tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90592499182415412372024-02-19T04:12:40.546+00:00Whitehall 1212Torcuil Crichton's Westminster blogWhitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.comBlogger935125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-81664689717417764172020-05-08T08:28:00.001+01:002020-07-07T13:37:42.738+01:00Alasdair Crichton, last of the VE Day generation<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span></span>
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>On the anniversary of VE Day this is the remarkable story of my uncle Alasdair and his experiences at the end of WWII.</i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>There are wonderful pictures that could accompany this story but in our current coronavirus lockdown it isn't possible to get them. I will try to add them at a later date.</i></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />Last December, just as we approached the shortest day of the year, we buried our uncle Alasdair at the Braighe cemetery, a mile or two from the Isle of Lewis village where he was born.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">At the age of 94 Alasdair Crichton, my father’s brother, was the last of the men in the WWII generation of veterans from Swordale.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My father used to tease him about how being a 1945 recruit he never actually made it to the war.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That was only partially true, as I discovered when I went to visit my uncle in the summer of 2011, fresh from Westminster’s political battlefields.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I came to his Stornoway home with a gift I thought he might find interesting. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of our cousins, Sergeant Major Alasdair Iain MacKenzie of the Scots Guards (now a Captain), had days before presented the colours to Her Majesty at the annual Trooping of the Colour.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I’d been to the ceremony and spoke to him about the experience. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It wasn’t Sergeant Major MacKenzie’s only task that summer.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This Lewis lad told me he had also been in charge of Barack Obama’s guard of honour at Buckingham Palace during the US President’s state visit to the UK. That, I thought, was pretty impressive.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in Stornoway I presented my uncle, a former Scots Guard, with the Trooping of the Colour programme.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There were pictures showing our cousin, not as bearskin-hatted chocolate soldier, but in a slit trench, a three-tour veteran of Afghanistan. He’d been Obama’s guard too, I added.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My uncle seemed pretty non-plussed by all this humblebragging about our illustrious relative.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">He wandered off through the house while I stayed chatting to my aunt, Mairi. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pretty soon Alasdair was back with a card-backed manilla envelope which he handed to me. Inside was a sheaf of 10”x8” black and white photographs.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Who do you see there?” my uncle asked.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Well, that’s Stalin, and that’s Churchill and that must be Truman,” I said making a stab at the threesome central frame.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“And who do you think that boy is there in the ranks they’re inspecting?”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I looked at him and he looked at me.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alasdair said: “I was Churchill’s guard of honour at Potsdam.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I was stunned. But if my father taught me anything it was never to be short of an answer, so I groped for his words.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Da said you weren’t in the war.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That was almost true, my uncle explained. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alasdair had enlisted in 1945 in the Scots Guards and was training with his comrades somewhere on the English moors to take the Allied campaign into Germany for the last push.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It wasn’t to be. An ear infection impaired his balance and Alasdair had to stay behind while his battalion crossed the Rhine into Germany and swung northwards to end their war in Hamburg.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alasdair had to wait in barracks for the next lot of recruits to be trained and was flown into Berlin as hostilities came to an end.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“My first night in Germany was spent in a ditch by the side of the road,” he recalled.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">His company had orders to make for a country mansion in Potsdam, south west of Berlin, but their route was blocked by Russian troops.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In these uneasy days after the Germans had been defeated it wasn’t clear if the Russians would be the next enemy or friends.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">After three days of negotiation the British were allowed through and on arriving in Potsdam discovered the nature of their mission, to be Churchill’s guards.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVhr3LYo2-ZqAPLWVeZq2umkmke5CSBVE7-f0SU9cpsl9HhvEXVrZdLxWUeGLtspR8xfcFLk58Dg51ZPJOXNZcIYapl2-iqHM7-mrwytMs61SsBjj5JAY4NFxGds-B-DBiEGeYc_QG4h8/s1600/potsdam.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="565" data-original-width="800" height="282" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVhr3LYo2-ZqAPLWVeZq2umkmke5CSBVE7-f0SU9cpsl9HhvEXVrZdLxWUeGLtspR8xfcFLk58Dg51ZPJOXNZcIYapl2-iqHM7-mrwytMs61SsBjj5JAY4NFxGds-B-DBiEGeYc_QG4h8/s400/potsdam.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Churchill, Truman and Stalin at Potsdam, from the Imperial War Museum archive</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Pointing to another picture of a guardsman, at attention outside a mansion, my uncle said: “That boy was one of my best friends. That’s the house Churchill stayed in and he used to complain about the noise of our tackety boots marching up and down all night keeping him awake.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There were probably more pressing issues keeping Churchill awake, I reckoned.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But my uncle told me how one evening the day watch was ordered to hand in their boots which were flown back to London overnight and returned the next morning with rubber soles. It must have been true.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Now who’s that there?” my uncle quizzed me again turning to another photo.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“That is Clem Attlee,” I said, proudly recognising the Labour post-war Prime Minister. Shortly after the war ended Churchill was turfed out, Attlee was in and came to Potsdam.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEKEU4LPUi4AL9oxstdjipL3wtkpOs8f66l1fPL28v0RlluP8BTPw4e6wpyt9JJYS1Jp0Cfjkb1t1rfLPowfXCF5PSqzZt-Eps2SZhTwfz6qK28D-wtCkyODxbMU9c56imLXQxHQx4bA/s1600/IMG_0087.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="943" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbEKEU4LPUi4AL9oxstdjipL3wtkpOs8f66l1fPL28v0RlluP8BTPw4e6wpyt9JJYS1Jp0Cfjkb1t1rfLPowfXCF5PSqzZt-Eps2SZhTwfz6qK28D-wtCkyODxbMU9c56imLXQxHQx4bA/s320/IMG_0087.jpg" width="188" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alasdair and my father in London sometime after WWII. My uncle stayed in London for seven years after the war.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">One of my father’s earliest political memories was sticking up two fingers at Churchill at a Glasgow election rally in 1945. Churchill was good for war but people wanted Labour’s peace and Attlee was one of my father’s heroes.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My uncle disagreed. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“No, we didn’t like him,” Alasdair said. “He gave too much to the Communists” pointing at Stalin, reinforcing the image of my uncle being in the middle of this historic post-war conference.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The division of Europe had in fact been mostly settled earlier at the Yalta conference but that didn’t mean that tides of geopolitics weren’t swirling around Potsdam and my uncle’s life.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“But we liked Truman,” said Alasdair. “He dropped the bomb.”</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That sounded appalling to me, but when my uncle explained it just underscored our generation’s shallow understanding of the actual horror of war.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My uncle and his friends knew what the war expected of them. Their service books were marked “Far East” and Postdam might only have been a colourful diversion on the road to a hellish invasion of Japan if the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not brought the conflict to a close.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHgf84FyYR3S5cue-cdoaIIgLIJec7dCObCIEp0b54455eTyP3i-68elHaIgmwC3RpU-o2Y7V_JFVgEuS1Z8jRUaWIUNWTju-mhPAM-vfT6sXCRYr84JmQfuu3eacW_TJi87FY3d1PRs0/s1600/Alasdair.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="724" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHgf84FyYR3S5cue-cdoaIIgLIJec7dCObCIEp0b54455eTyP3i-68elHaIgmwC3RpU-o2Y7V_JFVgEuS1Z8jRUaWIUNWTju-mhPAM-vfT6sXCRYr84JmQfuu3eacW_TJi87FY3d1PRs0/s320/Alasdair.JPG" width="238" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alasdair in Scots Guards uniform in a picture sent to his sister, Nora.</td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So, yes, my father was partially right. My uncle missed the war and thankfully so.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Alasdair had never spoken before about his military service, few of them did, and he added only a few details about the starving civilian population he’d seen while stationed in post-war Germany.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">I suspect the trauma of it meant that generation couldn’t remember the details, although the experience completely defined who they become as men. Good men, as I remember.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">My uncle was one of the humblest of that generation who fought for and then rebuilt Britain, literally in his case as he worked on the construction of the Royal Festival Hall on London’s Southbank.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Back in Lewis Alasdair married, raised a family, became a teacher and lived a quiet life as a committed Christian. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">All his adult life he’d probably consider himself more a soldier for Christ but he did his service for his country too.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And, as he taught me that day he revealed his role in the closing chapter of WWII, never try to pull rank on an old soldier. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;"> </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOsiQ_pfEhlVpr1NKUJFpAjRxMvoEZ4y5SMLjBnbaKveMOmzbVHFg3UF7WXgK1IA5KNo1Rjqnnz0uuQUQ14Pypv3c9UJzVGMgYwuD2bT-1doBfeZ5a3PKrjLmAIDQdSUJsgGTVLo2-29M/s1600/IMG_0728.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOsiQ_pfEhlVpr1NKUJFpAjRxMvoEZ4y5SMLjBnbaKveMOmzbVHFg3UF7WXgK1IA5KNo1Rjqnnz0uuQUQ14Pypv3c9UJzVGMgYwuD2bT-1doBfeZ5a3PKrjLmAIDQdSUJsgGTVLo2-29M/s400/IMG_0728.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Alasdair Crichton, Swordale and Matheson Road, 1925-2019</td></tr>
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</span>Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-11471718076052487202019-12-18T14:40:00.000+00:002019-12-18T14:40:04.839+00:00 Five things Labour should to do now, and five things it (probably) won’t.From the Daily Record Sat 14/12/19<br />
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The Labour party in England woke up yesterday in the same situation Labour in Scotland found itself in 2015 - shattered, its citadels sacked, the activists bewildered and not knowing how to win back territory taken fore granted for generations.<br />
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There are few lessons from Scottish Labour on what to do next, because the party was ahead of Corbyn into the ditch.<br />
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If there is a lesson from further afield it is that there no guarantee for social democratic parties in an age of identity politics.<br />
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The French Socialist party banked just 6.4 per cent in last year’s elections, in Greece Pasok last polled at just over six per cent. That shows what is on offer for Labour if change does not happen.<br />
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Here are five do’s for revival, and five don’t pitfalls.<br />
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1) Goodbye Corbyn, but not all of Corbynism<br />
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If he hasn’t gone by now more shame on him. The leader, and his legacy of anti-patriotism as much as anti-Semitism, repelled Labour voters. He was a force for failure, not a cause for hope. But the agenda for change, for nationalisation and for renewal, people wanted that. To persuade voters Labour needs leaders who can communicate big ideas, and how they would be paid for, beyond reading out a shopping list.<br />
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2) Take your idealogical purity and stuff it where your majority just went<br />
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If a party keeps losing, Labour’s lost four in row, it is beyond time waiting for voters to come home. If the Momentum purists and trade union barons put a ring of voting steel around socialist purism and one more push to awaken the working class, then it is time to start thinking about another centrist party. The purge of purism has to be done, and done quickly, or Labour is lost for a decade. <br />
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3) Adopt a friend<br />
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If you’re Labour and don’t have any Tory or SNP friends you’re not principled, you’re just a loser.<br />
Listen, don’t preach on politics. Often people will shock you, but unless they cross a racist or bigoted line, try to work out what policy responses can answer their fears.<br />
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4) Open up<br />
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Mandatory re-selection isn’t popular but open primaries can be. Labour needs top talent, and needs to sound and look like the people it wants to represent. That starts with you, Richard Leonard.<br />
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5) Embrace the nation<br />
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The UK fashion industry is bigger than the car industry, no one has worked in a deep mine in three decades. New commuter housing developments on the edge of hollowed out former mining towns, in places like Mansfield and Bolsover, do the talking, pay the taxes and voted Tory. Offer aspirational voters the future, not just an echo of the past. So green lives four our kids not just green industrial jobs. <br />
