AUSTERITY & NUKES: THE PRICE WE WILL PAY FOR INDEPENDENCE?

'The party leadership plans to adopt vast majority of Growth Commissions recommendations.'

Do people realise what that will mean? It means that they will be adopting the plans for a neoliberal economy, no different to the neoliberal economies causing so much misery and strife the world-over. That and the SNP leadership's sworn allegiance to the Atlantic Alliance with a possible change of policy over nukes means that there will be little or no change after their post-independence plans.

I'm willing to bet serious money that one of the major concessions that will follow will be to allow the UK to keep its nuclear weapons indefinitely on Scottish soil. Similarly they will be forced to make concessions about the UK's continued access to North Sea oil.

The price Eire had to pay for her independence was to give away the six counties to the Brits. No doubt they will demand a similar sacrifice from Scotland over oil and nukes.

JUST MORE CARROT-DANGLING?

Sturgeon and the SNP have had almost five years to prepare for a second referendum.

They've done sweet FA in all that time. Now they're calling for citizen's assemblies! What are they playing at? What are they afraid of? When support for indy is at least 50% of the population why do they continue to behave in this feart fashion?

Are they feart of the public or of WM, or both?? How far do the polls have to move before she'll do anything? And why, unlike Alex Salmond, is she not out in the streets drumming up support? Is she serious about indy or is it all just another carrot-dangling exercise?

FACEBOOK'S VENAL NATURE

I'm told that Mark Zuckerberg's great grandfather is Lord Rothschild. Whether true or not this man's greed and venal nature has no limits.

Not satisfied with banning a perfectly democratic blog for supposedly being abusive (!) I have now received this from their administration. Meanwhile all my appeals to FB to review their ludicrous ban remain ignored.

For the Yes Family to continue with this FB dictatorship is like turkeys voting for Christmas. We really must find an alternative platform and soon.

BACK TO ANIMAL FARM

Oh the irony!

The very same people in the Yes Movement who quite rightly rail 24/7 against the tyranny of  British unionism are now turning on any individual on Facebook's Yes pages. We are being banned from Yes pages and now even our private blogs are being blocked from being posted.

Since the summer of 2017 I have become increasingly outspoken about the manner in which the SNP's leadership have mismanaged the movement for Scotland's independence. It was that summer that my eyes were opened to their defeatism and consistent refusal to fight a general election on the indy ticket. Well, once one's eyes have been opened it's very difficult to close them again and the revelation was accompanied by a constant stream of abuse that it was my pleasure to receive on Facebook pages.

That's when I was shocked into asking myself the question, what is wrong with these people that they cannot stand the slightest bit of criticism or dissent? Why are they so intolerant of others who do not share the exact same views as they do? And just who are they who enjoy spending their time screaming at each other?

I believe there are at least two groups: firstly those who really are no different to sectarian football fans who treat independence and the SNP as a football club where everyone else is there to be abused and shat upon; and secondly a silent group of privileged, well-educated people with some degree of vested interest in promoting the SNP and keeping it in permanent power.

It is that second group which concerns me because I believe that they do not work alone and that they coordinate campaigns to isolate, marginalize and eliminate anyone who dares to criticize the party on the social media. It is this second group which I believe is responsible for the treatment that is being meted out to those who dissent.

The latest episode started with my being banned from a Yes group called Uncensored for Scotland. No reason or notification was given for the ban but as this was the second time it had happened on this page it was pretty clear that the reason for their ban was that, in their eyes, my posts were having a 'divisive' effect on other members! Quite how I was causing division was, of course, never divulged!

Following that I decided to revive my old blog, Chimes of Freedom, which had been lying dormant for several years. Yet, no sooner had I done that and posted blog articles to FB, I was again banned, this time not for my FB posts but for those from my own private blog! The reason given by FB was that I was 'spamming'!

That's when the penny dropped. Someone was reporting my posts as spam and FB was acting on their complaints. Every ban has been challenged and I await FB's decision. You will understand why I'm not holding my breath!

Now, while all this might strike you to be a rather childish game I believe it is rather more serious than that. Are this second group, the more well-heeled ones, acting alone? Or are they part of a coordinated informal campaign which can be traced back to the New SNP's headquarters? My intuition tells me that's more than likely and that this is the way the New SNP apparat seeks to control opinion on the social media.

That apparat knows only too well how to turn to their advantage the algorithms of the FB polis by firing off a volley of spam reports against anyone whose posts they don't like and who they wish to silence. That is exactly what happened to me.

Now I am all too aware that this claim will be immediately denounced by their vigilantes to be nothing more than a crazy conspiracy theory. But I've heard that accusation made only too often by people with something to hide. So all I request from those who read this is simply to keep in mind what I say, even if you don't buy the whole story.

