Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
They're almost in the septic tank now.
Will you vote for independence?
- Thread starter ska invita
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danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
I'm at the inlaws on my mobile phone, and for some reason the Bissett link won't work. What does it say? "Ethnic cleansing"? What's that about?
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
whatm the Bella Caledonia link doesnt work? :/
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
‘Ethnic’ Cleanse
By bellacaledonia on April 16, 2014 • ( 44 )
By Alan Bissett
According to the Herald journalist David Torrance he is an ‘ethnic nationalist’. To the composer James Macmillan he is a ‘Blood Scot nationalist’ and ‘motivated by hate’. To the Labour blogger Ian Smart he is ‘anti-English’ and ‘a nasty piece of work’. To The Telegraph’s Iain Martin he is full of ‘hateful pish’. Who is this monstrosity walking among us, conducting his rage-fuelled pogroms against the English? Why it’s me! – with my English grandmother, English god-daughter, English cousins and half-English girlfriend. Did I mention I lived in England for three years?
‘Yeah, but some of my best friends are black.’
Okay then. Let us examine the evidence for these serious charges. What exactly has the ‘ethnic nationalist’ Bissett said to warrant such a ferocious reaction?
Could it be this?
If no Scot is ever appointed to a chief position in the Scottish arts again, so be it. This might still be preferable to divisive talk of ethnicity and enmity erupting where there was none. (‘Who Carries the Carriers’ , National Collective)
Or this?
The intellectual and scientific achievements of the English are vast. (‘Is it cos wur Scots?’ National Collective)
Or this?
By bellacaledonia on April 16, 2014 • ( 44 )
By Alan BissettAccording to the Herald journalist David Torrance he is an ‘ethnic nationalist’. To the composer James Macmillan he is a ‘Blood Scot nationalist’ and ‘motivated by hate’. To the Labour blogger Ian Smart he is ‘anti-English’ and ‘a nasty piece of work’. To The Telegraph’s Iain Martin he is full of ‘hateful pish’. Who is this monstrosity walking among us, conducting his rage-fuelled pogroms against the English? Why it’s me! – with my English grandmother, English god-daughter, English cousins and half-English girlfriend. Did I mention I lived in England for three years?
‘Yeah, but some of my best friends are black.’
Okay then. Let us examine the evidence for these serious charges. What exactly has the ‘ethnic nationalist’ Bissett said to warrant such a ferocious reaction?
Could it be this?
If no Scot is ever appointed to a chief position in the Scottish arts again, so be it. This might still be preferable to divisive talk of ethnicity and enmity erupting where there was none. (‘Who Carries the Carriers’ , National Collective)
Or this?
The intellectual and scientific achievements of the English are vast. (‘Is it cos wur Scots?’ National Collective)
Or this?
Scottish independence is not about ridding ourselves of the English, not least because there are so many English people integrated here anyway, with jobs, friends and families, and because Scotland and England will always be right next door to each other. People from both nations will still be free to live in, work in and visit each other’s countries anytime they like. (‘Is it cos wur Scots?’ National Collective)
Curiously, none of these gentleman were able to identify a single quotation to back up their accusations. Quite the methodology.
We could, of course, examine their motives. It should surprise no-one that all of them are Unionists, and that both Smart and Macmillan have form for making inflammatory, baseless comments intended to provoke exactly the kind of reaction about which they can say, ‘Look at how angry they are!’ Smart has refused to apologise for his infamous tweet – “Better 100 years of Tory rule than the turn on the Poles and Pakis after indy fails to deliver” – incredible on so many levels.
Macmillan is also a stranger to understatement, happy to describe Rangers and Hearts football fans as ‘eager talkers of fascist filth’ and claim that the abortion of female foetuses in India and China is western feminism’s gift to the Third World. Macmillan also once called the National Collective, a group of artists in favour of independence, ‘Mussolini’s cheerleaders’. This is the same National Collective who organised a Wish Tree, on which people could write their hopes and dreams for an independent Scotland. Mussolini was fey like that.
