Brexit

I've had it with Brexit.

I've had it with TV and newspaper journalists who can talk of nothing else but still manage to make themselves look like complete eejits every time they open their mouths. Like the journalists who have so far blamed the failure to secure a deal on the EU, on people who voted remain, on business people who are trying to warn us we are walking into an economic disaster, on the SNP, on Tory MPs who refused to vote against their constituency or their own consciences and were labelled traitors by the newspapers.

I've had it with politicians. Today's reports of Boris Johnson reminding us technology has done away with 'borders' between London boroughs collecting the congestion tax - like there was some similarity with a border between two countries transporting goods and livestock and one paltry wee tax on motorists. With one country being an open door to another 26 in the EU and the other an open door to the UK. I'm sick of the Labour Party not being an opposition but trying to be everything to everybody even if that means flipping views just about on a daily basis. And most of all, I'm sick of the Tory government which got us into this mess and has no idea how to get us out.

I've had it with the way the government of the various parts of the UK is being neglected: laws are not being passed or repealed, austerity is still in place after 8 years and we're not even talking about it, people are getting poorer so retail industries are in the doldrums, the tax take is falling, the infrastructure is falling apart, the railways and hospitals in England are a disgrace, and EU citizens are leaving despite the fact we need them.

I'm sick of red buses, bullying by Nigel Farage, squabbles between cabinet ministers, some of whom couldn't run a menoj never mind a government department.

Am I only seeing the dark side of Brexit? I don't know. Tell me what the light side is.

Saving the Yes vote

I signed off from a few Facebook pages at the start of January. This was part of my 'be good to yourself' New Year resolution. They were all political websites and I'd got tired of the same people replying to any political comment, not with arguments against or for anything that had been written, but just with insults such as saying sh*tebag, w*nker and f*ck to anyone who tried to argue. Like a few other people, I did try to argue for open discussion and maybe a bit of tolerance or to at least stop calling No voters 'yoons' - and then gave up. For me, the crunch was being harangued by a small group of vegans. I'm willing to support people in their ethical aims but then I wondered is this really more important than getting independence? When I wished everyone well and said cheerio in January, my decision to leave these FB pages also met with a few personal insults and that persuaded me I was right to get out.

It also confirmed for me that something has gone far wrong with the Scottish independence cause - because that's what all of these FB pages were about.

If you think the Yes campaign is ready to go once a date is set for a second independence referendum, then you should leave this blog page right now. Because I think we're in trouble and I'm going to say why.

Money - the Yes campaign has none. The Yes campaign had very little cash in 2014 and now we've got even less. Is anyone filling the coffers? Does anyone have an idea of how to fill the coffers?  The Unionists do. They already have a stash of cash. Not to mention people with a background in PR and media, who will be able to flood the newspapers and TV with fake news - just as they did in 2014. Do the Yes people have any idea how to counter this? Yes has a loud voice on social media (Facebook and twitter) but the No campaign still has all but 2 newspapers onside. And a  lot of people still read newspapers in Scotland.

No Voters - we know who the Yes people are and we have a good idea of how to spur them into action, but do we know anything about the people who voted no in 2014? Do we just pretend they're not there or hope we can talk them round when the next referendum is announced? Or are we conducting online polls to find out how people feel about independence - how they think it will affect them, and how we can help persuade them?  In other words, do we have a strategy? Of course, there are No voters we can never talk round but do we have an idea about the people we might be able to persuade? Do we know how many people have shifted to Yes since 2014 by themselves after looking around at what's happening in the UK right now? Especially given what's happening in Northern Ireland over the open border, not to mention the fact that Westminster has taken back a lot of powers from Holyrood and handed them to the secretary of state for Scotland. or that the company that wants to frack in Scotland is taking the Scottish government to court over it and may well win.

Old People - the no campaign in 2014 had a good propaganda machine going: your pension will be at risk if you vote to leave the UK, your savings will be jeopardised if Scotland doesn't have the pound sterling as its currency, etc. Have we done anything to persuade this group of people (who voted massively against independence) that it can be done and we can all benefit? Or do we follow the Facebook riff that these old folk will all be dead by the next referendum so no need to worry?

