Don't get fooled again!

 

© Daily Telegraph

Would you buy a used windmill from either of these men?

Salvo's North-East Hub or The Brian Allan Show

 My purpose in writing this piece is not to cause distress to the Alec Salmond Fan Club. My reservations about Mr. Salmond are clearly expressed in Settler Watch Lynn and the Road to Devolunion; https://troostories.blogspot.com/. My purpose in this piece is to tell of a well-intentioned attempt to support the pro-independence claims of Salvo.

          By trying to make something work you find out more about it. After five months of frustrated effort I complained to the High-Heid Yins of Salvo about their organisational structure and the way in which it worked to waste the energy of anyone who genuinely believed that Scotland should return to the fold of sovereign nation states.

On the 7^th May 2023 the Salvo Secretary, Jan Hendry sent an electronic document to those who had joined Salvo in an area from Dundee to Forres. This document was a call to form Salvo’s North-East Hub at a Meeting in Aberdeen. The document of 7^th May had a draft constitution attached and a list of positions to be filled by willing Members.

          The Meeting was organised and overseen by Brian Allan who introduced himself as an activist with Aye Aberdeen. The Meeting duly appointed four office-bearers. Leigh Dubbels took responsibility for the Convener/Coordinator role; Wilma Bruce, Treasurer; Brian Allan, Membership Secretary; Louis Mair (author), Minutes Secretary.

          A few days later I looked in my in-box for the document of the 7^th May as an aid to writing a draft minute. I found a similarly styled document dated 8^th May. This document also purported to have come from Jan Hendry. The 8^th May document had a significantly different list of office-bearers. No-one at the 9^th May Meeting had mentioned these alternative posts. I wrote to the Salvo Secretary asking for clarity.

          Some days passed before Jan Hendry replied. I was told that my query had caused the Salvo secretary some confusion; the document had been composed and sent by someone else. My next attempt at writing the draft minute involved a more careful look at my electronic in-box. I found the 7^th May document but when I opened it the list of Hub positions was not as I remembered it. My rough notes agreed with my memory. I asked a friend if you could alter an e-mail once it was in the recipient’s in-box. I was assured that this could not be done. I then wrote to Jan Hendry to ask for clarity. The Salvo secretary told me that the document had been edited. Jan Hendry was exceedingly vague about who had edited the document which looked like an e-mail but was not an e-mail.

          I cannot say with certainty who forged the 8^th May document. I can however speak five languages and everything I know about literary criticism suggests that Brian Allan is the prime suspect. I cannot say with certainty who edited the 7^th May document; once again I suspect that it was Brian Allan. My draft minute contains Hub posts that cannot be traced in the paperwork.

In June 2023 the North-East Hub’s Membership Secretary organised an admin-team meeting. Three of the four Hub Officers were present with a fourth figure by video conference. It was not clear what the Membership Secretary wished to discuss. The Convener/Coordinator was keen to tell me that she had given up the Convener’s duties and was now a Coordinator. It seemed probable that Leigh Dubbels had been schooled in this confused piece of thinking. I suggested that Miss Dubbels should resign from her post if she no longer wished to take the responsibility. I then asked Brian Allan what post he held with Salvo’s central organisation. Mr. Allan said, reluctantly, that he was a member of the “Core Group”. I had to leave to catch a bus, forgetting to ask the name of the lady on the video-link.

          Not long afterwards I learned that a Researcher had been appointed and her name was Dot Jessiman. This appointment was clearly not a Hub appointment. The name sounded familiar and I found it in a circa November 1993 newspaper cutting. A Dot Jessiman had been involved in a publicity stunt which benefitted Alec Salmond. In 1993 Alec Salmond had achieved favourable press reports in both the Scotsman and the Press and Journal over his association with New Scots for Independence. This hollow sham was fronted by Dot Jessiman. New Scots for Independence was never heard of again. Alec Salmond claimed to be leading the SNP towards Scottish independence. The Scotsman and the Press and Journal are virulently empire-loyalist newspapers. Dot Jessiman is currently a member of Alec Salmond’s Alba Party.

I was unable to attend the July “Admin Team Meeting”. It was around this time that Brian Allan claimed that he had become the ‘Chair’, presumably of the Admin Team.

           For the August Meeting the entire Hub was invited and an agenda was sent out by Leigh Dubbels. Item 1 on the agenda was the appointment of a Chair and a Secretary. This was achieved very promptly and the Meeting moved on to the kind of chaotic discussion that had been a feature of the May Meeting. The agenda was completely forgotten. Brian Allan gave the Meeting a long ramble about the need to copy leaflets given him by the central organisation. This led to the rapid appointment of two people who seemed to have known that this was coming. They were designated Chief and Deputy Clerk. It looked to me as though Brian Allan had created non-jobs for two of his cronies.