Iain Martin, meanwhile, has worked for every right-wing British newspaper you can name and claims on his website that, ‘fearing a Nationalist victory and a potential show-trial I fled my homeland’. Clearly he’s good at getting things into perspective.
Smart, Martin and Macmillan are engaging in simple smear tactics, and I am their latest target.
Smart admitted as much when he tweeted sinisterly last weekend that I was ‘now fair game’ and that (blowing his Viking horn) ‘I’ll be the least of Bissett’s worries over the next short period’.
The real disappointment is Torrance. He’s a high-calibre journalist, often reasonable, intelligent, able to see the angles, not one who normally goes in for slurs. What he has done by dropping the word ‘ethnic’ into the debate, without justification, is irresponsible.
It is interesting to note that Macmillan added his tuppence-worth in the Comments below Torrance’s Herald piece, as though Torrance, by using the term ‘ethnic’, had emboldened him to go one further and accuse me, bizarrely, of ‘blood Scot nationalism’. Torrance’s article is the thin end of a dangerous wedge.
So what prompted these attacks?
The impetus was my play The Pure, the Dead and the Brilliant, opening at the Assembly Rooms as part of the forthcoming Edinburgh Fringe, an excerpt of which was performed as part of a Yes cultural showcase in front of the SNP conference (and Martin’s ‘stunned hacks’). The scene took the form of a debate in the Faerie Kingdom – think Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost – about how Scottish independence may be averted, which morphed into a parody of the No campaign.
The only time that England was mentioned was in the following rant from one of the anti-independence Faeries:
Curiously, none of these gentleman were able to identify a single quotation to back up their accusations. Quite the methodology.
We could, of course, examine their motives. It should surprise no-one that all of them are Unionists, and that both Smart and Macmillan have form for making inflammatory, baseless comments intended to provoke exactly the kind of reaction about which they can say, ‘Look at how angry they are!’ Smart has refused to apologise for his infamous tweet – “Better 100 years of Tory rule than the turn on the Poles and Pakis after indy fails to deliver” – incredible on so many levels.
Macmillan is also a stranger to understatement, happy to describe Rangers and Hearts football fans as ‘eager talkers of fascist filth’ and claim that the abortion of female foetuses in India and China is western feminism’s gift to the Third World. Macmillan also once called the National Collective, a group of artists in favour of independence, ‘Mussolini’s cheerleaders’. This is the same National Collective who organised a Wish Tree, on which people could write their hopes and dreams for an independent Scotland. Mussolini was fey like that.
Iain Martin, meanwhile, has worked for every right-wing British newspaper you can name and claims on his website that, ‘fearing a Nationalist victory and a potential show-trial I fled my homeland’. Clearly he’s good at getting things into perspective.
Smart, Martin and Macmillan are engaging in simple smear tactics, and I am their latest target.
Smart admitted as much when he tweeted sinisterly last weekend that I was ‘now fair game’ and that (blowing his Viking horn) ‘I’ll be the least of Bissett’s worries over the next short period’.
The real disappointment is Torrance. He’s a high-calibre journalist, often reasonable, intelligent, able to see the angles, not one who normally goes in for slurs. What he has done by dropping the word ‘ethnic’ into the debate, without justification, is irresponsible.
It is interesting to note that Macmillan added his tuppence-worth in the Comments below Torrance’s Herald piece, as though Torrance, by using the term ‘ethnic’, had emboldened him to go one further and accuse me, bizarrely, of ‘blood Scot nationalism’. Torrance’s article is the thin end of a dangerous wedge.
So what prompted these attacks?
The impetus was my play The Pure, the Dead and the Brilliant, opening at the Assembly Rooms as part of the forthcoming Edinburgh Fringe, an excerpt of which was performed as part of a Yes cultural showcase in front of the SNP conference (and Martin’s ‘stunned hacks’). The scene took the form of a debate in the Faerie Kingdom – think Book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost – about how Scottish independence may be averted, which morphed into a parody of the No campaign.
