Politics and Football are a poisonous cocktail !

Holyrood 

The Scottish Parliament

Parlamaid na h-Alba

There are times in life when utter despair overwhelms you! This despair I hasten to add has nothing really to do with my personal life. In that respect things could not be better! 

• I have the love of my life in Wilma.
• I have a beautiful house without a mortgage in a city and region which I truly adore!
• We're comfortable enough financially, so won't starve.
• We're not too physically constrained despite being Septuagenarians.

So why the angst I hear you ask?  There are literally millions in the UK who are not a tenth so lucky as Bunty and I are.

The answer is politics in SCOTLAND !! 

For some 65 years Scotland has avoided a Tory Government here, yet have been anchored/manacled to various blends of them in Westminster and I include the form of Labour that has been in effect Tory Light with a form of socialism that Keir Hardy most assuredly would not recognise !

A couple of years or so ago it was looking like a "shoo-in" for Independence ! We had a defeat in 2014 but only on the basis of "Project Fear" from Westminster telling the electorate that their pensions were at risk if they voted to leave the UK, but events subsequently had shown this to be absolute nonsense and to be frank about it; lies, damned lies and bent statistics!

Where does football come into this? A fair question were it not for the lunacy that pervades Scottish Football especially in the largest city Glasgow.  There are two clubs in Glasgow that frankly exude mutual hatred and is based on religion.

Celtic           equals Roman Catholicism with hints of Irish extraction.

Rangers       equals Orange Protestantism with loyalist inclinations.

To the central point of this blog !  

The tribal nonsense emanating from both sides in Glasgow is endangering freedom for Scotland by the vast majority of Rangers fans clinging to so called "Loyalism" to the crown and the Union Jack whilst declaring themselves to be anti-Independence despite the fact that their livelihoods' are most assuredly not going to be enhanced by the likes of Boris Johnson and his right  wing band of crooks.  

Whilst at the same time the Celtic fans are adamant that Nicola Sturgeon is tacitly supporting Rangers by not hammering them for the crowd scenes last weekend and as such they won't be voting for her on that basis. 

It beggars belief that working class fans of both sides are so blind to the impact of control by a frankly obscenely biased Tory Party that they'd prefer to metaphorically "Cut off their noses to spite their faces"

At 74 years of age I'm unlikely to see past another decade or so, but this has an impact on all of their futures and those of their off-spring's .

Leave the football crap on the football pitch this is about your future !

Dildo Harding spaffs more money on Test & Trace £37 Billion is more than the entire Scottish annual budget £34 Billion on her failed system!

"Baroness" Diane Mary Harding of Winscombe (Dido) to her cronies, with her husband John Penrose a Conservative M.P.  (Quelle surprise!).  

The redoubtable Dido has form in terms of spending public cash on flogging "Dead Horses"  and that ironically since she was a Champion jockey, and that her biggest gaff to date (prior to this "Test & Trace" fiasco) was Talk Talk mobile phones which rumbled up a bill for £60+ million. 

One of her other "attributes" considering where it is thought the UK dropped the ball at the start of the Covid 19 crisis in 2020 was allowing the Cheltenham Racing Festival to proceed at a time when social distancing was a dilemma for Sage!  

Surprise, surprise ! Who has a board position at the Jockey Club responsible for the festival?  Yes you guessed it "Dido" Harding!

Not that I'm suggesting that her rise to prominence had anything to do with links to the Tory Party or that her appointments were down to that allied to having studied at Magdalen College alongside David Cameron. 

          Aye Right you are Dido !!!

For those "Unionists"  here in Scotland, I am suggesting that this is a glaring example of Tory "Chumocracy" and the very idea that this "Union" is one of equality based on fairness is ludicrous bordering on insanity !  The choice is yours in May and it is more about your children than yourselves.

The "Demise of a Leader" and the rise of his Replacement

The whole sorry saga over Alex Salmond and his "alleged" behaviour towards women who worked for him has been a potentially enormous banana skin for the SNP and the present leadership.

That banana skin provided the Scottish opposition parties with the ammunition they so desperately needed as the inexorable rise of Scotland's desire for Independence gathered with 20 + successive polls showing a lead for the SNP.

Alex Salmond's resignation from the leadership of the party in 2014 and he was replaced by Nicola Sturgeon, but continued as an MP in Westminster until he lost his Gordon seat to of all people, a Tory of whom nothing is known, Colin Clark !  This pillar of Conservatism (Clark) lasted a whole two years before disappearing from public view.  

In truth, I thought myself fairly up to date with politics in Scotland until this came up!  In the Scottish world of political movement to have unseated what was a metaphoric giant of the political sphere north of the border and then to disappear after a mere two years in politics takes some doing. 

