Yet another new blog

This is going to be a rant. For me, the worst part of Brexit is it's b$ggering up my writing style. Every piece I want to blog starts the same way: What the f$ck!  We're in the hands of a bunch of thick, lying Tory b$st$rds and there doesn't seem right now to be any way to get away from them. If Brexit has done nothing else, it has reduced my opinion of the British electorate. Not the Scottish electorate, note: those of us in Scotland had a real ding-dong in 214 but we learned a lot, whatever way we voted in the Scottish independence referendum, and we're not likely to crawl back into our wee corner and keep quiet. As we used to say as weans: Make me! It doesn't matter to me that Treeza jets up to Bridge of Weir (very handy for Glasgow International Airport, so she can jet right back out again for her next engagement). It doesn't matter that the bampot owner of INEOS is threatening to leave Scotland. Go for it, big man - we've sussed it: you need u...

I watched Pointless and left the telly on while I was reading my emails. On came the BBC's 'national and international news.' We had an item about 100 refugees trying to cross the English Channel on small boats. 100. Not all at once. Over the past few weeks. Compared to the vast numbers of people trying to gain entry to Greece, Italy and Malta, not to mention Turkey and Lebanon, this is not a huge figure. But why is this matter suddenly of interest now? Did this happen in the past? Or is it new? We'll never know. There's no analysis. This is the BBC, so we just get pictures that the gullible can tut over. Then a 'correspondent' announced that the USA was the UK's largest market. This is nonsense, of course. Anyone who knows anything about the EU knows that's where the UK's market lies. The UK sells twice as much to the EU as it does to the USA. Is the suggestion that the UK could sell more to the USA to make up for losing markets in the EU? A...

I worry about Mhairi Black. Don't get me wrong. Although I'm not SNP, I respect the efforts the SNP have made to involve women in politics. I'm a big fan of Jeanne Freeman at Holyrood and Joanna Cherry at Westminster. I wish the Scottish Greens could recruit so many talented women. Especially younger women.   But I wonder how long the political system can hold on to people like Mhairi Black. Watching her on her feet in a Westminster committee, I began to wonder how much it would take before she got fed with all the flim-flam: all MP colleagues have to be called Honorable Members and you can't accuse them of voicing an untruth - even if they are obviously out and out liars - and the proceedings have to come to a halt while we sort out what she has called one of them, so no business is done. I can see exactly what's happening. It no doubt happened when Keir Hardie was elected in 1892... and still went on when Nye Bevin was elected on 1928. West...

Well, would you adamandeve it? Amber Rudd, the one-time Home Secretary who took the fall for her boss - Teresa May, in case you've forgotten - was hardly back in post in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions before she was mouthing off about the UN report on poverty in the UK. She condemned the report: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/19/amber-rudd-un-poverty-report-return-frontline-politics  Her view: << Amber Rudd  has launched an attack on a UN report about the state of poverty in Britain in her first  Commons  appearance as work and pensions secretary. In her new role as head of the department that oversees UK welfare policy, Ms Rudd said the language used by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights was “wholly inappropriate” and “discredited a lot of what he was saying”.>> Well, she would say that, wouldn't she?  I believe she also asked who the Rapporteur is. Clearly, nobo...

When I went to Glasgow University 52 years ago from my comprehensive school in a scheme in the People's Republic of Glasgow (and I'll fight anybody who dares to suggest Crookston Castle was a 'bog-standard comprehensive'), it was still fairly unusual for state-educated young people to go on to higher education. I remember wee bits of matriculation day even now. I was with two other girls from my school and we'd no idea what we were meant to do. At one point, I found myself waiting to sign some sort of register, which involved giving my father's occupation. I briefly wondered what his occupation had to do with the university - or me, for that matter - and why my mother's occupation wasn't requested, and then I gave myself a mental shake and wrote: 'shipyard fitter.' Only then did I notice all the earlier entries in the register seemed to be made up of words like 'lawyer', 'doctor' and 'engineer.'  But, just as should be...