          In September there was a “Bonfire of the Vanities” night on the 18th. The Aberdeen clique around Brian Allan organised a bonfire on a river bank near the beach. It is a spot where people often light fires and no-one who saw it would have thought it unusual. I am not sure how many bonfires were lit between Dundee and Forres by the 400 Members of Salvo’s North-East Hub. I organised a bonfire on Tap o Noth, a prominent hill near Rhynie. I took a photograph of this fire and on the 19th September I shared my picture with the North-East Hub’s facebook page. My photo was approved for others to see by Brian Allan (Admin); on the 29th September. If you wanted to minimise the impact of a campaign that is how you would do it.

          In August I had attended a North-East Hub Meeting. The Hub appointed Dave Greig to the position of Chair. The new Chair was enthusiastic about his role which he saw as that of a secretary, much in the way that Brian Allan understood the structure of organisations.

          As far as I can re-construct the story of my exclusion from the September Hub Meeting it runs as follows: the Chair, Dave Greig, wrote an invitation to all Members to attend a Meeting on the 14th September. As he did not have access to the Hub’s mailing-list he entrusted his mailing to Brian Allan to send out. Dave Greig would have been pleased to receive a copy of his own mailing on the 11th, he would have had good reason to assume that Brian Allan had sent the mailing to all the Members.

           However Brian Allan had deleted my name from the mailing-list before informing everyone else about the Meeting. On the afternoon of the 14th September Brian Allan seems to have phoned Dave Greig to ask him to contact me by telephone to ensure that I knew about the Meeting. Brian Allan had my telephone number, Dave Greig did not. Brian Allan knew that I lived 25 miles away from Aberdeen, Dave Greig did not. Dave Greig sent me a text-message telling me about the Meeting, three hours before it began.

          I then phoned Dave Greig and was assured that I had been told about the Meeting by e-mail on the 11th September. I had been looking for something else on the 12th and knew this to be untrue. Ten minutes after the end of my call to Dave Greig I missed a call from Brian Allan. When I called him back he had nothing to tell me.

          By these Machiavellian manoeuvres Brian Allan could claim that I had been informed about the Meeting but I had chosen not to attend. To his lasting credit Dave Greig resigned from the position of Chair shortly thereafter. I have previously been involved with organisations which degenerated into cults of personality. They were always unable to pursue their stated aims.

          Salvo has a constitution which mentions a Core Group, two Guardians and a number of Stewards. How these people are appointed and the relationships between them are not available in writing. In practice without some unseen power in the background the organisation could not work. In pursuing the constitutional path towards independence, Salvo does not work.

          Salvo’s published material does not challenge the great lie about the Holyrood Assembly. There is no constitutional link between the colonial assembly at Holyrood and our 1706 Parliament. There is no link between the Holyrood Assembly and Scotland’s constitution. Tony Blair was being honest (for a politician) when he likened the Holyrood Assembly to a Parish Council. Mr Blair did not say ‘English Parish Council’ but his audience would have understood him; hopefully at least one hundred Scots will also understand him.

          The people I interacted with and learned about during my five months with Salvo’s North-East Hub were mostly supporters of Alec Salmond. The money to pay for Salvo’s expensive glossy leaflets may well be coming from the generous pension that a grateful Emperor of London pays to Mr Salmond. Like Aye Aberdeen, Salvo seems, to me, to be a hollow sham that will attempt to divert our energy into constitutional cul-de-sacs. Other similar new, improved and allegedly pro-independence organisations are springing up at an alarming rate. If you want to take part in a just struggle you should find out about them and be quietly and politely sceptical.

A Cross for Saint Andrew

 

Settler Watch Lynn and the Road to Devolunion

In late February or early March of 1993 a small poster appeared at the foot of Mairs Street in Portknockie on Scotland’s Moray Firth coast. This was the first of many Settler Watch posters that would be attached with wallpaper paste to suitable surfaces; mostly in Strathmore and the North-East of Scotland. Putting up these posters was a breach of the law on fly-posting; an offence which was seldom prosecuted. Settler Watch did not breach the Race Relations Act because “We aa all Bwittish” was the imperial line; at that time. Settler Watch did not breach the rules for membership of the Scottish National Party; it had been designed with the SNP’s constitution in mind. Settler Watch put pressure on a shady organisation called Siol-nan-gaidheal to take action rather than making threats. I know the above to be true because I was that SNP Brechin Branch Secretary; I stuck up that first poster.