I am just as keen as these zealots to see the day dawn when Scotland will be free again. But where they and I part company is that I would like our freedom to be real, to mean something in our everyday lives and not just to become another means to keep a political party packed with privileged technocrats in charge of the Animal Farm.

PLUS CA CHANGE: FEAR & LOATHING IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA


I have decided to revive my old blog which, as you might see, has been lying dormant for the last six years. 

Since September 2014 I have been focusing all my energy on promoting Scotland's independence through Facebook and more recently MeWe. I did this in the belief that using the social media provided us in the Yes Movement with a powerful new tool for change. A tool that has been used successfully by movements all over the Planet.

As well as that an awareness of modern history pointed to something very powerful unfolding in the events taking place in this country which took me back to my earlier days as an organizer and campaigner in England during the Peace Movement of the 1980's.

The peace movement we created in those days was extraordinary. Growing spontaneously it not only covered the entire UK but continental Europe as well as the rest of the world. Women played a major role and my former Russian-speaking wife played a significant part when she and others travelled to St Petersburg (still Leningrad in those days) to build bridges of friendship with the local Peace Committee. We did all that without the help of the Internet.

During those days I well remember the radical historian, E.P. Thompson, who spoke about European disarmament and the Cold War being propagated by US President Ronald Reagan and Britain's Margaret Thatcher as the very mirror image of what President Brezhnev of the USSR was projecting on his side of the iron curtain. It was only much after the fall and dissolution of the Soviet Union that we were to discover that a major reason for its collapse was that the Soviet Union was no longer able to keep up with the level of arms production and deployment at the frightening pace being set by the US Military-Industrial-Complex.

Moreover US intelligence knew this and was upping the arms race with the deliberate intention of breaking the USSR in this manner. And of course they succeeded in doing just that. In that game of brinkmanship the USA played an aggressive proactive role whilst the USSR was reduced to playing an unsuccessful reactive one.

Talking as he did about how both sides of the Cold War were throwing-up and reacting to a mirror-image of themselves he went further. He pointed to the growth of a liberation movement within the Soviet Bloc and Solidarnosc in Poland. He predicted that this movement which, at the time, was active within the eastern bloc would inevitably spill over into western Europe and mirror itself west of the Berlin Wall.

Well, it didn't happen as neatly as that but the Scottish Referendum in 2014 brought back his prediction to mind. Just as movements like the Polish Solidarnosc were in a struggle to overturn Soviet imperialism here it was now happening in western Europe where a people were going about something not unsimilar in their attempt to rid themselves of the vestiges of another old empire, the British one.

At last the revolutionary times that Thompson predicted had come. In its own way what Scotland faced in September 2014 was the prospect of a peaceful revolution and the end of a 307-year era of occupation by a foreign power. And though we were denied that chance at the ballot-box that first campaign sparked a flame in the heart of Scots which has burned and grown ever since. The inevitability of big changes was something too great to be extinguished.

That's what took me to Facebook and the social media. Just as had happened in other countries, I saw the social media as the tool for organising and mobilising our own movement for liberation. Perhaps I was being far too idealistic about what I thought we could achieve through the Net. While I am sure that it has helped to attract support to the rallies and marches it has done little else.

Instead of growing and maturing into a vehicle with a life of its own the Yes Movement on the internet remains nothing more than a disparate bunch of individuals who, collectively, remain beholden to the whims and fancies of a small clique of leaders in a political party which keeps us at arm's length while preoccupying itself with the reading of opinion polls and the production of revisionist economic reports that pander to no one but the obscenely-rich 1% and their neoliberal servants.

Anyone who dares to question this status quo is screamed at and called a plant, a yoon or similar. They are rubbished, marginalized and treated like lepers. That's the price you have to pay for speaking out of turn about the SNP or its government.

Up until now I have consistently made it clear that I do not and will not comment about the rank-and-file membership of the SNP but that I reserved the right to criticize its leadership. All that fell on deaf ears with too many cybernats appearing to be unable to distinguish between the two. To these people the SNP and its leaders have taken an almost god-like role. 'Trust in Nicola, she knows best!' has become a rallying-call to the foot soldiers and anyone who won't do as they're told is dismissed willy nilly as some kind of low life that has no place in the Yes Movement. Instead of the politicians serving the people it is we who are being expected to kowtow to the politicians.

