One might equally have asked the Member for Lothian Region if she could have come back from the Australian Jungle and got on with the day job.
Or maybe they might have asked her why, when she was leader of the Scottish Labour Party, she thought that it was a good idea to visit America to campaign for Hillary Clinton.
See, by now Kez, I’d have thought that you might have learned that people who live in glass houses should probably buy VERY big curtains.
Of all the train companies in this Benighted Kingdom, ScotRail has the best performance.
In fairness, Kezia may not have noticed that there is a howling gale across Scotland and that there has been torrential rain. An unfortunate outcome of this is that outdoor things tend not to work at 100% capacity… and I might say, wouldn’t do even if she, or her daft new boss, were the first minister.
As we have said before, reasoned and reasonable criticism is the job of opposition. Criticism for the sake of criticism is not.
Powerful and dynamic though the first minister may be, the winds and the waves do not obey her, no more does the rain.
Grow up, Kez.
**********
Of course, it’s the Daily Mail, so it’s unadulterated rubbish.
In 2009, in private audience with the Queen at Balmoral (something not granted to the Daily Mail “journalists”), Alex Salmond and HM discussed flag flying after which he ordered that the Royal Standard be flown on “royal occasions”, rather than the union flag.
“I remember the occasion very well,” Salmond said in a post on his website.
“Her Majesty asked me if the Lion Rampant was a popular flag in Scotland.
“I was able to assure her that it was and indeed much beloved of Scottish football and rugby fans. Thus I brought the new policy into effect and left the union flag flying, as appropriate, at armed forces day and Remembrance Sunday.”
And that makes sense. Flying a royal standard is a great deal more respectful to the Queen personally than flying any other flag.
Happy to correct if wrong, but which part of the Telegraph front page article is wrong. They quote advice issued by your government that only the Satire should be flown on all occasions apart from Remembrance Sunday. Does that document not exist?
1/2 It has been practice to fly Lion Rampant on Royal occasions since 2010. I have not ordered, instructed, authorized any change – indeed there has been no change. Civil servants recently updated published guidance to reflect the long standing practice…
Needless to say the ever moronic Murdo Fraser made a fool of himself by comparing Nicola’s tweets to those of Donald Trump’s. UH? Get back on the meds, Murdo.
Fraser said: “This is a desperate attempt by Nicola Sturgeon to spin her way out of trouble.
“The SNP is more interested in lowering Union Flags than raising standards in schools and hospitals.
“The First Minister’s Trump-style Twitter denial by candlelight last night does nothing to change the facts.”
Well, in that respect, of course, he is right. The fact is that there has been no change.
Mr Fraser must have been going around with his head under his arm because this has been the policy since 2010. Does he not notice anything around him?
As we said, Murdo, it was agreed with the Queen 9 years ago!
Have you ever had a private audience of the Queen, Murdo? Awe well never mind. Maybe when whatever Rangers are called now win the Cup, huh?
Anyway, we look forward to the Mail’s apology in 5pt type on page 42.
***********
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
According to a Tweet I just read:
“At Scotland Question today at Westminster the Tories continually referred to the already debunked fake News about Flags. The Secretary of State for Scotland was the prime activist in perpetuating the blatant Fake News.”
To be fair, with Fluffy, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s not plain out lying, given that he’s so incredibly thick.
A flag is one of these big wavey things, Fluffs. Hope that helps.
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British Nationalists are so obsessed with flags!
The Rampant Lin has always been the royal flag in Scotland it flies proudly above the royal palace of Holyrood House.
What a Brit Nat pile of lies. Time will tell that they will be on the wrong side of history.
Hope over fear.
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Story broke in the Daily Diana. You’ll notice the mast head has, erm, a Saltire. How insulting to her Majesty!
Change it immediately you vile separatists.
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Lion!
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In among the usual odour of ordure, I believe I scent a top-note of hysterical desperation..
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Nasty smell!
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I have a Rampant Lion, but IF I were to fly it an a Royal Occasion. The Lion would Face AWAY from the pole. Apparently in heraldic terms this is a GROSS insult!