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Five things Labour shouldn’t do (but might):<br />
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1) Don’t look back in anger<br />
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History is in the rear view mirror, the party could be too. Fine, blame Jeremy or John, kick the dog or the dressing table, anyone but yourself. Your opponents are in front, not behind. Unite quickly to get on with winning.<br />
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2) Choose the wrong leader<br />
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There is a certain inevitability to the left, which controls the party, trying to prove it was right and the voters were wrong by choosing a bad leader. Don’t choose a leader for you, choose a leader for that SNP/Tory/Lib Dem mate you’re talking to again. You need someone who can win. Otherwise see point 2 above<br />
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3) Don’t forget the who won the election<br />
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Not Johnson, but the grown-up children of working class voters you lost a connection with. Don’t deny reality, reconnecting on voters’ trust is hard work and takes time.<br />
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3) Don’t break up the country<br />
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Don’t buy the nationalist narrative of Scotland being ”different” but learn from the SNP that politics is about identity as well as policy. Labour’s identity is common endeavour, that more is achieved by unity. Keep challenging nationalists to come up with a progressive argument for dividing people from each other.<br />
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5) Don’t give up<br />
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Against failing school and health standards, against austerity, against globalism and climate change, people need a social democratic alternative more than ever.Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-70340662308497550172019-11-07T08:02:00.000+00:002019-11-07T08:02:55.857+00:00Tom Watson, the changed man<div style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
For the Daily Record 07/11/19</div>
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At the Labour conference I took a walk around Brighton with Tom Watson, it was a revelation.</div>
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The first person we (almost) bumped into was Jeremy Corbyn. But the weekend after the botched coup against the deputy leader he was in no mood to meet the boss.</div>
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We did, however, have several other encounters as we wandered through the Lanes.</div>
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“Are you still here?” someone shouted.</div>
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“They haven’t got me yet,” said the cheery pro-politician.</div>
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“That’s too bad then,” came the reply, but it was in jest. He was genuinely popular.</div>
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People flocked to greet him but Watson was most struck by one man whom he had met two years earlier.</div>
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“You changed my life,” said the man. “You got me dieting and look, I’ve lost two stone.”</div>
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Watson’s own inspiring transformation from “Big Lad” to svelte “Modfather” changed his outlook on life utterly. He looked and talked differently.</div>
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There was a sparkle in his eye when he spoke about health, less so when he talked about Labour.</div>
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On the way back to the conference he reminded us how he and his father once had their picture taken with Corbyn outside the hall. “Happy days, two years ago,” he joked.</div>
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But the laugh was hollow, the rift at the heart of Labour irreparable. </div>
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Tom Watson is one of the most tenacious and fearless campaigners of his generation, and his leaving is Labour’s loss.</div>
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With his departure a light goes off in the window for those who thought they could return to a moderate Labour party any time soon.</div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-8990649656817113982019-11-07T07:56:00.004+00:002019-11-07T07:56:47.126+00:00Keith Schellenberg recalled<i>For the Daily Record 01/11/19 on the death of Keith Schellenberg, former laird of Eigg</i><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the West Highland Free Press, where I started in journalism in the 1980s, we campaigned for radical land reform.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was when I stepped ashore on the island of Eigg with photographer Sam Maynard I learned this was easier in theory than in practice.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The islanders, almost all tenants of the landlord Keith Schellenberg, were living in derelict, rented homes. They were working, or not working, depending on the whim of the laird who controlled everything on Eigg apart from the dole and the doctor.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eigg, we found, was in the feudal death-grip of landlordism.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After years of neglect at the hands of this self-styled “playboy”,the islanders had enough of his cricket matches, vintage Rolls Royces and Toad of Toad hall buffoonery.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Speaking out took some courage, but for those who did it was the first step in finding a voice in their own story. </span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In turn charming and menacing, Schellenberg was a savvy legal and media operator, casting himself as a misunderstood philanthropist of which the Hebrides has seen many.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He tried outsmart the islanders by selling on, first to himself, then to a German fire artist.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With legal advice from the late Simon Fraser, the islanders proved smarter. They now own the place - game, set and match. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I returned to Eigg two years ago for the 20th anniversary celebrations of the buy-out.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The islanders were the same, warm and welcoming, and there were lots more kids running around. The population has increased by 60 per cent, over 100 happy souls live on the inner Hebridean paradise. People were getting on with ordinary, radical lives.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yesterday, as news of “Schelley’s” death spread, the last of the 3,000 tons of community-owned forestry harvested on the island was being shipped off the modernised pier.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe that, the fact that islanders are cracking on with making Eigg a viable, self-sustaining community, is the best memorial to the Schellenberg era of misrule.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-11766165359190376932019-07-27T11:58:00.004+01:002019-07-27T11:59:34.696+01:00Dear Priti Patel - an open letter<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>From my Daily Record column</i></div>
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Friday 26th July</div>
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Dear Priti Patel,</div>
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In fact, Dear Secretary of State for the Home Department. Forgive the informality and my open approach.</div>
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We haven't had many journalistic dealings with each other, not since your parliamentary aides stole four bottles of whisky from a Scotland Office reception a few years ago and you had to issue an apology, which you did with great grace and humour.</div>
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Your staff were reprimanded, not sent to the gallows (er, ha ha). You changed your mind on capital punishment, I hope I can change your mind on something else.</div>
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You inherit a bulging in-tray from Sajid Javid; Brexit, citizenship and immigration will be priorities.</div>
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Hopefully you will not have been bequeathed Javid's closed-mind attitude to drugs consumption rooms and the dire health crisis which leaves Scotland facing more than 1000 drugs deaths this year.</div>
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Health officials in Glasgow, the Scottish Government, local MPs, and this newspaper are campaigning for consumption rooms where addicts can administer their own drugs in a safe and sterile environment.</div>
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This is controversial, I accept, but these facilities have been proven to save lives elsewhere.</div>
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The Commons Scottish affairs committee investigation into the issue, which the Home Office boycotted under Javid, should be in your red box soon.</div>
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On health grounds, there are few arguments left against these facilities.</div>
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As a political issue it is rather more tangled. The SNP insists getting the facilities running should involve devolving part of the Misuse of Drugs Act to Scotland.</div>
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Whitehall sees this as conceding more power without purpose.</div>
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It need not be so.</div>
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As Home Secretary you could change the relevant clauses of the Act by statutory instrument, without a vote in Parliament.</div>
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At the stroke of a pen you could approve a UK pilot scheme in Glasgow, save lives in Scotland, confound opponents and show your Government has compassion for some very vulnerable people.</div>
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It's a big ask, but it would be a great start for you and is easier than Brexit.</div>
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Good luck with that by the way.</div>
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Yours, TC.<br />
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-8458288720900354102019-07-26T18:45:00.000+01:002019-07-26T19:00:32.477+01:00Beware of making Boris the bogey<div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; caret-color: rgb(77, 77, 77); color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>From my Daily Record column</i><br />
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DOES political purgatory mean having to live the same lousy life twice over? That's been the experience of observers who are veterans of both the 2014 and 2016 referenda and their aftermath.</div>
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Every aspect of nationalism we see writ large across the UK today, we saw in Scotland first.</div>
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With Boris Johnson, pictured right - a populist to match Alex Salmond in his pomp - installed as Prime Minister, we are about to see the next phase of British nationalism.</div>
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In this stage, patriotism is harnessed to the no-turning-back certainty of a divisive referendum and moulded into an unbeatable political force.</div>
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People who took the step and voted Yes in the 2014 independence referendum were easy to gather behind the SNP in a first-past-the-post election the following year, creating a 50 per cent share of the vote for one party and nearly wiping out the opposition in Scotland.</div>
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Watch what will unfold. The cabinet Boris Johnson assembled on Wednesday is not one for government, it is for political warfare.</div>
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The horseguard of the Leave campaign have been recalled to duty.</div>
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Three of the great offices of state, Chancellor, Home Office and Foreign Secretary are filled by the talented children of immigrants, Javid, Patel and Raab.</div>
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This cause for liberal celebration also provides cynical cover for a Prime Minister who is about to run a nativist British campaign appealing to white, working-class patriots to get a breakout Brexit over the line.</div>
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Johnson, charismatic, funny and optimistic, will have no problem coalescing Leave voters behind this Big Brexit party in an early general election.</div>
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He will be the peoples' champion, opponents the unpatriotic roadblock to Brexit.</div>
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That is the plan, it's simple, and Scotland, that laboratory of nationalism which populists the world over now study, has shown it works.</div>
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One veteran Leave campaigner was quoted earlier this year saying that "if Vote Leave was a party, we'd smash everyone at an election".</div>
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In Scotland that's not a political revelation, it's a plain fact.</div>
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In the run-up to 2016, the Leave UK campaign studied and learned from the successes and mistakes of the SNP's 2014 venture.</div>
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They didn't produce a detailed manifesto. Alex Salmond's White Paper, and when you read it now, it is still stunning to think it was produced by an impartial civil service, became an albatross around his neck.</div>
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They didn't propose any detail on the Irish backstop or anything else to tether their fantasy to the ground, which is why so much remainer energy since has been spent on complaining the electorate were sold a pig in poke.</div>
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The voters weren't fooled, they didn't vote on detail, they voted on how they felt.</div>
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The Leave campaign, like the Yes campaign was an exercise in psychology as much as politics.</div>
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The change campaigners reached into the emotional hearts of voters to turn doubts on identity into opportunities.</div>
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The very meaning of Britishness, once the BBC is rubbished for "bias", is the NHS, Labour's neverending legacy.</div>
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In the Autumn of 2014, the Yes campaign warned there were only days to save the "NHScotland" from a UK Government by suporting independence.</div>
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That control of the NHS was already wholly devolved to Scotland didn't stand in the way of the lie.</div>
