What a task. Pick a few phrases that reflect the new Scotland...

So, as we begin the process of recognising ten years of the Parliament building, the presiding officer, Alex Fergusson has suggested it is time that we add another voice to the 24 writers whose words celebrate Scotland, are carved on the Canongate wall.

Of the snippets already there, Hugh MacDiarmid's 'Scotland Small?' is a personal favourite. Although it is carved in obscure text and difficult to see.





Scotland Small?

Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small ?
Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché corner
To a fool who cries ‘Nothing but heather!’ where in September another
Sitting there and resting and gazing round
Sees not only the heather but blaeberries
With bright green leaves and leaves already turned scarlet,
Hiding ripe blue berries; and amongst the sage-green leaves
Of the bog-myrtle the golden flowers of the tormentil shining;
And on the small bare places, where the little Blackface sheep
Found grazing, milkworts blue as summer skies;
And down in neglected peat-hags, not worked
Within living memory, sphagnum moss in pastel shades
Of yellow, green, and pink; sundew and butterwort
Waiting with wide-open sticky leaves for their tiny winged prey;
And nodding harebells vying in their colour
With the blue butterflies that poise themselves delicately upon them,
And stunted rowans with harsh dry leaves of glorious colour.
‘Nothing but heather!’ - How marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!

However, the one that sums up a Scotland that is now thankfully on its last feet is the wondrous 'Scotland' by Alastair Reid, of New York, the Dominican Republic and Whithorn, also one of the finest men to ever draw breath, and whose company I've spent many a happy hour in.




Scotland

It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it.’

Then again, MacDiarmid's diatribe against moral turpitude, fair gets the hairs up on the back of your neck.

"My aim all along has been (in Ezra Pound's term) the most drastic desuetization of Scottish life and letters, and, in particular, the de-Tibetanization of the Highlands and Islands, and getting rid of the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white-mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps calls Medlar Novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe),Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles o the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery. "

Can a Gray mouse lead a white mouse faction?

Curious George and the lost spirit of honesty.

Following last weeks own 'special' brand of stupid from Dumfries and Galloway Labour MP ickle Russell Brown (above), attacking SNP Culture Minister Mike Russell for a book written 11 years ago. One would have rightly thought, that after sense prevailed, and intelligent people who had actually read the book, acclaimed it as an honest warts and all assessment of Scotland after 18 years of Tory rule, and as a condemnation of decades of Labour incompetence in running civic Scotland, the fuss would have been consigned to the bin marked, 'further puerile Labour rubbish'.




Alas and alack no, as has been mentioned elsewhere, this week brought forward the spectacle of Baron George Foulkes of Cumnock (seen above lying in a near comatose state, in the back of his Ministerial limousine, after being arrested for drunk and disorderly behaviour in ThatLondon) through the keyboard of his well nourished Gollum, Kezia (when will she drop the dale from her name?) Dugdale (yes I know boo hiss, what a sexist blah blah-tough) proferring the following motion to the Scottish Parliament:

S3M-03621 George Foulkes (Lothians) (Lab): That the Parliament calls on the Minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution to retract his derogatory remarks about parts of Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Stirling and Lanarkshire, made in his book, In Waiting: Travels in the Shadow of Edwin Muir, in October 1998; in particular calls on the minister to retract the comments that imply that Glasgow is too dangerous to get out of a car and that tenement closes are covered with the bodies of unconscious drug addicts, that describe the flag on Edinburgh Castle as “an awful mutant tablecloth”, that suggest that Dumfries is full of “skinny, ill-dressed women”, that Aberdeen is inhospitable and that Stirling is undesirable, and believes that it is against the interests of Scotland to have a minister who is responsible for promoting Scotland and its culture to be seen to continue to hold these views.




