Reflections at 65

I started writing this a week ago on my 65^th birthday, the day local Aberdeenshire SNP councillor, Geva Blackett, was reported to the Ethical Standards Committee and the police for her part in a series of tweets about hanging my MP, Andrew Bowie, from the Kincardine Bridge by his genitals. 

In 2007, I read a book entitled Mao: The Unknown Story. I wonder if Ms Blackett and her cronies read it too, because it contains a description of how Mao’s thugs tied a rope to dissenters’ privates, the other end to a car, and dragged them through their village.

I met Andrew Bowie on my first night leafleting for Better Together in 2014, soon after I realised that Scotland was in grave danger of being destroyed by a group of people whose ideals and practices are alien to me, and that I shouldn’t expect others to do the work of defeating them. We have been friends since. 

As I wrote, I wondered what my father would have thought of what is going on in Scotland. Like many who read this, my dad was the greatest man I ever knew; a sapper in the war, joiner, church elder, Royal Arch Lodge past Master, manager of Linlithgow Rose, Arsenal scout, bowler and council rent man, and locals lined the street to watch his funeral procession in 1975. My mum’s family contained several acknowledged gifted kids who left school at 14. Her brother was the last of three generations of joiners at the paper mill.

They adopted me, and I joined a generation of well over a million Scots kids who benefited from post-war Tory and Labour policies on health, education and council housing – probably the best ever system to enable families to get on, if they were willing to work at it. Nowadays, it’s called Attainment and Social Mobility and it means bugger all, other than a virtue signalling tool to brainwash unfortunate people into thinking “freedom” and prosperity can only be delivered by voting SNP and Yes.

Incidentally, these three public services had their golden years well before they were devolved, centralised and politicised.

Actually, I’ve a good idea what my dad would have said. Everyone I knew in Linlithgow, regarded Billy Wolfe, who succeeded nazi sympathiser Arthur Donaldson as SNP leader, as a joke, and relished his seven general election whackings by Tam Dalyell.

Of the zombie Flora McDonald and Rob Roy lookalikes trudging along Scotland’s streets with AUOB, they’d have shaken their heads and said, “where dae they get these folk fae?”

I’m not sure if they’d be able to take in the “England out of Scotland” border post manned by the most sinister elements of AUOB, or some of the proposed manipulation of our justice system. 

What really convinced me that Scotland is being stolen, was a few weeks ago, when closing a debate on BLM, Justice Minister Humza Yousaf in an astounding rant, spat – off a series of senior public positions in Scotland that were all white, or “wyte” as he pronounced it, thereby accusing my country of being systematically racist, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Scotland is full of native Scots and 96% white, and begging the questions “what does he intend to do about that?”

We know: He is trying to ram through a flawed Hate Crime bill that will stifle free speech, the kind that might otherwise expose the tyranny and racism of his own party. A Hate Crime bill that has united the Law Society and the Catholic church and every major newspaper, except The National, in condemnation.

This assault on liberty has to stop, and until last week I couldn’t see the opposition doing it. Ten months until the Holyrood elections, the opposition hardly lay a glove on the SNP.

But, a week is a long time in politics. Jackson Carlaw’s departure means Downing Street has got real, and so now, will the Scottish Tories. Keir Starmer needs to do the same – clean out their deadwood “SNP-lite” faction and bring in some real talent – the former MP’s who have been on the sidelines since the 2015 general elections.

The Libdems? Maybe they will get the message in time too.

And of course, there’s George Galloway’s Alliance For Unity. Can Galloway deliver on his goal of uniting the parties in a tactical voting alliance?

There are 2 million NO voters out there, 1m people depending on UK furlough money, 1m Brexit voters with no-one to vote for, 1.2m people who, in 2016, did not vote SNP or Green (the Gardening Section, as Galloway calls them). Surely we can get a Holyrood pro-UK majority out of that lot?

Maybe May 2021 will see the last of the nationalist MP stringeruppers, “England out” border patrols,  Yousaf “Wyte, Wyte, Wyte” rants and Indyref2.

I hope that by my 66th birthday we’ll be celebrating their demise. 

Allan Sutherland is the Director of Scotland Matters. Follow him on Twitter at @sud55allan

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