Warning by The Colonial Office: 

The Race Relations Act has changed since 1993

          The detail from the first paragraph that is important to an understanding of a long, involved tale is the date. Settler Watch was an active, campaigning organisation in March 1993. Late in March Settler Watch made its press debut. On the 25^th March 1993 the front page of the Kirriemuir Herald carried a story about Settler Watch. Two subsequent editions (April) of this weekly newspaper published letters on the subject of Settler Watch.

          By May the empire had begun to strike back. Three imperial stooges in the South-West of Scotland founded Scottish Watch. The empire, acting through auxiliaries, had chosen to create a bogus organisation with a name that was designed to create confusion in the ranks of any potentially “webbelious” inhabitants of the rich Jockinese colony. This is a standard practice of the London Empire. Scottish Watch’s first action was to distribute leaflets at an SNP event. This was designed to provoke the leader of the SNP. A leader who was unaware that the SNP had a constitution. A leader whose loyalty to the SNP’s talk of Scottish independence needs to be questioned.

          Settler Watch had not been idle during this period. We were recruiting activists and distributing posters, sponges and tubs of wallpaper paste. We acquired an old photocopier and had it repaired by a Brechin patriot. This was a self-contained, low-budget response to the concerns that the voters of North Angus had been expressing on their doorsteps. Our activists were told that they should not target individuals and that publicly-owned items like road-signs and telegraph-poles were ideal places to stick posters. For the most part our activists were disciplined and genuinely risked their reputations to pursue the goal of re-asserting Scotland’s sovereignty.

          During March and April our recruits were usually SNP Members who had been or were members of Siol-nan-gaidheal. An Aberdeen Branch of Siol-nan-Gaidheal had fallen out with the Central Belt leadership. In defiance of the leadership they had given their entire funds to Gaelic-medium education. Siol-nan-gaidheal is probably still making hollow boasts about this modest transaction. Andy McIntosh was one of these ex-Siol Members. He was atypical as a Settler Watch activist as he was not an SNP Member. Andy McIntosh was a former territorial army (imperial) soldier who was involved in the macho (but legal) world of gun clubs.

          In March 1993 Andy McIntosh told us he had a collection of letters written to the press about the potential problems for Scotland of a colonial settlement modelled on the Irish Plantation. In those far-off days there was a time-honoured tradition of publishing the names and addresses of anyone whose letter was printed in a newspaper. Settler Watch would change that. Andy McIntosh proposed and Settler Watch accepted that he would send out starter-packs of Settler Watch posters with a covering-letter. These packs invited potential sympathisers to copy and stick up Settler Watch posters.

          It was Andy McIntosh who introduced Sonja Cameron to Settler Watch. Sonja was a recent graduate of Aberdeen University, like her friend Lynn Conway. By May Andy McIntosh had lost interest in Settler Watch’s moderate and broad-based approach. However he lent his car to Sonja and Lynn and they went out on the 2nd May to break the law on fly-posting. The two young ladies were apprehended by officers of Grampian Police. They were charged with the misdemeanour of fly-posting.

          The case was called before Stonehaven Sherriff Court on September 10^th 1993. Much had happened in the intervening months. From April until the 23rd of July there had been a complete silence in the imperial media on the subject of Settler Watch. It is reasonable to assume that this press censorship was imposed by means of a ‘D’ notice to newspaper editors. Lynn had quietly resigned from her job to spare her employer any embarrassment; Sonja continued to work as a television presenter. Persons unknown had acquired Andy McIntosh’s starter-packs and re-directed them to people who were not potential Settler Watch sympathisers.

          Stonehaven Sherriff Court found both Sonja and Lynn guilty of fly-posting. Sonja was fined £50 and the unemployed Lynn was fined £30. This is where the story becomes a little strange and the power of imperial spin trumps rational thinking.

          The imperial press unleashed a diatribe of racist abuse on Sonja. Lynn was so completely forgotten that one newspaper editor referred to her as “the other woman”. Yet in reality it was Settler Watch Lynn who should have been the big story. In May of 1993 Lynn Conway worked as a full-time Research Assistant for a prominent North-East politician. When Lynn Conway was apprehended over Settler Watch posters she worked for Alec Salmond.

          Although Alec Salmond knew nothing about Lynn’s nocturnal activities it is strange that not one editor ever mentioned his name. If the imperial power had wished to end Alec Salmond’s political career in September 1993 they had everything they needed to do so. Instead they chose to end Sonja’s career as a newsreader. If Alec Salmond had been any kind of a threat to imperial control of the rich  Jockinese colony things would have been different.

          Alec Salmond went on to lead most of the Scottish National Party into the constitutional cul-de-sac of devolunion. Alec Salmond continues to get a good press in the empire’s latest project to split the pro-independence vote. Sic a parcel o rogues in a nation.  