We called him Pop. He was what is now called 'a career soldier' but the truth is he enlisted in the army in the 1890s because he was poor. He boxed for his regiment. He mentioned serving in India and Ireland and Gallipoli, but he didn't really talk about his war experiences. Like a lot of men, I suspect, he just wanted to put it all behind him. So I don't know what he did in India, except that one time on a troopship, a fakir put a lot of men under hypnosis and got them to take their clothes off. This is the only photo I have of him, in Trafalgar Square: The woman on the right is my grandmother. The other woman seems to have been her friend. We were told they were in London for the Armistice in 1918 but I can't be sure. I don't know what granny did in World War 1 either. Some sort of nursing maybe? Pop hated the British state. He was a Socialist. He reserved his special contempt for the Conservative Party and the 'chinless wonders' of the aristoc...

And I don't mean Scotland.  We do a lot of things really well in Scotland: our NHS is doing better than elsewhere in the UK, our teachers do their best by our children, the infrastructure of the country is improving - and all this despite being kept chronically short of cash and forced down a road called austerity that we didn't vote for.  Of course, some of you will disagree with me. After all, you can see that we are fed daily bulletins by the media depicting us as hopeless and our elected government as useless. For example, on Friday the BBC Scotland website fed us the line that:  <<The delayed Aberdeen bypass could cost its builders "hundreds of millions" of pounds more than the contract signed with the Scottish government, it has been claimed.>> This is presented as a fact. The headline doesn't mention that this is a claim by a Labour MSP and his claim is not substantiated by anything even remotely resembling evidence.   It's as if t...

I was very fond of the Royle Family. Great acting. I loved Sue Johnson, Ricky Tomlinson and especially Caroline Ahern. They reminded me a lot of my own not-so-royal family. For example, they featured my mother's secret chocolate biscuit stash (in the kitchen, up beside the water heater). The episode I will never forget was Denise (Caroline Ahern) cooking Christmas dinner 'with a twist', the twist being she'd forgotten to defrost the turkey. The Royal Family? Meh. Not so much. Certainly not when they insist on turning up to state events looking like the cast of some Ruritanian satire. Not that the Windsor family are in any way a joke. You only have to look at how well they've done financially over the last 60 years to see 'the firm' (as they call themselves apparently) still shows a large element of native cunning, if not intelligence. Plus they have this ability to breed. The Windsors must now be as numerous as Queen Victoria's lot.  Princ...

Slavery was never mentioned in my education in Glasgow, except as something that happened way out there in Africa and the USA. We knew there were streets in Glasgow named after plantation owners in the Caribbean: Oswald Street, Buchanan Street and the rest. I knew because someone told me that the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art was lodged in what had been a townhouse built by a rich Scottish merchant who traded with the USA. We knew the Merchant City (if anyone talked about it at all - it was a pretty run down part of Glasgow till the 1990s) was build on trade with the USA and the Caribbean. But trade in what? Sugar and cotton figured. People? No. It has taken us a long time in Scotland to face up to our past. My first inkling of what had happened back then in the 18th century came from a novel by James Robertson: Joseph Knight. The novel described in great - and sometimes horrible detail - the slave plantations of the Caribbean, often owned by Scottish men who had been on the wrong...

Arron Banks, who bankrolled the Brexit Leave campaign and is now under police investigation for election fraud, told C4 their news service was responsible for the fake news in the UK media. Oddly enough, some of us think C4 News have the only reporters likely to dish up a modicum of genuine enquiry on a daily basis. The people some of us think are responsible for producing fake news in the UK are mainly in the BBC, where reporters seem to be unable to produce a question that goes deeper than 'How are you today, Mr Farage?' What right has Arron Banks got to intervene - I almost wrote interfere - in an election in the UK? None at all. He's just a voter, like the rest of us. But he has money. A lot of money and lots of political and media connections who like his money. Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Brexit for me is that the opposition parties go on acting as if the political situation is normal and nothing has changed. They're all still playing by Queensber...