Optimism - yes, I know it's a weird thing to put in this post, but I really believe that we need some optimism for the future. The UK economy has been in a mess since 2008 and doesn't look like recovering any time soon. People have suffered, especially in the public sector where wages are about 15% lower now than they were. Brexit has dragged us down, with nothing but bluster coming out of the Brexit camp as far as I can see. Is the future for Scotland looking any better? If Brexit has taught us anything, it's that the negotiations to leave the UK will be tough. But do we have enough going for us to make it worthwhile? I think we do: our exports are holding firm; oil prices are doing well; the Scottish Government is not just handling austerity but planning for the future - thanks to the Greens, who continue to act as a left of centre spur on the SNP government.

A year ago, a unionist friend put up a comment on Facebook in which she mentioned that Quebec had 3 referendums before giving up on the idea of independence. She seemed to be settled in for the long haul - and pretty certain Scotland would come to its senses and eventually reject independence. So there's another plus: the complacency of unionists. That can only work to the advantage of Yes voters.

Dear Madam

Yes, you. The middle-aged woman in the elderly silver VW Golf. I was behind you yesterday afternoon on Fenwick Road. Fortunately, I was in a different lane, so you didn't get to tail-gate me, as you did the guy in the Kia and then the two women in the Corsa.

You were obviously in a hurry.

Maybe you're a stranger in these here parts. You may not know that before we got the lights on the stretch of road between the Eastwood roundabout and Burnfield Road, there were several horrific accidents, two of which resulted in young people being killed. Or maybe you're local. In that case, you must know how dangerous Fenwick Road can be. And you must know when the schools come out. Or were you late for picking up the kids or the grand kids?

In that golden half hour when the schools are coming out, I'm extra vigilant. I'm not too bothered about the cars this woman was tail-gating. Adults can look after themselves. But I saw her twice roar along the road and shudder to a halt at pedestrian crossings - one of them with a crossing patrol person on duty. On both occasions, the kids and mothers or grannies (who had right of way, since the green man was lit up), started to cross and then, alarmed, drew back onto the pavement.

So let me ask: what's wrong with this woman that she thinks it's okay to frighten wee kids and their escorts and make them step back from the edge of the pavement?

Where I live, I know every day there will be two sets of things to look out for: big groups of St Ninian's pupils walking up or down the hill from Eastwood Park, usually deep in conversation, not always aware there are cars around. And lots of cars heading over the brow of the hill to drop off or pick kids up from OLM primary school.

Anyone who thinks they can charge through this kind of traffic is off their head.

There's been a lot of talk about introducing a 20mph limit in city streets. I'm for it. I'm not sure the woman in the silver Golf will be so happy.

Identity

Two news stories from this week have got me thinking.

The first is the Northern Ireland political situation. Yet again, Northern Ireland is left without a government, as it has been for a while now. This time it seems the talks to set up power-sharing between the DUP and Sinn Fein broke down because the DUP and their allies in the Northern Ireland Assembly can't accept the Gaelic Language Act that Sinn Fein want.

Some of us in Scotland are worried about losing our parliament when Brexit is pushed through. And we're amazed that the people of Northern Ireland are so ready to allow politicians to hand their country - sorry, province - over to direct rule from Westminster and apparently because of a Gaelic Language Act.

Our amazement only shows our ignorance as outsiders of how important language is to the identity of most people and certainly to people in Northern Ireland, most of whom speak English. Because Gaelic isn't the only language of Northern Ireland: there's also Ulster Scots, the language spoken by people descended from the Lowland Scots who migrated in the 17th century to the Ulster counties of Ireland. The two languages neatly define the religious and political divide of Northern Ireland. The numbers of people speaking either of these languages don't in fact matter. It's not about numbers. It's about identity. And nearly 20 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, issues of identity in Northern Ireland are as heavily politicised and as far removed from tolerance as they ever were.

How do you change attitudes like those in Northern Ireland?

You might as well ask how you change attitudes in the USA to guns. Year after year, skinny, slightly stunned and weird-looking young white men, poorly educated, not obviously clever or talented in any way, appear in court accused of mass murder, after shooting up a school. Time after time, the parents of murdered children demand justice, the parents of murderers either deny all responsibility or claim they asked for help with their sons and got none, and the media - social and otherwise - are filled with claims that carrying guns is an inalienable right of US citizens, guns don't kill people - people do, this wouldn't happen if everyone was armed, etc. Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association quite unashamedly feeds funds to politicians who will protect the NRA and its members.