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How very quaint and Ruritarian it all is! I love fancy designs, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t seem to invest them with any serious meaning.
On the other hand, I must get myself a gauntlet and practise throwing it down. It sounds like something a gentleman ought to know how to do.
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Unfortunately you may have difficulty finding a yoon gentleman and one who understands your gesture .
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I’m shocked that you don’t know that already, Ed.
When I think of royalty, I can nevr quite get the idea of Grand Fenwick out of my head.
And Margaret Rutherford as the Grand Duchess Gloriana
https://media.gettyimages.com/photos/margaret-rutherford-in-costume-as-grand-duchess-gloriana-xii-ruler-of-picture-id514699114
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Galardia
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That rings a bell… enlighten me stp?
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Terry Thomas?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlton-Browne_of_the_F.O.
Carlton Brown of the FO
TT was in there
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That’s where I saw it. I love these old films.
🙂
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I just wish we could rid of them.
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Jeez … where do I start here Tris.
Crocodile Dugdale who has deigned poor wee Scotland with a wee visit from her new home in a jungle somewhere overseas thinks, I use that word very VERY loosely here Tris, there is a problem with oor wee train set and demands the FM does something other than correct misinformed ignorant incompetent unionists. I have only one thing to say about this … thank feck we have Nicola Sturgeon as oor FM and NOT Crocodile Dugdale!
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I’m trying to imagine Nicola out there with Humza moving a fallen tree, or pumping water off the tracks. Maybe fixing an odd overhead wire or two while she’s about it…. or holding back the wind while the train crosses bridges.
Daft woman!
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Sorry Tris … I’ve long since come to the conclusion that she is NOT even THAT intelligent!
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I do believe the MSPs from the Labour Branch Office over in Bath Street would be doing more to help the situation by performing an anti-rain dance at some central location, preferably with TV cameras. I am pleased to be able to supply a model for them to mimic.
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LOL.
Or
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Apology NFC
Looking at Murdo’s ears I find I am surprised he can’t do a Vulcan Mind Meld. Then I remember he has no functioning brain
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It brings disadvantages, but, lord knows, he seems happy enough.
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If you have no real self awareness you don’t know that you are an idiot.
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Oh look at the flag Liz is flying over Balmoral…
Fancy that nasty Nicola making her do that.
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Hiv tae say, really disappointed in Iain Dale.
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I think he apologised to Nicola though.
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Where did you see that Tris?
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I’m sorry, I was wrong I read it again…
He said he was happy to retract if he was wrong. Despite Nicola and Alex clarifying, and indeed the Scottish Civil Servants who were responsible for updating the paperwork (some 7 years later) I’ve seen no apology.
The thing is that it has been standard practice since 2010 and none of the idiots has noticed.
I see Colonel Blimp’s jumped on the bandwagon.
She really is a piece of work.
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He is a Metropolitan Tory, in with Thatcher.
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Tris,
Of all the Scots words that I have come across, pish has endeared to me most. A very versatile word.
So for this occasion: Utter pish. To comment more may cause health hazard.
ABU
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He he. It is a most descriptive word.
Not for use in polite company.
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What roasters. The alternative to sheer stupidity as an explanation for it is rather disturbing, though.
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Either they are very stupid or they use the fact that no matter what they say, the BBC and the British Press will cover it.
I was listening to the BBC news at 5.30 this morning … I know, sad act.
OK … So, the pound is at it best value against the dollar since the Brexit vote.
Normally, the pound is compared with the dollar and the euro.
This morning no mention was made of the euro.
This may be because, although the pound had strengthened against the dollar this was more to do with the dollar being weaker than the pound being strong. It hadn’t hardened against the euro.
Maybe not fake news exactly, but selective news certainly, and I believe that they talked at length on the tv news tonight about Cameron saying that Brexit wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Needless to say he’s at Davos.
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I have noticed for quite some time when accessing the business headlines in the Metropolitan Propaganda Rags that their habit is to always highlight the £ to $ Exchange rate.
Is it not a fact that with the Brexit Storm raging around us daily the rate against the Euro is far more relevant?