In August 2018, he (Salmond) resigned from the SNP in the face of allegations of sexual misconduct in 2013 while he was First Minister. In a statement he said that he wanted to avoid internal division within the party and intended to apply to re-join the SNP once he had an opportunity to clear his name.

There's an "oxymoron" if ever there was one! 

"Alex wants to avoid internal division within the party"

This is precisely what he has caused and to greater effect than all the opposition representation combined.

My opinion (for what it's worth) is that having admitted and apologised for his behaviour to one woman, and acquitted on numerous other charges (?) there is no doubt that his attitude towards women under his power/influence is that of someone who thinks that he can behave in a chauvinistic and frankly misogynistic fashion towards them. My heartfelt sympathies lie with his wife, an innocent in this moral debacle. He truly has done more damage to Independence than the entire Westminster cabal and if it results in the loss of Independence then he would be well advised to emigrate.

A Whitehall "Farce" without Brian Rix or the Theatre of that name!!

 Those of us who are of a certain age remember fondly the "Whitehall Farces" in the 50's and 60's in the Whitehall Theatre, London. These plays were fairly innocent comedy sketches highlighting the vagaries of Government, the Armed Forces and mainstream life in the UK at the time! 

As an aside, Brian Rix also made a series of television "farces" which dominated the theatrical ones insofar that they had a wider audience via the new medium of television ! This popularity of his ninety T.V. farces made Rix the highest paid actor on the only television medium at the time, the BBC.

  

This then is the history of "Whitehall Farces" and in truth they were an absolutely innocent, joy to watch.

Sixty + years later and the public have a new form of "Whitehall Farce", the only difference is that, this farce has nothing to do with the Theatre of that name! Nor do we have the benefit of the redoubtable Brian Rix scripting this farce.

In London, the ‘White Hall’ of Henry VIII was associated with rather more serious aspects of government and was the building before which Charles I was later executed on 30 January 1649. A scaffold was constructed in front of the building and the execution party stepped out on to it from a first floor window.

A massive palace, it had more than 1,500 rooms and featured an indoor tennis court, a bowling green and a cock-fighting pit, all put in by Henry VIII. In 1698, the palace of Whitehall was gutted by fire and never rebuilt. 

Whitehall becoming the site for key administrative offices such as the Treasury and 10 Downing Street. Military buildings also surround the site, including Horse Guards. The term ‘Whitehall’ refers not just to the site of the former Palace of Whitehall, but to the bureaucratic institutions of the government in general.

The "Den of Iniquity" or "Farce H.Q." if you want!

The present occupant of No 10 has apparently had upwards of £100,000 spent on decorating the flat in No 11 Downing Street in the taste of his latest flame Ms Carrie Symonds;

Obviously Ms Symonds is at the forefront of the colour blind and technicolour nightmare movement.  What is "farcical" in this particular decorative sin against humanity is that both she and her erstwhile fiancé Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson have appealed for a charity to be set up to pay for this cultural monstrosity.

Ashgrove and Independence a political analogy !

All Scottish Unionists would have the Scots believe that continued membership in the United Kingdom is the "Nirvana" we ought to aspire to and that it is the only way to prosper ! 

This though shows that the only way to prosper in the UK is to be "in with the In-Crowd"  !  

To try and show what a glib and frankly shameless liar that is the Prime Minister at this time, when Editor of the Spectator Magazine; had this printed in a 2004 edition; Hardly the work of a fan of Scotland! 

I ask my English friends; How would you feel with Johnson subscribing to this piece of prose for the English as opposed to the Scots ??

The Scotch – what a verminous race!

Canny, pushy, chippy, they’re all over the place, 

Battening off us with false bonhomie, 

Polluting our stock, undermining our economy.

Down with sandy hair and knobbly knees!

Suppress the tartan dwarves and the Wee Frees!

Ban the kilt, the skean-dhu and the sporran

As provocatively, offensively foreign!

It’s time Hadrian’s Wall was refortified

To pen them in a ghetto on the other side.

I would go further. The nation

Deserves not merely isolation

But comprehensive extermination.

We must not flinch from a solution.

I await legal prosecution.

My own comparison preference would be to compare Bunty and I having bought the house of our dreams (Ashgrove) and now we work at the fine tuning of the dream house in terms of decoration, furniture, flooring and the garden. 

In other words our own "Nirvana" is a work in progress but that with judicious financial planning and careful use of our resources we will have the real free house of our dreams! 

