George Galloway – Blood and Porridge

July 10, 2024July 31, 2024

Rishi sunk, Liz trussed, Penny dropped

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

Now the dust has settled after the British general election on July 4^th, it’s time to offer my tuppence worth about the result. This saw the Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, brought to power for the first time in 14 years. It also saw the Conservative Party, under Rishi Sunak, take an ignominious and well-deserved humping and get booted out of government. They shed 244 seats in the Westminster parliament and ended up with just 121.

But first… A message for viewers in Scotland.

As (a) someone who’s believed for a long time that Scotland would ultimately be better off as an independent nation rather than as a region of Britain, and (b) a total pessimist, I wasn’t surprised at the dire election result for the Scottish National Party, where it ceded many seats in Scotland to Labour and went from having 43 seats to having a mere nine. As I said in a post a few weeks ago about the SNP’s new leader John Swinney – what a baptism in fire he’s had – “I suspect folk in Scotland are so scunnered by the SNP’s recent scandals and mishaps, and so desperate to see the back of the Tories, that they’ll vote for Labour en masse next month.”

The SNP having so few Scottish seats in parliament and Labour having so many – they’ve now got 37 in Scotland – isn’t something that thrills me. Scotland has lost some decent SNP representatives in London, for example, Alison Thewliss, John Nicholson, Tommy Shepherd and Alwyn Smith. To be fair, I have no idea what they were like as constituency MPs, but they impressed me with their capabilities and eloquence when I saw them speak in parliament.

Also, I’m old enough to remember the 1980s and 1990s – a period of almost continuous Conservative rule from London – when the Scottish seats were also packed with Labour MPs and, the joke went, in Glasgow you could stick a red rosette on a monkey and it’d get voted into Westminster. The old Scottish Labour contingent contained several heavyweights like John Smith, Donald Dewar, Alistair Darling, Robin Cook and Gordon Brown, and also a few mavericks like the admirable Dennis Canavan and the gruesome George Galloway. But the majority of those MPs were, for want of a better word, turnips.

As I wrote on this blog a few years ago: “I’m thinking of such specimens as Lanark and Hamilton East’s one-time Labour MP Jimmy Hood, who once declared he’d oppose Scottish independence even if it made the Scottish people better off – the fact that as an MP he was busy claiming £1000-a-month second-home expenses in London no doubt had something to do with his keenness to keep Westminster running the show. And Midlothian’s David Hamilton, who in 2015 did his bit for the battle against sexism by describing Nicola Sturgeon (and her hairstyle) as ‘the wee lassie with a tin helmet on’. And Glasgow South West’s Ian Davidson, who charmingly predicted that after 2014’s referendum on Scottish independence the debate would carry on only ‘in the sense there is a large number of wounded still to be bayoneted’. This shower became known as the ‘low-flying Jimmies’ because of their lack of ambition in anything other than being cannon-fodder for Labour at Westminster and enjoying all the perks that came with being MPs. And with numpties like these populating the Westminster opposition benches during the 1980s and 1990s, it’s no surprise Mrs Thatcher’s Tories had a free run to do whatever they liked in Scotland.”

It’s possible the new crop of Scottish Labour MPs will be more distinguished than their predecessors, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s especially since the two most famous ones are the self-important Douglas Alexander and Blair McDougall, head of the ‘no’ campaign before the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, who famously reassured worried Scottish voters that Boris Johnson had no chance of ever becoming British prime minister: “I think that Boris Johnson’s a clown… he’s not even an MP let alone Prime Minister at the moment.”

From wikipedia.org / © Lauren Hurley

Nor does it inspire confidence that new PM Keir Starmer has made Edinburgh Labour MP Ian Murray Secretary of State for Scotland. Murray is more hardline-Unionist than many of the Tories. When his predecessor as Scottish Secretary, Tory posho Alister Jack, was asked if a Conservative government would ever allow another referendum on Scottish independence, he mused that support for independence would have to be running at about 60% in opinion polls. When Murray was asked if there were any circumstances in which he’d allow a referendum, he curtly replied: “None whatsoever.”

Not that I think Labour’s hegemony in Scotland this time will last as long as it did previously (when it had the bulk of Scottish MPs until 2015). For one thing, the party situation and voting situation are now much too volatile. Scotland today has six parties competing in a first-past-the-post electoral system – Labour, the SNP, the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and, unfortunately, Nigel Farage’s far-right-wing Reform Party. (I didn’t include Alex Salmond’s Alba Party in that list because they lost their deposit in every seat they contested.) And Labour’s share of the vote in Scotland last week was just 5.3% ahead of that of the SNP, so their position is hardly unassailable.

Anyway, onto the results for Britain generally. While I was delighted to see the Tories pulverized – and they thoroughly deserved to be pulverized, having presided over one of the most disastrous periods of government in British history, one that brought us austerity, Brexit, Prime Minister Boris ‘party during lockdown’ Johnson and Prime Minister Liz ‘crash the economy’ Truss – I have to say I’m worried. Starmer’s Labour Party won the lion’s share of the seats in parliament, but the votes cast for them were not that many – they received 9,731,363 votes, 33.8% of the total cast. That number is lower than those won by Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader, the much-maligned Jeremy Corbyn, who managed 10,269,051 votes in 2019 and 12,877,918 votes in 2017. What saved Labour’s bacon this time was a low turn-out and the presence of Farage’s Reform Party, luring right-wing voters away from the Tories. If you add up the right-wing votes, those cast for the Conservative and Reform parties, they exceed Labour’s figures by more than a million votes and more than three percent of the vote-share.

Which is concerning, as I don’t think Starmer’s government is going to be popular for very long. Again, as I wrote last month, his party was “so obsessed with attracting former Conservative Party voters they’ve made their policies a continuation of the right-wing ones that’ve damned Britain to rack and ruin during the past 14 years. For instance, they’ve vowed not to revisit the terms of the Tories’ Brexit arrangement with the European Union, even though it’s hobbled British businesses and it’ll thwart their plans to ‘grow’ the economy; and they won’t countenance raising taxes, which makes you wonder how they’re ever going to lift Britain’s public services out of their current, dire state.”