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Yes, but with the $ tumbling, it looks more favourable to the UK to quote only the £/$ rate. Things look a lot less rosy when you look at the £/€ rate.
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Well, in economic terms, we do more trade with Europe, but the UK is a major tourist destination for US tourists, and vice versa – though tourism to the US has ¨fallen off a cliff¨ thanks to Trump, according to one source – https://goo.gl/1zgXAY (shortened URL).
In other words, the tourism exchange rate may be of greater interest to your average punter than the exchange rate for most of our trade. That said…
… highlighting the USD/GBP exchange rate serves the propaganda purposes of decreasing the salience and thereby diminishing the importance in people´s minds of the EU, and of talking up the salience of the Special Relationship and the Atlantic Alliance, with all its positive freight of convoys running the U-boat blocade, Normandy landings, Winning the War of the English-Speaking Peoples v. foul non-English and non-American non-English-speaking foreign Johnnies (and various species of geek in Asia), and sticking it to Mr. Hitler where the sun don´t shine.
I do not know to what extent that explication rings true for other people and would actually quite like to know: I think our alert readers must know by now that I have a particular interest in the theory and practice of propaganda.
An aside: the young lass I was talking about elsewhere in these comments – one of my care assistants – was in this morning, and I ran the question about being unable to unsee the propaganda by her again, and she let me know that she has found that she too has not been able to stop seeing it now she´s looking for it. Nor can she imagine losing that sense of it now she´s had her eyes opened. So she has moved from not being particularly politically aware at all though leaning towards Yes, but simply not paying much attention, to actively rejecting what the meeja is trying to feed her. Which is an improvement. Losing the Cringe is always good too, for anyone.
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Yes, I saw that Trump had put tourists off.
Odd that, to be fair. Unless you are on a golf course, a very expensive one, you are highly unlikely to bang into Trump.
France is the top tourist destination in the world it seems, despite the fact that they got rid of their royals a few hundred years ago…
Spain next, but I suspect they don;t go to see the Fascist Felipe.
I suspect that if things get much worse here folk will have to take to a trip doon the watter tae Rothsay again…
Of course all this stuff is propaganda.
I would never underplay the contribution that the USA made to the war in the 1940s, but although our school history books never showed it, I suspect that had it not been for the Soviets, we’d have lost anyhow.
Becasued they were communists, of course, it wasn’t the done thing to thank them for distracting Hitlers efforts, financial and manpower wise with the Eastern Front. (I only know about it because of “Allo Allo”.)
I think your experience with the lass shows that, if these things are talked about rationally and clearly, in a non hectoring manner, it is possible to persuade people to look again.
Well, some anyway.
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I gave up history classes in school because the teacher was an effing psychopath, but I did study quite a bit later, at university – my degree´s in modern languages and modern European history, and I have family reasons to be interested in Poland. Wedged between Russia and Germany as it is, Poland is a good place to look at European history from, if you see what I mean. I recommend ¨God´s Playground: A History of Poland¨ by Norman Davies – it´s in two volumes, with Volume II covering from 1795 on. The latest ISBN for that is 0231128193.
I had the honour and privilege of knowing a Polish professor who as a lad had been an eyewitness to the occupation and destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis, and its later ¨liberation¨ and continued destruction by the Soviets – it occurred to me only later what a rare and amazing thing it was to have known such a person and heard his stories of that time, including one about him crawling through the sewers on a number of occasions towing – presumably well sealed – parcels of food into the Jewish ghetto. He was hooked up with the Polish resistance, and he was wee, so who better… The Professor was the reason I went to Poland when I was just 17, by train and ferry, way back before the Iron Curtain fell, before Solidarność, before any of that.
Readers may not be immediately aware that the young Soviet Russia tried to reconquer Poland in 1920 (or that Poland is about 100 miles to the west now from where it was at that time). We tend to forget that in the aftermath of WWI, Germany was diminished, the Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, the Ottoman Empire fell… then we have the Treaty of Versailles in which Europe and much of the Middle East (and Africa) get carved up all over again. Tanzania (Tanganyika) had been under German rule before then, for example.
