Ironic when we’re the ones that DIDN’T vote for this. Made worse by the fact that we’ll be paying for HS2 which is also going to take business from Scotland.NO, you Neanderthals. In Europe that means Victory.That’s quite inspired for that lot.But all is not lost. A trade deal with Mr Trump awaits within days of us leaving the EUSo we are striking ahead, taking back control and… erm… Oh, well.Oh well, I suppose there are others just as bad out there. Jacob?Brexit. Good for the taxi business.Hmmm, yeah, well, moving on…Enigmatic? I can’t wait to make all these decisions… Oh wait, it won’t be us, it will be Westminster, and the decisions will be whether or not we should eat the chlorinated chicken or give it to the dog.I thought all the money we saved was going to the NHS, not the foreign car makers.Don’t ya just love all this freedom we are going to have?
She’s the most catastrophically stupid PM the UK has ever had.
From what I can make out the only reason she ever made it off the back benches is because of the staggering amounts of money her husband has pumped into the tory party over the years.
Unfortunately,for many Scots being British trumps all and they will just accept the nonsense dished out by Westminster as being the only possible alternative.
Pathetic.
Well at least Major Fox was being honest to his own code of truth ?
If people /citizens can read what he said and still let him get away
with it then they have only themselves to blame.
Given a lot of the elderly brexiteers are out ofthe world of work
or in fact completely out of this planet. And are just pining
for an imaginary never was England glorious England.
Fox is a complete idiot. Seriously I’d not leave him in charge of the cloakroom.
But they seem to think that what they can do is become a little offshore tax haven and ditch all the health and safety and human right rubbish, minimum wage and all that kind of trash that gets in the way of people making obscene profit.
Of course, being Fox he hasn’t worked out how complicated this is all going to be. Because he’s dim.
Grump. A waste of space, the lot of Them. By “Them” I mean the “British” Establishment, of course, not the Illuminati or the Rosicrucians or the Knights Templar. Double grump. “To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.” Gore Vidal said that, and now I have too. Triple grump. I would much prefer them to be punished here on Earth than do the Romans 12:19 thing and let the Lord take His own sweet time about it… Quadruple grump. No justice, no peace, and They’re not only greed-driven and bloody-minded, They’re stunningly incompetent, as Their performance in the Brexit negotiations shows so very clearly. Quintuple grump. There is no quintuple grump. Sextuple grump. Only because I wanted to write something with sex in. Septuple grump. Now I’m just showing off. Octuple grump. They can start with a plague of boils, moving swiftly on to plague number three: they’re lousy, so let them have lice. Preferably carrying typhus fever.
Oh, I know, Conan! Our Latin teacher Mr. Chalmers (50 years ago now, my God) dinned that into us, along with one or two other things, such as hypocausts and decimate. And two-faced Janus and doors. Deaf as a post, poor man – we horrible, snotty, smelly and obnoxious little pubescent animals could say anything in answer to his questions and he’d say “Very good!”, and write something completely different on the blackboard (completely different but correct, of course).
Have you considered the possibility he was playing deaf – I had a maths teacher once who did that, he’d been a teacher for 42 years (maths/physics/chemistry) and simply couldn’t be bothered anymore 🙂 He got away with it as he taught the top “sets”. I only worked it out when I met him several years later 😀
Ah, that’s becasue the Latin year started in March.
July was previously called Quintilis because it was the 5th month… and was changed in AD 44 or thereby, to July, after Julius Caesar and August was previously called Sextillia, changed in honour of Augustus Caesar in something BC.
So you can just say your grumps started somewhere other than at the beginning… like the months.
Jim, I get called it by my grandchildren as well and I think being called grumpy is a much misunderstood term nowadays. Grumpy in oor wee faimley means that you tend to be a bit negative (because you always hope for the best but life teaches you otherwise) you still keep your sense of humour though and your rye way of looking at things. It’s a compliment, your wisdom if not actually being heeded is at least acknowledged. It’s an expression of affection.
It’s a shame that the word is sometimes used to describe folk who are miserable, unhappy and probably depressed.
Yeah, when I say I’m grumpy, I don’t mean I’m a miserable old git (no laughing at the back there!), I mean I’m perfectly happy in myself, I love my friends and am loved by them, but I am NOT happy about the political etc. situation and I don’t mind who knows it – and I’ll grump about it as much as I can in the hope that I can help move things along in the right direction. But I tell you, young Scottish folk nowadays – very fine, a lot of them, and they are a lot less likely to fall for the shite put out by the likes of the Daily Heil. So I have hope.