Meanwhile, looking at what’s left of the Tory Party, I see that its surviving MPs include that self-promoting, hard-right-wing trio Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch. As MPs, and with Rishi Sunak on his way out, they’ll be able to run for the party leadership. I can see one of them winning, swinging the Tories even further to the right and cutting a deal with Farage before the next election, probably in 2029. Farage is the favourite British politician of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, so I’m sure lots of foreign money would mysteriously arrive to ‘grease’ such an arrangement.

© BBC

Oh well. You have to take your pleasures when you can, and there was much to enjoy on election night, when various Tory politicians I didn’t like lost their seats. I shed no tears, for instance, when Penny Mordaunt got the boot in Portsmouth. Another self-promoter, she’s always annoyed me with her jolly-hockey-sticks brand of patriotism and it confounded me how, for a while last year, she was hero-worshipped for carrying a big sword, whilst wrapped in patterned blue wallpaper, at a ridiculous Ruritanian ceremony in Westminster Abbey. Mind you, she was talked about as potential future leadership material, and was a moderate by Tory standards, so she might have prevented the party from veering off into Farage-land if she’d kept her seat.

I was also tremendously cheered by the departures of that preposterous, top-hatted, Victorian undertaker Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset; the braying, bearded bovver-boy Jonathan Gullis in Stoke; the middle-finger-raising Andrea Jenkyns in Yorkshire; the absurdly-coiffured Boris-Johnson cosplayer Michael Fabricant in Lichfield; and Liam Fox, Grant Shapps, Thérèse Coffey, Johnny Mercer, Gilliam Keegan… Oh, how I laughed.

Incidentally, on the non-Tory front, it was also fun to see the afore-mentioned gruesomeness that is George Galloway usurped from his seat in Rochdale, just four months after he’d won it in a by-election.

Obviously, the best result was the one that ended Liz Truss’s tenure as MP for South West Norfolk. The shortest-lasting Prime Minister ever – she managed only 44 days in office, easily beating the previous record set in 1827 by George Canning (who at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM) – Truss has spent her time since showing not one ounce of contrition for her brief but disastrous reign, during which her plan to bring in massive tax cuts and pay for them by increasing government borrowing resulted in the pound plummeting, banks and building societies pulling 40% of their mortgage products off the market, and 30 billion pounds getting added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, effectively doubling it. Far from it. Truss has been blaming everyone but herself. She’s even accused a beastly ‘anti-growth coalition’ and woke ‘deep state’ of sabotaging her premiership. Meanwhile, she’s also been ingratiating herself with the American far-right and cheerleading for Donald Trump. I do hope July 4^th’s result terminates her political career, as her industrial-scale arrogance, incompetence and lack of self-awareness are getting a bit terrifying.

From wikipedia.org / © Simon Dawson

Finally, I was pleased to see the Green Party win four seats – just one seat less than Farage’s mob, who secured five. Does this mean the British media, including the BBC, will now be giving them nearly as much coverage as they give Farage? Don’t bet your life savings on it.

March 18, 2022March 18, 2022

It’s time Putin’s pals were put in the bin (Part 2)

© Cold War Steve

Continuing my rant about miscreants who support Putin and / or are generally making arses of themselves during the current crisis in Ukraine – this time miscreants in the United Kingdom.

Vladimir Putin – presently stuck in a big, bloody hole he’s dug for himself in Ukraine, but still determinedly digging, using thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives as his shovel-blade – has never been short of pals in Britain. Back in 2001, soon after Putin had won his first presidential election in Russia, and not long after the start of the second Chechen war, which saw the deaths of at least 25,000 civilians, a third of Chechnya deemed a ‘zone of ecological disaster’, and most Chechens left suffering ‘discernible symptoms of psychological distress’, then-British Prime Minister and Labour Party leader Tony Blair jetted out to Moscow and cosied up to Putin. El Tone praised him for showing ‘real leadership’ and giving ‘strong support’ in the ‘fight against terrorism’.

Even today, Blair is hero-worshipped by certain centre-right politicians and commentators in Britain. Ironically, while later Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn is commonly loathed and belittled as a traitorous, anti-Western, lefty scumbag, it’s worth recalling what Corbyn said about Blair’s visit to Moscow in 2001. “When the Prime Minister… meets President Putin this evening, I hope that he will convey the condemnation of millions of people around the world of the activities of the Russian army in Chechnya and what it is doing to ordinary people there. When images of what is happening are translated into other parts of the world, many people are horrified…” Exchange ‘Ukraine’ for ‘Chechnya’ and you realise how Corbyn’s words resonate in 2022.

No doubt nowadays Blair keeps his mouth shut about Putin’s supposed statesmanship. But another well-known British politician is less reluctant to express his admiration for the warmongering Russian ogre. Right-winger, Europhobe and wannabe broadcaster Nigel Farage has said of him: “I wouldn’t trust him and I wouldn’t want to live in his country, but compared with the kids who run foreign policy in this country, I’ve more respect for him than our lot.” Meanwhile, the donkey-faced, and full-of-donkey-shit, Farage has made copious appearances on Russia Today, coming out with such gems as the claim that Europe’s modern democracies have been run ‘by the worst people we have seen in Europe since 1945’. Worse even than Putin? Yes, I’m sure Nige thinks so.

By the way, let’s not forget Aaron Banks, Farage’s compadre in the Vote Leave campaign that managed in 2016 to tear the UK out of the European Union, possibly helped by a wee bit of Russian funding. In 2017, Banks did his bit for the Putin cause by tweeting: “Ukraine is to Russia what the Isle of Wight is to the UK. It’s Russian.”

Elsewhere, there’s multiple evidence suggesting that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government, if not totally in love with Putin’s habit of inflicting atrocities on neighbouring countries that annoy him, is certainly in love with the wealth of the Russian oligarchs who surround the man. Recent claims about the amount of donations the Conservative party has received from such oligarchs have ranged from 1.93 million to 2.3 million pounds.