That Polish-Soviet war was grippingly described by the writer Isaac Babel, who wrote in Russian though he was born in Ukraine, in his ¨Red Cavalry¨ stories. Here´s a bit of bio from an FT review (shortened URL https://goo.gl/4pf7GL): ¨When the Soviet secret police came for Isaac Babel in the early morning of May 15 1939, he can have had few illusions about what lay ahead. A lengthy roll-call of writers, many of them personal friends, had vanished into the infamous Lubyanka jail, never to be seen or heard of again. Babel was to suffer eight months of imprisonment, torture and forced confessions, before being executed by gun shot in January 1940 after a 20-minute trial for entirely trumped-up charges of treason.¨
And here´s a bit of chilling description, culled from that FT review: ¨… In “Crossing the Zbrucz”, the narrator discovers his roommate is not sleeping, as he’d presumed, but in fact dead. “His gullet is ripped out, his face is hacked in two, and blue blood sits in his beard like hunks of lead.”
I didn´t use the FT´s sharing tool for that the way it wanted me to, so please click on that link to the article so that I can set that against any charges of Piracy and Copyright Infringement I may face!
I think I must have entertained everyone quite enough for one day, so am now shutting down.
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I fear I’ve used my FT allowance for the month, but I did click nonetheless.
I think none of us who didn’t live through any of it can’t ever appreciate just how appalling it must have been… and of course some places in the world, still is.
I was in Budapest a couple of years ago and my Hungarian friend took me to the Museum of Horrors.
Horrors are what it was. First the Nazis, then the Soviets. By the end of the tour we all had tears in our eyes.
My friend Dani’s Mum and Dad of course, lived in the Soviet era and his Gran, (nagymama) lived through the 1950s. Her brother, an activist, and medical doctor, was forced to flee to Sweden where he practised as a doctor until quite recently. (He’s now in his 80s). I’m hoping that sometime this year I will get to Sweden to meet him. I imagine his tales will be amazing.
We moan about our lives here, but seriously… we have no idea of REAL hardships.
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One thing the Scottish independence movement has achieved is to be responsible for stripping away the superficial veneer of respectability that has covered British nationalism for far too long. We are now, at last, beginning to see just how awful British nationalism really is. If that’s what our ‘opposition’ politicians are happy to be part of, then hell mend them. They deserve everything we can throw at them. Are they really that blind/stupid/insensitive to what’s going on with their tacit consent? As for the media, there are no words available in the English language that I know of to describe them these days, and I refuse to resort to obscenity or profanity, much as I might want to. They are beneath contempt and highly dangerous to boot.
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I think a row of stars wold best describe our forth rate forth estate.
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Five stars. All blank.
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“happy to retract if I’m wrong” the usual weasel words. Totally meaningless.
They fall for this type of fake news so easily, because they are desperate to find fault with the SNP/Scottish Govt/ Nicola/ Scotland, or all four. What fools they are.
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Retractions and apologies are always ion smaller print, aren’t they?
I’d be expecting an apology to her majesty in tomorrows papers…
“Oooops, sorry ma’am, didn’t know you’d authorised this. Thought it was one of these ghastly separatists. Nothing worse in our great union, the best country in the world, then those awful nationalists. Eh, ma’am. grovel grovel.
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Kez as usual is spot on right
time for nicola Mctrump
to cease and desist her
twittering forwith.
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Awww bless. I knew someone would stand up for her.
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Love it! The British Bulldog – inbred, deformed, fundamentally thick and bloody useless: it faints if the weather gets too warm, poor thing. A pretty (or maybe not so pretty) symbol of the Union 🙂
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MInd he’s marginally better looking than that daft Blairite MP wi his Union Jackit! Probably brighter and better company too! Forgotten his name but he resigned as Scottish Shadow coz he hated Corbyn like the plague.
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Did Kez Dugdale use Twitter to complain about oor Nicola using Twitter? I only just now twigged. What a twit.
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As the hapless idiot Cameron once said…
Too many Tweets make a Twat!