The more I read and hear about Brexit the more I realise that the Tories do not have a credible and realistic strategy in dealing with the EU. Something that was conjured up to attract UKIP voters has ended up as a political nightmare with far-reaching and drastic consequences.
A Tory MSP whose name I didn’t catch was being interviewed today and she was rubbishing the claims that Aberdeen and Edinburgh would be adversely affected by Brexit. The interviewer suggested to her that the approach to negotiations was a political mess and, incredibly, she claimed that it would be a bigger mess if the SNP were doing the negotiating. When asked to explain she said “Think of the adverse effect on Aberdeen and Edinburgh if Scottish fishing rights were returned to Scotland and the SNP Government”!!
In her attempt to denigrate the SNP it is difficult to decide whether this was her own opinion or that of the party but it was a strange comment to make considering that most of the fishing communities voted Tory in order to get the fishing rights restored.
Not sure that Tories have their own opinion. Only way to find out is to look for the scar on the back of their necks where the implant goes! Be careful not to get too close…
The referendum was supposed to keep the hard right of the Tory Party in line.
Once the Brits voted NO, that was it. It was over…. only it wasn’t, because the Brits voted YES, and everyone was flabbergasted.
They’d made promises that they couldn’t keep and they had NOTHING prepared and no one capable of preparing it.
They had no leader and there were no credible applicants for the job.
Leadsome, Gove, Johnson, Fox, May.
A bunch of 3rd rate no-hopers.
And from day 1 the EU got stuck into their side of the argument, while the Tories had a leadership election and faffed around, burbling about being strong as stable, as if somehow, if they said it often enough, they would be.
Then she organised an election and any pretence of strong as stable went out the window, as she had to team up with the political wing of the Orange Order and the Red Hand of Ulster.
Davis has nothing, becasue he listens to no one except the people who agree with him. Johnson is a clown, Fox is an idiot, and May can’t cope.
And I’m agry because we will suffer.
If it all gets too horrible May and Johnson can fly off and live out their days in some millionaires’ playground in Monaco or Bermuda or wherever…
You and I will be stuck here in the isolated backwater.
As for the MP, yeah brilliant. Never mind the mess the Tories are making. The SNP would do worse.
Except the SNP have shown that they were prepared for this, and they have a position on everything which is NOT based on how great Britain is.
Hopefully the great British public would finally wake up, and, err, notice that they have been treated contemptuously by a bunch of multi-millionaires? It is a bit like determining the future of the nation by electing the winning couple from ‘Come Dancing’ as our new rulers. Couldn’t be worse, could it? Perhaps not.
Too many of us seem to have a far greater enthusiasm for a nostalgia for times that never were, rather than recognising a con when it is staring us in the face. They treat us as dogs, where the whistle gets the response they want, and the media is that whistle.
It makes me despair that so many electors are enamoured by that sort of ‘sit up and beg’ nonsense. Do they even realise that they actually have agency?
Those of us that have been inoculated though copious reading of inter alia, your own web site and this one, appear unable to persuade a measly 10% of the Scottish population that they ought to exercise whatever they have in place of a brain, in their own best interests, and their children’s, and their children’s children and so on as infinitum. Instead they cry and scream like the denizens of Bedlam, where good is bad and self torture in ‘normal’. It is ‘nurse knows best’ taken as a maxim.
It is quite depressing that the appalling state of the UK government hasn’t really shifted the polls on Brexit or independence.
I think we just need to be patient. The UK won’t leave the EU for some time to come, assuming the EU agree to some kind of transition deal, which appears to the the current consensus at Tory HQ. That means Scotland will retain all EU regs and directives until something like 2022. Time is definitely on our side.
You’ve reminded me of a quotation attributed to Dorothy Parker: on hearing from a friend that President Calvin Coolidge had died, she reportedly said “How can they tell?”
I do not know the msp of whom you denigrate or what was
said or why..but if the snp was pointed out as worse or much worse
hen as yoon I must agree snpBAD always and forever !Grr ! Grr !
I hope that there is some sort of way in which we can do that before ‘hard brexit’ becomes reality. And that sufficient fellow Scots – broad definition – realise that they would be the victims of this disaster.
Quite how anyone in Scotland has suddenly decided that the Conservative and Unionist Party is a ‘good thing’ – according to opinion polls and the last General election, is beyond me.
Been meaning to ask about something. I’m curious about the political cartoons where the people are drawn like horror show caricatures with themes that seem spectacularly vulgar, violent, and in general bad taste (by American political cartooning standards.) I really couldn’t believe the cartoon with daggers in five dead people lying in a pool of blood.