The only time that England was mentioned was in the following rant from one of the anti-independence Faeries:
Think about your relatives in England. They’d be foreigners – Yes, FOREIGNERS, cos we all know FOREIGNERS ARE A BAD THING – who would be unable to love you ever again and who you’d certainly never see because there would a ONE HUNDRED FOOT WALL OF ICE ON THE BORDER LIKE IN GAME OF THRONES all to fulfil Alex Salmond’s dream of being Scotland’s first ever dictator, cos it’s all about him, you know that right? There’s only one person in Scotland who actually wants independence and he’s JUST A BIGOT WHO HATES THE ENGLISH! I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Don’t give me that guff about redistributing wealth and getting rid of Trident and improving democracy, you just want to round the English up into Gulags and force them to eat porridge and read the poetry of William McGonigall every single day, don’t you? No? WELL THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE GOING TO TELL THEM!
Neatly, Torrance, Martin, Smart and Macmillan, in their rush to brand me anti-English, demonstrate the accuracy of the satire.
Each speech from the Faeries was pro-Union in content, often using the No campaign’s own words and themes against them. Is Torrance really asserting that to hold a mirror up to the strategies of Better Together somehow constitutes ‘ethnic nationalism’?
I’m not sure I qualify as a nationalist at all, let alone an ‘ethnic’ one. I am a socialist. If I believed the best future for the Scottish working-class lay in the Union I would vote No. If we were still living in the post-War settlement of the Welfare State and full employment – led by a Labour party that truly represented the people, not middle-class swing-constituencies and the USA – I would vote No. That compassionate Westminster, however, existed all-too briefly and is irretrievable without the shock to the body politic which Scottish independence will provide.
A living, breathing, functioning democracy in Scotland, and an economy which works not for the ruling-class but the people – the kind advocated by Yes groups the Common Weal, Radical Independence, the Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party – will be an example for the rest of the UK to follow.
In short, I am partly in favour of Scottish independence because it will be good for the Scots and the English. Scottish ‘nationalism’, if we can even call the independence movement that, is bound up only with the struggle for self-determination, as opposed to the imperialism and elitism of its British counterpart. After independence we should be wary of anyone still calling themselves a ‘Scottish nationalist’. What we are all working towards is the normalisation of Scotland.
It’s often the rhetoric of the Unionist left that a worker in Ipswich and a worker in Inverness have more in common with each other than with their respective overlords. This is, of course, true (though I fail to see how Scotland remaining in the UK actually helps a worker in Ipswich). These days I feel more in common with the Englishman Billy Bragg or the Welshman Rhys Ifans – who understand and support the motives of Yes – than I do with Scots like Smart, Macmillan or Martin, whose dogged loyalty to an increasingly brutal British state I find alienating. One of the reasons I feel so comfortable in the Yes campaign is because of its inclusive, pro-immigration stance. If English people were to move to an independent Scotland to escape the right-wing consensus down South I would consider that quite a victory.
Torrance accuses me of having a ‘black and white view of history’ and being from ‘the “Scotland was colonised” wing of the Yes campaign’. As such, I kindly invite him to a reading of my work-in-progress for the Tron’s Mayfesto season next month – Jock: Scotland on Trial – which explores Scotland’s culpability in slavery and the colonisation of other countries.
In the meantime, David, please drop this talk of ‘ethnic nationalism’. Any reasonable observer would struggle to find it in the broad, pluralist Yes campaign, so it shouldn’t be invented where it doesn’t exist.
Neatly, Torrance, Martin, Smart and Macmillan, in their rush to brand me anti-English, demonstrate the accuracy of the satire.
Each speech from the Faeries was pro-Union in content, often using the No campaign’s own words and themes against them. Is Torrance really asserting that to hold a mirror up to the strategies of Better Together somehow constitutes ‘ethnic nationalism’?
I’m not sure I qualify as a nationalist at all, let alone an ‘ethnic’ one. I am a socialist. If I believed the best future for the Scottish working-class lay in the Union I would vote No. If we were still living in the post-War settlement of the Welfare State and full employment – led by a Labour party that truly represented the people, not middle-class swing-constituencies and the USA – I would vote No. That compassionate Westminster, however, existed all-too briefly and is irretrievable without the shock to the body politic which Scottish independence will provide.