Oh lordy…
Lots of Love Cameron! Down wit da kids or what!
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Kezia Dugdale, no long back frae Oz
and as big an eejit as she ever was,
Tweets, “Nicola, go help Humza with the trains.”
Maybe Kez’ll help Dicky Leonard wi’ the drains
and Ah’m thinkin’ that would be only right
‘cos like Scottish Labour they’re blocked wi’ shite.
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Photos this and pasted it on Twitter with link back
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Nicola Sturgeon
Verified account
There now follows a wee thread…
1/ since the truth doesn’t seem to matter very much to some, let me set out the facts on this ridiculous flag story…
2/ there are two essential elements to the story. One, that @scotgov has recently changed its practice on what flags to fly from government buildings on Royal occasions; and two, that I ordered such a change. Both are wrong.
3/ since 2010, the Lion Rampant has been flown on Royal occasions – entirely appropriately. Since the Lion Rampant is the Royal Banner, it is not clear to me why anyone would object to that. However, the key point is that there has been no change to this since 2010.
4/ yes, the civil service recently decided to update the published guidance, but simply to ensure that it accurately reflected the long standing practice – the underlying policy has not changed. And why would it?
5/ as for the claim that I ordered a change, I have issued no instructions, orders, authorisations – or even expressed an opinion – about changing flag policy. The update of the guidance was an administrative step – albeit a sensible one – and not done at my request.
6/ sadly, the truth will not matter to some in today’s media – and that’s part of a much bigger problem, I’m afraid. But I still believe (hope) it matters to most in the media – and certainly to the public.
7/ now I’ll leave those who are motivated to do so to argue about flags. I’ll get back to matters health, education, the economy and protecting Scotland’s interests. ENDS.
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As I’ve said before, The Daily Diana, The Daily Heil and The Daily Torygraph made this front page outrage news.
They clearly hadn’t done any investigation at all. Not one of their reports in the last 7 years had even noticed the change which took place in 2010.
If they had contacted anyone to find out about the story, I’m sure that the Civil Servants would ahve informed them of the situation. They could have then checked with Alex Salmond, one party to the agreement, or with the royal household, the other party to the agreement.
The Heil and the Diana are cat litter material (you’d not find me wrapping my fish supper in either, for fear of their poison seeping through and making me a fascist). They are written for the hard of thinking, but the Torygraph used to be a quality paper before the mad twins got their hands on it. It sad that we seriously wonder when there’s going to be a page 3 girl in it.
I wonder if they are going to send an apology to both Nicola Sturgeon and the Queen.
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Right. That is actually a serious point, Tris. At what point does an egregious example of fake news become actionable in a court of law? I suppose anyone complaining about it would have to go through whatever the press complaints body is calling itself these days.
I wonder – just kicking this out there – is it worth taking a leaf out of Scotland in Union’s book – or rather, Amnesty International – and organize mass write-ins to protest this kind of thing? Both to the meeja outlets themselves, but also to IPSO – there, I looked it up so nobody else has to bother. It might put a crimp in the Usual Suspects’ style if we could guarantee even a few thousand e-mail responses demanding corrections and apologies when they publish this kind of crêpe. Mind you, I stopped bothering even trying to complain to the BBC some years ago when I stopped even getting automated acknowledgements, because I took that as a sign that they´d simply blocked me.
Other folk may well have better memories than mine, but the last stooshie like this that I remember was when that Siobhan McFadyen woman – another roaster – wrote a completely made-up piece in the Scottish Express about oor Nicola supposedly deliberately affronting Theresa May when she came up for tea and buns at Bute House by not flying the Union fleg. It was all completely fictitious – and the piece even concluded by noting that the protocol for the whole occasion had all been arranged between the relevant officials at Downing Street and in Edinburgh.
This new one about the fleg seems more coordinated, though. It can surely be no coincidence that that a whole coterie of Yoon rags have simultaneously abandoned all journalistic ethics and best practice in order to print something that is so obviously Big Lie propaganda.