I thought that ANYTHING goes in violent gun-totin America, but I can’t imagine anything like this ever showing up in a mainstream American publication. So I’m curious….is this typical of British political cartooning generally, or is this a particular cartoonist in a particular publication.
Dunno. Some political cartooning in the UK is, frankly, vicious. It seems to be mainly directed at politicians who are either waxing or waning. But I read Private Eye, sometimes, so I am no judge of what is ‘normal’. 🙂
Steve Bell of the Guardian is ‘interesting’ in that respect.
Arguably, and perhaps badly, it releases the pressure on the person or topic under scrutiny.
It is easy enough to research more extreme, much more extreme, examples.
It is only on the odd occasion that our ‘standards’ are breached, and that is usually because the cartoonist hits the wrong target. (See Mr Bell, above.)
@ East Neuker……Yes, the American gun death stats are very disturbing. I notice that violent deaths in Britain often involve knives not guns, and daggers often show up in those violent bloody cartoons. My theory about the English is that in the glory days of empire, their inherent violent bloody greedy nature was organized and institutionalized for military conquest which resulted in the rape and pillage of half the world. Today, the concept of empire is no longer popular, so the English have subjugated their violent nature under a cloak of aristocratic respectability. Their intrinsic nature is seen only occasionally in the form of those weird political cartoons……and the sharp edged cutting nature of British satire and humor generally.
I could even make a case for the English being responsible for America’s gun problem, since it has a constitutional basis in the second article of our Bill of Rights, which defines gun ownership as a human right. And why is that in the American constitution at all? Because it was privately owned guns which fired the first shots at the British army and sustained the revolution through difficult times. Therefore, the founders of the republic felt it necessary to be sure that Americans stayed well armed in case the Brits ever came back to our shores. (Which they did in 1812 and burned our beloved White House.)
OK……so maybe my theory about the English being historically responsible for every problem on earth, including the American gun problem, may be a bit overdrawn. But I do find it intellectually and emotionally satisfying, so I think I’ll go with it. 😉
PS: Speaking of guns and the revolution, there was a Scottish officer in the British army named Patrick Ferguson who was making a nuisance of himself burning American farms, hanging American rebels and what not during the bloody Southern Campaign in the Carolinas. He was shot and killed at the Battle of Kings Mountain by a teenager named John Gillam (or Gilliam,) with his rifle that he had NAMED after his girlfriend “Sweet Lips”. That’s the story, although reliable reports say that Ferguson actually had too many bullet holes in him to tell for sure. But it makes a great story and a cool song. 🙂
Yep poor Patrick Ferguson never got back to Scotland. What the early American patriots did to his body was disrespectful and best left unsaid. Suffice it to say he had seriously pissed them off…..LOL.
Douglas…..Very interesting comments and links! I’d say that Britain does indeed have much more of a tradition of really vicious cartooning involving political figures. The president here shows up in cartoons, but it’s more often with a light touch, even if it’s in opposition. The Steve Bell cartoons are the ones I was thinking of specifically. I really don’t find them as much funny or intellectually clever, as I find them bizarre, vulgar, offensive, and sometimes stomach turning. I can’t imagine what turmoil would erupt here in the states if an editor ever actually published a cartoon of dead politicians with daggers sticking in them, lying in blood. And yet I assume that the Brits don’t really think much about it.
Bud Neill is probably more my style. I love that two legged equestrian statue….LOL. I think that Americans find madcap British humor to be really quirky….and often an acquired taste. But when it clicks, it has a following. Most people here finally figured out Monty Python. And I love the YouTube clips of Spitting Image, but I can’t imagine EITHER of them or anything like them originating in America. British situation comedies have played here, but I usually have trouble getting into them…..the humor seeming subtle (or nonexistent.) A friend of mine bought me a box set of “Vicar of Dibley.” He says it’s great. I just can’t get into it. I keep waiting for something funny to happen.
I had a similar experience with the Vicar of Dibbley. I discovered that I had a better laugh when I wasn’t watching it. Consequently my advice to you Danny would be to take note of the time you would have been wasting watching it and use that time doing something you like and enjoy yourself instead.
If you adopt this principle then Vicar of Dribley is a complete success.
@ Greig: LOL…..I think that’s great advice about Vicar of Dibley.
I’ve never seen Last of the Summer Wine, so I’ll definitely do as your suggest there.
I did get hooked on Downton Abbey. Yes, it was more a soap opera than a serious period drama, but I just had to find out what happened in the goings on of the aristocratic Crawley family and Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham. Downton ran for 5 or 6 years I think, but I didn’t discover it until the last season had concluded. So I saved time by binge watching a lot of it on the internet. 🙂
LOL Danny. There are a lot of comedy programmes in which you wait for something funny to happen… and then you wait longer, and well, it never gets funny.
