MONDAY’S National had plenty to think about, especially Carolyn Leckie’s heartfelt despair at her former party the SSP’s concerted attack on the SNP, and Martin Hannan’s biographical and political take in the sports column. Mainly because of the Old Firm’s grip on the political scene, his and other such stories have to be told now. Thankfully, readers are also still demanding that the Willie McRae cover-up is not buried. All of these topics reflect all that is wrong in our divided nation in a way that no Unionist paper would dare say.
Like Carolyn, I deplore the anti-SNP attacks from all those purporting to be for independence. Who else is going to win the necessary elections to achieve such a goal? Nothing is perfect in this world, apart from myself. The SNP did not create austerity, even though it is forced to administer it through the parsimonious block grant, whilst the bulk of our assets are frittered away in vainglorious Unionist projects to maintain the fiction of the Faitherland “superior” mentality.
I also left the SSP at the time of the split and, like Carolyn, still have some friends as members and even more as ex-members.
READ MORE: Anti-SNP rants are not helping my former party the SSP
As a Scottish Republican Socialist platform, fighting against a pro-Unionist ruling clique, at every conference we were told our annual motion entrenching Clause V for an independent Scotland was “anti-English, fascist, Stalinist, incompetent and badly written” and it was regularly blatantly manoeuvred off the agenda, to be finally and overwhelmingly defeated.
Ironically, one of the Unionist platforms agreed with the Scottish Republican Socialist Movement (SRSM) that the motion should be put in the interests of democracy, knowing it would be overwhelmingly defeated, and deplored the undemocratic nature of the party. The leader of that Unionist group has recently been expelled from the arch Unionist Labour party for challenging their democracy, and has been wrongly called a “racist” for being pro-Palestinian and anti-the Zionist State of Israel. He is no more anti-Jewish than the legitimate opponents of the Imperialist British State are anti-English, or white poppy wearers are anti (mistreated) ex-service personnel.
The proposer of the SRSM draft motions, the late Dave Leadbetter, happened to be English. He had a degree in Scottish history from Stirling University and a law degree from Durham and knew his stuff. He also chaired a Willie McRae Committee comprised of lawyers, journalists, academics, etc. One of the findings was from a retired scenes-of-crime officer from Cornwall, whose report blasted the impossibility of the official findings.
READ MORE: Remembering the fallen is a part of the Celtic FC story
Martin Hannan’s own story was against imperial injustice and the downright jingoistic loyalism of poppy moral blackmailers and those who hide behind our dead relatives to pursue further wars and misery in the name of a dead Empire. As a Partick Thistle fan, who also deplores sectarian bigotry and divisiveness and supports a United Ireland and an independent Scotland against the Brutish State, I also am bemused at the Green Brigade’s anti-SNP stance and attempts to legislate against bigotry.
Where are campaigns to get rid of the Lords Haughey and Lord Reid, Brian “Scotland is British” Wilson etc, whose Labourism introduced the Public Order Act, which prevented the GB “walking” from Glasgow Cross to Parkheid? It was not the SNP, or “Nazi RUC” Strathclyde polis to blame, but a Labour Cooncil.
How many, like me, were horrified and outraged to see Union Jack bagpipes being used to jingofy Sunday’s poppy fascists on live TV? It was the Brutish State that outlawed the “warpipes” and Highland dress and lead to the Clearances. Marx said that in Ireland whole villages were cleared, but in Scotland, land of romance and Sir Walter Scott, whole areas the size of German principalities were cleared. I know where my loyal unities lie – not in a murdering British nationalist state.
Donald Anderson
Glasgow
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