The fact that They´re doing it so blatantly makes me think that They must be really rattled… it´s the insidious propaganda that you DON´T notice that is the really dangerous kind, the sly, subliminal, negativistic, confidence-sapping and Cringe-reinforcing stuff that requires mental effort before you can say ¨Hang on a minute!¨, and a mental revolution to rid your mind of completely.
Once you´ve seen it, you can´t unsee it – that´s my experience, and it seems to be true also of the people I´ve helped teach to be aware of the propaganda and how it works. That inability to unsee is why there are so few independentistas who get buyer´s remorse and change their minds: being pro-independence is not like getting religion, it´s a considered point of view that is constantly (and ironically) reinforced by the flood of toxic bilge pumped out by the Scottish meeja – and, of course, the meeja in the rUK. Once you´re aware of it, it scunners you. An inability to bear watching Reporting Scotland is a common sign of this!
We have to remember, though, that although we can see it for what it is, it is not aimed at us: we are lost causes. No, it is aimed at reinforcing the prejudices of the believers in that Old-Time Unionist Religion, the nationalism that isn´t nationalism.
As another example of irony, it´s true to say that we independentistas as the ones keeping not just the hope of a better future alive, but we are also the ones trying to preserve what was best about the way the UK used to be. Many younger readers – both in Scotland and out of it – are probably unaware that the UK was not always the toxic place it is today, that we once had almost no beggars, no homeless, no rough sleepers, no food banks, an NHS that did not look as if it might collapse at any moment, no tuition fees at university, and even maintenance grants, not loans, to help you study there. We didn´t use to have PFI contracts either. We did have tolls on the bridges, mind you… There can be no doubt in anyone´s mind, surely, that given the power to do it, the Scottish Government would fix all the items on that list that it hasn´t fixed already – and that the current Westminster regime wouldn´t even bother trying, except perhaps to try to make things worse.
I shall now segue seamlessly into another ill-concealed bit of hobby-horsing, drum-banging and general bee-in-bunnet ranting.
As a usage note in relation to my style of writing, if anyone has been interested enough to read this far, by ¨meeja¨ I mean the amorphous Unionist print, online and broadcast media that have been coopted into serving as mouthpieces for the ¨Party Line¨ spun by the regime / the Powers That Be / the Establishment. Those who actually write or otherwise produce the stuff are consciously aware of the bias in what they are doing to greater and lesser degrees, but somewhere there are people who know exactly what they are trying to achieve.
It would be nice to be proven wrong sometimes, wouldn´t it?
Westminster is no stranger to psyops, and we Scottish independentistas are a threat to the status quo that has served Them so well for so many, many years. What would be surprising would be if there were no effort by the upper echelons of the British State to thwart and undermine us.
By ¨They¨ with a capital T I mean the more and less shadowy figures who pull the strings in Scotland and the rUK. We can all think of some – the Usual Suspects – who include the Honorary Colonel and her brigade of useful idiots at Holyrood. Stick the baker´s dozen fine upstanding-for-Scotland Tory MPs in the grab bag too. Looking to our nominal left, we can regard Dick Leonard not just with slack-jawed wonder but also with wild surmise, and his idiots are equally useful, of course. Chuck a few press barons into the mix too, indeed, all the meeja. However, there are others we don´t know about because they have a much lower public profile. You do not have to be a tinfoil-hatted, swivel-eyed, paranoid, hair-on-fire conspiracy theorist to arrive at that conclusion, I think.
Even with the bloated and overblown House of Lords that we so enjoy, the prospect of donning the vermine cannot be the motivation for most of those people. That brings me to the unanswered question in my mind: I know all the many reasons why I support Scottish independence, but do They, and Unionists more generally, know with any comparable degree of clarity why they are against it?
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Phew…
That was some rant, Ed.
Frankly, I doubt if it is worth the effort of writing to the IPSO (ironic that “facto” would normally follow that).
I remember reading that Tabloid newspapers don’t particularly mind being sued for inaccuracies like this.
The job is already done, as you say, readers can’t unsee, and the headline has done what was intended… sold a lot of papers or earned a lot of clicks!