But I’ve found that with English, American and even French shows. Old and new.
I guess people’s tastes vary.
I’d genuinely not thought about the fact that it was a bit ‘off’ to show cartoon pics of people lying in pools of their own blood… I guess that it is only funny if you know that they have all been stabbing each other in the back to grab extra power for themselves.
But now you mention it, from an outside point of view, it is in rather poor taste, and if it were Nicola, John, Humza and Shona, I guess I’d be pretty pissed off about it.
The English politicians are rather distant from us here, and the way they behave it’s a bit hard to believe they are of the same species.
Still, in fairness, that’s no excuse either. If it were foxes or hedgehogs or bees I’d be upset.
I think it’s because they are our oppressors, we are nothing to them, they are controlling our lives in a way we do not like or want and there’s nowt we can do about it.
I imagine the feeling may share similarities with how career criminals view the police or prisoners and warders. It’s all a matter of degree as well.
I had never thought about it, but I was a bit shocked when Danny pointed it out, and I felt nothing at all to see Gove, Leadsom, Cameron, Boris and that hateful Crabbe DWP Secretary, preaching about his religious piety… standing for leader, and then resigning after he got caught out with wandering fingers and a rather less than pious desire for a woman other than his wife..
Tris…….Interesting discussion!! I now know that the cartoons I’ve never liked are by Steve Bell. His caricatures seem horror show creepy, and his cartoons always seem to have elements that seem vulgar and tasteless. But I was truly flabbergasted at the murdered politicians lying in a pool of blood. Mostly I was thinking about how that could never be published in a mainstream publication here in the states. In a country loaded with guns and a history of assassination, threats or implied threats of violence directed toward the president or politicians generally can earn you a visit from the FBI. Or in the case of the president, it’s a Secret Service matter, and the Secret Service presidential protection guys consider the FBI to be old softies…..LOL. If they decide that you’re no threat, they’ll probably just tell you to stop that s***. But in general, the less contact you have with the Feds the better. 😉
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
She’s the most catastrophically stupid PM the UK has ever had.
From what I can make out the only reason she ever made it off the back benches is because of the staggering amounts of money her husband has pumped into the tory party over the years.
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I wondered what it was.
Straight off the back benches and into the Home Secretary’s job, and in the end contesting the leadership against the Leadsom woman.
We’ve had some real corkers, but she is the absolute limit!
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Unbelievably it could have been worse. We could have ended up with Leadsom, (shiver runs down spine.).
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LOL. Now that would have been …erm… the words escape me.
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Unfortunately,for many Scots being British trumps all and they will just accept the nonsense dished out by Westminster as being the only possible alternative.
Pathetic.
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Ah well, there really is no accounting for people’s taste.
It’s not something I’m proud to be.
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Well at least Major Fox was being honest to his own code of truth ?
If people /citizens can read what he said and still let him get away
with it then they have only themselves to blame.
Given a lot of the elderly brexiteers are out ofthe world of work
or in fact completely out of this planet. And are just pining
for an imaginary never was England glorious England.
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Fox is a complete idiot. Seriously I’d not leave him in charge of the cloakroom.
But they seem to think that what they can do is become a little offshore tax haven and ditch all the health and safety and human right rubbish, minimum wage and all that kind of trash that gets in the way of people making obscene profit.
Of course, being Fox he hasn’t worked out how complicated this is all going to be. Because he’s dim.
http://terryentoure.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/clucking-mad.html
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And yet, you advocate we enthral ourselves to this?
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Aye there’s something there that doesn’t compute.
The thing is that Labour either has, or doesn’t have (like the Tories) a viewpoint on all this.
Kezia and Jeremy seem to be at loggerheads, a bit like the Colonel and Tessy.
Mess, doesn’t begin to sum up the situation.
But Scotland didn’t vote for this and didn’t vote for it in a big way and even Carwyn Jones seems to see that London’s view is all wrong.
London may not need the single market, but Wales and Scotland do.
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Grump. A waste of space, the lot of Them. By “Them” I mean the “British” Establishment, of course, not the Illuminati or the Rosicrucians or the Knights Templar. Double grump. “To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.” Gore Vidal said that, and now I have too. Triple grump. I would much prefer them to be punished here on Earth than do the Romans 12:19 thing and let the Lord take His own sweet time about it… Quadruple grump. No justice, no peace, and They’re not only greed-driven and bloody-minded, They’re stunningly incompetent, as Their performance in the Brexit negotiations shows so very clearly. Quintuple grump. There is no quintuple grump. Sextuple grump. Only because I wanted to write something with sex in. Septuple grump. Now I’m just showing off. Octuple grump. They can start with a plague of boils, moving swiftly on to plague number three: they’re lousy, so let them have lice. Preferably carrying typhus fever.