What Really Brought the Greenwash Gang tae Glaesgae?

Mr. Johnson and his puppet-masters could have associated climate-failure with almost any of the cities in their control. Belfast and Derry were not considered but why pick on Glasgow? The detail that catches my attention is the sub-letting of Scotland’s sovereignty to the U.N. London has made an internationally witnessed claim to having complete and unquestioned mastery of the Scots and the land that once was once their’s.

Since our talk-a-good-independence representatives began their march into the cul-de-sac called devolunion we have:

had our representation at Wastemonster reduced;

had our legal system subjugated to English imperial law;

had a serious challenge to any claim that the 1707 Union did not surrender our sovereignty.

All Under One Banner and similar organisations have been doing a good job. It is not enough to stop the rot. Constitutional affairs cannot be entrusted to politicians.

What constitutional insult are the neighbours planning next? Charles III of Greater England is currently having his media profile air-brushed and enhanced. In 1993 we briefly held the initiative and they were confused. We cannot just react to their provocations or accept their manipulations. There can be no nation without leadership.

Can the Scots Really Understand the Evils of Imperialism?

 

The island of Jamaica has been portrayed to us as a tropical paradise. Happy, smiling black people are allowed to sing a chorus of “White folks been awful good to me.”;¹ where they have a role in this imperial fantasy.

Xamaica, the Land of Springs, became a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century. The native Tainos or Arawaks spoke the same language as the Tainos on Cuba and Hispaniola. Under Spanish Imperial Law it was forbidden to enslave the natives. As with many things in imperialism this was propaganda and the actual practice was very different. There are no written records of Jamaican Tainos being rounded up and shipped to Cuba and Hispaniola; that would have been illegal.

There may possibly be a written record of Jamaican Tainos risking their lives to try to warn the Maya on the mainland of the threat from imperialism. The story of a canoe voyage from Las Islas Palizadas, on Jamaica’s south coast to the Yucatan Peninsula is told in History of the Conquest of Mexico.²

By 1655 the Jamaican Tainos had been fully assimilated by imperialism. Their memory had a place in history but it was more easily accessible in the mythology of the new Jamaicans. Their language was no longer heard in the Land of Springs. “... the end of a lang sang.”³

Jamaica's coat-of-arms shows fanciful representations of two Tainos; mis-leading images enslaved by an artist's brush.

In 1655 Jamaica acquired a new owner; a benign, enlightened owner; if you believe the propaganda. The English took over from the Spanish. England and Greater England (Scotland and Ireland) were under the benign and benevolent dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell. Seeking to bring the benefits of English civilisation to the entire Spanish Empire, Cromwell sent a large military force to the West Indies. This expensive expedition heroically wrested Jamaica from the embrace of the wicked Catholics. In 1655 Jamaica entered the English family of nations; a thoroughly dysfunctional and unhappy family.

In 1657 Cromwell's man in Jamaica formally invited 'The Brethren of the Coast' to establish their version of free-trade in Port Royal. These unsavoury characters have a somewhat sketchy historical profile. They were pirates to the Spanish whose shipping they preyed upon. Their most famous leader, Henry Morgan, was described as being Welsh. In the English of Wessex (the West Country) 'wales' means foreign. The designation of Welsh is open to interpretation and the name of Morgan is not unknown in the Scottish province of Buchan. Piracy was a well-established trade in Buchan long before Cromwell's time.

The English preferred to describe their pirates as privateers and also as buccaneers. The origin of this latter term is uncertain. If the Buchan free-traders had compounded the name of their province of origin with their privateering trade they might well have called themselves buchaneers. Deliberately mis-pronouncing every language (especially their own) seems to be a symptom of the imperial disease. From buchaneer to buccaneer is a linguistically simple sound-change. The alternative explanation is more complex.

In 1707 the English state underwent a fundamental re-organisation when it formed a federal union with the state of Scotland; henceforth to be known as Great Britain. In Jamaica the English imperial flag was embellished with a few patches of blue to become the Brenglish imperial flag. On the mainland the Spanish robbed and enslaved the Native Americans. From Port Royal Scottish pirates under an arms-length English/Brenglish administration robbed and murdered the Spanish. If you look closely at the spectacular ruins that are left by empires you will find that they are stained with blood and cemented by despair.

The 1707 Brenglish imperial flag is constitutionally related to a state called Great Britain.

Concentration camps are generally thought to date from the 1860s. Their invention is credited either to the 'bad Spanish' empire in Cuba or to the benign, enlightened “Brutish Empire” ⁴, under great provocation, as a temporary measure, in Natal and Orange Free State, during the Boer War (1899-1902). Many Jamaicans believe that the first concentration camp was the island of Jamaica. At 100 miles by 50 miles it was also the largest.