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Similarly, Leave reached into the battlefield between head and heart during Brexit, guaranteeing the NHS would flourish, £350million a week extra, but only outside the EU.</div>
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Fortunately or not, the deep anti-politics anger sparked by the 2008 crunch, superheated by the expenses scandal, hardened by the fall in living standards, had not reached boiling point in 2014.</div>
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On the morning of June 24, 2016, on what Nigel Farage coined "Independence Day", SNP strategists bitterly realised they had gone too early.</div>
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Had they waited, the mood even a few weeks later might have tipped the world their way.</div>
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If the SNP are to learn from history they won't repeat Labour's mistake when faced with a populist, right-wing Tory Prime Minister.</div>
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Scottish Labour, then the power in the land, demonised Margaret Thatcher to the extent that voicing support for the Conservatives, far let voting for them, was discouraged.</div>
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Funnily enough this didn't create Labour converts.</div>
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Tartan Tories simply began coalescing around the party most likely to beat Labour, the SNP.</div>
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If the SNP offers no better argument for independence than Boris Johnson as a "bogeyman", it could repeat history and reap the same harvest.</div>
Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-71106526710610092612019-07-16T10:53:00.002+01:002019-07-16T10:53:47.333+01:00New PM could help tackle soaring drugs deaths<style type="text/css">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;"><i>From the Daily Record 5th July 2019. A little lengthy but it spells out what safe drug consumption rooms amount to and how they could be tried in Scotland. </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">As the Tory leadership caravan trundles towards Perth tonight, a pack of hounds pursuing the pro-fox baiting Jeremy Hunt, Boris Johnson is nearly home and dry.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">By now voting papers are hitting Home Counties door mats and most Conservative members have made up their mind, it has to be Boris for Brexit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">If only the sense of dismay greeting that outcome in Scotland could be matched by Johnson’s own anxiety over his lack of grip on the country of which he has next to no experience. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">There’s precious little understanding of Scotland by the current occupant of Downing Street, let along the next one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Theresa May gathered Scottish Tory MPs recently, her first group meeting two years after their election. Proceedings started, apparently, with Gavin Barwell, the PM’s chief of staff, telling the room he hadn’t been to Scotland often and outlining what the PM’s speech should say. That heavy rain the other week, it was the weeping frustration of Scottish Tories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">There’s little Boris Johnson can do to change Scotland’s political weather to his advantage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">It’s doubtful his blond appeal can counter the nationalist line that his personality alone is reason enough to stage a second independence vote.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">A hard Brexit, Johnson’s epistle to the faithful, his suicide note to the nation, is a clear and present danger to the Union.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">On the constitution, and much else, a new PM is going to need every lever at his disposal to wrongfoot Nicola Sturgeon.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">One thing Johnson could do is listen to his own libertarian instincts to outpace the SNP in a progressive policy area.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">If the Tory leadership contest did us one favour it was to explode the hypocrisy around illegal drugs, taking Michael Gove’s leadership ambitions with it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The next Prime Minister will almost certainly be a self-confessed drug criminal, possession of a class A drug like cocaine can mean up to seven years in prison, and the prisons are full.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The need for an overhaul of drugs policy across the UK is writ large. In Scotland we are headed for 1100 needless drugs deaths a year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The rethink on safe consumption facilities that Scottish politicians and this newspaper are campaigning hard for only serves to highlight the drugs crisis across the whole UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">In England Police chiefs are offering offenders treatment as an alternative to prosecution.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Unfortunately for the SNP, a demand for anything different is always viewed through the prism of conceding more powers and meets Whitehall resistance.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">But this is a UK-wide crisis, the constitution has little to do with it, and, it seems, not much has to change in the law<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>to allow safe drug consumption rooms that save lives in other countries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Heroin Assisted Treatment clinics, straight-up medical centres where people are prescribed heroin, rather than methadone, by a doctor for use in the clinic, are on the way. A licence for one to open in Glasgow should be in place for the Autumn.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">But supervised drug consumption rooms, where people bring their own street drugs to a safe, sterile space for use under medical supervision, are illegal.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Health experts avoid calling these places, pardon the media parlance, “shooting galleries” or “injection rooms”. They would look like health centres, and from Portugal to Canada they have proven record in reducing fatalities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">There are just a few legalistic steps to overcome to allow a safer drug consumption facility to operate, because no Health board can put its staff at risk of prosecution for allowing their premises to be used for taking illegal drugs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">There has to be an exemption from specific sections of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the kind of exemption that allows similar facilities to operate in a range of European countries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">In evidence to the Scottish Affairs committee Professor Alex Stevens, a member Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs, said it would take just a simple statutory instrument to go through the Commons, that is without a vote, to alter the law.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Or, a letter of comfort from the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s chief legal officer, that health staff would not be prosecuted could provide police and medics, and people who use drugs, with the clarity needed.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The Lord Advocate, James Wolffe, has so far refused to do this pushing the problem back to the Home Office which sticks to the letter of the, highly outdated, 1971 law.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">But in his evidence to Scottish MPs this week, Chief Inspector Jason Kew, of Thames Valley Police, suggested the Lord Advocate could reconsider.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">He pointed out that prosecutions can only happen if they first pass the “public interest test”. Given soaring drug deaths would it be in the public interest to prosecute medical staff simply trying to save the lives of vulnerable people?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The roadblock to preventing more deaths is essentially a political one.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">The current Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, is irreconcilably against decriminalisation or safe consumption rooms, citing the abhorrence of ordinary people on the streets of Bristol where he grew up to drug trading and its consequences.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Getting drugs and needles off the streets is, of course, one argument for safe consumption rooms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">However, one consequence of a new Prime Minister is a new cabinet, and Javid may be moving on very soon, possibly to become chancellor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">An opportunity arises, for Scotland and for Boris Johnson.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Another Johnson, Police Scotland’s Steve Johnson, spelled it out in harrowing detail this week. Day on day he is recording deaths through drug abuse of people in their early 20s, people his officers know are in need of a doctor not the dock of a courtroom. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">In one stroke a new Prime Minister could cut through the legalistic buck-passing, and signal that we are ready for a new, grown-up debate on drugs policy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">But scoring a political coup would be incidental and hardly the point. Boris Johnson would be saving lives in Scotland, lots of them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: small;">Tell me, which Prime Minister doesn’t want that headline?</span></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-44757296597307496062019-07-12T10:56:00.001+01:002019-07-12T10:56:11.630+01:00Rogue polls will send indy down the plughole
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<i>From my Daily Record column today 12/07/19</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Whatever is in the water this summer is fast polluting the independence campaign.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">First Angus MacNeil pipes up and says forget a referendum, any election win will do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Then Kenny MacAskill, whose judgment and political antenna are several stages of evolution ahead, calls for a wildcat, illegal vote.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Add to that Joanna Cherry hijacking plans for citizens’ assemblies as a tool to “create a consensus around Scotland and a bigger majority for Yes” and there’s your democratic credibility swirling down the plughole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">A consultative referendum was a disaster in Catalonia and supporters of citizens’ assemblies are looking at the wrong country.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In Ireland, they were used, successfully, to transition the country on abortion and sexual equality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">These were big cultural and generational changes, massively assisted by the collapse of the Catholic Church and the lived experience of friends and family members talking about previously taboo subjects.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">In Scotland, we have been talking about nothing else but constitutional politics for years. Not so much talking as shouting, abusing and singing Kylie Minogue with our hands over our ears if so much as a contradictory tweet comes our way.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Citizens’ assemblies will never be seen in Scotland as anything other than an SNP astroturf campaign, the independence agenda given the synthetic appearance of a grassroots engagement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Scottish voters have been to the polls eight times in the last 10 years. We were the test tube for the divided, post-crash world that’s seen the rise of nationalism from America to India.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">We are the canary in the coal mine of post-truth politics and now we’ve reached the stage where politicians say: “Forget the will of the people, who needs a referendum?” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">To quote the philosopher Justin Timberlake, sometimes the greatest way to say something is to say nothing at all. Not that you’d expect MacNeil to button up.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">However, I notice the SNP Government spent £24million on foreign affairs last year, promoting independence abroad. That’s just £1million less than his party has cut from the core budget of MacNeil’s Western Isles council in the last five years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It shows you what just one year of shutting up about the constitution is worth.</span></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-19300588526799404182019-07-12T09:35:00.000+01:002019-07-12T09:35:19.221+01:00Sùil Eile air Apollo 11<div class="m_-6773298431446505564gmail-m-6933117021569719909gmail-p2" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<span style="font-family: Minion Pro;"><i>Bho colbh an Daily Record. Mo thaing do Daibhidh Woods agus Mairi K, mar is àbhaist. </i></span><i style="font-family: "Minion Pro";">English translation below.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Nam chuimhne, bha mi cho fad’ air falbh bhon taigh ’s b’urrainn dhomh a bhith aig m’ aois.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bha mi ann am Bràgar, aig dachaigh m’ uncail, taobh eile an eilein.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bha telebhisean san t-seòmar-suidhe, ri taobh uinneag ìseal. Bha mise nam shuidhe air an làr.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">“That’s one small step for man...”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bha na h-ìomhaighean dubh is geal, làn sneachda dealain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Ach bha fios agam, fiù ’s mar phàiste, gun robh sinn ann am fianais seòrsa de mhìorbhail.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Anns na lethcheud bliadhna th’ air a dhol seachad chan eil am faireachadh sin air falbh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Tha na rinn iad, Niall Armstrong agus Buzz Aldrin, le bhith a’ coiseachd air a’ Ghealaich, fhathast a’ cur iongantas orm.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bidh mo charaid, a tha na eòlaiche air na speuran, a’ toirt leis ball-coise agus ball teanas a-steach a sgòiltean, ’s iad a’ riochdachadh na Cruinne agus na Gealaich.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Ann am meudachd, tha iad an ìre mhath ceart a-rèir a chèile.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Dè cho fad ’s a dh’fheumas am ball teanas a bhith bhon Chruinne gus sealltainn cho fada ’s a dh’fheumadh na h-astronauts siubhail? Faid do ghàirdein, dà mheatair, còig?<span class="m_-6773298431446505564gmail-m-6933117021569719909gmail-apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bhitheadh an ball teanas 7.5 meatair air falbh, sin 238,900 mìltean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-size: 12pt;">Bhon a thàinig an sgioba mu dheireadh, Apollo 17, dhachaigh chan eil clann an duine air a bhith cho fad ri mearachd pàiste bho uachdar na talmhainn.</span></div>
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Translation</div>