Grump over.
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Even though boils is actually no. 6, it makes at least as much sense as calling the 10th month October.
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Blame Julius and Octavian Caesar for the months of July and August crowbarred into the calendar.
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Oh, I know, Conan! Our Latin teacher Mr. Chalmers (50 years ago now, my God) dinned that into us, along with one or two other things, such as hypocausts and decimate. And two-faced Janus and doors. Deaf as a post, poor man – we horrible, snotty, smelly and obnoxious little pubescent animals could say anything in answer to his questions and he’d say “Very good!”, and write something completely different on the blackboard (completely different but correct, of course).
I remember him with great affection.
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Have you considered the possibility he was playing deaf – I had a maths teacher once who did that, he’d been a teacher for 42 years (maths/physics/chemistry) and simply couldn’t be bothered anymore 🙂 He got away with it as he taught the top “sets”. I only worked it out when I met him several years later 😀
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LOL, Vestas.
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Good grief… no, in my old teacher’s case it was genuine. It was really obvious if you had to talk to him person to person.
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Ha ha… Sorry, I didn’t see the rest of the conversation, Ed. I should have known that you’d know all that stuff 🙂
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Oh, I didn’t see that, Conan. My version is slightly different from yours. Hmmmmm
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Ah, that’s becasue the Latin year started in March.
July was previously called Quintilis because it was the 5th month… and was changed in AD 44 or thereby, to July, after Julius Caesar and August was previously called Sextillia, changed in honour of Augustus Caesar in something BC.
So you can just say your grumps started somewhere other than at the beginning… like the months.
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Well, I hope you feel better Ed…
I’m really annoyed that they are so incompetent.
That’s not what we pay them for.
What comes after “octuple”? You’d think it would be nontuple, wouldn’t you.
But they leave the “t” out. It’s “nonuple”, which sounds really daft!
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Speaking as a man known to his grandchildren as Grumpy, I take my hat off to you. An excellent grump.
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LOL
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all granddads are known as grumps to the grandchildren
even when they move heaven and earth for them !
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Awww, I bet you do too Niko.
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Jim, I get called it by my grandchildren as well and I think being called grumpy is a much misunderstood term nowadays. Grumpy in oor wee faimley means that you tend to be a bit negative (because you always hope for the best but life teaches you otherwise) you still keep your sense of humour though and your rye way of looking at things. It’s a compliment, your wisdom if not actually being heeded is at least acknowledged. It’s an expression of affection.
It’s a shame that the word is sometimes used to describe folk who are miserable, unhappy and probably depressed.
It’s just not the same thing.
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Yeah, when I say I’m grumpy, I don’t mean I’m a miserable old git (no laughing at the back there!), I mean I’m perfectly happy in myself, I love my friends and am loved by them, but I am NOT happy about the political etc. situation and I don’t mind who knows it – and I’ll grump about it as much as I can in the hope that I can help move things along in the right direction. But I tell you, young Scottish folk nowadays – very fine, a lot of them, and they are a lot less likely to fall for the shite put out by the likes of the Daily Heil. So I have hope.
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That’s a good point!!
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The more I read and hear about Brexit the more I realise that the Tories do not have a credible and realistic strategy in dealing with the EU. Something that was conjured up to attract UKIP voters has ended up as a political nightmare with far-reaching and drastic consequences.
A Tory MSP whose name I didn’t catch was being interviewed today and she was rubbishing the claims that Aberdeen and Edinburgh would be adversely affected by Brexit. The interviewer suggested to her that the approach to negotiations was a political mess and, incredibly, she claimed that it would be a bigger mess if the SNP were doing the negotiating. When asked to explain she said “Think of the adverse effect on Aberdeen and Edinburgh if Scottish fishing rights were returned to Scotland and the SNP Government”!!
In her attempt to denigrate the SNP it is difficult to decide whether this was her own opinion or that of the party but it was a strange comment to make considering that most of the fishing communities voted Tory in order to get the fishing rights restored.
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Not sure that Tories have their own opinion. Only way to find out is to look for the scar on the back of their necks where the implant goes! Be careful not to get too close…
Of course, no media will repeat her words.
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LOL.
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I’d say the whole thing was a catastrophe.
The referendum was supposed to keep the hard right of the Tory Party in line.
Once the Brits voted NO, that was it. It was over…. only it wasn’t, because the Brits voted YES, and everyone was flabbergasted.