The first African slaves in Jamaica were imported by the Spanish. Their descendants are the Maroons (from Cimarrones) of Jamaica's semi-desert interior. The English initially preferred to use people they described as bonded-servants to do the kind of ”Carry Go Bring Come”⁵ tasks that are beneath the dignity of imperialists. These people were from diverse backgrounds and anyone could volunteer for bonded-servitude which is also known as indentured-service. In reality bonded-servitude, a form of slavery ⁶, was used by deep-soothers to thin out the Celtic over-population of the north and west of England and other barbaric parts of 'ouwa islands'. They were really doing them a favour as they were incapable of supporting themselves; or so they said.

Many bonded-servants died on the passage to their new home on the Island of Springs. Once they arrived they were hard-working and cheap to keep. They had a bad habit of dying from tropical diseases; probably made more deadly by malnourishment and despair. By the end of their seven or eleven year bonds they were thoroughly acclimatised, addicted to rum and ready to join the pool of cheap labour in their new home. That was true for some but many had been promised that the bond-holder would pay for their passage home if they should survive their period of bonded-servitude. How convenient for the bond-holders if their servants should succumb to the effects of over-work, brutality and mal-nourishment shortly before the period of bondage was due to end. In this crucial detail the bonded-servants were in a worse position than the African slaves who were to replace them as the lowest strata of the English imperial class-system.

Although the use of Celtic slaves had many advantages in the building of England's tropical paradise, there were also many disadvantages. The high mortality rate was a serious drawback, many of them didn't live long enough to repay the cost of shipping. Wouldn't it be enlightened and inspired if we were to breed a race of servile people who had the meek and fatalistic qualities of the Celts combined with the psychological toughness and resistance to tropical diseases of West Africans?

Ideas of this type were not entirely good news for the Celts but they were certainly bad news for some of the peace-loving nations of West Africa. English domination of shipping and the West African trading-posts allowed them to control the supply of African slaves to their American colonies. Jamaica became a sorting-office for this lucrative trade. The Celts still had a place in the imperial plan. They became the plantation underseers who taught the Africans how to be productive members of an enlightened, christian empire. The Celts were still slaves (though one should not say so to their face) but they had now moved up one class in the imperial plan.

The task of turning the new recruits to the imperial plan into a productive and profitable work-force was complex. They had to be persuaded to give up their languages, cultural beliefs and sense of values. In return they were given a place in the civilised world of English-speaking imperialism; and a new name! Some Africans went along with 'cultural assimilation' while others resisted. The more humble and co-operative blacks tended to be considered ideal for onward shipping to other markets, including the American colonies. The selective-breeding programme in Jamaica, probably without realising it, was selecting for a rebellious, culturally-confident lower class of Jamaicans.

When, in 1776, a small group of trouble-makers temporarily withdrew the American colonies from the 'family of nations' the ever-patient mother-country still controlled all the shipping and access to foreign trade. There followed (until 1812) a period of benign and enlightened guidance to steer the American renegades back to the right course. The shipping of assimilated Africans from Jamaica continued for many years. At least 160,000 Africans were thus trans-shipped through Jamaica.⁷

The moral depravity inherent in this sad tale is difficult to evaluate; impossible to understand. The achievements of the Nazi regime in Greater Germany lasted for 5½ years. The imperial regimes in Jamaica lasted for 400 years; “400 years of the same philosophy”⁸. They have left a moral and cultural legacy that causes Jamaica to stand out among all the small nations of the world. Jamaican contributions to world music and track athletics are out of all proportion to the small size of the island's population.

The Celts, many of them Scots, who were caught up in this holocaust have contributed to the island's rich and restless heritage. Jamaica's flag is a saltire flag. Many Jamaicans have Scottish surnames. There are still communities on the island who see themselves as being of Scottish extraction⁹. Much of the power in the lyrics of Jamaican popular songs comes from their understanding of the evils of imperialism. Peter Tosh (Mackingtosh), Justin Hines (Innes), Bunny Wailer (Livingstone) and Prince Buster (Campbell) all make worthy attempts to describe and evaluate the imperial wasteland. The Honourable Marcus Garvey¹⁰, Jamaica's national hero, ranks alongside The Holy Prophet Mohammed in his contribution to shaping African cultural identity.

"My coat is Scottish, my name is Irish but I am an African." Marcus Mosiah Garvey 1887-1940

The problem the Scots need to overcome is that they are too close to the trees to see the wood. The empire that tortured and tormented 26-counties-Ireland for seven hundred years has broken and ignored the spirit and the letter of the 1707 Treaty of Union. In 1973 when Scotland, willingly, entered the European Union our legal system was not subordinate to a Brenglish High Court. There is no moral or legal reason why we should accept subjugation to English Law today.

