarily. Semtex and the mainland bombings come to mind.
It would have been fitting if the object stuck up the arse of the dying Khaddafi had been a stick of dynamite (touch paper unlit).
Yes, the problem being, of course, that the children bombed to death in Sirte had never heard of the IRA or Idi Amin.
Mary cooes
“Craig @ 5.35 I would have thought a four letter word followed by ‘off’ would have been more appropriate than humouring your correspondent.”
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Did you mean “fuck”, Mary?
OK then – fuck off, Mary.
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Another example of you thinking this is your blog, I feel. It isn’t. Like me, you are but a commenter on here (or, in your case, a cut-and-paster)
“Yes, the problem being, of course, that the children bombed to death in Sirte had never heard of the IRA or Idi Amin.”
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And the children blown to pieces in Omagh and hacked or beaten to death in Uganda had probably not heard of “Colonel” Khaddafi either.
Enough! I’ll have none of this. Gaddafy was a damn good sport when Alan Feraday and Tom Hayes framed him for Lockerbie. He settled the case that would have disgraced us all and he gave the victims some money as though he did it. Good thing, too, if he hadn’t done, CIA would have toppled our government like some pathetic little banana republic.
Anything to confuse and divert from the subject of the vote, whether its 15.000 dead NATO civilian victims in Sirte, or the curious writings of David Irving, the price of a pint of milk… anything will do to divert from the thread and the most important vote in Scotlands history.
Now to the mechanics of the vote.Do we know
How many polls between here and the weekend?
why are there so few when the vote is so important?
when is the count? after the vote or the next day?
Here we go again. Pooootin/khaddafi……heroes of the Left. What these maroons refuse to get is that they aren’t the issue, any more than that 18 year-old black boy from Ferguson is the issue.
It’s beside the point, (as if they don’t know the point) if he was a cigar-thief. Overriding issues escape them like monkeys released from their cage. But it’s so convenient to shoot bystanders who happen to be lurking nearby.
Now tell us how bad Assad is. You won’t tell us anything new. But that’s just window-dressing for what you’re really about.
Ever the gentleman. Shows what a lower rank independent day school and an Oxford college does for one.
It’s a still warmish late Summer evening and the Canada geese are flying in skeins overhead honking to each other. Magic.
If independence is achieved
But it won’t be.
If Scotland splits from the UK it will be even more subordinate to the EU than is the UK and they will have no choice but to become part of NATO, which will expect them to be among the first to volunteer troops for service in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or alongside NATO’s current best friends, the Nazis of Kiev.
Scots seeking independence should vote UKIP, then at least they’d be independent of the undemocratic European Union. After that, they could promote devolution for all parts of the UK and a UK exit from Nazi-Nato.
California Haze
“Here we go again. Pooootin/khaddafi…”
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I’ve noticed that you often write “Pooootin” – presumably in order to take the piss out of the American pronunciation of that name.
Tell us, O Great Seer and Polymath – how should it be pronounced?
CanSpeccy
“…the Nazis of Kiev.”
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To judge by your disregard for truth, CanSpeccy (and from your racist views), you are much more of a Nazi than anyone in govt in Kiev.
Mary
“It’s a still warmish late Summer evening and the Canada geese are flying in skeins overhead honking to each other. Magic.”
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Alternatively:
“It’s a still warmish late Summer evening and the Eminences’ comments are skidding through the blogosphere around us screeching and venting to each other. Nightmare”
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These Mary’s human face posts fool no one. You are the Hilde Benjamin of this blog.
To judge by your disregard for truth, CanSpeccy (and from your racist views), you are much more of a Nazi than anyone in govt in Kiev.
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Anyone who doesn’t bow to your pathetic ideology is a Nazi, a propagandist like you must see Nazi’s in your sleep. Oooh! look there goes another Nazi, Oh! please give me a break.
There you go Craig, you’ve made it into the big time, Chris Spivey used YOU as a source regarding the Israeli’s trying to steal Syrian oil. Whilst you’re checking that out check James Foley’s mum out too she’s already appeared in the Sandyhook incident and the Boston Bombing, it would appear she’s as fake as some of your posters in here.
http://chrisspivey.org/heads-tales/
Both the At Doune and the St Andrews speech pages return 404 errors, since around 5:30pm. I would like to bring this to the attention of the webmaster.
you are much more of a Nazi than anyone in govt in Kiev.
Sheesh, the Anglo-Zionist imperialist propaganda is as deep and as shitty here as just about anywhere on the Web.
You thinkJulia Tymoshenko, calling for the genocide of Ukraine’s six million ethnic Russians is less Nazi than I, who have repeatedly been condemned as a racist by twats like you for opposing the genocide of the European peoples through a combination of mass immigration and propaganda to suppress the fertility of the indigenous population.
Ha! Missed Republic of Scotland’s rejoinder to Habbybackarupt. Thanks for the sensible comment.
Ever the gentleman. Shows what a lower rank independent day school and an Oxford college does for one.
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Mary I get the distinct feeling HABB is a misogynist, due to his b*ggering days at bording school, a trait way to commonly associated with the self obsessed and morally defunct Oxbridge classes.
The problem with previous SNP electoral campaigns has historically been that they peaked two weeks too soon. If the parallel is valid, now is the point from which the most strenuous effort is required, and the ability to see past your own propaganda without succumbing to that of the other lot.
There is an additional complication:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/nigel-farage-and-rupert-murdoch-britains-biggest-eurosceptic-and-its-most-powerful-media-mogul-have-private-meeting-9715073.html
Like Blair, the bonobo Farage doesn’t do irony. Hear what the rabid little-Englander saith:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/scottish-independence/scottish-independence-nigel-farage-accuses-alex-salmond-of-stirring-up-excessive-nationalism-9711666.html
Expect some pretty dirty tricks from Murdoch, and Farage trying to get his revenge for being ejected from Scotland earlier in the process. Although Scottish independence could only benefit Farage if he thought about it; with only a Labour rump for opposition, the English political climate (warning – mixed metaphor) would inevitably swing sharply to the Right.
Incidentally, Farage’s visit to NYC coincided with that of a charter aircraft of some previous interest – now on the way home. Is he doing a Blair?