WHILE the Tories and the anti-independence media obsess over Michael Matheson's £11,000 roaming charges, a sum which the Scottish Government Health Secretary has paid back, they are far less keen to pay attention to the more than £11 million of public money annually which the Conservative Government in Westminster wastes on the PR stunt of the UK Government headquarters in Edinburgh.
Kindhearted, which in this instance is a synonym for gullible, souls might wonder if this is because £11m a year is a drop in the ocean of Tory wastes of money.
There's the billions wasted on the cancelled HS2, the estimated £140m splurged on the failed Rwandan deportation project, all of which form part of the estimated £100 billion in public money which the Conservatives have wasted over the past four years.
But then the Scottish Tories and their allies in the Scottish anti-independence media are not very keen to talk about that wasted money either. This is what happens when you have a media which sees its main job as being to keep a lid on support for independence and subjects the Scottish Government to intense scrutiny and criticism while giving a free pass to far bigger Tory government sins and its waste of much larger sums of public money.
The seven-storey Queen Elizabeth House in Edinburgh was opened in 2020 and naturally it was named after a monarch. When it comes to naming things after members of the Windsor family the British state is as zealous as an incontinent mongrel confronted with a long row of lamp posts.
‘Best Scot at Westminster' (sic), or should that be (sick), Alister Jack (above), promised that the new UK Government hub would be "a visible and tangible sign" of Conservative ministers delivering on pledge to strengthen the UK. But three years on the only visible and tangible sign of that is the eyesore giant British flag which adorns the front of the building.
Apparently, the best way to strengthen the Union is by slapping giant flags on things in the name of (checks notes) opposition to nationalism.
The building includes an expensively appointed cabinet room which we were told would be used for regular meetings of the British Government Cabinet as part of its love bombing campaign to pretend that it actually cares about Scotland.
The UK Government has declined to confirm whether the cabinet room has ever been used. We can take that as a no, then. Conservative ministers say that they want to strengthen the union, but certainly not at the expense of risking contact with Scottish people in the wild.
Three years on, Queen Elizabeth House is not a symbol of cooperation and collaboration between the nations that make up this so-called union; it's a symbol of Conservative determination to dominate and control and to impose their vision of uncompromising Anglo-British nationalism on Scotland.
Robin Harper rages at the Scottish Greens
Former Scottish Green leader Robin Harper, who is no longer a member of the party, preferring instead to lend his support to Gordon Brown's anti-independence "Our Scottish Future" project, for which he is a board member, has now urged party members to oust the "ruling cabal" of the party's current leadership, a leadership, which whatever you might think of them, has achieved far more than Harper ever did, bringing the Greens into government and securing ministerial posts for the party.
Harper quit the Greens in August this year, citing his opposition to the party's support for the Gender Recognition Reform Bill and his belief that the party had shifted too far to the left. So. Naturally, he's going to be far more comfortable in the company of the right-wing of the Labour party. However, the Greens have supported trans rights and Scottish independence for years, so why did it take him so long?
"Ruling cabal" in this instance appears to stand for "a party leadership that I don't agree with and which I don't have the support to vote out”. Mind you, if the independence opposing Harper had his way, the Scottish Greens would still be a minor party on the fringes of Scottish politics rather than the third biggest party in Holyrood and the second biggest pro-independence party in Scotland.
Unionist pressure group can't keep a lid on in-fighting
All is not well in the anti-independence pressure group These Islands, which opposes nationalism as long as it's Scottish, Welsh or Irish, but which is incapable of recognising the right wing and increasingly aggressive Anglo-British nationalism which dominates the modern Labour and Conservative parties as being a form of nationalism at all.
Economist Tony Yates, who joined the group's advisory board in May 2022, said on social media that he had taken the decision to step away from the organisation citing his disquiet with a fellow Council member regularly writing for right wing current affairs magazine The Spectator.
He explained: "The Spectator has become a vehicle for overt racism, Covid denial and fascist-adjacent populism.
“It's occupied that position for a long time, but Douglas Murray's comments about Humza Yousaf having 'infiltrated' crystallised my feelings about this."
"Fascist- adjacent populism" is the right wing Anglo-British nationalism about which These Islands is so complacently indulgent.
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Yates did not name the fellow council member who writes for the publication but a number of These Islands' board members do so. Contributing editor of These Islands John Ferry is a regular writer in the right-wing magazine, as is former Labour MP Brian Wilson, ex-broadcaster Trevor Phillips, as well as founding members historian Tom Holland and the notoriously thin-skinned chairman Kevin Hague.
Far-right wing writer Douglas Murray is an associate editor of The Spectator. He has been accused of propagating the extreme right wing "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, which accuses so-called global elites of conspiring to replace white Christian Europeans with brown and black Muslims in order to tighten their control over the world.
The conspiracy theory was until recently confined to the extreme right political margins of racist white nationalism and overt fascists, but figures like Murray and former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson have of late been working tirelessly to normalise it and make it acceptable in mainstream conservative politics.
Such normalisation of the extreme right has dangerous consequences, such as the electoral success of far right politician Geert Wilder in the Netherlands, Javier Milei in Argentina and the continuing support enjoyed by Donald Trump in the USA despite the numerous criminal charges he faces and his openly declared intention to rip up the traditional safeguards of democracy and rule as a dictator.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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