The Empire-Loyalists who claim to be 'Unionists' will have a template for federalism; if they ever bother to read the 1707 Treaty. They could campaign in a positive way for the opening of The Scottish Exchequer; a provision of the Treaty. The oral propaganda that was the context for the signing of the 1707 Treaty is, in Scots Law, something they could bring before the courts. True Unionists, if they were serious, would be campaigning for the closure of the English Parliament and the, long-delayed, opening of the British Parliament, in York.

The talk-a-good-independence-at-election-time factions get a good press from the imperialists. They have set themselves up to repeat the history of the talk-a-good-socialism-at-election-time faction. If we are to have years to wait for the next step they should be years of planning, organising and hard work. The Americans, the Irish and the Jamaicans all gained their independence from the same evil empire. If you think it was easy you are not fit to live in a sovereign state.

REFERENCES

1 Harriet Beecher Stowe; Uncle Tom's Cabin;

2 Bernal Diaz del Castillo; History of the Conquest of Mexico; many translations; look for Yucatan Peninsula in the index

3 “That is the end of a lang sang”, was a contemporary comment on the 1707 Treaty of Union. I associate it with Fletcher of Saltoun but can find no reliable confirmation of this.

4 Stokely Carmicheal; attribution from Mark Kurlansky; Nonviolence 25 Lessons from ...; Random House; 2006; p. 169

5 Justin Hines (aka Justin Hinds); Carry Go Bring Come; Island Records; 196?

6 Eric E. Williams; Capitalism and Slavery; 1944

7 C. E. Long manuscripts; official records of human-trafficking into and out of Jamaica from 1702 to 1787; published by, Jamaica Family Search

8 Peter Tosh; 400 Years; Blue Mountain Music Ltd;

9 Ian Thomson; The Dead Yard;

10 Stanley Nelson; Look for me in the Whirlwind; Firelight Media; U.S.A. 2000

Amy Jacques Garvey; Garvey and Garveyism; 1935

Féderico García Lorca; The King of Harlem (Poet in New York); many translations; first published in 1940 as El Rey de Harlem

Barriers in the Sea

I find it strange that the media are discussing the idea of a customs barrier in the Irish Sea as though it was something new and completely unprecedented. Our partner in the 1707 Union, the Parliament of England, has operated a customs barrier in the North Sea and the North Atlantic for many years. I am referring to the customs barrier that separates Scotland from an area known as the United Kingdom Continental Shelf.

Every worker or piece of equipment that makes the journey from Scotland to an oilfield installation off our coast, crosses this customs barrier at the 12-mile-limit. Workers carry passports and equipment clears customs as it leaves (or enters) Scotland.

Our partner in union traded away the “expendable” fishing grounds but they are keen to retain control over the oilfields. Their misuse of the term ‘United Kingdom’ has become so routine that it is perceived as being an ancient usage. Yet it has only become fashionable in the past half-century. The name of the 1707 Union as a federal state was and is Great Britain. It is a state composed of two nations and the Duchy of Cornwall. Wales was incorporated into England by military conquest a long time ago.

England’s attempts to subdue and incorporate the entire island of Ireland (Lesser Britain to geographers) have proved to be a deferred success. These imperial adventures gave rise to the 1801 Union and the name of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. This was abbreviated to ‘Great Britain’ or ‘Britain’ until the 1970s. The 1801 Union was a fraud entered into by the ‘Parliament of England’ and a colonial ‘Parliament of Ireland’. The treaty is drafted so as to be in clear breach of the 1707 Union which constituted a single Parliament of Great Britain.

The 1707 Union Flag

If we are to proceed towards a meaningful and stable independence we will need to know who we are negotiating with. We will need to know who the competent parties to the negotiations are. We must try to set out our stall so as to make the terms and conditions that end the 1707 Union difficult for our former partner to wilfully ignore or imaginatively misrepresent.

If we stick to the two equal states model of the 1707 Union things will be complex enough. If we admit any little Englander fantasies such as the ‘Rest of the United Kingdom’ we could open the door to a Welsh solution. The Old English word ‘wales’ means ‘foreigner’. If Scotland shoulders an equitable and agreed proportion of the debts of Great Britain we would be taking a first shaky step towards a more dignified and adult future.

If Scotland takes on a fair share of Great Britain’s debts and liabilities we underline our moral and legal claim on the assets and equity of Great Britain. This seems to me to be essential if we truly aspire to take on the tricky business of recovering from the Darien Disaster. By claiming stewardship of the Parthenon Stones, The Malvinas, Gibraltar and Albania’s gold we would announce to the world that we are serious.

