Another milestone.
This
week the Flag in the Wind hits the 400th Issue,
and I am reprinting the first two items from the first
issue, 9th June 2000. We never did get around
to putting the paper itself on the Internet, but we have
managed to cross fertilise between the Flag and the SI a bit
more.
The
achievement of 400 issues is due to the Compilers, and first
and foremost to Peter D Wright, who was an enthusiastic
supporter when the idea was first mooted, and who still
contributes the Cultural Flag every week. Thanks are due to
Allison Hunter, who did a stint until other Nationalist
duties took precedence, and to Richard Thomson, Ian Goldie
and Donald Bain all giving their time, expertise and
effort. Putting the Flag on the Web was done for the first
four years by Alastair McIntyre, and when he moved to Canada
this was taken over by Tricia Wallace; this job is done
every week without fail, and our heartfelt thanks to both.
The Flag in the Wind – 9th June 2000.
MAY 1999 AND ALL THAT
It would be too banal to say that in Scotland last year the
earth moved. However the creaking monolithic British State
did move, and Scotland had its first ever democratic
elections.
This has transformed Scottish politics from once a month
Westminster Questions, into daily discussions and debate and
has put a constant focus on to Scottish problems never
before experienced.
The Scots Independent is a monthly newspaper and although it
has been at various times in its long life a weekly we do
not have the resources at present to go down that road. The
very nature of a monthly means that we have been unable to
comment on political events as promptly as we might have
wished. A case in point was the Hamilton By Election which
was called by the Labour Party within three weeks. Their
amazing speed in calling this was justified as they came
within a whisker of losing it. Nevertheless it was over for
the Scots Independent between issues.
Very shortly the Scots Independent itself will be going on
the Internet but The Flag in the Wind on a weekly basis will
enable us to act and react to issues on an ongoing basis.
The Flag in the Wind is here to stay.
THE "SETTLED WILL?"
Anent
the above; I and every Nationalist I know (and a good many
with a small n as well) are heartily sick of hearing the
phrase "The settled will of the Scottish people" At the
recent SNP Conference in Perth I went to a nearby restaurant
for lunch. When I asked what the soup of the day was I was
told "Tomato". "All right " I said "I will have the tomato -
but it is not my settled will". (The waitress gazed at me
uncomprehendingly).
I wanted a plate of soup. I did not particularly want Tomato
Soup but it was Tomato Soup or no soup. I did not want a
devolved Parliament, but it was a devolved Parliament or no
Parliament.
Ergo---.
Alex Ewing -
Nationalist
Alex
Ewing died on Tuesday 29th January 2008.
Alex Ewing was one of the most extraordinary Scots of our
time and his death will be greeted with dismay and deep
sorrow by his huge circle of friends, not only in politics
but also in many other spheres including journalism and show
business.
He loved Scotland with a deep passion that owed nothing to
economics, or ideology or personal advancement.
For him independence was so obvious a goal that any argument
to the contrary was simply absurd. And no-one could ever
match Alex in exposing the absurd, with a devastating and
totally spontaneous sense of humour that frequently left
listeners helpless with laughter.
Alex was a larger-than-life person. Few who met him would
forget him. With his passing we can expect large numbers of
anecdotes, some even true,to be recalled. As we mourn him
let us remember the magic times we enjoyed in his company.
Donald Bain
During the time I have been editing the Scots Independent,
Alex faithfully supplied the paper with brilliant incisive
political cartoons.
The March Scots Independent will have an obituary.
Jim Lynch
SNP Budget clears first hurdle.
While very pleased that the SNP Budget has cleared the first
hurdle, it is depressing that the Lab/Lib coalition voted
against it. It does not appear that they did so with any
kind of positive attitude, for instance the Liberals did not
submit any amendments at all; perhaps they did not
understand anything.
According
to Calum Cashley’s blog, Labour, at the Finance Committee,
submitted the following deductions; I have no knowledge
what they wanted to spend the money on but their
recommendations found no takers. Looks as if they were
changes for the sake of changes.