Johnson seems particularly enamoured with members of Russia’s mega-wealthy elite. In 2018, while he was serving as Theresa May’s foreign secretary, he was seen stumbling about an Italian airport suffering from a hangover, and lacking his security detail, after attending a shindig thrown by Russian media magnate Evgeny Lebedev at his castle near Perugia. Lebedev subsequently received a peerage and now, technically, is ‘Baron Lebedev, of Hampton in the London Borough of Richmond on Thames and of Siberia in the Russian Federation’. Johnson has sheepishly denied allegations that he used his influence to secure the peerage for his buddy.

© Private Eye

Though late last week the British government announced it was freezing the assets of seven Russian billionaires (including Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich) with close ties to Putin, this only came after weeks of prevarication. Originally, it looked like the UK wouldn’t be clamping down on dodgy Russian money until late in 2023, which would have given those likely to be affected a good year-and-a-half to sell their assets and move their money off British soil. Even with this new change of heart, Abramovich and co. have already had a fortnight’s grace-period to shift some of their wealth. Basically, Johnson’s regime is reluctant to do anything that might sully London’s reputation as a haven for dodgy money.

Summing up the absolute state of the Conservative Party on this issue is its wretched co-chairman Ben Elliot. Simultaneously, Elliot’s been sourcing donations from super-rich Russians and been offering services to them in Britain through his ‘concierge’ company, Quintessentially. “Quintessentially Russia has nearly 15 years’ experience providing luxury lifestyle management services to Russia’s elite and corporate members…”, ensuring that from “restaurant bookings to backstage concert access, a bespoke lifestyle is at our clients’ fingertips.” So drooled the blurb on Quintessentially’s website until recently. Then, suddenly and mysteriously, this obsequious drivel was deleted from it.

While we’re heaping abuse on the British government, we shouldn’t overlook the smirk-faced Priti Patel, who – until another apparent U-turn last week – seemed determined that the Ukrainian refugees Britain was allowing in should be vastly outnumbered by the Russian oligarchs it was welcoming with open arms. At one point, while other European countries had taken in Ukrainian refugees in the tens of thousands, the UK had dished out a mere 50 additional visas to them.

Besides Patel, it’s worth castigating government minister Kevin Foster, who advised people fleeing Ukraine to apply to Britain’s ‘seasonal worker scheme’, which would allow them to spend their time in the country picking fruit. Such humanity, Kev! Also, some hatred should be directed towards whatever nasty piece of work in the Home Office complained to the Daily Telegraph that Ireland had allowed in too many Ukrainian refugees. All those shifty Ukrainians, claimed the anonymous source, would “come through Dublin, into Belfast and across to the mainland to Liverpool”, thus creating “a drug cartel route.”

Needless to say, Britain’s resident community of publicity-seeking, rent-an-opinion gobshites have fastened onto the Ukrainian crisis like flies fastening onto a cow-plop. George Galloway, that fedora-wearing gasbag whose rhetoric seems to weave between old-school socialism (when he’s in England) and hardline British nationalism (when he’s in Scotland), and who’s a fixture on the Russian-owned Sputnik radio channel, tweeted recently: “Me, Farage, Hitchens, Carlson and Rod Liddle are a pretty broad front of people who think NATO expansion to the borders of Russia was a pretty bad idea. Maybe pause and think about that?” When I paused and thought about it, my immediate thoughts were: “George Galloway, Nigel Farage, Peter Hitchens, Tucker Carlson, Rod Liddle… Wow, what a team! Couldn’t Marvel make a superhero movie about them? Maybe call it Arseholes Assemble?”

Hilariously, Galloway’s Putin-sympathetic stance has ended all unity in the All for Unity party, the staunchly pro-UK outfit he set up in Scotland prior to the last Scottish parliamentary elections. Jamie Blackett, the party’s former deputy leader, and also the Deputy Lieutenant for Dumfriesshire and a Daily Telegraph writer, recently disowned his old boss and announced the disbanding of the party.

Meanwhile, Neil Oliver, the alleged Scottish historian and talking head on right-wing outlet GB News, lately delivered a bewildering monologue, the gist of which was: “I’ll be honest. I don’t know what’s happening in Ukraine. I don’t understand it either.” Oliver’s professed ignorance of the situation didn’t stop him talking about it for nine minutes, however. It’s also strange that when it comes to Putin and Ukraine Oliver is so hesitant to climb off the fence, considering how quick he’d been in the past to condemn, say, the Scottish National Party (‘disastrously incompetent’, ‘small’, ‘not worth bothering about’), or the Black Lives Matter movement (‘anarchists and communists’ eating ‘into the built fabric of Britain’). Very strange indeed.

One other thing bugging me about Putin’s current horror show is how certain people have pounced on it and tried to use it to promulgate the right-wing agendas they’ve been pushing for years already. Take the ‘culture wars’, in which Putin’s ‘anti-woke’ position had until recently won accolades from Western pundits on the right of the spectrum. Well, now that Putin is officially a Bad Lad, they can’t praise him directly anymore. Instead, they’re pushing the narrative that woke stuff no longer matters during the crisis that good old Vlad, sorry, bad new Vlad has created.

Here’s the absurd Daily Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson, recently opining: “The outbreak of war has shone an unflattering light on our society… Watch issues like LGBT, net-zero, Partygate, Black Lives Matter and farcical ‘Stay Safe’ Covid restrictions all fade into well-deserved insignificance now that war is back.” According to Pearson, in other words, now that Putin’s behaving like a c*nt, we should all stop fretting about being civil to our fellow human beings, about preventing them from dying of Covid, about preventing the planet from burning up, and about our leader Boris Johnson being a lying, unprincipled sack of shite.

And here’s the barmy Spectator pundit Lionel Shriver, writing: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations – it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes.” Though I suspect Putin would still have attacked Ukraine if fewer people on Western social media had been using the pronouns ‘they’ / ‘them’ in their profiles.