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In my memory, I was as far away from the house as I could be for my age.</div>
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I was in Bragar, at my uncle’s home, on the other side of the island.</div>
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There was a television in the living room, beside a low window. I was sitting on the floor.</div>
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“That’s one small step for man...”</div>
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The images were black and white, full of static snow.</div>
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But I knew, even as an infant, that we were witness to some kind of miracle.</div>
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In the fifty years since that feeling has not gone away.</div>
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What they did, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin by walking on the moon, still amazes me.</div>
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My friend, who is a space expert, takes a football and a tennis ball into schools, representing the Earth and the Moon. In scale, they are about the right proportion to each other.</div>
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How far does the tennis ball need to be from the Earth to show how far the astronauts had to travel?</div>
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The length of your arm, two metres, five? The tennis ball has to be 7.5 metres away, that’s 238,900 miles.</div>
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Since the last crew, Apollo 17, returned home humanity has not gone the width of an infant’s finger from the surface of the earth.<span class="m_-7046811514809703647gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-90108086648815961072019-07-12T09:27:00.000+01:002019-07-12T09:40:46.572+01:00Sùil Eile air Peadar Thatchell<div class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-p2" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i>Bho colbh an Daily Record - English translation below</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Bha Peadar Thatchell air Rèidio Mòr (sin a th’ agamsa air Radio 4) an latha eile, agus ’s e a bha uasalach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Tha Thatchell air a bheatha a chur seachad a’ srì airson chòraichean na coimhearsnachd geidh agus cearteas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Thàinig e gu aire an toiseach aig fo-thaghadh Bermondsey anns na h-ochdadan, sabaid cho salach agus a tha eachdraidh air.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Bha na Lib Dems a’ càineadh Thatchell - tagraiche a’ phàrtaidh Labaraich - air sgàth ’s gun robh e geidh.<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Bhuannaich Sìm Hughes, nach robh air aideachadh fhathast gun robh e fhèin geidh. Chan eil fhios an d’fhuair e a-riamh mathanas airson sin.<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Co-dhiù, ’s ann mu chòirichean agus càineadh a bha Thatchell a’ bruidhinn air an rèidio.<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Bha am fear seo air a chur far cùrsa trèanaidh o chionn ’s gun robh e a’ coimhead air dòigh-beatha gheidh mar pheacadh sa Bhìoball.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Cha b’ urrainn dha a dhreuchd mar neach-obrach sòisealta a dhèanamh le beachdan dhen leithid, a rèir an oilthigh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Dè bh’ aig an Naomh Peadar ri ràdh?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Thug freagairt gheur mun duine: “Tha e cruinn comasach beachdan domhain cràbhach a bhith aig neach gu bheil co-sheòrsachd ceàrr, coltach ri mo mhathair fhìn, ach gun a bhith a’ dèanamh leth-bhreith an aghaidh duine a tha geidh.”<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Sin spiorad mathanais.</span></div>
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translation<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Peter Thatchell was on Big Radio (it’s what I call Radio 4) the other day, and he was graceful.</div>
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Thatcell has spent his life fighting for the rights of the gay community and for justice.</div>
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He came to attention first at the Bermondsey by-election in the 80s, a fight so dirty that it became history.</div>
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The Lib Dems attacked Thatchell, the Labour candidate, because he was gay.</div>
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Simon Hughes, who had not yet admitted he was himself gay, won. It’s not clear if he was ever forgiven for that.</div>
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Anyway, it was about rights and condemnation that Thatchell was speaking on the radio.</div>
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This individual had been booted off a training course because he saw a gay lifestyle as a Biblical sin.</div>
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He couldn’t do his job as a social worker with these views, according to the university.<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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What did the Saint Peter have to say?<span class="m_1843045955711673540gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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He gave answer with insight: “It is perfectly possible to hold deep religious beliefs that homosexuality is wrong, like my own mother, but never to discriminate against gay people.”</div>
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That is the spirit of forgiveness.</div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-45393728259821792872019-07-12T09:19:00.002+01:002019-07-12T09:19:54.249+01:00Will Boris do a Darroch on Scottish fishing?
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><i>There is a way for Boris Johnson to get a Brexit deal done quickly. It just requires him to throw Conservative support in Scotland under a bus. From my Daily Record column:</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">As Donald Trump dog-walked the UK ambassador out the White House door we saw what kind of Prime Minister Boris Johnson will be.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Rather than stand up for the nation’s interests, Johnson promoted his own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Kim Darroch (surely that’s pronounced “och” not the “ock” of Anglo broadcasters) was toast the moment the future PM refused to back our man in Washington.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Regardless of what his team might brief about a bigger game, a UK-US alliance to challenge the EU unless we get a Brexit free trade deal, what Johnson did was craven, abject, and plain sooking up to the biggest boy in the playground,<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Or was it? Brexiteers propelling Johnson towards the throne think he sent a strong message to the civil service, to Europe, and his party. Namely, there is nothing and no one he will not throw under a bus for his advancement, which hangs on getting a Brexit deal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The signal will make Europhile civil service mandarins shudder into line and ought to<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>give fair weather allies of Tory Brexiteers pause for thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Scotland’s fishing barons, for example, the Tories’ best new friends, should take a slug of Trawler Rum to steady the nerves. Here’s why.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">There is more chance of the lobster escaping the creel than there is of Johnson getting the Brexit deal through the Commons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">He is not mad enough to crash out without a deal (you try crossing fingers while typing that). Even in his mumbling evasiveness it is clear Johnson has to re-negotiate something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">He can’t work up a new deal in three months on time-limiting the Northern Irish backstop and finding these mythical “alternative arrangements” to satisfy the EU and the Tory right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Fortunately, there is another plan already on the loom that fits the purpose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">According to an authoritative Brexit expert, Mujtaba Rahman, the best option in play is to lengthen the transition period, the time we would still abide by EU regulations without having a say in shaping them, in order to “bury” the backstop.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">It allows Johnson to deliver leave, and parks the border question for later.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">This could be relatively easy to negotiate, would deliver the DUP, and get rebel Tory MPs back on board. Halloween party here we come.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">There is just one catch. The idea was kicked around Downing Street earlier this year but strongly vetoed by the Scottish Conservatives.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Any extension of the transition period would mean staying longer in the Common Fisheries Policy without a voice.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The Scottish Codfathers (five families own 45 per cent of the fishing quota) are already furious at being kept in the hated CFP until December 2020. Under no deal they’d be out and ruling UK territorial waters from day go.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">One thing is sure, if they are not out by May 2021, the next Holyrood election, they’ll pull the rug on Ruth Davidson’s Tory revival and possibly pull the curtains on the United Kingdom as a consequence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Now, it is perfectly possible to argue the SNP alternative for Scottish fishermen is to be permanently in the Common Fisheries Policy, that’s what Remain means. But the narrative of the Tories betraying coastal communities (again) will be hard to counter.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">So, a route to deliver Brexit exists for Johnson on the first day he walks up Downing Street.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">He just has to decide if throwing the Scottish fishing industry under the metaphorical bus is a price worth paying. Will he do a Darroch on the fishermen, and possibly the Union too?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Which takes us neatly to what will the Scottish Tories do?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The lobster in the trap right now is David Mundell, the Scottish Secretary. Johnson is said to be keen to keep him in place to provide stability.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Mundell has proved himself nimble enough to jig around SNP opponents. Facing any other Scottish Tory would be like being slapped with a wet fish. But Mundell can’t swallow no deal and the can’t see the Union washed into the North Sea to allow Johnson to deliver on his over-promises.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">But Darroch gives us a glimpse of how the scales will be weighed in Downing Street when it comes to hard decisions and self-interest.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Pass the rum, please.</span></div>
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<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-89455453195973140712019-06-11T12:15:00.002+01:002019-06-11T12:15:56.624+01:00Rockall fishing wars, you ain't seen nothing yet<div style="color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
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<i>Given the renewed interest in Irish fishing boats around the Rockall box, I’ve dug out a Daily Record piece I wrote last year, predicting the stramash after being alerted to what was going on. Reprinted below.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></div>
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<i>Irish boats have been in and around Rockall for years in waters claimed by the UK. But last season they started, in the words of a Scottish fishing source, “taking the proverbial” in the sure knowledge that no UK Minister wanted to see an Irish skipper in the dock of a Scottish court over a territorial dispute while Brexit negotiations were at a delicate stage.</i></div>
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<i>This year the talking is over, and Scottish Ministers can no longer ignore the complaints of the Scottish fishing fleet or the evidence of the electronic trackers that show exactly where the boats are. They’re warning they will dispatch a fishery cruiser. The Irish government’s apparent bafflement is puzzling, everyone knew what was going on, but during Brexit talks everyone chose to ignore it.<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></div>
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Daily Record 07/09/18</div>
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SCALLOP wars? You ain’t seen nothing yet.</div>
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Tempting as it is to see the fishing clashes in the English Channel as Brexit without nets, the incident only shows how complicated negotiating a shared resource like fish is.</div>
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UK boats have ancient rights to fish the French coast, just as French boats came to UK waters long before a Common Fisheries Policy.</div>
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For years, it was generally accepted that small British boats could enter the “closed” French waters for a limited number of “days at sea”.</div>
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There was no agreement this year, although that has been sorted now after flares and dangerous clashes at sea.</div>
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What tipped the French is that the small boats from Newlyn and the West Country have been joined of late by trawlers from Scotland.</div>
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One of the vessels attacked in the Channel was the 95ft Honeybourne III, registered in Peterhead but apparently belonging to a Canadian-owned company. So, nothing as simple as a Scottish boat, and a signal, if one were needed, that our post-Brexit fishing policies should start afresh with an emphasis on boats fishing areas assigned to their home ports.</div>
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Expect more of these disputes post-Brexit.</div>
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I’m told Irish trawlers are “pulling the proverbial” in the Rockall box conservation area on the edge of Britain’s Atlantic territorial waters.</div>
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During delicate Brexit negotiations, which government would risk having an Irish trawler hauled through a British court over fishing infringements?<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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When I looked yesterday, the marine traffic map showed the Honeybourne III was still there, off the coast of Le Touquet. The live mapping service said: “Status: engaged in fishing.”</div>
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Its business is scallop dredging, scraping the ocean floor for shellfish, which has been described as akin to cutting down orchards to pick apples. But that’s another debate for post-Brexit Britain.</div>