The European Union Flag in October 2019

It is to be hoped that the continuing state of England would see the wisdom in returning to us the Book of Deer, the Burghead Bull and the Cutty Sark. However that would be up to them. If they really wanted to make a pacific gesture there are Berwick and Cumberland to consider. They might offer to take the old nuclear submarines away from Rosyth; but I’m not holding my breath about that.

Another approach to our resumption of all the outward trappings of sovereignty would be to start at the top. If we revoked the 1603 Union of the Crowns the constitutional muddy water becomes much clearer. We could then lay claim to the Koh-i-Noor diamonds. The fake coronation stone would, of course, be returned to us under a treaty obligation from auld lang syne. If our former partner was being level-headed and well-intentioned they might also return the Bishop’s Chair that was stolen from Scone Palace. But I’m not holding my breath about that.

Fattie & The Bairn; What will we learn from past mistakes?

In 1976 Alex Harvey sang about The Boston Tea Party. There was a clear reference to our constitutional aspirations. The 7:84 Theatre Company were looking at our history from our own perspective. Jack Bruce, the creative talent in Cream, was back hame in his ain countrie. There was an air of expectation. To be of lasting value the arts must reflect experience and challenge the silent majority.

In the grubby world of politics Willie Wolfe and Gordon Wilson were given a rough ride by the alien press; as you would expect. They seem to have been genuine leaders of an independence movement that was expected by many to achieve much.

In Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari the great travel writer quotes an imperial auxiliary called Uncle V.S.: “Empires do not lie they simply elide”, or words to that effect. It was during the sixties and seventies that the Brenglish Empire elided our oilfields out of the territorial and constitutional jurisdiction that we call Scotland. This loss of sovereignty does not feature in the stunted and deformed discourse that is tolerated by our imperial masters.

When artistic endeavour is over-shadowed by imperial brutality the stories cannot be told in an easily accessible format. Many critics have compared the stories of The New Testament with the stories in Josephus’ The Jewish War. They are accounts of the same historical period, the same places, the same people. The accounts were written in a totalitarian world that had no tolerance for dissent. They are great literature but the intersection of The New Testament and The Jewish War is an empty set. The two accounts seem, on the face of it, to have beamed down from different star-ships.

If any keen young historians wish to test my hypothesis on imperial censorship, they might care to research a third commentator on the same period. Tacitus wrote an account of a ‘Swordsman’ who suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a ‘Farmer’. The characters are better known as Calgacus and Agricola. To a totalitarian creed of a master-race it is inadmissible that a farmer should defeat a swordsman. They were clearly of different social classes. Even if it did happen, a responsible writer would elide the names so as to restore order and discipline to the world.

Just suppose, o ye historians of this poor little colony, that Tacitus was writing an allegory, in a way that would be understood by his contemporaries but would not be rewarded by a trip to the lion’s den. Just suppose that the events in Agricola took place on the eastern, and not the western, edge of the empire. Just consider that there are clear hints of the Emperor Vespasian, the hero of Josephus, in Tacitus’ Agricola. Can the battlefield for Mons Graupius be located by reference to The Jewish War?

I can think of only two men of the twentieth century who may have had something of the prophet in them. I mean no disrespect to The Last Messenger, may God grant him peace. One of the voices of the twentieth century whose honour has increased with hindsight is Marcus Garvey. Garvey famously said: “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.”

What should these words mean to the Scots? Our history begins with the great stone monuments of Orkney. Yet the strange anomaly of Mons Graupius, a battle without a battlefield, is used by our enemies to skew the whole historical perspective. If you question Tacitus you might go on to question Bede. We should be trying to match the written sources to the archaeological record. Our overseers will continue, for as long as we permit them, to tell us of defeat, dependence and devolunion.

The other great voice of the twentieth century said: “The Revolution winnae faa intil yer haan like a ripe aipull. Yi mun mak it haapen!” Though to be fair to Che Guevara he said it in Spanish. Che’s revolutionary adventures were a bit of a catalogue of well-intentioned fiascos. The exception was Fidel and Raul Castro’s well-publicised and well-financed Cuban Revolution.

© quotefancy

The importance of Che Guevara’s example for us is his clarity of vision. Despite his privileged background he won the internal struggle within his own mind before moving on to influence others. Che took the personal responsibility for plucking his own apple from the tree of knowledge. “Nothing on airth enduris bot fame”, as they say in Inverurie.