Now to just drop a further bogie into Kezia's slimfast Muligatawny soup, let me just proffer the following review from The Glasgow Herald (as was) dated December 9 1998, under the heading:

BOOK of the DAY

reviewed by

Vi Hughes

On page 18 weighing in at 409 words, fighting out of Neil Wilson Publishing for a reasonable £9.99

IN WAITING: TRAVELS IN THE SHADOW OF EDWIN MUIR

by Michael Russell

REFRESHINGLY, Michael Russell, chief executive of the SNP, speaks also as a private person as he looks at Scotland in these past few months before the birth of its Parliament. His new book is loosely based on Edwin Muir's Scottish Journey of 1935. Russell conducts a sort of dialogue with the famous poet and thinker that enriches and deepens his own book.
His aim was "to escape from the straitjacket of day to day politics and to indulge in the luxury of visiting and thinking about the country and its people, trying to learn from them what my country is about, and what it wants to be". Russell travels the length of the country. Unlike Muir, his work did not allow him one sustained period of travel, but his various sorties to different areas, by car, train, bus, or ferry, at least allowed him to observe the failings of Scottish transport services, particularly in outlying regions.
He starts with Edinburgh where he has only a day to spend . . . no chance of emulating Muir's unsurpassed portrait of that beautiful and exasperating city. He talks to two unemployed teenagers, inarticulate on the topic of Scottish politics, a vinegary lady in the Botanical Garden cafe who thinks that London is the place for "the Parliament", some "mean-faced old men" in a pub, and lastly, thank goodness, meets John, a joiner, who really cares and looks forward with hope to a new life after May next year.
In Kirkcudbright, a visit to his old school inspires reflection on the failing state of education. In Glasgow and Lanarkshire his writing gains force, fuelled by a mixture of anger at what the ravages of industrialism have done to people's lives, and concern at how little has been done to repair that damage. Muir's description of the devastated areas, quoted in the book, shocks him with its relevance to conditions today.
The book contains the inevitable bit of Labour/SNP knockabout and, alas, some shallow anti-English stuff. There are also one or two misunderstandings about Edwin Muir. But in expressing his own humanity and compassion Russell acknowledges that his party has no monopoly on such feelings. It is this belief that lends a positive note to his conclusion - that the new Parliament could and should help evolve "a politics of ideas and principles . . . " that would "serve Scotland much better".

Now the above is a warts and all copy and paste of the original review, I could have taken out the comment about "shallow anti-English stuff." But, I'm not into covering up honest warts and all analysis, or selecting or burying quotes out of context. I would add that Vi Hughes who reviewed the book is an Australian author of quite excellent childrens literature, and may not have understood that Mike Russell is English born....

Anyhoo, back to the Baron, this lover of all things liquid and bi-legged, is without doubt one of the most effective tools the SNP have on the path to Independence. His rambling comments are of great value for followers of Scottish politics, deliberately!

However, this week, probably in response to the above motion, or as is more likely, as a means of informing the parliament, just exactly how much public money the Baron and Ms Dugdale have cost us Dr Ian McKee submitted the following motion.


S3M-03628 Ian McKee (Lothians) (SNP):

That the Parliament, mindful of the answer to question S3W-17445 by the Minister for Parliamentary Business on 10 November 2008 that the cost of answering a parliamentary question is £98.51, notes that at least one member has asked over 1,000 questions in this parliamentary session, costing a total of over £100,000, and that if all members followed this example that the cost to the taxpayer would be nearly £13 million, or £26 million in a full session, and therefore requests all members to consider whether their question is really necessary before incurring yet more public expense.


So in addition to his numerous members motions (ohh missus) the delightful Baron has cost the Scottish taxpayer £100,000 with his consistent line of Parliamentary drivel, all driven by his belief that the SNP must be as corrupt as his beloved Scottish Labour party. £100,000 spent so far proves that he's still drooling on the leather seats of his ministerial limo...Keep up the good work George, deliberately.

Scotland's independence day

On the day that Broon, fluttered his eyelash, gave big Barak a comehither wink and proclaimed himself the big man on campus, an American journalist wrote something akin to a piece of journalism, we in Scotland have long given up on. An impartial article. Read on and applaud.

* For lurking dependence junkies, be aware that you are being insulted, you just don't know by how much.


ONE OF THE most interesting politicians in Europe these days is a Scot, and I don't mean Gordon Brown. Alex Salmond is the first minister of a devolved Scottish parliament, a creation of Tony Blair's Labor government designed to take the wind out of Scottish separatist sentiments.

A few years ago, however, a ranking member of the British royal family, whose members aren't supposed to get involved with politics, committed an indiscretion by telling me that he thought devolved parliaments were a terrible idea because they could break up the United Kingdom. The Welsh would stay with England, and maybe the Northern Irish, he said, but the Scots probably would not. Salmond, the head of the Scottish National Party, is banking on the royal being right.