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<span class="gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>I NEARLY fell off my scooter when a Mercedes with the numberplate Y19 YES drove past me outside Westminster this week.</div>
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Nationalist friends will take it as a sign from on high - well, the DVLA - that next year is the destined one for an independence majority.</div>
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Then an SNP MP told me no, it was probably just Alex Salmond on the way to record his Russia Today programme.</div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-25598075754639948082019-06-11T11:53:00.000+01:002019-06-11T13:21:18.081+01:00Am fear-tàilisg an dràthair nan stòcainnean<div class="m_-9075723086465744488gmail-m-3419757570796365716gmail-p1" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-size: 10pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt;">
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Coltach ri mòran eile a tha a’ fuireach faisg air Tràigh Ùige, bidh mo charaid a’ cur an taigh aige mach air mall do luchd-turais fhad ’s a tha e thall thairis.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Mar sin bha e anns an Spàinn nuair a bhuail an naidheachd e mar bhrag tàirneanaich.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Is e sin gu bheil teaghlach ann an Dùn Èideann a’ reic fear-tàilisg Ùig a “lorg” iad anns an dachaigh aca.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Anns a’ mhionaid, bha fios aige gur e sin am dearbh phìos a bh’ aige fhèin ann an dràthair nan stòcainnean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ach a rèir nam pàipearan-naidheachd, tha am pìos seo – aona phìos - a’ dol air a’ mhargaidh airson còrr is millean not.</span><span style="font-family: "minion pro";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Abair staing.<span class="m_-9075723086465744488gmail-m-3419757570796365716gmail-apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "minion pro";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Gus am faigh e dhachaigh, chan urrainn dha a bhith cinnteach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ach tha e <i>an ìre mhath cinnteach</i> gur ann à Dùn Èideann a bha an teaghlach a ghabh an taigh airson ceala-deug.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Daoine às a’ bhaile mhòr a’ gabhail brath.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Ach chan urrainn dha a bheul fhosgladh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">’S ann an uairsin a thòisich na ceistean a thaobh ciamar a bha am fear-tàilisg aigesan sa chiad dol a-mach?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Chan eil aige ach an aon fhurtachd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "minion pro"; font-size: 13.5pt;">Cha toir e fada an t-airgead a dhèanamh a-rithist tron diabhal Air BnB sin.</span><span style="font-family: "minion pro";"></span></div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-9548791816863028352019-05-24T10:17:00.002+01:002019-05-24T10:17:20.515+01:00A farewell to failure
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>My Daily Record column for today</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When she goes – and that could be anytime between the next keystroke and Donald Trump leaving for the D-Day celebrations in June – there will, no doubt, be some sympathy of Theresa May.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It is fair to say she was dealt the worst hand of any incoming prime minister since Churchill took over from Chamberlain in the spring of 1940 as the German army advanced to the French coast.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But it is also true that May has done nothing since July 2016 to improve her own chances or that of the country she effectively stopped running many months ago.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She will not go down as the worst prime minister of the modern era. That booby goes to David Cameron, who gifted us this bitter legacy we all share.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As May said in what will be seen as her valedictory speech, moving “from the simplicity of the choice on the ballot paper to the complexity of resetting the country’s relationship with 27 of its nearest neighbours was always going to be huge”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For her, it has proved impossible.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the sentence sums up how a referendum harnesses a political curse on a generation. Having experienced two, most Scots wouldn’t wish another on any country or leader.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In her favour, May showed dogged resilience, bore relentless criticism in her stride, went beyond human exhaustion and remained wedded to her Christian sense of duty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Those strengths were also weakness, demonstrating her inability to compromise, to dig in and fall silent when flexibility and reassurance were needed to lead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Abba’s dancing queen was not fleet of foot enough even to avoid the slow lava flow that overwhelmed her. She will go down as the most incompetent diplomat and negotiator to cross the threshold of Downing Street as prime minister.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">From the Lancaster House speech, where she ruled out the single market and freedom of movement, to the Charing Cross compromise, where she threw a kitchen sink full of concessions, she was a failure.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">May was to deliver Brexit. Yesterday, morning, the death notice of her Withdrawal Agreement Bill was read out, or rather excluded from Commons business.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">On the threshold of Downing Street, she said she would pursue the “burning injustices” of division and inequality that stalk Britain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Yet in the week her fate was sealed, the United Nations accused May’s Government of presiding over a welfare system that has turned the country into a digital Dickensian workhouse for the poor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She said she would defend the Union but called on the DUP, the political black and tans, as reinforcements.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She let Eurosceptic Unionists misrepresent the people of Northern Ireland and she completely misread the new European identity of the Irish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She held Scottish nationalism at bay with a brittle, but so far effective “now is not the time”. But she showed no feel for this or any other part of Britain outside her own Oxfordshire church parish background.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">May’s biggest task, which she so often put ahead of the national interest, was holding her beloved Conservative Party together.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Her ultimate failure is to leave her party and country a legacy that will rent it in twain from the top to the bottom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">His name is Boris Johnson. Brexit is a doomed enterprise for many reasons. The political foundations to assemble a coalition for any Brexit model are not in the parliament of no majorities. Changing Prime Minister does not change that. The misery continues.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There have been only 54 prime ministers in the three centuries of a United Kingdom. May is the sixth of my adult lifetime.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The office is the pinnacle of politics, a rare and incredibly difficult daily and lifetime feat that few can conduct well and even then, only for a limited time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Her childhood ambition was beyond May’s abilities. Unable to accept reality, paralysed by her own decisions as much as by a hung parliament, she leaves us no further forward and she has no achievements to speak of.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There – I’ve reached the end of the column and she is still prime minister. She shouldn’t be for much longer.</span></div>
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<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-41370016599330598142019-05-12T13:18:00.002+01:002019-05-12T13:18:51.962+01:00The great hang-glider debate, 20 years of Holyrood<div class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-p2" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "Minion Pro"; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal; min-height: 14px;">
<i>Thoughts on 20 years of the Scottish parliament, Daily Reord 11/05/19</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">It was quite an event, the day Scottish parliament opened at the General Assembly on the Mound in Edinburgh.</span><span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space" style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">It was a day of great speeches, Donald Dewar’s best ever. A morning of great music, Sheena Wellington singing “A Man’s man for a’ that” in front of Price Philip and the MSPs joining in. The strains of Inverness Gaelic choir wafted up to the press gallery where we sat, a new model army of political journalists looking down on 129 new members of the Scottish parliament.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">At the time there was about one journalist to every two politicians, more than enough to capture Winnie Ewing’s words that echoed of history and continuity: “The Scottish Parliament, adjourned on the 25th day of March in the year 1707, is hereby reconvened’.” It was her finest moment too.<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Somewhere I have the commemorative Royal Bank of Scotland pound note printed for the occasion, slipped into a copy of Neil Gunn’s “Silver Darlings” bought that day because I’d meant to read the novel for years and now seemed like the time for a new beginning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">That’s how it felt, as children from all of Scotland’s schools marched down the Mound and new faces made life-long friends as Scotland’s political class made it's way to the pub.<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">It didn’t seem divided, as the body politic is now, although in the thrilling finale to ceremony, as the Red Arrows escorted Concorde in a fly-past down Princes Street, the seeds of the next 20 years were cast in a comic aside.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">“See if that was your independent Scottish republic that wouldn’t have been Concorde it would have been a hang-glider,” joked one stridently Unionist hack to his colleague.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">“Aye, but it would have been wur hang-glider,” came the sharp retort. which pretty much sums up the current divided state of play in Scottish politics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">To begin with the delivery of devolution itself was the achievement, the pendulum swing from almost two decades of Conservative rule and the response to many years of demands for devolution in the United Kingdom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">With the hindsight of 20 years many argue devolution, to Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland,<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>is still unfinished business, that Holyrood is not complete despite tax-raising powers now being giving MSPs the freedom to raise and spend how they choose.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Yet the reluctance, or complexity, in assuming new powers on everything ranging from welfare payments to VAT is highlighted by critics as the unpreparedness of the current SNP government to move forwards.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">The push-pull of devolution will continue for years and while Scotland has changed, Westminster institutions have yet to match the new devolutionary politics that strain at the ties of the United Kingdom. The devolve and forget attitude of Whitehall, and the high-handed treatment of devolved governments at what are meant to be joint inter-governmental meetings, grates with those outside (and some inside) the Westminster postcode.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Now the Scottish parliament is part of nation’s furniture,<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span>although arguments about that furniture and the Enric Miralles designed home for the parliament, absorbed almost five years of controversy until politics came down from the hill to Holyrood at the foot of the Royal Mile.<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Holyrood, and its upturned boats is now seen as more important by Scots to their lives than the House of Commons and Big Ben, though it is the full-blooded drama of Westminster politics that still catches the country’s attention, and occasionally the country’s breath.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us, said Winston Churchill. Holyrood may disprove that. Despite the radical design of Holyrood the politics that emerged from the building have been essentially conservative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">There have been some ground-breaking initiatives. Land-reform, the pre-legislative gift from the Labour government, has still to extend beyond the crofting counties. The smoking ban and the minimum price for alcohol will have long-term health benefits for the nation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But others, like free care for the elderly and the abolition of tuition fees, mostly benefit middle ground, middle class Scotland that the all sides must satisfy to in order to build an electoral alliance. <span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i>The stats for health outcomes and educational achievement for the poorest parts of the country remain stubbornly low, lending credence to the conclusion that devolution has been very good for Scotland’s middle class and not so good for the poor.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i>That raises, even after 20 years, a fundamental question about what politics and parliaments are for, if not improving the lives of the country’s citizens?<span class="m_6406908911209683907gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">While post-devolution England experimented with health care, education and social care reform - for better or worse - successive Scottish governments have shown no great courage for reform or for taking on vested interests that might prevent change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Radical is not the word to describe 20 years of Holyrood, managerialism is and that lends itself to another m word, mediocrity.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But two decades is not long in the lifetime of a parliament and there is still great energy, great opportunity in Scotland to do things differently, as the recently ignited debate on climate change demonstrates.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Part of the reason why everything has stayed the same while everything changed is that the bandwidth has been absorbed by one political project - independence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">The rise of the SNP, the eclipse of the Labour party as the home of the traditional left vote, and the first, though perhaps not final, independence referendum have been the defining moments of the first 20 years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">That has been an incredible story and for those on the nationalist side of the debate these have been years of steady advance on the long, perhaps inevitable, march to independence. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">In 2014 the world looked on as that impulse for self-determination came close to a big bang that would have set Scotland on a very different trajectory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">Since then the world has moved on, leaving Scottish politics and Holyrood still in permanent orbit around the independence question or, as my squabbling journalist friends would have it on that first day 20 years ago, the great hang glider debate.</span></div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-76183252262718621142019-05-10T10:54:00.002+01:002019-05-10T10:54:51.344+01:00Sùil Eile air Liverpool vs Barcelona