£60 million from the Capital Works Budget
£10 million from Routine and Winter Maintenance
£10 million from Police Support Services
£5 million from Police Information and Communications
£75 million from Water Support for Borrowing (this fund
is for improving water supplies)
£12.5 million from the Health Information Budget
£20 million from the former Efficiency and Reform Fund
(that's right - a fund that no longer exists, but they
want £20 million out of it)
£33 million from the Local Government Resource Grants
That's £245.5 million in cuts Labour wanted to make.
There is still a lot of fuss about police numbers; so far no
comment has been made about the fact that the SNP Budget
process was severely damaged by Labour Liberal and Tory all
ganging up to force through £500 million for the Edinburgh
Tram Project. The SNP had a manifesto commitment to stop
this project, but had to concede; the alternative would have
been a vote of no confidence right at the very beginning of
the Parliament, not a good way to start. At the end of the
day, £500 million would have paid a lot of polis, but just
wait until you hear the opposition saying this was another
broken promise.
Friendly advice.
Looking at the media in this past week alone, the following
items on Defence have emerged:
Six SAS members have been charged with fraud and will face a
court martial in February; it is the first time personnel
from the Regiment have faced public prosecution for such a
serious criminal offence as conspiracy to defraud.
Civil servants in Whitehall have been banned from taking
laptops from their offices; apparently over 600 laptops and
PCs have been stolen since 1998.
The
Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons is gravely
concerned at the strains placed on the armed services after
running at full stretch in Afghanistan and Iraq; they are
concerned about the number of experienced officers leaving
the Army due to underfunding, overstretch and equipment
shortages. Troops were not getting enough rest time, and
were regularly getting underpaid and overpaid.. The
Committee also expressed concern at the fact that the costs
for the Astute submarine and Type 45 destroyer have risen by
£500 million since March 2006, and that the bill for the new
Nimrod MR44 was also increasing.
Two thirds of Royal Marine 45 Commando are living in sub
standard accommodation at Arbroath; this is the unit that
was requested by American President George Bush to police
the Afghanistan/Pakistan border because of their skill in
mountain and Arctic warfare. Now back in Scotland they are
living in hovels.
On Christmas Eve a planeload of soldiers returning from Iraq
was diverted to Prestwick, due to bad weather; they should
landed at an airfield in England, which ironically was clear
when they flew over it. No one at Prestwick was aware of
their arrival and there were no arrangements to get them
home.
Around the same time another planeload of soldiers returning
from Iraq had to strip off on the tarmac in freezing weather
to don civilian clothes, as someone said they could not
enter the terminal in uniform.
The point of the above items is that the part time Secretary
of Defence, Des Browne has stated publicly that he will not
take lessons on Defence from Nicola Sturgeon SNP Deputy
First Minister and MSP for Govan. Nicola had said that if
there was to be a delay in starting on the two massive
aircraft carriers, proposed for Govan, then a lot of
shipbuilding workers would be unemployed, would look
elsewhere, and the whole project could be lost. She also
asked why 6 support tankers, which were “grey” ships, ie
classed as military ships and thus only to be built in
British yards, had been declassified and put out to tender
in the European Union. This will mean that Scotland will
again lose out on shipbuilding, probably to Poland; we have
already lost out on a CalMac ferry due to these rules. It
has always seemed peculiar to me that our Westminster
Government is so reluctant to defend jobs in Scotland, and
adhering to European rules that all the other countries
wangle their way around, doubly peculiar when we consider
how devoted they are to “red lines”.
It would seem from all the above that Des Browne is making a
godawful mess in his stewardship of the Ministry of Defence,
and needs to take lessons from someone.
Other part time pursuits.
In his other part time job, Mr Browne is Secretary of State
for Scotland, and in his interview for the Politics Show on
BBC Scotland last Sunday, he effortlessly (?) metamorphosed
from Defence to his other job, and produced yet a further
indication of his powers that we were hitherto not privy to.
When
asked questions about the Electoral Commission and the Wendy
Alexander issue in particular he stated that there would be
no prosecution. This was news to us, and apparently to Glen
Campbell, the interviewer, as well. Here was the man with
two hats, suddenly revealing a third one underneath, as the
judge of what does or does not constitute a breach of the
law. In another life, Mr Browne was a solicitor, so we
cannot accuse him of not knowing the law, so it would seem
that he has the authority to issue instructions to the
Electoral Commission. We think that might merit a question
in both Parliaments.
