Question Time

This is about politics - go and find more pictures of kittens and puppies if you're not interested in this.

I don't watch Question Time. I prefer not to hear any more about how austerity is bad, the EU referendum is both good and bad, the UK can't take more 'migrants' because it's full, and everything else is Jeremy Corbyn's fault because everybody knows he's a commie. But I got emails from the Green Party telling me Patrick Harvie was going to be on tonight's session so I switched on.

I left the Labour Party 3 years ago after 40 years of membership off and on, dickered about for a while and then joined the Scottish Greens after the Independence Referendum. I pay my membership and I also give them 30 quid a month by way of encouragement. They need the money. I know perfectly well the Greens attract people who are sandal-wearing, alfalfa-munching hippies with weird ideas (not me, by the way) but their basic principles are sound:

              <<The Scottish Green Party is part of an international movement guided by the 

                   principles of environmental, social and economic justice.

                   We favour local control, radical participatory democracy and are committed to 
                    international co-operation and peaceful means to achieve our objectives.>>

As a place to start from, that'll do for me.

In a UK that is still dominated by what the London press refers to without so much as a hint of irony as 'the three main parties' - that is the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems - the Greens get b*ggerall publicity, this despite the fact the party must in my (not particularly humble) opinion be the next big thing. I like to watch any representative of the Greens any time they manage to get onscreen.

Tonight, Patrick Harvie might as well have stayed at home. As might John Swinney. We had 4 unionists against the two of them. I don't know who the guy in the tartan tie was - don't bother telling me - I don't care. I hope he's lying awake in his hotel room staring at the ceiling asking himself: What the f*ck just happened? Although I doubt it. I'm awake myself because that's what I'm wondering.

Did we get a wide-ranging discussion of the issues facing Scotland and the UK and the EU? Like the drop in the oil price and how it affects the Scottish, UK and EU economies (because they are all inter-connected), the disgrace that is the 'jungle' in Calais (and the one up the motorway in Dunkirk) and the lack of an EU solution to the 'migrant' problem, the cut in disability benefits in the UK voted through the house of commons by millionaires, the parlous state of the world's economies, or even the fiasco that is the clean for the queen campaign? Of course not.

I put on the mute button quite a lot while I looked at the ceiling shouting 'O for f***s sake,' but as far as I could make out what we got was unionists harping on about the Scottish independence referendum. That, I'm sure you remember, was in 2014.

The unionist parties are obsessed with it.

Myself, I don't give a rat's *rse when the next referendum is. I want to know who's going to sort out the economy, put some bankers in jail pour encourager les autres, deal with Trident and sort out the lottery that is housing so that my family can have a hope of buying a decent place to live.

Do the unionist parties in Scotland have views on any of that? Who knows? Do they have policies and ideas on anything? Just on hammering away at the SNP, it seems. Maybe that's what bothered me tonight: the lack of reaction by the panel members to anything Patrick Harvie and John Swinney said.

The unionist parties in Scotland seem to take their orders from their parties in Westminster and they have totally missed the point. Voters in Scotland (and I suspect in the north of England and in Wales and parts of Northern Ireland) despise them.

Do politicians understand how bad things are?