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Sùil Eile bho colbh an Daily Record</i></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih4OVixF-gJqQmA-EKF4hsD-2OuzoN29kssx5k8m_q8ErHNSihpcQHy6OHeMjrGKaw6DfjrQxT_9wXJzQdeVOINF7fhODrv6dtqq8KNcflsUpuErtAOaJ9f7hb0W5zYospkiT9pM_pxUE/s1600/IMG_1075.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1177" data-original-width="1600" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEih4OVixF-gJqQmA-EKF4hsD-2OuzoN29kssx5k8m_q8ErHNSihpcQHy6OHeMjrGKaw6DfjrQxT_9wXJzQdeVOINF7fhODrv6dtqq8KNcflsUpuErtAOaJ9f7hb0W5zYospkiT9pM_pxUE/s320/IMG_1075.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">John Reddin agus Alex O'Henley, Barcelona, 1993</span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Cha do chluich mi riamh geama proifeasanta, agus leis an fhìrinn innse, chan eil mi a’ leantainn ball-coise gu dlùth.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ach sheas mi aon turas le Alex O Heanlaidh - a tha caran nas eòlaiche air a’ chùis - ann am meadhan na pàirce anns an Nou Camp, dachaigh sgioba Barcelona, aig leth ùine ann an geama an aghaidh an seann nàimhdean, Madrid.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Bha fuaim gun stad, sreathan thar shreathan de luchd-leantainn cho àrd ri creagan Hiort os ar cionn, bruthadh san adhar a bha a’ toirt oirnn ar dromannan a chrùbadh. Cha robh sinn ach a’ losgadh pìos airson a’ chamara, ach bha sinn air chrith.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">An e sin a rinn a’ chùis air Barca, an sgioba as fheàrr anns an t-saoghal, ann an coire goileach Anfield an oidhche roimhe?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dhuinne nach robh ann, tha e do-chreidsinneach mar a thàinig sgioba Jurgen Klopp air ais bho thrì tadhail sìos gus buannachadh ceithir gu neoni.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dhaibhsan a bh’ aig a’ gheama, bha e na mhìorbhail. Agus cò ach iadsan, luchd-leantainn a bhios dìleas gu bràth, a dh’adhbhraich e?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Dè a thuirt Jock Stein nach maireann? “Chan eil dad ann am ball-coise gun luchd-leantainn.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Bha sin air a dhearbhadh ann am baile mòr Liverpool, air an t-seachdain seo. Agus an uair sin thachair mìorbhail Spurs.</span></div>
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<b>translation</b></div>
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I never played a professional game, and to tell the truth, I don’t follow football that closely.</div>
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But I once stood with Alex O’Henley, who is a little more knowledgeable on the subject, in the centre spot of the Nou Camp, the home of FC Barcelona, at half-time in a game against the old enemy, Madrid.</div>
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The noise never stopped, column upon column of supporters rose above us as high as the cliffs of St Kilda, pressure in the air that pressed down on our backs. We were only shooting a piece for camera, but we trembled.</div>
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Is that what did for Barcelona, the best team in the world, in the boiling kettle of Anfield the other night?</div>
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For us who weren’t there, it is unbelievable that Jurgen Klopp’s team came from three goals down to win 4-0.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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For those who were at the game, it was a miracle. And who caused it, except fans who are loyal to the death?</div>
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What did the late Jock Stein say: “Football without fans is nothing”.</div>
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That was proven in the city of Liverpool this week. And then the miracle of Spurs happened too.</div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">Thàinig seo bho Alex às dèidh</span><span style="font-size: small;"> laimh: </span></b></div>
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<a class="twitter-atreply pretty-link js-nav" data-mentioned-user-id="27844589" dir="ltr" href="https://twitter.com/Torcuil" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #dd2e44; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; letter-spacing: 0.27px; text-decoration-line: none; white-space: pre-wrap;">@Torcuil</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ha Torcuil sin an oidhche a’ phas mi am ball gu Raghnall Koeman</span><img alt="😉" aria-label="Emoji: Winking face" class="Emoji Emoji--forText" draggable="false" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f609.png" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; height: 1.25em; letter-spacing: 0.27px; padding: 0px 0.05em 0px 0.1em; vertical-align: -0.2em; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 1.25em;" title="Winking face" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; letter-spacing: 0.27px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Cha robh cabhag sam bith orm am PTC sin a dheànamh! Bha còrr is 100,000 sa Champ Nou an oidhche sin. Abair access ge-tà. Més que un club</span><img alt="👍" aria-label="Emoji: Thumbs up sign" class="Emoji Emoji--forText" draggable="false" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/1f44d.png" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; height: 1.25em; letter-spacing: 0.27px; padding: 0px 0.05em 0px 0.1em; vertical-align: -0.2em; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 1.25em;" title="Thumbs up sign" /><img alt="⚽️" aria-label="Emoji: Soccer ball" class="Emoji Emoji--forText" draggable="false" src="https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/72x72/26bd.png" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #14171a; font-family: "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 27px; height: 1.25em; letter-spacing: 0.27px; padding: 0px 0.05em 0px 0.1em; vertical-align: -0.2em; white-space: pre-wrap; width: 1.25em;" title="Soccer ball" /></div>
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<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-87107972188304494652019-05-10T10:41:00.001+01:002019-05-10T10:59:56.046+01:00Strugeon speech on a burning question<style type="text/css">
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<i style="font-size: medium;">From my Daily Record column 03/05/19.</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>I should have posted this earlier but it still stands, especially now as the First Minister is moving on Air Passenger Duty and withdrawing support for a third runway at Heathrow (The SNP abstained in the last Commons vote).</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Nicola Sturgeon followed up her fairly predictable SNP conference speech the other week with something far more thoughtful, opening up about the kind of big ideas we have to adopt to stop climate change.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>Only a politician with lots of political capital can do this kind of thing, I argue Sturgeon should use her’s to advance this agenda. Anyway, read on...</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Two big speeches from Nicola Sturgeon this week, one had acres of attention the other hardly appeared on the radar. Guess which was the most important for you?<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We knew so much about the SNP leader’s bid for a second independence referendum that when she addressed her party conference at the weekend it had all the drama of watching a well-maintained cuckoo clock striking the hour.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To be fair Nicola Sturgeon has made this speech often and regularly manages to dress up old news. No one in the hall really believed there would be a referendum in the two year time frame but they cheered to the rafters anyway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She also had a standing ovation for a more nimble line, stealing Jeremy Corbyn’s thunder and riding on Greta Thunberg’s wave, by announcing Holyrood would declare a climate change emergency.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">My inner cynic (I try to keep him at bay) sighed. This party spent 40 years telling us Scotland’s independent economy would forever be buoyed by hydrocarbons. What is the new SNP slogan to be: “It’s Scotland’s oil, and it’s staying the ground”?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">That’s what a real response to a climate change emergency would mean.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In the hall the commitment to carbon-free future only required the same suspension of belief as a second independence referendum happening next weekend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Remember, we’ve had the “Saudi Arabia or renewables” promise of the Salmond days but a government whose entire bandwidth was so taken up with the first independence campaign that no proper industrial strategy emerged.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It has fallen on trade unions, who see work in the renewables sector go across the North Sea, to come up with the vision of how jobs, communities and the country can actually benefit from the green manufacturing revolution that has almost passed us by.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But then Sturgeon’s second speech of the week, to a woolly sounding Wellbeing Economy Governments Policy Labs, struck the tone of someone with serious intent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In Panmure House, the home of Scottish economist Adam Smith, Sturgeon acknowledged the “growing realisation that growth is not the only measure of a successful economy”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She added: “And there is a growing realisation that we must give much greater priority to the wellbeing, and the quality of life, of people living in a country.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Economists and environmentalist argue, quite rightly, that capitalism and our consumerism are eating up the planet. As Greta pointed out this is for the benefit of a privileged few. I think she meant us.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To save us from ourselves governments have to stop endlessly chasing GDP figures, and more and more consumption, as a sign of national success.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">To make sure the momentum that propelled Extinction Rebellion protesters into Michael Gove’s office is not ”only mildly less shit than expected” there has to be follow through on this week’s declarations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The big targets of the Committee on Climate Change to stop global warming do come down to the personal.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Recycle, replace the boiler, buy an electric car next or better still have no car at all. Eat less red meat and fly a lot less.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">These are big asks but only what the coming generation will oblige on us to do. Best get on with it as we already owe them for time wasted.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But to make this a decisive moment the entire political conversation has to change.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Either we overthrow capitalism (an ongoing project on the streets of Paris) or we change it, and change our measures of political success.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">That’s extremely hard. Let’s all be more responsible and get slightly poorer is not as catchy as let’s get rich, and need not be the case.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But if we’re to stop the planet burning we should vote for happiness and wellbeing not economic growth, as the First Minister suggested in her pioneering speech.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It’s going to take leaders with incredible communication skills, confidence and masses of personal capital to persuade people to change priorities, to jump the tracks and engage in radical 21st century, world-saving politics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But I’ll tell you what Nicola, that’s a better mission than making clockwork speeches about a 19th century idea like nationalism.</span></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-72117300724983968192019-05-10T10:29:00.000+01:002019-05-10T10:29:54.696+01:00Migration, and Scotland's one-way love affair with Europe