For those that wish to, here is how to make a complaint:
https://www.ipso.co.uk/make-a-complaint/
I frankly doubt that anyone will have been swayed one way or the other by this.
It actually has the effect of making people like us even less affectionate towards the union. More dismissive of anything these papers write.
Anyone outraged by the notion that her Britannic Majesty had been so offended by the wicked first minister, will already be a lost cause.
The papers have made fools of themselves among those intelligent enough to notice or care (yet again, I might add).
It’s just another sad part of the history of the demise of the UK.
By the way, if any of the unionist party leaders had come out and condemned this as utter rubbish, perhaps they might have earned some respect.
As far as I know, so far, they haven’t.
So Carry on Dick and the Colonel failed again. Utter lies are fine as long as they suit their purpose.
I read last night that the “facts” (which remember, not one of the journalists (LOL) writing about it had actually noticed in 7+ years of the policy being operative) may have been put about by none other than the Scotland Office, ie Fluffy.
The Scotland Office has form on this. Remember the Liar Carmichael and his tales about Nicola and the French Ambassador?
Maybe Fluffy thought he was brighter than the Liar Carmichael and would get away with it.
Now I don’t think that Carmichael was/is bright at all, but the notion that Fluffy is brighter … Well!
And I ask again, will any of the outraged newspapers which ranted against the policy, be gracious enough to apologise to her majesty their disgust at a decision made by her?
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Thank you, Tris! And thank you also for pointing the finger at Fluffy Mundell and the Scotland Propaganda Office, which I chose not to. Leaving the question of the man´s basic intelligence aside, it seems that in the context of this whole fleg dirdum-stirdum Fluffy actually lied to the Westminster parliament. Well, I suppose the word ¨lied¨ goes to yer ackshl mens rea of the thing, so we will just have to say ¨misinformed¨ the Westminster parliament.
Perhaps someone will confirm that for me? I can´t find the account I read of it right at the moment, and as we are all too well aware, we must always be sceptical about our sources.
So, when can we expect a retraction and an apology from Mundell? I´m not up to researching further at this point – which is why I didn´t say anything about it in my rant ^^^^.
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I don’t really know where it originated, but a reliable Twitter mate “Taylor” tweeted about it last night.
Taylor
@dtaylor5633
Think we can all tell now that the fake news flag story came right out of @DavidMundellDCT office
Wonder which staff member will be blamed…
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I was told the other day “All that stuff about the NHS is fake news. I was at the hospital the other day, everything was fine, no queues , no hanging about. Fake news I tell you.” I tried to tell him that the it’s the English NHS the papers and TV were talking about, not the Scottish NHS . He wasn’t having it, “It’s the NHS they’re talking about.”
We NEED a name change.
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Damn good idea. SHS? Scottish Health Service? I am quite sure that the marketing people could make up slogans involving ¨ownership¨ and ¨YOUR health service!¨ pretty much on the spot.
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Yes, but all the signage etc would cost a lot of money which we don;t have…at least not for cosmetics.
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True enough, the Unionists would be on it like flies on sh – still worth doing, though, and as cheaply as possible and as as visual evidence of parsimony – as in using up old paper stock before using the new, sticking cheap letters S over the Ns in NHS signage… anyway, we know the Unionists would squeal that it cost too much even if the bill were only tuppence ha´penny.
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True, I guess.
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I think it used to be called something different, but Ted Heath, who wanted to make all the countries exactly the same (One Nation) ie into England, changed the name.
I agree we should change the name, but it would probably be very contentious to do it while it is so cash strapped.
These things cost money and it’s money that should be being spent on patient care.
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On flags: Scotland has her own flags, despite what swivel-eyed yoons might think to the contrary. The Rampant Lion should be flown if the monarch is present (there are some exceptions, see The Court of the Lord Lyon’s website) as it is the royal standard of Scotland. There are versions of the British Royal Standard, one for use in Scotland which carries the Rampant Lion in two quarters rather than one. The horses’ mouth, https://beta.gov.scot/publications/flag-flying/
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Thanks! Bookmarked. It didn´t occur to me to check the actual guidelines. Silly of me.
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