Articles by Jamie Blackett

So the SNP is intending to “extend the right to stand for election to sixteen year olds.” Who knew? I had assumed that they already were but maybe Ross Greer, the wokier-than-thou Scottish Green MSP only identifies as sixteen.

It is, I am forced to admit, a brilliant strategy. At a stroke ‘gammons’ and ‘boomers’ like me will be focused on this latest provocation rather than asking how the Scottish ‘government’ could possibly have committed around £240,000,000  in the shipyards and still have no ferries; or where the allegedly missing £660,000 from the SNP’s ‘indy fund’ is; or how it is that Nicola Sturgeon’s publisher allegedly received over £295,000 of public money prior to the publication of her ‘inspirational’ selected speeches Women Hold up Half the Sky (a title borrowed from Chairman Mao); or what has happened to the £5bn Covid support money destined for Scottish businesses that Audit Scotland think is unaccounted for?

Back on the trail. and I arrive on the seafront in Troon just as George is mounting the soapbox. Getting out of my car is a blessed relief. My little car was only ever designed to be a run-around and I have been bent double for two and a half hours, all the while imagining Douglas Ross, Anas Sarwar and Nicola Sturgeon sitting on their battle buses, sipping coffee and checking their Twitter timelines. Still, there is something virtuous about being the underdog in this fight. When it’s my turn on the soapbox I talk about what has been on my mind while driving. The lack of posters for any party, even the SNP, on my way here raises questions. Are the people of Scotland not going to vote? Have they lost interest in politics? Or is it that they are resigned to the outcome?

“You know there was no word for dildo in Gaelic until the SNP invented one? They have paid translators to come up with the full suite of words to cater for all sexual tastes.” The breadth of George’s grasp of current affairs never ceases to amaze me. We are blethering in a café in Stranraer on our soap box tour of the South of Scotland. This conflation of the SNP’s fake Gaelicisation, warped morality and waste of taxpayers’ money would have been a gift for opposition politicians and the media in most countries. The fact that it has barely permeated the public consciousness in Scotland, let alone provoked an outcry, is yet another reason why Holyrood needs George Galloway in there speaking out against the SNP’s corruption of society. 

As the election enters its final week, All For Unity has come under sustained attack from people on Twitter, led by Tory party activists, who, scared of losing list seats, have briefed candidates to launch personal attacks on George Galloway. 

To be honest, I was initially sceptical about George too. However, I had been awestruck by his debating skills in the US Senate, his passion in 2014 on the pro-UK side, and his commitment now to strategies that could beat the SNP and beat back the ugly and tiresome Nationalism that has brought Scotland to its knees. All of that is what got me talking with him about a new party to help break the stalemate.

I decided to do my bit for the television party political broadcast in a field with our dairy cows in the background. The sun is shining and, by chance, they are grazing one of the paddocks that has Criffel, the South of Scotland’s most beautiful mountain, in the background. 

Gayatri (George’s wife) is behind the camera and despite being outside her comfort zone, gamely scrambles under the electric fence and gingerly picks her way in patent leather ankle boots between the cowpats to set up. 

They say, with penetrating accuracy, that once you become a parent you are only as happy as your least happy child. And, sad to say, since we got the Alliance for Unity going last year it has been like having an extra child. The party’s triumphs and disasters have produced the same reaction in me as my children’s and I find myself worrying like a parent about our progress. 

The anxiety to start with was not finding enough people of sufficient calibre to join us; then it was that the Electoral Commission would find excuses to keep turning down our application to be a political party until beyond polling day; then it was that we would simply be ignored by everyone; then it was that we would never feature in any polls. So the Sunday Times poll putting A4U on 4%, one percent behind the Liberal Democrats, is a bit like seeing one of the children winning their first egg and spoon race: It is heartening and frustrating at the same time. 

“A week is a long time in politics” is a trite opening sentence but it has been true this week, as Salmond’s forced entry into the race has left things ‘all changed, changed utterly’ as WB Yeats wrote 105 years ago in a rather similar context. It is what we have feared all along: the formation of a ‘Nationalist Front’ and a creeping Ulsterisation of Scottish politics with Salmond already talking about ‘street protests’ as part of their campaign for secession. The big question is: will a nationalist monster with two heads be harder to slay, or will those heads devour each other? 

George Galloway and I launch our campaign by filming a ‘Potemkin rally’ in the pub carpark – all that we can do during lockdown.

We are met by the village loudmouth, ostentatiously masked by a black scarf against the Covid on the cold March breeze. “What’s going on here? Did you no see the saltires as you drove in? We don’t want you and your Union here.” He patrols the one street in the village while we are filming, just in case any ‘Yoons’ think about joining in.

Commentators on Scottish politics have tribal allegiances, just like the rest of us. They tend to be very dismissive of any new parties threatening to muscle in on the comfortable three-party opposition at Holyrood.

They cling to the dream that their preferred leader, Douglas Ross or Richard Leonard, is going to lead the long-awaited recovery in the Conservative or Labour vote and sweep the Nationalists from power, or that Willie Rennie will become kingmaker in any coalition.

When the history of the last decade in Scotland is written, the role played by the Scottish Green Party will come in for special criticism. I had never really thought much about the Green Party. While serving around the world in the Army, I had formed a hazy impression of them as well-meaning eco-eccentrics, the recipients of the none-of-the-above vote at elections and recently led by Caroline Lucas, who seemed to punch above her weight, and occasionally say something sensible on Question Time. 

Commentary by Jamie Blackett

Do you know the Mull of Galloway? The chances are that you don’t; even people who live in Galloway have probably never been there, unless they have a passion for sea birds, or lighthouses. I can recommend it for these two things, plus the seascape, but mainly as a way of exploring one’s inner sense of Britishness.

There, standing on the southern-most tip of Scotland, gazing across an empty Irish Sea, once the nexus of trade in these islands for early Britons, you get the sense that, having travelled miles to be somewhere really isolated, you have actually located the centre point of the United Kingdom.