Likewise Independence !  It is not going to materialise overnight and there may well be adjustments and financial outlay that we have to make in order to have the country of our dreams, but living in a form of rented accommodation where the landlord is an overbearing, lying, misogynistic, narcissistic, immoral cheat is not where I want to live in the winter of my life!

So it is with Scotland as a "Home" for the population (irrespective of where they originate from), it won't happen overnight, but it will be a place that ultimately those who live in it will be considerably happier than they are at present (even if it does cost a bit more in terms of tax!)

A final thought to any "Unionist" reading this;

If Scotland is such a financial drain on the UK Treasury as is alleged by Unionists and Westminster, why are they so desperate to keep Scotland in the Union and never say "Right off you go Scotland" rather they are constantly carping about the benefits of the now defunct Union !  Could it be anything to do with;

Then there's the question of Nuclear Submarines (Trident) and the redundant ones being held at Rosyth!

Furthermore; The UK government secretly planned to dump the radioactive hulks of 22 nuclear submarines in the sea off north west Scotland, documents released by the National Archives reveal.

A survey for the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in 1989 identified six sites for “seabed storage” of defunct naval submarines near the islands of Skye, Mull and Barra for up to 60 years – and probably longer.

Detailed and highly confidential MoD studies concluded the plan was “feasible” and would “obviate the international problems which we would face were we to dispose of these vessels in international waters.”

Well Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson that will be over my dead body !

Rage does come anywhere near describing what I feel about the present United (?) Kingdom status !

 Here I am in the middle of a Pandemic with my own self inflicted disease (COPD) and I take that on the chin, because I brought it about myself with almost half a century of thinking I was "Jack the Lad" with cigarettes !

The rage is not from the Pandemic itself, but the ramifications of it, Covid-19 on our society and our puerile response to it as a society! 

Now at this point I need to make clear that I have some very good and close friends for whom total absolution is essential (to the rant I'm about to embark on) Richard Osler, Roger Strike and Allan Pook are three of the most  genuine guys you could wish to meet, ergo guys;

"Et ego te absolvo a peccatis tui "

Now you can carry on being Tories while I wallow in the warm water of separatism and the break up of the allegedly United (?) Kingdom.

The anger/rage is about the inequality of life in 21st century Britain and the fact that there are children for whom poverty is a way of life and whether it is the fault of individual parents or not is irrelevant! 

 These are fucking children for the love of God and to have obscenely wealthy companies decide to apparently profiteer from their plight is sending my blood pressure through the roof. This Government would have done the square root of naff all had it not been for a young footballer who has what they have not; a conscience !  

Marcus Rashford is a beacon of light in an extremely dark tunnel of capitalism and my admiration for him and his family grows daily ! Pressure from him and those members of society who do understand conscience, brought to attention of a cabinet of multi-millionaires, the plight of the many thousands of children who are falling out of the net of school meals during the Pandemic and eventually the cabinet decide to give them "food parcels" (not vouchers since that would eliminate a stratum of donors to the Tories from their ability to profit from misery).

Still it was supposed to mean that the children would be fed during the national lockdown so it was a step in the right direction !

Wrong ! 

What Chartwell perceive to be a balanced diet and nutritionally fair for a growing child is;

As an aside this, this morally defunct company (Compass) were found in 2013 to have "inadvertently" supplied horse meat to schools in Ireland and Northern Ireland and in 2006 were fined £40 Million for a bribery allegation in terms of a UN contract for peace-keepers in Liberia ! With this background in commercial catering they are just the sort of company that this Government would associate in terms of contract award !

Dearest Bunty has just been through to try and calm me down to a mere apoplectic rage!  

It's not working though as I truly want vent my anger physically on the people who are running this (dis) United Kingdom !

Children starving, suicides increasing, debt pushing people into extreme poverty, companies collapsing with attendant unemployment but the bastards in Westminster give themselves another £10,000 for having to work from home?  

Mea culpa Bunty, there is nothing I wouldn't give for you except the desire to truly batter every one of these complete arses into oblivion !

Is this possibly the return of political sense ?

The apparent resurgence of political populism in the Western World with Trump, Johnson and Orban seems to have hit the buffers with the events in Washington's Capitol Hill in the last couple of days!

 

At this moment in time only the Arch Buffoon the US President, Donald J Trump seems to have come off worse, but the others who so readily spent the last 4 years kissing his ass and in the case of our own Prime Clown Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson actually going so far as to suggest that Trump should be awarded the Nobel Prize, will be wondering if it can happen to Trump what chance have they got?

On the global scale you also have other populist leaders in Bolsonaro, Modi and Duterte all of whom purport to be leading their people to their version of the promised land !

If Trump can be canned on the basis of the rambling politics he espoused, then these numpties must surely be having a second thought on their chosen path?