One last thing for which Britain’s right-wingers must be thanking Putin is the attention he’s diverted from the looming issues of manmade climate change and the dire state of the environment. Thanks to the headlines being dominated by Ukraine, not much attention has been given to, for instance, the apocalyptic floods that have stricken Queensland and New South Wales. And, somewhat inevitably, the afore-mentioned Nigel Farage is currently trying to relaunch his political career by demanding a new national referendum – this time, not about the UK’s membership of the European Union, but about the British government’s supposed adoption of Net Zero policies to combat climate change. Farage, of course, wants us to vote against them.

I wonder why he’s doing this. Could he be thinking of a country that helped finance his previous, successful referendum campaign? Or could he be thinking of an oil-exporting country that would stand to gain if Britain gave up on green energy and became wholly dependent on fossil fuels again?

I can’t possibly think of a country that falls into both categories.

© The Jewish Chronicle / twitter / @ VirendraSharma

May 12, 2021June 18, 2021

Don’t play it again, Salm

© Slainte Media / RT / From archive.org

On March 26^th, six weeks before the elections for the Scottish Parliament, former Scottish First Minister and former Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond launched his new Alba party to contest those elections.

In response to the news, George Galloway – a man with a lengthy political CV himself, having been Labour MP for Glasgow Hillhead, Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow and Bradford West and leader of the Respect Party, and now leader of the Alliance for Unity party, which he launched last year in anticipation of the Scottish parliamentary elections too – tweeted: “So it’s me and Alex Salmond in the ring. Heavyweights. Him for separatism, me for the union. Seconds away…”

In the event, neither Salmond’s Alba nor Galloway’s Alliance for Unity got enough votes to send any of their representatives to the Scottish Parliament. The former amassed 44,913 votes and the latter managed 23,299 out of a total of 2,716,547 votes cast. So that tweet, as they say, aged well. Both heavyweights got their arses kicked.

I’m not shedding any tears over Galloway’s humiliation. He’s a politician whose couple of good deeds – his involvement with the Scotland United campaign for the creation of a devolved Scottish parliament in the early 1990s; squaring up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in the aftermath of the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2005 – have been obliterated in the public memory by the tsunami of crap things he’s done in his endless quest to promote himself. These include dishing religious-related dirt on his political opponents during his campaigns with the Respect Party; defending the execution of a gay man by the Iranian government whilst working for Press TV, funded by the same government, in 2008; climbing onto the Nigel Farage bandwagon by endorsing a vote for Brexit in 2016; hugging extreme right-wing strategist and evil incarnate Steve Bannon in 2019; and, let us never forget, pretending to be a cat slurping cream off Rula Lenska’s lap on the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother.

Meanwhile, lately, Galloway’s antics during his doomed campaign to get into the Scottish Parliament via the second-vote / proportional-representation ‘list’ system have included him urging voters to give their first vote to the Conservative Party (the former left-wing firebrand had declared a few years earlier, “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative, please shoot me”); causing a twitter pile-on, intentionally or unintentionally, against Scots-language poet Len Pennie; making unsavoury references to the ethnicity of Scottish Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf (“You are not a Celt like me”); making a hilarious video where he sucked up to the Scottish Gamekeepers Association and promised to end Green Party ‘tyranny over rural communities’ whilst resembling a cast member from Last of the Summer Wine (he obviously believed gamekeepers had short memories considering that in 2002, as an MP, he’d supported a hunting ban); and generally trying to reinvent himself as a true-blue, Union Jack-waving, Churchill-and-spitfires-obsessed slab of gammon.

Now that he’s torched every left-wing principle he once professed to have for the sake of self-promotion, it’d be nice to think that this beyond-disastrous election result will make Galloway slink off beneath a rock and never show his face again. But of course he won’t. He’ll be back. The creature knows no shame.

I’m not shedding tears for Alex Salmond either, but I’ll admit to feeling at least slightly conflicted. For the last 35 years, since the dark days when Margaret Thatcher ran Scotland with the imperious disregard one would give a colonial possession, Scottish politics have felt like a rollercoaster with both giddy peaks and despairing troughs. And Salmond has been a constant presence on that rollercoaster. I know plenty of people who loathe him but I’ve seen him as a force for both the good and the bad, the good earlier on and bad more recently. It’s the memory of the good things that gives me a twinge of sadness to see him end up like this, even if he brought most of it upon himself.

From en.wikipedia.org

I remember when I first saw him. One afternoon in early 1987, while a fourth-year undergraduate student, I was nursing a pint in the Central Refectory building at Aberdeen University. I noticed from the corner of my eye a group of students whom I knew as members of the campus branch of the SNP – Alan Kennedy, Val Bremner, Gillian Pollock, Nick Goode – enter and wander over to the counter. They were in the company of a young, round-faced bloke in an un-studenty suit, shirt and tie. I identified him as an up-and-coming SNP politician whom Alan Kennedy, a good mate of mine, had told me was standing in the next general election in nearby Banff and Buchan against the incumbent Conservative Party MP Albert McQuarrie. He’d come to the university that day to address the SNP group and this was the SNP students showing their visitor some post-talk hospitality. The politician, I’d been assured, was one to watch. Indeed, Alan said something along the lines of: “He’s going to do great things.”

A few months later, on June 11^th, the general election took place and this rising SNP star wrestled Banff and Buchan away from Albert McQuarrie and became its new MP. I recall McQuarrie, a doughty old-school Scottish Tory MP who revelled in the nickname ‘the Buchan Bulldog’, bursting into tears during a subsequent interview at what he saw as the unfairness and indignity of losing his beloved constituency to an SNP whippersnapper. He was perhaps the first politician, but certainly not the last, to have his nose put out of joint by Alex Salmond.

By the early 1990s, Salmond was SNP leader. I lived in London at the time and occasionally I’d drink with a Labour Party spin doctor, also from Scotland. He had no inhibitions about telling me, at every opportunity, what a detestable creep he thought Salmond was. With his appropriately smart-Alec manner and habitual smirk, which frequently expanded into a Cheshire-cat grin, and a general arrogance that no doubt came from knowing he was intellectually streets ahead of the numpties making up the majority of Westminster’s Scottish Labour MPs, you could understand how much of an annoyance Salmond was to his opponents. But back then the SNP had just three MPs, so at least he could be dismissed as a minor annoyance.