In 1707 we retained control of all the important powers, levers and structures of a nation-state. The Kirk included social security, popular entertainment and much more. Our legal system included enforcement of law and the collection of taxes. The Scottish Exchequer exists in constitutional law, though it was illegally elided out of the deal by the Brenglish on both sides of the border. The education system in 1707 even had a couple of its own M.P.s. It regulated professions and put knowledge to work to defend our customs and ideals.

By contrast the smoke and the mirrors of devolunion are supported by all the imperialists, from raging to closet; the imperialists who suck the soul from our nation. When Norway voted for independence from the Swedish Empire it was a very poor country. What it had was a belief in itself and a clear vision of what constitutes a self-reliant community. There was no half-baked scheme to entrust their gold reserves to the Swedes. There was no time-share monarch, to be the servant of two masters. The Norwegians voted for a known constitution and then put in the hard work and sacrifice that builds a nation.

When the history of our times is considered by a generation as yet unborn they may well puzzle over Brexit. The sudden out-pouring of well-financed and carefully-polished lies must surely have had some purpose? Might it have been that the imperialists feared that bad-european-regulations widnae thole the protestant succession? The European courts would have been unlikely to rubber-stamp the blatant anti-Catholicism at the heart of the Brenglish monarchy. Have they sacrificed the economic security of the many over the aristocratic obsession with a family of their choice being closer to God than the rest of us? These ideas have no place in the constitution of Europe’s oldest nation-state. Just read the written exert from our oral constitution that is entitled: The Declaration of Arbroath.

Our opportunity to start a new verse of an auld sang canna be far awa. “Bigg thy hoose upon a rock.” We need to advertise our nation’s requirement for a monarch; a King, Quine or other gender of Scots.

“Even a great nation may fall, but only a contemptible one can be destroyed”; Staniswuf Stushits.

Bibliography

Josephus; The Jewish War; 1981; Penguin, London.

Linton, Abbot; The Declaration of Arbroath; 1320; Arbroath.

Sax, Jamie (ed); The Holy Bible; 160-;

Tacitus; Agricola;

Theroux, Paul; Dark Star Safari;

Zamoyski, Adam; Poland, a history;

Fattie-Fattie's Legacy

The 6th of December 2021 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Irish Free State. What will we do to commemorate this constitutionally important moment in history?
With a little more self-confidence we might embark on a programme to print a commemorative postage stamp. There would be little point in asking the Brenglish Imperial Post Office to sell them. We could of course order the Postal Service of Scotland to do so. If we had the self-confidence, leadership and constitutional savvy that goes with being a nation.
Some readers may wonder what the Irish Free State is and why it should matter to Scotland. The 26 counties (minus Sovereign Base Areas) of the Irish Free State together with the six (or 41/2), counties of northern Ireland are England's constitutional partner in the 1801 Union of Parliaments. This is the union that brought about the 1801 version of the Brenglish Imperial Flag. This is the union that London wishes to impose on Scotland.

The Irish Free State flag (London version)

The existence (or non-existence) of this particular union is important to Scotland. We cannot leave the 1801 union; simply because we never joined it. It is purely and constitutionally a union between the Parliament of Ireland and the Parliament of England. It's relationship to the Irish Free State is a precedent for us to learn from.
The Scottish Royal Family were involved in the 1603 Union of the Crowns. The Stuarts gave up a full-time (and relatively secure) job in favour of a time-share arrangement; which ended badly for them.
The Scottish Parliament in 1706 negotiated the union that created Great Britain; the 1707 union. As the Scottish Parliament was never sovereign, they could not have surrendered our sovereignty in so doing. It was under the name of Great Britain (and Northern Ireland) that the London Empire negotiated Scotland's entry into the (European) Common Market. That they are now negotiating to leave the European Union under another name might just be, "One of these things old boy".
The complexity of all these various unions has come about through the devious or perfidious nature of imperialism (a close cousin to totalitarianism). Under Salmondism the Scots put much energy, finance and faith into exploring just one of the constitutional cul-de-sacs of imperialism.
The importance of the Irish Free State to Scotland is partly in the constitutional precedents. It also gives us a real-world insight into the problems that lie before us. I cannot hope to educate you on these important legal niceties by myself. You have to want to learn.
The constitutional responsibility for teaching you rests with the empty-minded-banditti who draw wages from the Scottish Education Department. Fattie-Fattie's Niece can only get good press coverage if she continues to explore constitutional cul-de -sacs.

"Even a great nation may fall, but only a contemptible one can be destroyed." 

Staniswuf Stushits

Bibliography

Coogan, Tim Pat; Micheal Collins; 1990; Random House, London.

Eccles, Clancy; Fattie Fattie; 1969; New Town Sound, Kingston, Ja.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRXMEhhH2GQ