Well, so much for Scotland's revolution! The more hysterical cybernats doing this remind me of a story that the Russian dissident, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, once told of a meeting when Stalin made a speech and the Soviet deputies kept applauding him endlessly, each of them afraid of being the first one to stop clapping. Until they were falling down in sheer exhaustion! Too afraid to think for themselves or to admit that they might be mistaken, the zealots in our Yes Movement would like us all to toe the same Stalinist line or else.

This was not quite the mirror-image that Thompson foresaw. Nor the one that I had hoped would start to grow in Scotland on that fateful day in September 2014. 'Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose' seems a far more appropriate pointer to the future if the chorus-group of name-callers are to have their way. I really have to struggle these days to be an optimist about where we're being led. The Promised Land that beckons may well turn out to be nothing more than a mirage with the name callers finding yet more scapegoats to blame for their own failures.

THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED

I understand that collectively we suffer from disempowerment. Our system disempowers us and then enslaves us.

In Scotland we have the compounding of disempowerment due to centuries of annexation by an occupying power. But now all that is rapidly changing so this is OUR moment in what is really a global revolution of which we see only bits and pieces when the MSM allows us to.

Brexit has provided us with a critical watershed moment in what is really a peaceful revolution. And we know all too well the meaning of the phrase The Revolution will not be Televised!

A SHARED DREAM

I want to see Scotland free of this nasty imperialist anachronism called the union. Brexit has exposed the UK before the whole world to be a sick, inward-looking parasite that feeds off corruption, lies and xenophobia. No one in their sane mind would wish to live in that kind of society.

I feel sorry for the sane ones in England; they have no alternative to the current political mess they are in. But we in Scotland do have an alternative and we have a party, the SNP, which is poised on achieving the greatest political victory of its existence.

Given that moment of history-in-the-making it would seem churlish and ungrateful for anyone to criticise the SNP or its leadership. And we all know that the unionist trolls are everywhere on these pages, determined to conduct a last battle of words as they are pushed inexorably into history. And so long as their battle is simply one of words, usually invective, let them do their worst. Who's listening?!

They don't worry me too much; they are part of the bad old ways, even if they don't know it, governed by emotions and a fantasy they call the past. It's the future that concerns me. Like many others I have a dream of a New Scotland, a new renaissance, where our little country will help lead the Planet into the 21st Century.

WHOSE COUNTRY?

Yesterday I posted this article from Bellacaledonia, The SNP's Great Moving Right Show, https://tinyurl.com/y596ecor

Expecting the usual chorus of abuse and yoon-calling I decided to post it to just a few pages. No sooner had I done that I was told by one self-righteous cybernat, “if that’s the way you feel Rory, away to England and help JC. Your attitudes and posts are not helping the independence movement you claim to support.”

The BC article, if you read it, is about the right-moving tendencies of certain senior SNP figures such as Andrew Wilson and Angus Robertson and how this is reflecting on the conduct of the Party. My purpose, as always, was to inform others and to let them decide. But apparently this is no longer allowed. And as a 'New Scot' of 33 years' standing I am told to 'away to England'!

That did it. I can sympathize with feelings of resentment against migrants from the south coming to live in Scotland and treating it like a colony of Little Britain. But I have never been one of those and anyone who checks out my track record in local government politics will know my commitment to the Highlands as a former regional councillor and my preparedness to risk arrest and losing that post in order to put my body in front of the British state as I once did together with a small group of protesters at the Kessock Bridge in 1991, https://tinyurl.com/yxhekfm9

That protest was entirely spontaneous; no one planned it, it just happened. Afterwards the Scottish media was full of it and I believe that it helped the cause of Independence greatly. From being treated like a fool or a 'token coloured' by many Highland councillors I suddenly gained their respect. I also received racist abuse, including a vile note left in my councillor's pigeon hole. My reaction to that was to report it to the Highland Constabulary who sent several polis into the Council, effectively putting the fear of god into the guilty parties!

So when people make puerile comments on FB such as the one quoted above, forgive me if sometimes I reply in anger. With them the slightest criticism of the SNP's leadership and it's all-out nuclear war. For having the effrontery to do so I get called a Yoon, a Tory, a snake in the grass and a whole lot else. Such is party politics in 2019AD: everyone is expected to toe the line and remain very PC. The message is quite clear: If you say anything awkward about the SNP you can get the fuck out of 'our' country.

Our country? Since when did any political party confiscate the keys to our nation? When did we become a fledgeling one-party state? Just who are these people making these threats and what kind of a political agenda are they working for? I dread to think.

Nationalism is something that, for many years, I wouldn't go anywhere near. I was born in a country that tore itself apart in a 50-year civil war caused by ethno-religious nationalism. But after living in Scotland and serving her in public office my eyes were opened to the true extent of imperialist occupation in this country. And worse than that the ABUSE that came with that occupation. So when I heard Scottish nationalism described as 'civic' I was only too happy to join up to it.