I almost forgot, he does have another post; he attended a
meeting of the three Unionist parties in Westminster,
discussing how to dish the SNP, under the guise of a
Constitutional Commission, but apparently he was there as a
Scottish MP, and not as the Secretary of State for Scotland,
or Secretary of State for Defence or Electoral Commission
judge. Strange how he can split himself into a succession
of Chinese walls, but neither he nor his colleagues in
Westminster and Edinburgh can recognise that situation with
Alex Salmond? (See Synopsis)
And Aviemore pursuits
Very interesting article in the Sunday Herald entitled “Get
Carter”; this was the title of a 1971 gangster film starring
Michael Caine. The article was about Gordon Brown’s new
spin doctor, Stephen Carter, and whether he can pull him out
of the doldrums.
In
Scotland, Labour are using a different scenario; their war
cry is “Get Salmond”, not as a saviour, obviously, but to
destroy him and the Scottish Government. The latest episode
is based on the Aviemore non-issue; the development plan for
Aviemore Highland Resort was in danger of being scrapped,
due to a glitch somewhere in the planning application. The First
Minister, responding to requests from Labour MSP Rhoda
Grant, Tory MSP Mary Scanlan, SNP MSP Fergus Ewing and
Liberal MP Danny Alexander, spoke to Mike Russell,
Environment Minister, and to the planning authorities, and
the problem was identified and resolved.
There is now a row, orchestrated by Labour, that the First
Minister interfered because the developer, Donald MacDonald,
had donated £30,000 to the SNP in May. The issue got the
front page of the Sunday Herald and a slot on the Politics
Show on BBC Scotland. The matter is clear cut and Mike
Russell, Environment Minister was on the Politics Show
pointing out that he did speak to the objector, the Scottish
Environmental Protection Agency, but that he spoke to them
often and that it was his job to speak to them; his
contention was that if he had not acted then the project
would have been cancelled and hundreds of jobs lost.
Labour, of course are still bitterly resentful of losing
the election, and of how successful the SNP are in
government. The last Labour Executive (they would have
liked to call themselves a government but were feart) worked
on Jack McConnell’s pledge that he “Would do less, better”
(they got that half right) and hate to see things going well
for Scotland.
One disappointing aspect of this affair was that the BBC
showed the same clip making the allegations on the Sunday
evening news, but did not include Mike Russell’s rebuttal, a
clear breach of impartiality. It is also evident that the
Labour move is an attempt to take the spotlight off Wendy
Alexander. (See Synopsis)
Clamjamfry Donnie MacNeill
To him that hath
So, Anthony Lytton Blair, star of Fettes Academy drama
class, Ugly Rumour and former Prime Minister impersonator,
has landed himself a ‘nice little earner’. He is to receive
£1million a year for being a part-time ‘adviser’ to an
American bank that has made a very nice living out of the
Iraq war, which he was instrumental in starting. Some people
might say that he is entitled to earn some brass, I mean, he
only gets £64,000 a year pension. Not at all, say I, there’s
more than enough brass in his neck to last him a lifetime!!
Let
there be light
According to the proponents of nuclear power, because the
Scottish Government has decreed that there will be no more
nuclear power stations built in Scotland, the lights will go
out all over Scotland (except Gigha!) in a few years.
Rubbish! There will be enough of a glow from the piles of
nuclear waste we have accumulated over the years to light up
the whole of Scotland!
There is far too much concentration on the means of
production of energy and not enough on its conservation. For
instance, windows that are being produced today are nine
times more efficient than those which were fitted in houses
in the 1960s. Walls and roofs are, similarly, more efficient
than their older counterparts.
If the money that will be spent on new nuclear power
stations was to be spent on making our buildings
energy-efficient, then the planet would be the better for
it, as would our grandchildren.
Bang, Bang, You’re Dead!