How long ago that seems now. In those far-off days, the Labour Party controlled much of Scotland at council level, provided the lion’s share of Scottish MPs for Westminster and, when it arrived in 1999, dominated the Scottish parliament too. If their party also happened to be in power at Westminster, which it was occasionally, Scottish Labour-ites surely felt like masters of all they surveyed. If the Conservatives were in power at Westminster, which they were most of the time, those Scottish Labour-ites grumbled a bit, but diplomatically kept their heads down while right-wing Tory policies were imposed on Scotland.

Then in 2007 the sky fell in. Salmond’s SNP won the biggest number of seats in the Scottish parliament and he became Scotland’s First Minister. The SNP have remained in power there during the 14 years and three Scottish parliamentary elections since. They also won the majority of Scotland’s Westminster seats in the UK general elections in 2015, 2017 and 2019. They lost the independence referendum in 2014 – an event that led to Salmond resigning as First Minister and making way for his deputy and supposed protégé Nicola Sturgeon – but the percentage of the vote they got, 45%, was still far more than what anyone had expected at the campaign’s start. They upended the cosy old tradition of Scottish deference to the London-based overlords. Thank God for that, in my opinion.

© William Collins

This stuck in many craws. Not just in those of the Scottish Labour Party, with its historical sense of entitlement, but in those of the majority of Scotland’s newspapers, whose hacks had enjoyed a close relationship with the old political clique and liked to see themselves as part of Scotland’s establishment. It must have horrified them to discover that, no matter how negatively they reported the SNP and its performance in government, a significant proportion of the Scottish public ignored them and kept on voting SNP. Meanwhile, the grin of Alex Salmond, the bastard who seemed emblematic of their good times coming to an end, grew ever wider, his mood grew ever merrier and his girth grew ever more Falstaffian.

However, from 2017 onwards, Salmond’s many foes scented blood. 2017 saw him lose the Westminster seat that, after quitting as Scottish First Minister, he’d been elected to in 2015. That same year, he put on at the Edinburgh Festival a chat-show called Alex Salmond: Unleashed, which from all accounts was a graceless, self-indulgent and ego-driven mess. Soon after, he developed his stage-show into a programme called The Alex Salmond Show, which was broadcast on RT, Russia’s international English-language news channel. Associating himself with Vladimir Putin’s televisual voice to the world was not a wise move. Salmond hadn’t just given his detractors ammunition to use against him. He’d handed them a whole arsenal.

I’d always assumed there was no dirt to dig up on Salmond, for the simple reason that if there had been, his enemies in the old Scottish establishment would have dug it up and used it to wreck his reputation long ago. Thus, it was a surprise in 2018 when the Daily Record newspaper reported that Salmond faced allegations of sexual misconduct while he’d been First Minister. This had lately been the subject of an inquiry by the Scottish government and its findings had been passed on to the police. Although Salmond made sure there was a legal review of this, which resulted in the Scottish government admitting that its investigative procedures had been flawed and paying him half a million pounds in legal expenses, the police still charged him with 14 offences, including two counts of attempted rape, in 2019.

One year later, Salmond was cleared of these charges. The prosecutors dropped one charge, the jury found him not guilty of 12 more and the final charge was deemed ‘not proven’. Nonetheless, Salmond’s defence admitted he’d acted inappropriately, had been overly ‘touchy feely’ with female staff and ‘could certainly have been a better man’.

Meanwhile, the Scottish government and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, now totally at odds with Salmond, were subject to both an investigation by a Scottish Parliamentary committee and an independent investigation by Irish lawyer James Hamilton about how they’d handled, or mishandled, the affair. The committee concluded there’d been both individual and corporate incompetence but these conclusions weren’t enough to topple Sturgeon. Hamilton judged that Sturgeon hadn’t breached the ministerial code, something that Salmond and his supporters, convinced of a conspiracy against him in high places, maintained she had.

From facebook.com

Salmond claimed his new Alba Party, supposedly more gung-ho in its desire for Scottish independence than the cautious SNP, was not another attempt to undermine Sturgeon. But it was generally perceived as an effort to diminish her party’s vote in the May 6^th Scottish election – Salmond’s revenge as a dish served cold, a year after his acquittal. Whether Alba’s purpose was malevolent or benevolent, it didn’t succeed. The SNP ended up with 64 seats in the new parliament, with the Greens bumping up the number of pro-independence MSPs to 72, compared with the Unionist parties’ tally of 57 MSPs and Alba’s tally of zero.

It didn’t help Alba’s cause that it attracted a lot of fringe-dwelling dingbats in the independence movement, dingbats whom I’m sure Sturgeon’s SNP will be glad to see the back of. These included one vocal faction who seemed to spend all their time baiting and frothing against trans people. It also didn’t help that Salmond showed little contrition for his past misbehaviour. Fair enough, that misbehaviour hadn’t been enough to warrant a court conviction and prison sentence. But it did make him come across as a sleazebag whom no young woman would want to be around.

One thing I will say in Salmond’s defence. While I find claims of a conspiracy against Salmond in the upper echelons of the Scottish government, legal system and police force fanciful – conspiracies imply objectives, strategies and clear thinking, and to me the messiness of Salmond’s investigation and trial simply suggests witless blundering – I agree with his supporters that the Scottish press was pretty disgraceful in how it reported the case. From columnist Alex Massie trumpeting at the investigation’s outset that ‘whatever happens, it’s over for Salmond’, to the Herald previewing the trial with a ‘Big Read’ feature that it illustrated with pictures of the Yorkshire Ripper, Fred and Rosemary West, the Moors Murderers, Dennis Nilsen, Charles Manson and Adolf Eichmann, to a dodgy, nod-and-a-wink post-trial documentary by the BBC’s Kirsty Wark, the tone of the coverage didn’t suggest that a person is ‘innocent until proven guilty’. Rather, it suggested that a person is ‘guilty because we want them to be guilty’.

But that’s the only thing I’ll say in his defence.