But what's so civic about the name-calling and 'away to England' taunts? What have I done to earn such abuse other than to call out some right-wing opportunists who would like to inflict their own neoliberal dystopia on us all post independence? Sorry, but I've seen it all before in another time and another place and I ain't ready to be suckered into it this time. Politicians are there to serve us and not the other way round. If certain cybernats can't see that then they do no one any favours. If they remain naïve about how politicians operate that's one thing; but when they start being abusive and telling people to get back to their own country then the alarm bells start to go off. If these people are allowed to prevail then god help us all.

Politics appear to be moving evermore to the Right. And the SNP is not immune from this unpleasant phenomenon. If we are to be constantly silenced today pre-independence than what are we to expect once it has arrived? I no longer feel comfortable in the presence of this kind of intolerance which effectively says either believe unquestioningly what you are told or get the fuck out of our country.

During my 33 years in Scotland I have always voted SNP and in 2014 I was proud to be able to vote for Independence. When Alex Salmond was my MP and after the SNP victory in 2010 I wrote to him saying that I looked forward to the day when he was our first President.

Now I feel hurt and disillusioned by the thoughtless comments being made by certain cybernats on these pages. But being no spring chicken and having developed a tough skin in earlier political days I'm happy to give back as good as I get from these idiots.

But god help the New Scotland if their kind ever have anything to do with our collective futures

.

LIKE TAKING CANDY FROM A BABY

Since posting two articles, one from the Sunday Mail and another this morning from the Daily Record I have been subject to a torrent of anger, indignation and (the usual) abuse. This is now the kind of reaction to which I have become accustomed since I began posting what have been described as 'anti-SNP' articles over the last month or so.

Before that practically all my articles were in praise of the SNP. Not because I was ever that star-struck by the SNP but as my contribution to giving solidarity to them and Indy. It was for the same reason I joined the SNP in September 2014. Indy was always the driving motive, not party politics.

I admired Alex Salmond for having had the courage to deliver a referendum when support for Indy was around 28%. With the tremendous support he received from a vibrant Yes Movement that support rose to 45% and 50% at GE2015. Credit for that success and the 56 SNP MPs returned to WM must go to Alex and all those thousands of hardworking, committed patriots in the Yes Movement.

But the day after Indyref1 the Yes Movement was shut down and soon forgotten about. Meanwhile all the kudos for the Yes Movement's efforts shifted to the SNP. Since then we have seen a new leader, Nicola Sturgeon, treat Independence like a bargaining chip, something to duck and dive with and where the goalposts keep being shifted: first it was about EU membership, that was changed to Single Market membership. And now, after the SNP's heavy political losses, it looks very much that Indyref2 is going to be 'parked', 'kicked in the long grass' from which it'll never be retrieved.

My reason for posting the two articles were because they are very much in line with what we have been hearing from senior SNP figures (Swinney, Blackford and Sheppard) over the last week. If the UK were to go for a 'soft' Brexit and stay in the Single Market there would be no reason for Indyref2. End of.

Now what we hear is that while Indyref2 is 'parked' indefinitely Our Leader is going to concentrate on Brexit negotiations. What this really means, when all her initiatives are studiously ignored by the Tories, is anyone's guess. Anything could happen. Jeremy Corbyn could well be the new PM with a more conciliatory approach to Scotland. Who knows?

But to dilute the SNP's constitutional commitment from fighting for Indy in every election to a referendum, and then to further dilute that referendum twice more before finally putting even that into suspended animation is ...

The politics of expediency? Fudge and mudge? Dodging the issue? Take your choice. Whatever has brought Our Leader to this one thing is clear: to play fast and loose with a mandate given to her by our sovereign Parliament is grossly irresponsible and a dereliction of her position as Party leader as well as FM. Despite all her claims to act on behalf of the country the decision to dispose of Indyref2 in this way is about her party's electoral losses and has nothing to do with the aspirations of Scots for freedom.

To do this to us all is an act of irresponsibility and cowardice. It is also a great betrayal.

Although I could see this coming I still feel sick in the pit of my stomach. The shock this will cause in so many of us who put our trust in the SNP and its leadership will take time to play out. Some will cling to straws and refuse to accept the truth, reacting in anger and disbelief. How could this happen?

In the coming weeks we will read all manner of articles attempting to analyse and rationalise. But one thing to me is clear: those of us who will not so easily give up on Independence and who want to see the revival of a popular Indy Movement must never again make the mistake of entrusting the future of our country to any one political party or leader. We are learning the bitter lesson of what happened when we did.