It is true of course that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the 2nd amendment of the US constitution: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Mind you, the arms the writers of the constitution were thinking of were muskets, rather than the AR (Armalite)15 used in many school shootings in the USA in the past 40 odd years. (It seems the AR15 isn't the most dangerous weapon openly available to people who want to shoot people, but is used in school shootings on a 'copycat' basis and also because it is lightweight, readily available and can be fired from waist-high position so you can look really cool while you're killing people).

To those of us looking on from the outside, it seems bizarre that such firepower can be bought in a shop by just about anyone. Indeed, attempts are being made to reduce the restrictions on who can buy weapons like this. And the US government - including Obama - have been unable to tackle any part of this problem.

As in the Northern Ireland language question, it's not about numbers, although there are a lot of gun owners in the USA: it's about identity. Some of the nicest people in the USA simply do not understand that the rest of us find their need to own and carry guns weird. We can - and do - cite murderous events in Dunblane (Scotland) and Tasmania (Australia) and the successful actions taken to reduce murder by gun after them, but the gun attitude in the USA is so ingrained it's hard to imagine how it can be changed.

Maybe we could ask who gains by keeping the people of Northern Ireland split over their identity. And who gains by allowing the people of the USA, the richest country in the world, to arm themselves.

I offer no answers to these questions but I am open to ideas.

Medical history is written by men

These are the reasons given for women being admitted to a mental hospital in the USA in the 1860s.

A friend posted this on Facebook in a group devoted to history. A lot of the contributors to the group are men and a lot of them regularly put up very interesting documents. This document was posted by a female member of the group and it attracted disbelief and in a few cases ridicule. Surely, wrote one man, this was a 'made-up list.' 

It's hard to know where to start with this. Because I'm old, I take it for granted that people know their own social history. They will surely realise that 1864 is pretty much the pre-scientific age. That the Ancient Greeks started a tale that went round the western world for a couple of millennia claiming that women were the victims of their uterus, which wandered around the female body, affecting the woman's temperament and, of course, making her unreliable as a witness or a head of household or someone capable of managing her own affairs. Surely people know that almost all medical doctors

back then were men and all trained in the same pre-scientific way. Surely people have heard the tales of women's medical conditions being dismissed as imagination or hysteria. 

Good grief, Florence Nightingale, the founder of battlefield medicine, came back to London from the Crimea where diseases like brucellosis were endemic terribly ill and was incapable of doing very much for the following 40 years. Was she diagnosed with a physical illness? Not a bit of it: she had a 'nervous' illness, according to all the (male) doctors who saw her. 

It has taken a long time - and a change of personnel, to the point where more than half the medical trainees in the UK are now women - to persuade doctors that 'heavy periods' accompanied by appalling pain can be a symptom of endometriosis. Back in the day (50 years ago), one of my school friends almost lost her place to study Physics and Maths at Glasgow University because she was too ill to sit the national exams. This highly intelligent academic was advised by her doctor to get married and have a baby (in that order, of course). That would clean out the uterus and the pain would disappear. By the time she got proper treatment, her uterus was so damaged she was unable to have children. 

Among women today, it's a standing joke (we're a crude lot left to our own devices) that if men had to undergo a cancer test that involved crushing their testicles between glass plates and x-raying them, a better way would be found to do these things. Yet women are still subjected to the mammogram, which looks and feels like a form of medieval torture. Not to mention the awfulness of the smear test. Even nowadays, it feels as if medical procedures for women have to involve 'discomfort' (that's what medics call pain). Ask any woman who has had a D&C. 

There are still changes that need to be made. If nothing else, the treatment of women for heart complaints needs to be on an equal footing with the treatment of male patients, now that we're finally admitting that heart disease is not a totally male preserve. 

Maybe we're getting there, although I would suggest that you should never, ever allow a doctor - male or female - to draw blood. You'll be bruised from here to hell and back. Nurses do that - painlessly and with aplomb. 

Pan breid

This is a pan loaf - referred to in Glasgow as pan breid:



As you can see, the wrapper is slathered with the Union Flag. And it's not just our daily bread: your sprouts may come from a supplier in Fife but they'll still be branded as coming from the UK, rather than Scotland. We have even reached the point where some supermarkets are branding as UK goods items that come almost entirely from Scotland  - seafood, Scotch lamb and beef - and whisky, for example.

I have a few questions to ask about this outbreak of flags on the goods we buy in supermarkets. First of all, when did it happen that goods suddenly got covered in the Union Flag? And how is it possible that all the major supermarket chains - Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrison, M&S - started decorating their goods like this, and all at the same time? You don't suppose there could be any collusion between the supermarkets and the Tory government? Most if not all of them are supporters of the Tory Party. Or does it have to do with Brexit? Maybe it even goes further?