Meanwhile, post-election, Salmond has announced his intention to become an influential Twitter presence, just as a certain former US president once was. “I am going to unleash myself on Twitter,” he said the other day, “now that Donald Trump has created a vacuum for me.” No, Alex, don’t. Just don’t. Call it a day for Christ’s sake.

It isn’t so much that the Salmond Rollercoaster has reached the bottom of the deepest dip yet. It’s more that the Salmond Rollercoaster has run out of track.

From the Jersey Evening Post

January 25, 2021

Favourite Scots words, D-F

From en.wikipedia.org

This evening is Burns Night, marking the 261^st anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s greatest poet, and one-time ploughman, Robert Burns.

In a normal, pandemic-free year, children in schools the length and breadth of Scotland would have spent the past few days standing in front of their classmates and teachers reciting Burns’ poems. Those poems, of course, were written in the Scots language; so this must be the only time in the year when kids can come out with certain Scots words in the classroom without their teachers correcting them: “Actually, that’s not what we say in proper English…”

In fact, lately, Scots has been getting attention that has nothing to do with tonight being Burns night. Scots-language poetess Miss PunnyPennie has won herself tens of thousands of fans in recent months with her tweets and YouTube videos, in which she recites her poems and discusses a different Scots word each day. Those fans include author Neil Gaiman, comedienne Janey Godley and actor Michael Sheen.

Unfortunately, she’s also had to put up with a lot of negativity. She was the subject of a condescending and mocking piece published recently in the Sunday Times, which added insult to injury by calling her a blatherskite (‘ill-informed loudmouth’) in its headline. More seriously, she’s received much trolling on twitter. For instance, political ūber-chancer George Galloway – currently trying to reinvent himself as a diehard British nationalist in a bid to get elected to the Scottish parliament – tweeted something derogatory about her, in the process exposing her to potential abuse from his nutjob twitter followers.

Actually, Scots seems to have become part of the culture wars being waged in Scotland at the moment. Pro-United Kingdom, anti-Scottish independence zealots like Galloway hate the idea that Scottish people might have their own language because it contradicts their narrative that everyone on the island of Great Britain is one people and culturally the same. Hence, much online protestation (by people whose profiles are slathered with Union Jacks) that Scots is just ‘an accent’ or ‘slang’ or ‘a made-up language’ or ‘normal English with spelling mistakes’.

From cheezburger.com

Anyhow, as promised, here’s my next selection of favourite Scots words, those starting with the letters ‘D’, ‘E’ and ‘F’.

Dander (n/v) – stroll. Over the centuries, a lot of Scots words made their way across the Irish Sea to the north of Ireland, where I spent the first 11 years of my life, and the delightful word dander is one of them. I heard as many Northern Irish folk announce that they were ‘goin’ fir a dander’ as I heard Scottish folk announce it later, after my family had moved to Scotland.

Deasil (adv) – a Gaelic-derived word that means ‘clockwise’. It’s a less well-known counterpart to the Scots word widdershins, meaning ‘anti-clockwise’. I suspect the latter word is better known because it figures heavily in witchcraft and there’s been at least one journal of ‘Magick, ancient and modern’ with ‘Widdershins’ as its title.

Deave (v) – to bore and sicken someone with endless blather. For example, “Thon Belfast singer-songwriter fellah Van Morrison is fair deavin’ me wi his coronavirus conspiracies.”

Dicht (n/v) – wipe. Many a dirty-faced youngster, or clarty-faced bairn, in Scotland has heard their mother order them, ‘Gie yer a face a dicht’.

Doonhamer (n) – a person from Dumfries, the main town in southwest Scotland. For many years, I had only ever seen this word in print, not heard anyone say it, and I’d always misread it as ‘Doom-hammer’, which made me think Dumfries’ inhabitants must be the most heavy-metal people on the planet. But then, disappointingly, I realised how the word was properly spelt. Also, I discovered that the word comes from how Dumfries folk refer to their hometown whilst in the more populous parts of Scotland up north, for example, in the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee. They call it doon hame, i.e. ‘down home’.

Dook (n/v) – the act of immersing yourself in water. Thus, the traditional Halloween game involving retrieving apples from a basin of water using your mouth, not your hands, is known in Scotland as dookin’ fir apples.

Douce (adj) – quiet, demure, civilised, prim. My hometown of Peebles is frequently described as douce. However, that’s by outsiders, short-term visitors and travellers passing through, who’ve never been inside the public bar of the Crown Hotel on Peebles High Street on a Saturday night.

From unsplash.com / © Eilis Garvey

Dreich (adj) – dreary or tedious, especially with regard to wet, dismal weather. A very Presbyterian-sounding adjective that, inevitably, is much used in Scotland.

Drookit (adj) – soaking wet. How children often are on Halloween after dookin’ fir apples.

Drouth (n) – a thirst. Many an epic drinking session has started when someone declared that they had a drouth and then herded the company into a pub to rectify matters. Its adjectival form is drouthy and Tam O’Shanter, perhaps Burns’ most famous poem, begins with an evocation of the boozing that happens when ‘drouthy neebors, neebors meet.’ Indeed, Drouthy Neebors has become a popular pub-name in Scotland and there are, or at least have been, Drouthy Neebors serving alcohol in Edinburgh, St Andrews, Stirling and Largs.

Dunt (n / v) – a heavy but dull-sounding blow. It figures in the old saying, “Words are but wind, but dunts are the devil,” which I guess is a version of “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.”

Dux (n) – the star pupil in a school.

Eejit (n) – idiot. Inevitably, in 2008, when Dundonian poet Matthew Fitt got around to translating Roald Dahl’s 1980 children’s book The Twits into Scots, he retitled it The Eejits. Actually, there’s a lot of other Scots words in the D-F category that mean ‘idiot’. See also dafty, diddy, doughball and dunderheid.

© Itchy Coo

Eeksie–peeksie (adj/adv) – equal, equally, evenly balanced. A quaint term that was recently the subject of one of Miss PunniePenny’s ‘Scots word of the day’ tweets.