They’d made promises that they couldn’t keep and they had NOTHING prepared and no one capable of preparing it.
They had no leader and there were no credible applicants for the job.
Leadsome, Gove, Johnson, Fox, May.
A bunch of 3rd rate no-hopers.
And from day 1 the EU got stuck into their side of the argument, while the Tories had a leadership election and faffed around, burbling about being strong as stable, as if somehow, if they said it often enough, they would be.
Then she organised an election and any pretence of strong as stable went out the window, as she had to team up with the political wing of the Orange Order and the Red Hand of Ulster.
Davis has nothing, becasue he listens to no one except the people who agree with him. Johnson is a clown, Fox is an idiot, and May can’t cope.
And I’m agry because we will suffer.
If it all gets too horrible May and Johnson can fly off and live out their days in some millionaires’ playground in Monaco or Bermuda or wherever…
You and I will be stuck here in the isolated backwater.
As for the MP, yeah brilliant. Never mind the mess the Tories are making. The SNP would do worse.
Except the SNP have shown that they were prepared for this, and they have a position on everything which is NOT based on how great Britain is.
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The worry now is that they devote their efforts to the leadership race rather than Brexit. Hmm, would we notice the difference?
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Would we notice?
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Terry,
Hopefully the great British public would finally wake up, and, err, notice that they have been treated contemptuously by a bunch of multi-millionaires? It is a bit like determining the future of the nation by electing the winning couple from ‘Come Dancing’ as our new rulers. Couldn’t be worse, could it? Perhaps not.
Too many of us seem to have a far greater enthusiasm for a nostalgia for times that never were, rather than recognising a con when it is staring us in the face. They treat us as dogs, where the whistle gets the response they want, and the media is that whistle.
It makes me despair that so many electors are enamoured by that sort of ‘sit up and beg’ nonsense. Do they even realise that they actually have agency?
Those of us that have been inoculated though copious reading of inter alia, your own web site and this one, appear unable to persuade a measly 10% of the Scottish population that they ought to exercise whatever they have in place of a brain, in their own best interests, and their children’s, and their children’s children and so on as infinitum. Instead they cry and scream like the denizens of Bedlam, where good is bad and self torture in ‘normal’. It is ‘nurse knows best’ taken as a maxim.
OK, extreme response, but I woke up grumpy!
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There’s a lot of this grumpiness about!!
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It is quite depressing that the appalling state of the UK government hasn’t really shifted the polls on Brexit or independence.
I think we just need to be patient. The UK won’t leave the EU for some time to come, assuming the EU agree to some kind of transition deal, which appears to the the current consensus at Tory HQ. That means Scotland will retain all EU regs and directives until something like 2022. Time is definitely on our side.
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The current position of some of the UK government…for today at least… It may have changed by the time you read this.
I think once things get hard, as surely they will,things will change on independence.
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You’ve reminded me of a quotation attributed to Dorothy Parker: on hearing from a friend that President Calvin Coolidge had died, she reportedly said “How can they tell?”
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Right on Tris.
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I do not know the msp of whom you denigrate or what was
said or why..but if the snp was pointed out as worse or much worse
hen as yoon I must agree snpBAD always and forever !Grr ! Grr !
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Och, whit a haver you are, Niko
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A blethering shite.
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The SNP, of course, wouldn’t negotiate to leave. They’d negotiate to stay.
The only way out of this mess is independence. Tory and Labour are equally as bad on Brexit.
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Some asked me yesterday what came first…the chlorinated chicken or the salmonella egg…
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That’s a great question!
Why did the chlorinated chicken cross the road? It was banned from the pesty side.
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That really was Laugh Out Loud. (No, Eton Dave, if you’re reading this, that’s not Lots of Love.)
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Tris
at least people won a wee victory in the Supreme Court over Employment Tribunal fees that were brought in by the Tory and lets not forget the Liberal Democrats, in particular the hypocrite Swinson. I just blogged about it today https://grumpyscottishman.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/right-headline-wrong-people/ .
bruce
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Heading over there now Bruce. Thanks.
It was a victory for people and Swinson is a two faced *****.
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Westminster continues in its attempts to drag down Scotland. Yet hard brexit means indyref2.
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Dan,
I hope that there is some sort of way in which we can do that before ‘hard brexit’ becomes reality. And that sufficient fellow Scots – broad definition – realise that they would be the victims of this disaster.
Quite how anyone in Scotland has suddenly decided that the Conservative and Unionist Party is a ‘good thing’ – according to opinion polls and the last General election, is beyond me.
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Me too, but I don;t think it will happen.