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>From my Daily Record column today</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">They say 50 per cent of advertising works 50 per cent of the time. The only problem is you’re never quite sure which 50 per cent.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">On Brexit Day, well the scheduled one on March 29th, the Scottish government launched a glitzy advertising appeal to Europe on the theme of “let’s continue our love affair”.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The £2.1 million <a href="https://youtu.be/DiYmRBEtdU8" target="_blank">advert</a>, funded by public agencies, was screened at international airports like Munich and Paris and in prestigious newspapers like France’s Le Monde, Spain’s El Pais, and Germany’s Der Spiegel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The beach looked brilliant and the casting agent for the smooth, dark-haired actor declaring “Hey Europe, Scotland is open to you,” must have had the phone ringing off the hook.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But the advert, which we all loved, probably missed its mark.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Two weeks ago, in a humdrum Commons committee hearing, the romantic strain of the boyfriend on the beach mini-drama took a hard slap from the reality of what European workers think of Scotland. <span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">MPs were taking evidence on the effectiveness, or otherwise, of a pilot scheme for migrant workers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Stephanie Maurel, from Concordia, one of two companies handling the pilot immigration scheme for agricultural workers, was asked casually about Scotland’s attractiveness as destination. Casual, in that the assumption of the question was we’re a great place.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Her answer left MPs shocked.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She said, quite frankly, that agencies like her’s struggle to get people to go to Scotland.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">She said: “We think there is more of an issue in Scotland in terms of recruitment, more than England, Wales and Northern Ireland.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“It is a perception issue to the point that we will get a worker in Bucharest coming into our agent’s office saying: ‘I will do anything but I won’t do strawberries and I won’t do Scotland.’”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“They may never have been to Scotland before or the UK before, yet in their mind they will earn less or will not be treated as well in Scotland. We have videos and leaflets that do an excellent job of showing that it not the case but there is a really strong mindset that potential workers do not want to go to Scotland.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">In case they hadn’t heard, Maurel illustrated Scotland’s reverse attractiveness in figures: “It used to be ten workers for one farm, four to one three years ago. We now have three or four offers for each worker. So, Scotland versus Herefordshire, it is very likely they will take Herefordshire first.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If they had been showing the “Scotland loves Europe” advert it would have melted in the projector at this point.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">As a mainplank of their Remain campaign, and for independence, the SNP government has drummed home how Scotland’s economy will need migrants as the native population gets older.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Evidence of that is all around. In December there were 2396 nursing vacancies in Scotland, 5.1 per cent of all posts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Scottish Ministers argue for a separate immigration policy and for freedom of movement to continue. This despite figures showing 55 per cent of Scots (about eight per cent less than in England) think there has been too much immigration in the last decade.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">For whatever reason (and the weather might be a factor) immigration into Scotland is quite meagre with about 80,000 incoming met by 59,000 on the way out last year.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Overall about 11,000 people came to live here from the rest of the world last year, and a net 10,000 from the rest of the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What’s clear from that is Scotland cannot look on immigration from the EU as some kind of silver bullet to address population decline outside the central belt.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">What has to be worked out is ways to make young Scots stay in rural areas or return to them after their college or university education. That means devolving jobs outside cities, more rural housing aimed at single people, policies and spaces that make living there more female friendly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">That involves the hard grind of policy and is less glamorous work than basking in self-reinforcing myths about a Scottish boyfriend on the beach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Especially when it turns out Europe is just not that into us.</span></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-67086086506067000132019-04-05T08:31:00.001+01:002019-04-05T08:31:32.380+01:00The march of the millenials, bring it on<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>From my Daily Record column today</i></div>
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THERE have been some stunning sights outside Westminster recently, few of them inspiring.</div>
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However, walking across Parliament Square a few weeks ago, paying more attention to my phone than the surroundings, I blundered into one of the climate change school strikes.</div>
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The sheer energy, the passion, the justice of what the kids are demanding -that their parents to wake up to the emergency - left me tinged with shame that my generation have not done our duty.</div>
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I went to Parliament Square last Friday too, on what should have been a Brexit celebration day but was turned into a Leave means Leave rally against establishment betrayal.</div>
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The combination of waxed cotton jackets and the smell of cannabis skunk, the littered beer cans and the Union Flags aloft, made it too easy to dismiss this as an exhibition of fringe English nationalism, with a dark undercurrent of far-right infiltration.</div>
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Once these forces are harnessed in England, as they have been in the US, in Hungary and across the western world, politics could go down a dark tunnel.</div>
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As the demonstration was going on, Laura Kuenssberg was confronting bumbling populist Boris Johnson about his culpability in unleashing the chaos.</div>
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"We're talking in your office while Tommy Robinson is on a stage outside," said Kuenssberg, foreshadowing more than her Brexit Storm documentary, broadcast on Monday.</div>
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"Is that who it is?" replied Johnson, clearly caring little about how far the tide runs out from the centre ground.</div>
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Who will turn that tide? A 69-year old North Islington socialist who sees himself as more Allende than Attlee? No: the only people who will save us now are the kids.</div>
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The name everyone is talking about is Pete Buttigieg (how dare he have a name harder to pronounce than mine?).</div>
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He's 37, the eight-year mayor of a small city in the mid-west and a veteran of the Afghan war, and he wants to run for president of the USA in 2020.</div>
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If he wins, he'll be the youngest in history.</div>
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But Mayor Pete has more government experience than the current president and more executive experience than the vice-president.</div>
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He told TV host Stephen Colbert that his youth was his reason to run.</div>
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He said: "I belong to the school shooting generation - in high school when Columbine happened.</div>
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Our generation provided most of the troops after 9/11, we're at the business end of climate change and the first generation ever to make less than their parents.</div>
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"No one has more at stake right now than younger people coming up."</div>
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Buttigieg is a long shot and could be steamrollered by machine politics, but British political trends tend to follow the US and he's a signal.</div>
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Extending the pulse back to Scotland, it is perhaps already too late for the current cadre of change politicians.</div>
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The Sturgeons, Robertsons and Wilsons, all veterans of 2014, will always be viewed by the 55 per cent as the torchbearers who tried to sell them short the first time around.</div>
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These ambitious politicians have to realise (they probably do), that to succeed, nationalism must not just change but skip a generation too.</div>
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The person who wins politics back for the progressives will talk in the language of "we, the people" without leaving half the population grinding at their identity being misappropriated.</div>
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We might go to the despairing bottom of the "us and them" tank before resurfacing with leaders who bring together rather than divide.</div>
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But if there is hope, it is with young politicians, people the age Sturgeon was when she entered Holyrood 20 years ago.</div>
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If you know any, get them to watch Pete Buttigieg. Get them to be Pete Buttigieg.</div>
Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-9118996476788465852019-03-22T10:15:00.000+00:002019-03-22T10:15:29.237+00:00Land reform - time to get a shift on
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>From my Daily Record column</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The old hippy button badge used to say: “Scotland 19 million acres, five million people. Where’s my 3.8 acres?”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Times have changed but the facts about Scotland’s land ownership statistics remain as solid as the ground itself. Very few owners own a large tracts of the land.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Andy Wightman MSP, building on the work of John McEwen, reckons that 432 individuals own 50 per cent of Scotland’s private rural land.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It comes as no surprise then that the Scottish Land Commission, the government quango tasked with reform, identifies monopoly ownership and the concentration of power over land use as the biggest obstacle to economic development in rural Scotland.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I suppose to tackle a problem, you must first identify it, but it has taken a long time for the Commission to arrive at what was bleedin’ obvious to themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 and its rights for community ownership remains the single, most effective land reform legislation Holyrood has come up with, and the groundwork for that was laid before devolution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">About 562,230 acres of land is now in community ownership, and the economic and social regeneration accompanying the change in the Highlands and Islands is remarkable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But these mostly crofting communities are the low lying fruit of land reform.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The big estates, the monopoly board owners are still in place. <br /><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Land Commission report wants to squeeze them gently by putting public interest tests on the sale of land and requiring estates to draw up management plans that involve local communities.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Hmm, tax land holding until the pips squeak, I say. Impose transparent ownership registers and force lairds to live, as crofters must, within 20 miles of their holding.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Scottish government has a target of one million acres being owned by communities by the end of 2020. Better get a shift on.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-57264406521548785012019-03-15T12:11:00.003+00:002019-03-15T12:11:42.456+00:00Josie Duncan aig Gaelictronica, CCA, DiSathairne<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
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<i>Sùil Eile anns an Daily Record</i></div>
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Mar as àbhaist nuair a thig e gu ceòl tha mise air dheireadh a’ thighinn dhan chèilidh.</div>
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’S ann air an deireadh sheachdain a chuala mi airson a’ chiad uair guth Josie Duncan, anns an dàrna leth de <a href="http://ceolscraic.org/events/gaelictronica-2019-2/" target="_blank">Gaelictronica</a> ann an Glaschu.</div>
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Mar a thuirt mi, tha mi anmoch ag ionnsachadh gu bheil Josie, còmhla ri <a href="https://www.josieduncanmusic.com/projects" target="_blank">Pablo Lafuente</a>, mar-thà air duais ceòl Folk a’ BhBC a bhuannachadh.</div>
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Anns an CCA bha i còmhla ri Hamish MacLeòid, Leòdhasach eile air na keyboards, agus tè à Innis Tìle, Signy Jakobsdottir, cluicheadair beum-chiùil.</div>
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Le fuaim ìosal, eleagtronaigeach, guth geur Duncan agus ruitheam à cultur eile – saoghal eile cha mhòr - bha na thàinig a-mach iongantach agus gluasadach.</div>
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An rud a tha fior iongantach, ’s e mar a tha cultar beag a’ toirt dhuinn uimhir de thàlant seinn, bliadhna às dèidh bliadhna.</div>
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Tha Duncan agus MacLeòid air suala de ghinealach ùr de sheinneadairean a’ tighinn gu bàrr an-dràsta.</div>
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Chan eil ainm aca air a’ chòmhlan ged tha iad le chèile a’ cluich le Inyal.<span class="m_-554628979063294463gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Mas ann am Bristol a bha iad, ’s e Florence and the Machine a bhiodh orra, agus bhiodh iad ainmeil.<span class="m_-554628979063294463gmail-Apple-converted-space"> </span></div>
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Translation</div>
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As usual when it comes to music I am late arriving at the party.</div>
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It was at the weekend I heard Josie Duncan’s voice for the first time, in the second half of Gaelictronica in Glasgow.</div>
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As I said, I am late to learn that Josie, along with Pablo Lafuente, is already a winner of a BBC Folk music award.</div>
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In the CCA she was accompanied by Hamish MacLeod, another Lewis islander on the keyboards, and an Icelandic instrumentalist, Signy Jacobsdottir.</div>
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The the low electronic sound, Duncan’s sharp vocals and the rhythm of another culture, another world almost, what emerged was surprising and moving.</div>
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What is really surprising is how such a small culture produces so much singing talent, year after year.</div>
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Duncan and MacLeod and are on the wave of a generation of singers coming to the fore just now.</div>
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They don’t have a name for their band although they play together in the group Inyal.</div>
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If they were in Bristol, they’d be called Florence and the Machine, and they’d be famous.</div>
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Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-68371784453391660492019-03-15T12:01:00.000+00:002019-03-15T12:01:30.303+00:00Border thoughts - or the Yeats index of how bad the "situation" can be
