A Voice for Scotland's Anti-Nationalist Majority
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.
Today, The Majority, with the support of over 480 donors who raised £12,000 for their Let’s Put Up Billboards! crowdfunding campaign, launches the second stage of its #ResignSturgeon campaign, in a series of campaigns leading up to the Scottish Elections on May 6.
After a hugely successful campaign that flew a #ResignSturgeon banner over Holyrood and saw #Resign Sturgeon billboards appear across Scotland, The Majority now takes the fight directly to Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency in Govanhill, Glasgow and to the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood, using mobile digital ad vans carrying the message, ‘We don’t believe you Nicola’ and ‘#ResignSturgeon’. The schedule is:
Like Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats, I don’t like Mondays, but today has been more depressing than usual. The first setback was hearing the BBC describe Nicola Sturgeon being cleared by an ‘independent’ inquiry. The second was reading an op-ed in The Times by Alex Massie, the Spectator’s Scottish editor, describing the SNP as “exhausted but irreplaceable.”
The riposte to the first has to be that if this was an inquiry into Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, or almost anyone else, the BBC would not use the word ‘independent’ about an inquiry by an inquisitor carefully selected by the accused and limited by very delicately confined terms of reference before delivering a report that is at odds even with the leaked conclusions of the Kafkaesque Parliamentary Inquiry, which is then so heavily redacted as to be meaningless.
The Sunday Mail, 17 Apr. 2022
Indy supporters were whipped into a frenzy yesterday as S&M for Scotland officially launched under the eye-catching banner ‘PAIN IS GAIN.’
The group’s Master-dominator, Donny Frank, was unrepentant. “Indy is KINKY” he proclaimed to supporters at the Cockburn Centre in Edinburgh. The campaign draws on the Marquis de Sade’s principle that psychological satisfaction comes only through enduring and inflicting sustained bouts of carefully controlled agony. “That's why we stand in vats of cold porridge on a wet weekend,” he insisted. “Trust me, we’re the only intellectually honest campaign out there.”
As a young man, I was given the kind of advice you never forget, but hope you will never have to prove right. I was driving with a colleague, through a volatile part of the world, on a research trip, where landmines are very common. As we got into the truck, he turned to me and said, "Keep your feet as far apart as possible." I asked why and he replied, "That way, if we drive over a mine, you have a better chance of keeping at least one foot." I have all the flexibility of a pane of glass, but I spent the rest of the drive doing the splits. To this day, I am glad to say I still have two feet, unlike the SNP, who are shooting themselves in the foot, repeatedly.
The Scexit Files: Business Scotland, 10th March 2030
“Ffffwwhaa!!” the man spluttered, “£17.49 for a pint!” almost choking on his own tongue. “Are you oot o’ y’r mind?”
The CCTV camera caught it all. Facial recognition soon identified him as a Mr Rip Van McWinkle, ‘innocently’ ordering a well-deserved drink at the Glen Laggard Inn.
“Scots pounds,” the landlady explained.
Rip was too busy grumbling to listen – “rassinfrassin-poundzapint” – as he fished through his coins one by methodical one.
Controlling the narrative is vital to any information, or disinformation, campaign in politics and in policy. To achieve this, a political party will use several different tactics, such as catchy slogans, announcements, cover-ups and more. All these tactics fundamentally rely on someone to convey them from the party to the public: journalists and influencers that dominate the media and the online world.
The SNP have been able to control the narrative well, hiding their overtly divisive nationalism and objectively terrible record in government, which has allowed them to convince, or at least dissuade, criticism from most casual readers. The SNP has relied on many things to achieve this, but above all, they have relied on a sympathetic Scottish media establishment that they have, in turn, given either preferential access or outright bullied.
Today, The Majority, with the support of Scotland Matters, UK Union Voice and over 250 donors who contributed to a crowdfunding campaign, launches the #ResignSturgeon campaign, the first in a series of campaigns leading up to the Scottish Elections on May 6. The campaign starts with:
The campaign is a message to Nicola Sturgeon to take responsibility for her Government’s catastrophic handling of the Alex Salmond Harassment Inquiry, which cost the taxpayer well over £500,000 in damages to Salmond plus hundreds of thousands of pounds more in Scottish Government legal fees, as well as the cost of the ongoing inquiry.
Time is a unique concept; it is a variable constant that has come to dominate everyone's lives on this planet. Be it by the sun's movement and the need to care for cattle or the morning commute to your 9-5 job, time impacts us all, but we experience it in different ways.
One concept is that of time dilation, where the passage of time is different in two bodies depending on the velocity at which they travel; think of the masterful movie Interstellar, where the protagonist in space experiences time much slower than his daughter on earth so that when they meet again, he seems not to have aged at all while his daughter is on her death bed from old age. As abstract as this may seem, time dilation is very relevant to politics, especially in a time where our days seem to drag on.
The Scexit Files: Channel Four, 5 March 2021
This week, Celebrity Gogglebox is in Cawdor with retired assassins, Lord and Lady Macbeth, as they cosy up together on the sofa. They’ve just been watching the latest news report from their homeland on Scotland’s current power couple.
“What the ????☠⭍ !!!,” grunts Macbeth to his wife. “Don’t they ever learn?”
Her ladyship nods. “That fishy woman can’t even organise a couple of witches.”