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Bring it on… to quote Wendy.
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Been meaning to ask about something. I’m curious about the political cartoons where the people are drawn like horror show caricatures with themes that seem spectacularly vulgar, violent, and in general bad taste (by American political cartooning standards.) I really couldn’t believe the cartoon with daggers in five dead people lying in a pool of blood.
I thought that ANYTHING goes in violent gun-totin America, but I can’t imagine anything like this ever showing up in a mainstream American publication. So I’m curious….is this typical of British political cartooning generally, or is this a particular cartoonist in a particular publication.
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Danny,
Dunno. Some political cartooning in the UK is, frankly, vicious. It seems to be mainly directed at politicians who are either waxing or waning. But I read Private Eye, sometimes, so I am no judge of what is ‘normal’. 🙂
Steve Bell of the Guardian is ‘interesting’ in that respect.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/03/09/snp-steve-bell-if-guardian_n_6831028.html
(You have to read down – I have no idea why it starts with something else.)
Seems to me that drawing out your fantasies rather than acting them out, is a good thing?
The UK has a history of satirical, for want of a better word, of vicious political cartooning. See here for the tame version:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20462098
Arguably, and perhaps badly, it releases the pressure on the person or topic under scrutiny.
It is easy enough to research more extreme, much more extreme, examples.
It is only on the odd occasion that our ‘standards’ are breached, and that is usually because the cartoonist hits the wrong target. (See Mr Bell, above.)
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It’s a cartoon, Danny. Americans just do it for real, and that’s not funny.
Have a look at the comparative murder stats between Europe and the USA.
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@ East Neuker……Yes, the American gun death stats are very disturbing. I notice that violent deaths in Britain often involve knives not guns, and daggers often show up in those violent bloody cartoons. My theory about the English is that in the glory days of empire, their inherent violent bloody greedy nature was organized and institutionalized for military conquest which resulted in the rape and pillage of half the world. Today, the concept of empire is no longer popular, so the English have subjugated their violent nature under a cloak of aristocratic respectability. Their intrinsic nature is seen only occasionally in the form of those weird political cartoons……and the sharp edged cutting nature of British satire and humor generally.
I could even make a case for the English being responsible for America’s gun problem, since it has a constitutional basis in the second article of our Bill of Rights, which defines gun ownership as a human right. And why is that in the American constitution at all? Because it was privately owned guns which fired the first shots at the British army and sustained the revolution through difficult times. Therefore, the founders of the republic felt it necessary to be sure that Americans stayed well armed in case the Brits ever came back to our shores. (Which they did in 1812 and burned our beloved White House.)
OK……so maybe my theory about the English being historically responsible for every problem on earth, including the American gun problem, may be a bit overdrawn. But I do find it intellectually and emotionally satisfying, so I think I’ll go with it. 😉
PS: Speaking of guns and the revolution, there was a Scottish officer in the British army named Patrick Ferguson who was making a nuisance of himself burning American farms, hanging American rebels and what not during the bloody Southern Campaign in the Carolinas. He was shot and killed at the Battle of Kings Mountain by a teenager named John Gillam (or Gilliam,) with his rifle that he had NAMED after his girlfriend “Sweet Lips”. That’s the story, although reliable reports say that Ferguson actually had too many bullet holes in him to tell for sure. But it makes a great story and a cool song. 🙂
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It is a cool song. 🙂
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Yep poor Patrick Ferguson never got back to Scotland. What the early American patriots did to his body was disrespectful and best left unsaid. Suffice it to say he had seriously pissed them off…..LOL.
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Brits have pissed off people all around the world, Danny. That said, so have plenty other nations!
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LOL Fair comment.
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Danny,
If you are unaware of how comic strips help to define us Scots, this is also ‘interesting’ although a touch off topic:
http://www.discoverglasgow.org/statues-lobey-dosser/4572885054
The only two legged horse sculpture on the planet!
The inventor / author of this insanity was a chap called Bud Neill. For example:
“Y’affa yat? Whit yat r affa?” is perhaps Glaswegian at it’s best. Both in tone and sentiment.
The good denizens of this city raised 20,000 pounds to memorialise a strip cartoon hero in memory of that cartoonist. You see it above.
Then there was Angus Ogg and the folk in the Sunday Post……
It ain’t all satirical, exactly. Though there is probably a PhD in proving me wrong.
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Ah Douglas, Angus Ogg, the only reason I ever bought the Daily Record!
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Did Mairileen ever get her man?