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i>From my Daily Record column</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Prompted by a poem no less I asked, what is the Brexit temperature like in Dublin?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">“The nation is holding it’s nerve,” my Irish friend replied with the bedside manner of a solicitous doctor.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The Irish Republic has, of course, the most to lose from<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>a hard Brexit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Every sector of the economy, from farming to pharmacy, would suffer a “severe impact” a fortnight from now, according to the Dublin government’s assessment of “the situation”, another lovely euphemism for Brexit from the people who coined “the Emergency” for WWII and “the Troubles” for a bloody street war in the north.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Like everyone else the Irish government is braced for impact and set aside a grain store of money to compensate for the bodyblow to trade into its biggest market, the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But my pal explained how some in the Irish government have looked over the precipice and gamed beyond a hard exit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">They see a no-deal Brexit not as the end point, but the beginning of the UK’s eventual capitulation to the EU deal that has always been on offer, the only one on offer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">After a few months of no mushrooms on supermarket shelves and a 20 per cent drop in the value of sterling leaving a litre of Spanish holiday lager costing more than a fiver, the UK government will sign up, say some in Dublin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Starving the Brits into acceptance might have a wonderful historic irony but is as much a flight of fancy as a clean Brexit itself, particularly as the Commons options begin to narrow to Theresa May’s Brexit or a lengthy extension (a political purgatory for us all).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">By then someone must start blaming the Irish, whose great success has been to get remarkable solidarity from the EU27 to stop them being picked off by the imperious instincts of the UK.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Brexit is, after all, hopelessly snagged on Britain’s historic relationship with the island and a commitment to the backstop to keep the border between British north and Republican south open.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">There were plenty warnings about this lobster creel conundrum during the referendum campaign. But the UK looked the other way, much as it did when the Good Friday Agreement turned Northern Ireland into something that was not wholly British or Irish and anchored in Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The people of Northern Ireland understood this well and voted by majority to stay in the EU. They are, thanks to tribal voting patterns and historic boycotts, mis-served at Westminster.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The DUP, I expect, will eventually pay a price for being so badly out of step with a place that would rather see itself as a bridge, not a barrier, between the EU and the UK.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">While Brexit has not shifted the dial on Scottish independence, surveys show 62 per cent of people in Northern Ireland believe Brexit makes a united Ireland, and continued membership of the EU, more likely. That doesn’t mean it’s what they want but if you’re young and Norn, and not already left to study at a Scottish University, do the DUP represent the future?</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">The past is never far behind the future though. The New IRA has claimed responsibility for four parcel bombs sent to three London transport hubs and Glasgow university. The events of Bloody Sunday resurfacing in a court case evoke old hurts and memories.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Even at the height of an Islamist terror threat MI5 still allocates 22 per cent of resources to countering Northern Ireland-related terrorism, all reminders of what is at stake</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Often a single line that crystallises as an idea is the spark for an empty column.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">This morning it was Radio Scotland’s thought for the day slot which quoted the Irish poet WB Yeats: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">It seems apt for the times, doesn’t it?.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">But there is now, apparently, a Yeats index, a ruling that the more quotable Yeats seems to commentators, the worse things actually are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">If the poet has made it onto Thought for the Day “the situation” must be quite bad.</span></div>
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<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-83307906258526130352018-12-21T10:35:00.001+00:002018-12-21T10:36:06.306+00:00Sùil Eile air "Bana-Ghaisgich"<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
<span lang="PT-BR" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><i>Airson an Daily Record</i></span></div>
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<span lang="PT-BR" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">"Bana-Ghaisgich", aig Tèatar Finborough, Lunnainn</span></div>
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<span lang="PT-BR" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Tha sin uile air ar beò-ghlacadh leis a' bhàs, Leòdhasaich gu h-àraid.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span lang="PT-BR" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Tha sin follaiseach sa chiad shealladh aig Màiri Mhoireasdan, agus an caractar aice a' dràibheadh a dh'Ulapul agus smaoineachadh air ciamar a bhiodh i air a cuimhneachadh nan rachadh an càr far an rathaid. <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">'S ann mu dheidhinn bàs a tha an dealbh-chluich aig Màiri air fad, "Bana-ghaisgich", agus an cumhachd a tha aig boireannaich air a'chèile timcheall air.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Gu sgileil tha i a' cluich a h-uile pàirt, ceud bliadhna bho chèile, ann an cearcall timicheal call an Iolaire, lachanaich, a' seinn agus a' caoidh na thachair.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Leth-slighe troimhe tha thu a' tuigsinn carson nach robh iad a-riamh a' bruidhinn air an tubaist. Tha an sgriopt, cuideachd air a sgrìobhadh le Màiri, cho geur agus gu bheil thu air do ghearradh. <u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Uaireannan chan fheum thu faclan. Tha Mike Vass air an àrd-ùrlar a' cur ceòl ris a'chall, sliasaidean iarainn an Iolaire a' sgrìobadh ri na biastan.<u></u><u></u></span></div>
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<span lang="PT-BR" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Nuair a chuireas e air eìdheadh an RNR, 's e aon de na h-ìomhaighean as cumhachdaiche air àrd-ùrlar lom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;">Chunnaic mise i ann an Lunnainn. Bidh còisir aig <a href="https://www.theatreguleor.com/bana-ghaisgich-heroines" target="_blank">Theatre Gu Leòr</a> ann an Steòrnabhagh an ath sheachdain. Na caill e. </span></div>
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Translation</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">We are all obsessed with death, Lewis people in particular.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">That is obvious in Mairi Morrison’s first scene, as her character is driving to Ullapool wondering how she would be remembered if she went off the road.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Mairi’s play, “Bana Ghaisgich”, is all about death and the power women exercise over each other.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Skilfully she plays every part, a century apart, in a circle around the loss of the Iolaire, laughing, singing and mourning what happened.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Half way through, you understand why they never spoke about the tragedy. The script, also written by Mairi, is so sharp that it cuts you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Sometimes you don’t need words. Mike Vass is on stage putting music to the loss, the thighs of the Iolaire scraping against the beasts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">When he puts on the uniform of the RNR , it is one of the most powerful images on a bare stage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I saw the play in London. Theatre Gu Leòr will have a choir in Stornoway next week. </span><span style="font-size: small;">Don’t miss it.</span></div>
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</style>Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-86035738275939528272018-12-13T11:30:00.000+00:002018-12-13T11:30:16.566+00:00Clusterbùrach - a new ruling
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<i style="font-size: medium;">Sùil Eile airson an Daily Record</i></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Aon uair bha iad a’ gàireachdainn oirnn airson ‘s nach robh faclan againn airson rendezvous neo car a’ mhuiltein.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ach le poilitigs ann an staing, tha a’ Bheurla air ruith a-mach à faclan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">O choinn ghoirid tha bùrach, facal blasda Gàidhlig, air a bhith air a chur gu feum airson cunntas a thoirt air an ath char ann am Brexit.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tha “clusterbùrach” air fàs fasanta.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Tha Alastair Caimbeul ga chleachdadh, Mìcheal Russell, Hannah Bardell cuideachd.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Tha e sgrìobhte ann an Hansard agus tha nam pàipearan-naidheachd air droch litreachadh a dhèaneamh air.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Tha cunnart ann gu bheil am facal air a chaitheamh agus feumach air suaimhneas.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Tha Comhairle a’ Chànain (CaC) air a bhith a’ coimhead air a’ chùis agus air a thighinn suas le freagairt shìmplidh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">O seo a-mach cha bhi e ceadaichte bùrach a chleachdach airson Brexit. Ach tha e ceadaichte brexit a chleachdach airson bùrach.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Mar eisimplear: “Nach e tha air brexit a dheaneamh dhen bhiadh.” agus, “Abair brexit, a ghloic.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Tha e a’ ciallachadh gum feum sinn an litir x a chleachdadh sa chànan.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Ach cha tuirt duine sam bith gu biodh Brexit gun duilgheadas.</span></div>
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Translation</div>
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<br /></div>
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Once upon a time they used to laugh at us because we had no words for rendevouz or summersault.</div>
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But with politics in crisis, English has run out of words.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Recently the term bùrach, a tasty Gaelic word, has been deployed to describe the latest twist in Brexit.</div>
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<br /></div>
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“Clusterbùrach " has become fashionable. Alastair Campbell has used it, Michael Russell, Hannah Bardell too. </div>
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<br /></div>
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The word has been recorded in Hansard and newspapers have mis-spelled it.</div>
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There is a danger that the term is becoming worn out and needs resting.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Comhairle a’ Chànain (CaC), the Language Council, has been looking at the issue and come up with a simple solution.</div>
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<br /></div>
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From now on it is not permitted to use bùrach as a term for Brexit. However it is acceptable to use brexit to describe a bùrach.</div>
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For example: “Didn’t he make a brexit of the food”, and “What a brexit, you idiot”.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It means we have to introduce the letter x into the Gaelic language.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But no one said Brexit was going to be easy.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<br />Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9059249918241541237.post-11786600584435261482018-11-23T11:10:00.002+00:002018-11-23T11:10:34.097+00:00Sùil Eile air Ceòl 's Craic air a rèidio<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
'S E AN App is motha tha mi a' cleachdadh air a' fòn-làimhe 's e fear a' BhBC gus èisteachd ris an rèidio (sin nuair nach eil mi a' cleachdadh a' fòn airson craoladh air an rèidio).</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Ach bho chionn ghoiridh tha mi air mo bheò-ghlacadh le làrach-lìn a chuir caraid thugam. Dealbh mòr den phlanaid agus bidh thu a' sguabadh thairis air le do chorrag.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Ge bith càite a bheil thu a' stad tha thu a' lorg stèisean rèidio ionadal an àite.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Tha mi air a bhith eadar Alasga agus Astràilia agus a h-uile àite air an t-slighe Tha "RadioGarden" coltach ri a bhith ag èisteachd ri Shortwave nuair a bha thu òg, an saoghal tighinn thugad fo na plaideachan.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Ach mar as àbhaist tha an combaist ga do stiùireadh dhachaigh.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Bho àm gu àm bidh mi a' lorg "Ceòl 's Craic" rèidio air Facebook, ceòl an t-saoghail tro mheadhan na Gàidhlig.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Le preasantair ùr, Alana NicAonghais, an t-eòlas ciùil aig an Dotair Raibeart agus an riochdaire, Laurie Cuffe, tha am prògram sgoinneal, ùr-nòsach agus farsaing an coimeas ri na tha ri fhaighinn air a BhBC.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Bha fiù's agallamh aice le seinneadair Killing Joke an t-seachdainn sa chaidh.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
Tha iad airidh air luchd-èisteachd nas fharsainge.</div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>Translation - </i><i>The App I use most often on mobile phone is the BBC one for listening to the radio (when I'm not using the phone for broadcasting on the radio).</i></div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>But recently I've been caught with a website a friend sent me. a big image of the planet that you sweep across with your finger. Wherever you stop you find the local radio station of the area. I've been from alaska to australia and everywhere in between .</i></div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>"radiogarden" is like listening to shortwave when you were young, the world coming to you under the blankets. But as usual, the compass guides you home. From time to time, I find "Ceòl 's Craic" radio on Facebook, world music through the medium of gaelic.</i></div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>With a new presenter, Alana MacInnes, the musical knowledge of Dr Robert and the producer, Laurie Cuffe, the programme is fantastic, innovative and wide-raingng compared to what is available on the BBC.</i></div>
<div style="color: #4d4d4d; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 14px; padding: 0px;">
<i>They even had an interview with the singer from Killing Joke last week. They deserve a wider audience .</i></div>
Whitehall 1212http://www.blogger.com/profile/04035292083118129135noreply@blogger.com0