What point does this UK-branding intend to make? That the Union is alive and well and whatever the Scots may think with their wee pathetic parliament in Edinburgh, it's Westminster that's in charge?

I see it a bit differently: the wee parliament is doing pretty well. It's delivering what a lot of Scots want. It is led by a party I don't support (I'm a Green) but the party in power tends to listen to what other parties - and the people of Scotland - actually want. Maybe the wee parliament is being too successful. The best laugh of the week for me was the rush by politicians in the Northern Isles to claim credit for grants made to support inter-island ferries. But still the pro-independence parties keep on going on, taking Scotland in a direction damn near opposite to the way the Brexit-fueled UK is determined to go. Scotland wants a kinder, more civilised society - and it's not going to get it from Brexit.

Not that we can be complacent. The re-branding of supermarket goods is a lesson to us: the Unionists have a lot more power than the rest of us and we'll need to be pretty well organised to meet the unionist challenge in the second independence referendum.

By the way, 'pan breid' in Glasgow is also rhyming slang: pan breid = deid. That's how I for one see the Union Flag in Scotland.

Let's talk about the war

I got this from Calum Mathieson's Facebook page. 

From the cover of the Bella Caledonia magazine today, I also got this:

                                 How we escape the delusions of Brexit Britain 

There are quite a few pernicious delusions stalking the UK. I would like to say these delusions are limited to England, but sadly they can be found everywhere in Brexit Britain.

1 The UK has lost control over its laws and is being told what to do by the EU.  Only 13% of laws in the UK owe their origins to the EU. 87% of laws originate in the UK.

2 The people in the EU Parliament and on the EU Commission are unelected. In fact, all representatives in the EU Parliament are elected by the voters of their home countries and members of the EU Commission are nominated by their home governments. If you don't vote, you don't get the government you want in the UK (even if you do vote in some parts of the UK) or the MEPs you want - and your elected politicians in Westminster will nominate people to the EU Commission whom you probably don't approve of. 

3 The EU is run by Germany for its own benefit. Germany is a powerful member of the EU, because of its population alone but also because it has a buoyant and healthy economy. Germany struggled to absorb the former East Germany when Communism fell but it did it. The former Communist states of eastern Europe are also being successfully absorbed into the EU. When Czechia and Slovakia split in 1993, they did so peacefully and have now been welcomed into the EU. When the former Yugoslavia split, it was a complete disaster for all of the population, which culminated in a civil war and it will take a long time for the various countries to recover and find their place in Europe, assuming they want one. 

France, the UK, Spain and Italy are equally powerful members of the EU and they also pay in to the EU to support other, poorer countries. 

There is no 'top dog' in the EU. 

Is that what bothers some people in the UK? Do they imagine they are entitled to be a top nation? A world power? Up there with the USA, China and Russia? That honestly is impossible. The UK is a set of islands off the coast of western Europe. Great Britain is the name for the biggest of these islands. It's not a description of how good or powerful the UK is. 

Within the EU, the UK is part of a team. It's not adapting very well to this role and sadly a lot of politicians encourage people to be backward looking and to harbour resentment of other EU nations, even though the UK has been a member of the EU 'club' for 42 years now.  

4 The UK won 'a glorious victory' against Nazism. That is a complete lie. The Russians won that victory for us. 80% of the casualties of the second world war were Russians defending their country against a Nazi invasion. 

It can't be healthy to constantly refer to events that ended so long ago: it's a century since the first world war ended; 73 years in the case of the second world war. I reckon there's no one left who can remember the first world war and gey few who remember the second. You'd have to be born about 1930 to remember the events of the second world war. 

Up above, the Telegraph uses words like 'hate' and 'shameful' when talking about our German neighbours. I've heard similar references to France and French people. I have to tell you the Germans don't talk about the UK that way. The French also don't talk about their German neighbours that way and I've met a lot of French and German people who are confused about why the UK can't seem to move on from the second world war. It's worth pointing out that while most of western Europe has been occupied, tramped over by invading armies and subjected to appalling levels of mistreatment by their neighbours, England and Wales never have. Not since 1066 anyway. I can't say the same for either Ireland or Scotland, since what has happened in both of these countries looks to me like an occupation lasting centuries. 