Fankle (n/v) – tangle. I’ve heard the English plea to someone to calm down, “Don’t get your knickers in a twist!” rephrased in Scots as “Dinna get yer knickers in a fankle!”

Fantoosh (adj) – fancy, over-elaborate, a bit too glammed-up.

Fash (v) – to anger or annoy, commonly heard in the phrase “Dinna fash yerself”. Like a number of Scots words, this is derived from Old French, from the ancestor of the modern French verb ‘fâcher’.

Feart (adj) – scared. During my college days in Aberdeen in the 1980s, on more than one occasion, I had to walk away from a potential confrontation with Aberdeen Football Club soccer casuals. the juvenile designer football hooligans who seemed to infest the city at the time. And I’d have the scornful demand thrown after me: “Are ye feart tae fight?!” Meanwhile, a person who gets frightened easily is a feartie.

Fitba (n) – football.

Flit (n/v) – the act of moving, or to move, house. Commonly used in Scotland, this verb has had success in the English language generally, as is evidenced by the use of ‘moonlight flit’ to describe moving house swiftly and secretly to avoid paying overdue rent-money.

Flyte (v) – to trade insults in the form of verse. This combative literary tradition can be found in Norse and Anglo-Saxon cultures, but flyting was made an art-form in 15^th / 16^th-century Scotland by poets like William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Sir David Lyndsay. There’s a poetic account of one flyting contest between Dunbar and Kennedy that’s called, unsurprisingly, The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie and consists of 28 stanzas of anti-Kennedy abuse penned by Dunbar and another 41 stanzas of Kennedy sticking it back to Dunbar. According to Wikipedia, this work contains “the earliest recorded use of the word ‘shit’ as a personal insult.” Thus, flyting was the Scottish Middle-Ages literary equivalent of two rappers dissing each other in their ‘rhymes’; and Dunbar and Kennedy were the Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls of their day.

Footer (v) – to fumble clumsily. I remember reading a Scottish ‘coming of age’ story – though I can’t recall its title or author – in which the inexperienced hero footered haplessly with a young lady’s bra-clasp.

Favourite Scots words starting with ‘G’, ‘H’ and ‘I’ will be coming soon.

July 28, 2020

George, where did it all go wrong?

Last Thursday saw the Prime Minister of England – sorry, Prime Minister of Britain – Boris Johnson arrive in Scotland for a one-day charm offensive. This was intended to remind Scottish people of how lucky they were to be part of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the ‘mighty’ union as Johnson grandly put it, and dissuade them of any mad notions of voting for Scottish independence, which, according to recent opinion polls, 54% of them are now minded to do. Determined to press the flesh with the maximum number of Scottish people during his visit, Johnson flew into the bustling Caledonian metropolises of the Orkney Islands and RAF Lossiemouth. A little unfortunately, the Orcadian mainland is home to a small settlement called Twatt, which led to some unkind quips being made on social media about there already being ‘one Twatt in the Orkneys’. It was also slightly unwise for the PM to parley with some local fishermen and pose for photographers holding a pair of clawed, antennae-ed crustaceans, as social media was soon heaving with comments about how he ‘had crabs’.

But Johnson isn’t the only British political chancer to have foisted himself upon Scotland recently, proclaiming the message that red, white and blue unionism is good while Saltire-waving indie is bad. For July 2020 has seen the return to Scottish soil of one George ‘Gorgeous’ Galloway. Or to give him the title that immediately appears when you type his name into Google, ‘George Galloway cat.’

It’s hard to believe now, but once upon a time I considered Galloway one of the good guys. Well, one of the goodish guys at least. This was while he served as Labour Member of Parliament for Glasgow Hillhead, later Glasgow Kelvin, from 1987 to 2005. For many years Labour MPs formed the bulk of Scotland’s representation in the House of Commons, but apart from a few high-fliers like Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Donald Dewar and George Robertson, destined for cabinet jobs under Tony Blair, they were an uninspiring lot – a big, grey Scottish-accented blob whose only function was to shamble through the voting lobbies at their party’s bidding. They were nicknamed the ‘low-flying Jimmies’, though to my mind they were a living, if barely sentient, definition of the Scots word ‘numpties’.

However, the Scottish Labour MPs contained a small but interesting awkward squad. The squad included the admirably his-own-man Tam Dalyell; and the very leftward Ron Brown (who shocked the British establishment by heading off to Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and then on his return warning that it probably wasn’t a good idea for the West to fund the Mujahideen, later to morph into the Taliban); and the trio of Dick Douglas, John McAllion and Dennis Canavan, all of whom would later end up estranged from the Labour Party and end up supporting the cause of Scottish independence. Plus, of course, the ultra-awkward George Galloway.

Galloway was too left-wing for traditional mainstream Labourites’ liking, which was fine by me. I also approved of his constitutional stance. Though he didn’t go as far as espousing independence for Scotland, he advocated a large measure of home-rule for the country within the framework of the UK. And when John Major’s Conservative Party won the British general election in 1992 and dashed hopes of a devolved Scottish parliament being set up for at least another half-decade, and a campaign movement called Scotland United was formed to maintain pressure for the creation of such a parliament, I wasn’t surprised when Galloway became one of the movement’s leading lights.

From twitter.com/thoughtland

To keep the issue in the public consciousness, Scotland United held rallies in Edinburgh and Glasgow. I participated in a couple of these, though I can’t remember Galloway addressing the crowds. I do remember, however, one Saturday marching down to Leith Links in Edinburgh where, after speeches, we were treated to a gig by the Scotland United-supporting pop / soul band Deacon Blue. At one point, singer Ricky Ross pointed out the nearby premises of Leith’s Conservative and Unionist Association and started singing a cover of Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which contains the pertinent lyrics, “…how does it feel / To be on your own, with no direction home / A complete unknown…?” The memory makes me nostalgic. Trying to establish a Scottish parliament by having Deacon Blue sing Bob Dylan at the Tories. Those were the days.