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Douglas…..Very interesting comments and links! I’d say that Britain does indeed have much more of a tradition of really vicious cartooning involving political figures. The president here shows up in cartoons, but it’s more often with a light touch, even if it’s in opposition. The Steve Bell cartoons are the ones I was thinking of specifically. I really don’t find them as much funny or intellectually clever, as I find them bizarre, vulgar, offensive, and sometimes stomach turning. I can’t imagine what turmoil would erupt here in the states if an editor ever actually published a cartoon of dead politicians with daggers sticking in them, lying in blood. And yet I assume that the Brits don’t really think much about it.
Bud Neill is probably more my style. I love that two legged equestrian statue….LOL. I think that Americans find madcap British humor to be really quirky….and often an acquired taste. But when it clicks, it has a following. Most people here finally figured out Monty Python. And I love the YouTube clips of Spitting Image, but I can’t imagine EITHER of them or anything like them originating in America. British situation comedies have played here, but I usually have trouble getting into them…..the humor seeming subtle (or nonexistent.) A friend of mine bought me a box set of “Vicar of Dibley.” He says it’s great. I just can’t get into it. I keep waiting for something funny to happen.
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I had a similar experience with the Vicar of Dibbley. I discovered that I had a better laugh when I wasn’t watching it. Consequently my advice to you Danny would be to take note of the time you would have been wasting watching it and use that time doing something you like and enjoy yourself instead.
If you adopt this principle then Vicar of Dribley is a complete success.
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ps. Last of the Summer Wine is a series that droned on for years. Think of what you could achieve in the time spent not watching that.
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@ Greig: LOL…..I think that’s great advice about Vicar of Dibley.
I’ve never seen Last of the Summer Wine, so I’ll definitely do as your suggest there.
I did get hooked on Downton Abbey. Yes, it was more a soap opera than a serious period drama, but I just had to find out what happened in the goings on of the aristocratic Crawley family and Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham. Downton ran for 5 or 6 years I think, but I didn’t discover it until the last season had concluded. So I saved time by binge watching a lot of it on the internet. 🙂
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Well, to be fair, Danny, it’s hard not to watch something that Maggie Smith is in (although I managed!)
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Yes, Maggie stole the show….LOL.
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I watched some of that, and the only thing that was remotely funny, was Thora Hird… and she was only in it occasionally and for 2 or 3 lines.
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Another laugh out loud moment.
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LOL Danny. There are a lot of comedy programmes in which you wait for something funny to happen… and then you wait longer, and well, it never gets funny.
But I’ve found that with English, American and even French shows. Old and new.
I guess people’s tastes vary.
I’d genuinely not thought about the fact that it was a bit ‘off’ to show cartoon pics of people lying in pools of their own blood… I guess that it is only funny if you know that they have all been stabbing each other in the back to grab extra power for themselves.
But now you mention it, from an outside point of view, it is in rather poor taste, and if it were Nicola, John, Humza and Shona, I guess I’d be pretty pissed off about it.
The English politicians are rather distant from us here, and the way they behave it’s a bit hard to believe they are of the same species.
Still, in fairness, that’s no excuse either. If it were foxes or hedgehogs or bees I’d be upset.
So why is it I didn’t find that tasteless?
Weird.
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I think it’s because they are our oppressors, we are nothing to them, they are controlling our lives in a way we do not like or want and there’s nowt we can do about it.
I imagine the feeling may share similarities with how career criminals view the police or prisoners and warders. It’s all a matter of degree as well.
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I guess so.
I had never thought about it, but I was a bit shocked when Danny pointed it out, and I felt nothing at all to see Gove, Leadsom, Cameron, Boris and that hateful Crabbe DWP Secretary, preaching about his religious piety… standing for leader, and then resigning after he got caught out with wandering fingers and a rather less than pious desire for a woman other than his wife..
http://www.ey.com/uk/en/issues/business-environment/ey-uk-attractiveness-survey-2017-scotland
I am slightly shocked at myself, but yes, maybe it because I hate all they stand for and the fact that they hold us back.
Still….
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Tris…….Interesting discussion!! I now know that the cartoons I’ve never liked are by Steve Bell. His caricatures seem horror show creepy, and his cartoons always seem to have elements that seem vulgar and tasteless. But I was truly flabbergasted at the murdered politicians lying in a pool of blood. Mostly I was thinking about how that could never be published in a mainstream publication here in the states. In a country loaded with guns and a history of assassination, threats or implied threats of violence directed toward the president or politicians generally can earn you a visit from the FBI. Or in the case of the president, it’s a Secret Service matter, and the Secret Service presidential protection guys consider the FBI to be old softies…..LOL. If they decide that you’re no threat, they’ll probably just tell you to stop that s***. But in general, the less contact you have with the Feds the better. 😉
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