As for the Telegraph 'celebrating' events in the history of Europe that killed millions of people for the second time in successive generations, words fail me... 

5 The willingness of some UK patriots to use fascist ideology while hiding behind WW2 past. Let's start with the UK press: how on earth have we ended up with the most extreme right wing press in - I suspect - the world? Almost all foreign-owned, some of them nothing more than vanity projects for rich men but others - sinisterly - following an agenda that the USA's Tea Party would be pleased with. If you want to know where fake news came from, check the pages of the Mail, Telegraph and the  Express.

Then there's UKIP. the definition of political failure: a one-story party which should have disappeared off the TV screens and newspaper pages once Brexit had been achieved. Instead, it hangs on with no policies, no ideas and no MPs. Ironically, the only place it has representation is the EU Parliament. And it doesn't have to answer for anything that happens in Brexit. Who carries the can? Who will pay? Why, you and me - of course.  

Even more to the right are groups like Britain First, the EDL and the SDL. We saw the SDL in action in 2014 after the Scottish Independence Referendum. Flag-waving in George Square, trying to intimidate pro-independence supporters, and threatening SNP and Green MSPs online. Britain First has the distinction of inspiring Thomas Mair who assassinated Jo Cox and Darren Osborne who killed a worshiper leaving the mosque in Finsbury Park. 

The fascist ideology described by KS up above allows newspapers and political parties in the UK to dismiss people with brown and black faces as foreigners: women wearing hijabs, folk who speak a different language and worship a different prophet. Then we can deny them their rights in law and let them live under the constant threat of being 'repatriated.' That is, picked up off the street, locked up in detention centres, kicked out of the country.

Most crushing of all, in my opinion, is the failure to see that we need these people. Every country in the EU has benefitted for centuries from migration. Scotland is richer for the arrival of Russian Jews, Poles, Italians, Irish people, Chileans, Indians and Pakistanis. Now we welcome Syrians. Like all the other migrants who have come here, they will repay our willingness to welcome them many times over. 

The Holocaust

Are you following the trial of Darren Osborne who drove a van into a crowd of worshipers coming out of a mosque in Finsbury Park? Osborne is a right wing terrorist, who killed one person and injured 9 others for no reason other than their religious affiliation.

'Right wing terrorist' is an expression we seem to be reluctant to use in the UK, and I have to admit many white right wing murderers in the USA in recent years have similarly been allowed to escape being labelled terrorists. I'll bet there are no white right wing terrorists in Trump's Guantanamo.

The UK media managed to avoid using the expression 'right wing terrorist' when Jo Cox was murdered by Thomas Mair, even though he was shouting the name of an extreme right wing organisation called Britain First as he stabbed the young mother to death. Darren Osborne was in touch with the same organisation when he planned his attack on innocent people in London.

There's no logic to this: Osborne is Welsh. How did he end up attacking people at a mosque in London? He is described by the UK press as a loner and an unemployed father of four, although during his attack he was shouting 'death to all Muslims.' Mair is Scottish. How did he come to attack a Labour MP in England?

There's a pattern here. And it has to do with us, not people like Mair and Osborne. It's about denial.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people right across Europe in the 1930s denied there was a problem with the Nazis: after all, this was the legally elected government of Germany. It just couldn't be that millions of Jewish people, Roma, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, the religious, intellectuals - in fact, anyone who didn't fit into Nazi ideology - were being kidnapped and murdered in scrupulously organised camps. Except that they were.

Denial also led the governments of the UK and the USA to refuse to accept the many refugees that were waiting on their borders to find a safe place back in the 1930s. Children without parents or any other family waited desperately for a safe place to live.

Does anyone else see a parallel between the refugees of the 1930s and those arriving now, young people waiting in Calais for permission to cross the English Channel to where their families live or waiting on the Mexican border for permission to join their parents in the USA?

I watched the Alex Salmond show on rt tonight. He commemorated the Holocaust in a way that I found very moving: letting witnesses speak for themselves. They included a man who had been pursued all round Europe by the Nazis and joined the Resistance in France only to be betrayed and sent to the concentration camps, and a woman whose mother made it through all sorts of deprivation in order to keep her children alive and then committed suicide when she found out from a newspaper that her childhood sweetheart was dead.

I understand that the leaders of Britain First are on trial right now. I don't care what for but I hope they are found guilty.

In fact, given what they are responsible for, may they rot in hell.