Still, it was already clear that Galloway had a dodgy side. From 1983 to 1987 he’d served as general secretary of the British charity War on Want and stories of his antics during a conference in Greece – Galloway confessed to getting to know some local ladies ‘carnally’ – led to embarrassing tabloid coverage. I seem to remember one newspaper reporting his attempts to justify his behaviour with the headline I BONKED FOR BRITAIN. This presumably helped give rise to Galloway’s nickname ‘Gorgeous’. Meanwhile, his simultaneously smooth and self-righteous manner caused a lot of people I knew, even ones who shared his politics, to profess that they hated his guts.

During the next two decades, following Galloway’s exploits was a seesawing experience. He’d do something crap, then redeem himself by doing something impressive, then blow his restored credibility by doing something crap again. At the crap end was his grovelling to the Iraq despot Saddam Hussein, which in 1994 saw him utter the famous line, “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability.” Later, Galloway claimed, not very convincingly, that he’d aimed this line at the long-suffering Iraqi people rather than at Saddam himself.

But he deserved kudos for his opposition to George Bush Jnr and Tony Blair’s misguided, mendacious and ultimately catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. He denounced Bush as a terrorist, got himself expelled from the Labour Party, sued and won against the Daily Telegraph after it claimed Iraqi agents had secretly paid him with cash from the United Nations Oil for Food programme, and then squared up to a US Senate committee investigating the Food for Oil programme in 2005. The senate confrontation was probably his finest hour. He gave those senators a mauling. “…(I)n everything I said about Iraq I turned out to be right,” he declared, “and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 have paid with their lives, 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies.”

Though he’d torched his bridges with the Labour Party, Galloway managed for a time to defy Enoch Powell’s famous adage that ‘all political lives… end in failure.’ He formed the Respect Party, stood for election in the London constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 and won it from Labour. He stood down as MP there following a schism in the Respect Party, but in a 2012 by-election pulled off a similar stunt by winning Bradford West from Labour. Both constituencies had sizable Muslim communities and there were copious allegations about Galloway dishing religious-related dirt on his opponents – that in Bethnal Green he’d played up the fact that the Labour incumbent, Oona King, had a Jewish mother; that in Bradford West he’d raised the issue of the Labour Party’s Muslim candidate drinking alcohol; and that in the run-up to the 2015 general election he’d accused his Labour challenger, another Muslim, Naz Shah, of supporting Israel and lying about an arranged marriage. But Shah had the last laugh because she won Bradford West back for Labour.

© Channel 4

True to form, Galloway’s 2005 triumph in Bethnal Green was soon negated by his idiotic decision to take part in the 2006 series of Celebrity Big Brother. This resulted in such colossally cringy moments as George, no longer so gorgeous, dancing in a leotard beside the late Pete Burns of the band Dead or Alive, or pretending to be a cat and licking cream off the lap of actress Rula Lenska. Hence the word ‘cat’ popping up beside his name on Google searches.

More seriously, Galloway secured a job as a host on the Iran-government-funded Press TV in 2008 and that same year earned himself the ire of gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell for claiming that a gay man executed in Iran was punished for ‘sex crimes’ rather than for being gay. He landed himself in more hot water in 2012 when he defended Julian Assange against rape charges by describing having non-consensual sex with a sleeping woman (after consensual sex with her when she was awake), which Assange was accused of doing, as ‘bad sexual etiquette’ but ‘not rape’.

Galloway’s support for Assange was evidence that, as the 2010s progressed, he was increasingly happy to clamber onto any bandwagon that he thought would boost his profile. So he campaigned vociferously for a ‘no’ vote in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence – ‘just say naw’. Mind you, he was scathing of his ex-comrades in the Labour Party who’d joined forces with the Conservatives in the anti-independence Better Together movement. “If you ever see me standing under a Union Jack shoulder-to-shoulder with a Conservative,” he told Prospect magazine, “please shoot me.” Remember those words. Prior to the referendum, I watched him in a televised debate and discovered that, like a cartoon character, he’d now acquired a costume, a rarely-off-his-head fedora, and a catchphrase: “That is nonsense on stilts!”

Perhaps upset that his contribution to saving the United Kingdom didn’t result in ennoblement by a grateful David Cameron – he could have been Lord Galloway of Nonsense-on-Stilts – George then threw his lot in with the Brexiteers and campaigned for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016’s referendum on that matter. This spawned some nauseating photographs of him, a supposed socialist, posing with Nigel Farage, ex-City of London spiv, immigration dog-whistler and Donald Trump’s biggest British fanboy. That said, pictures of Galloway embracing the extreme right-wing nutjob Steve Bannon at a debate in Kazakhstan in 2019 were even more mind-melting.

The increasing number of causes that Galloway hitched himself to seemed in inverse proportion to the number of votes being cast for him in elections. A 2011 attempt to get into the Scottish parliament saw him win a less-than-awesome 3.3% of the vote in Glasgow. His performance in the 2016 London Mayoral contest was even worse (1.4%) and attempts to run in English constituencies in the 2017 and 2019 general elections had equally dire results.

Now George has a new wheeze, which is to run in next year’s Scottish parliamentary elections as head of something called Alliance for Unity, of which he says: “We have only one goal – to get the SNP out.” To this end, Galloway has declared himself willing to work with even the Conservatives. Yes, this is the man who a half-dozen years ago invited folk to shoot him if they ever saw him do that.

He intends to stand in the south of Scotland, a rural, down-to-earth area where I can’t see many people falling for his self-serving, narcissistic brand of bullshit. Maybe he figures he stands a chance because he shares a name with one of the regions there, Dumfries and Galloway. And who does he really expect to vote for him? Not Scottish independence supporters, obviously. Labour supporters will hardly vote for someone so willing to climb into bed with the Tories. And the hard-line loyalists / British nationalists who increasingly form the main support for the Scottish Conservative Party these days will hardly be enamoured with someone who’s said of Northern Ireland: “There is no Northern Ireland. It is six counties in the north of Ireland. It should have never been in the British state in the first place.” Nor will his urging of Arabs to kill British troops in Iraq in 2003, one of the final straws that got him chucked out of Labour, win him their admiration either.

George Galloway may still look, talk and act like the cat that’s got the cream. But I suspect he’s now used up the last of his nine lives.