What are we to make of the protests that the army is
misleading young people in an attempt to fill up the rapidly
emptying ranks? I don’t know about you, but the graphic
scenes we witness on out television sets these days from all
around the globe leave me in no doubt that the army is not a
‘Butlin’s with camouflage coats’! What do they want, labels
on guns saying ‘shooting kills’? They write the same thing
on cigarette packets, but who pays a blind bit of notice?!
Is
it not time that the proverbial penny dropped onto the heads
of the ‘top brass’? There are 7,500 British troops in Iraq
(they should never have been there in the first place, but
that’s another story) but there are 10,000 ex-British troops
acting as private armies for companies who are exploiting
the misery of the Iraqis. These mercenaries are doing this
job because they are paid many times more than the
‘regulars’ for putting their lives at risk!
It is telling that none of our Westminster politicians (nor
White House Hawks) have seen fit to put their sons or
daughters into harm’s way in the Middle East or Afghanistan,
by allowing them to enlist in the armed forces. (Bush senior
made sure that Bush junior was well out of Vietnam’s way by
putting him in the National Guard.) Perhaps if they had, the
decisions taken to involve their respective countries in
no-win war situations would never have been made.
Popping the question
It appears that some thirty years ago, the Callaghan
government pulled back from holding a referendum offering
the Scots a chance to have their say on independence. The
reason given was that it would offer the SNP too much of a
platform in the limelight and a chance to put across a
‘glamorous, having-it-both-ways picture’ to the voters. It
would also have been unfair, so the thinking went, not to
give the English their say in the break-up of the Union.
The motivation for it being considered in the first place
was that it would give the Labour party the opportunity to
meet the growing SNP challenge head-on and put an end to the
ceaseless carping of the ungrateful Scots. Sadly, the SNP
did the job for them in 1979!
Fast forward 30 years and the Labour government in
Westminster now doesn’t want to ‘meet the SNP head-on’ by
supporting a referendum to ask the same question. The
difference is, of course, that the SNP will be framing the
question this time around and unlike the last time, the
Scottish people are not likely to defeat it. The English, if
asked, would probably bid us ‘good riddance’ or ‘God speed’,
depending on which part of England they came from.
Consequently, the opportunity will not arise to ‘kill the
SNP stone dead’ – despite the prophesy of my old Port Ellen
primary school chum, George Robertson - and the modern day
SNP, having learned from the mistakes of history, is not
going to self-destruct this time around, are we chaps?!
One Good Turn
Memo to Stewart Maxwell: If your ‘sat-nav’ has given you bum
information and you realise you are heading up a cul-de-sac,
tell the passengers then turn around and find an alternative
route. People appreciate that the original information given
at the start of a journey is not always right and, whilst
U-turns are against the law if carried out on motorways,
they are perfectly acceptable in dead end streets – provided
you check the rear view mirror first!
As a footnote to the Sport Scotland debacle, a friend of
mine, fairly well connected in the Scottish Labour Party and
even more closely connected with Sport Scotland, told me
before the May election, that the SNP manifesto commitment
to scrap it was probably the right decision, even though it
meant he would be looking for a new job!
The
personal details of 14,223 people in
Northern Ireland have been lost, 37,546
in Wales, 459,778 and 34,667 from
elsewhere were lost, sparking top level
security fears about personal and
operational security.
David
Thompson said:
Professor
Helm, who has helped shape energy policy
for the past decade, confirmed that
"There never has been and never will be
a nuclear power programme that is
totally dependent on the market." Helm
also criticised the "fig-leaf" approach
the UK Ministers had taken, and urged
the Government to take a long-term
approach.
Commenting
on the report Alasdair Allan said;
Under
Labour, and with the help of the Liberal
Democrats, Council Tax in Scotland
increased by 60% since 1997. Dundee City
Council’s regular increases had given
Dundee one of the highest levels in
Scotland.
"Des
Browne appears to have blundered not
once but twice
"Malcolm
Rifkind has cut straight to the heart of
Conservatism by pointing to the
Commission as a threat to the Union..jpg)
The
overall winner was the Countryside
Alliance, followed by the Stop the War
Coalition.