After centuries of fighting the English to maintain independence, the two thrones were united when James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, after Elizabeth died childless. In 1707, the two countries were joined under one parliament - the one in London. For the next 300 years, Scotland helped build the British empire, contributed more soldiers per capita to Britain's wars than any other region, invented more things, and had more than its share of prime ministers. Edinburgh became the seat of the Scottish enlightenment, a remarkable burst of creative energy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But something of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce, and the independence of yore lingered in the Scottish heart.

Ten years ago, Scotland got its own parliament back, with limited powers. Defense and diplomacy are in London's hands. The Scottish National Party won the election of 2007 by a whisker. Some thought the Scottish Nationalists' minority government would fail, but it hasn't. Neither has Salmond, whose rapier repartee is often on display in the parliamentary put-down that Britons love.

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, I met the first minister in his office in the new Scottish parliament, a startling architectural statement in the tumble-down modern style. An economist by training, Salmond is a big admirer of the late John Kenneth Galbraith and began quoting some of his work from memory.

His plan is to get a referendum on Scottish independence before the people sometime next year. Polls don't show a majority of Scots ready for independence yet, but Salmond believes that they do want the choice. Getting a bill passed on a referendum will be difficult because neither Labor, nor the Tories, nor the Liberal Democrats want any such thing. During my visit, the Scottish edition of the Times of London revealed that in the 1970s the British Labor government went so far as to redraw the boundaries of North Sea oil to deprive Scotland of much of it, and even contemplated stirring up separatists movements in the Scottish isles of Orkney and the Shetlands, should Scotland go independent, to deprive Scotland of even more oil.

Salmond says the nations he looks to for inspiration are Ireland for its lower corporate taxes, the recession notwithstanding; Norway for its stewardship of oil revenues; Finland for education; and the region of Catalonia in Spain for its emphasis on cultural identity. In general, "I tend to like the Scandinavian societies," he said, for the way they balance freedoms and social responsibilities.

Salmond's independent Scotland would keep the monarchy and the English language, although efforts are being made to keep Scottish Gaelic alive. Salmond himself uses old Scots, the language of Robert Burns, when he feels the need to tweak colleagues in the British parliament in London where he also sits. "They know they are being insulted, but not how much," he says.

The SNP's nationalism is based on citizenship, rather than on ethnicity, religion, or language, and is pro-immigration; quite different from many national movements.

Scotland's two biggest banks, Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax Bank of Scotland, are in deep trouble, but Salmond hopes that even in recession Scots would prefer to have the "same economic teeth" that other nations have, rather than "hang on to the United Kingdom treasury."

Scotland's near neighbors, Ireland, Iceland and Norway, all became independent in the 20th century. Salmond is hoping that Scotland will come into its own early in the 21st.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.

Rockin' Roddy Piper Hoo haaa!

Excuses unionist parties might come up with against a free vote on an Independence referendum. Part One.

Soooo, in a rather straightforward interview in 'The Politics Show' (North Britain version), wherein MSP Mike Russell Minister for Culture, External Affair and the Constitution (CEAC) posited the suggestion that Holyrood might actually do the nation a service and remind the people that politicians are free thinking individuals, not entirely tied to slavish devotion of their pary and have a free vote to determine whether or not Scotland should hold an Independence referendum.

This brought witless cant from the desperate Unionistas.

Cue Steerpike, deep within the bowels of his Eastwood bunker, "Naw, he's ra minister fur breaking up Britannia."

Followed by Don't ravish Tavish, (adopt regulation plums in mouth, the poor boy makes Betty Windsor sound common), "Oh no, how frightful, we're only interested in getting us poor Scots out of this dreadful recession, dontchaknow?"

Then Bella, the shadow shadow First Minister / Secretary of State for Scotland. " Stop chuntering, your obsessed, let's get on with panning Brown over his recession."

I look forward to the other heavyweights on the Scottish political scene weighing in, and denying a free vote to all MSP's, particularly, TheWendy, Jackie the Hutt, Baron Foulkes and Duncan McNeill. And of course, how could I forget Iain 'Giggety giggety goo' Gray.






Addendum

TheWendy, "Let the people have their say on this matter"


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipd8JzfUr-E