A living, breathing, functioning democracy in Scotland, and an economy which works not for the ruling-class but the people – the kind advocated by Yes groups the Common Weal, Radical Independence, the Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party – will be an example for the rest of the UK to follow.
In short, I am partly in favour of Scottish independence because it will be good for the Scots and the English. Scottish ‘nationalism’, if we can even call the independence movement that, is bound up only with the struggle for self-determination, as opposed to the imperialism and elitism of its British counterpart. After independence we should be wary of anyone still calling themselves a ‘Scottish nationalist’. What we are all working towards is the normalisation of Scotland.
It’s often the rhetoric of the Unionist left that a worker in Ipswich and a worker in Inverness have more in common with each other than with their respective overlords. This is, of course, true (though I fail to see how Scotland remaining in the UK actually helps a worker in Ipswich). These days I feel more in common with the Englishman Billy Bragg or the Welshman Rhys Ifans – who understand and support the motives of Yes – than I do with Scots like Smart, Macmillan or Martin, whose dogged loyalty to an increasingly brutal British state I find alienating. One of the reasons I feel so comfortable in the Yes campaign is because of its inclusive, pro-immigration stance. If English people were to move to an independent Scotland to escape the right-wing consensus down South I would consider that quite a victory.
Torrance accuses me of having a ‘black and white view of history’ and being from ‘the “Scotland was colonised” wing of the Yes campaign’. As such, I kindly invite him to a reading of my work-in-progress for the Tron’s Mayfesto season next month – Jock: Scotland on Trial – which explores Scotland’s culpability in slavery and the colonisation of other countries.
In the meantime, David, please drop this talk of ‘ethnic nationalism’. Any reasonable observer would struggle to find it in the broad, pluralist Yes campaign, so it shouldn’t be invented where it doesn’t exist.
steeplejack
trapped lbw for a duck
basically: Bisset says some not too controversial things that get right up diehard Unionist noses, so this makes him Arkan.
In the same way that 2+2 = 3,081.
In the same way that 2+2 = 3,081.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Thanks for the c&p and the precis. Macmillan is one of the truly great contemporary composers, but politically he's a buffoon.
danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Funnily enough, it's actually Better Together who have links with Arkan. What with being funded by the same guy.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Perhaps the Bitters have jumped on Bisset after this wee gem.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Yet they do.
Some of the posts caught on Twitter have been eye opening. I've stopped looking at MSM now as it's sunk so low as Danny said above.
geminisnake
a complex mass of conflicting ideas
something to cheer us up for the weekend
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/201...ter-reacts-pictures_n_5172000.html?1397815084
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/201...ter-reacts-pictures_n_5172000.html?1397815084
Superdupastupor
fun to funky
come september the bitters will be giving it "theyre gonna eat your babies"
TheHoodedClaw
acknowledging ur soup leg
Must admit the use in this thread of "Bitters" is proper, sober grown-up politics. 
DairyQueen
Well-Known Member
Thanks for raising the tone.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Given the terms they've used about and against supporters of Independence I think we're being pretty reasonable.Must admit the use in this thread of "Bitters" is proper, sober grown-up politics.
TheHoodedClaw
acknowledging ur soup leg
Well, there's always taking the high ground if you choose to take it. Clearly some people don't.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
I'm definitely on the low ground/road by the Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond. I can see the high ground out my window and it's decidedly frosty. The No camp do tend to speak and behave bitterly too. I personally have been called a Nazi and also a Salmondella spore by someone being too clever to probably realise it's a bacteria. They did get quite bitter and slightly more offensive when I pointed that out to them. 
DairyQueen
Well-Known Member
I suppose some folk should be less bitter. I still think it is different scales, one side controls the press, government, and the other has a few twitter accounts. I am not sure there is that much inflammatory comments doing the rounds here.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
Report on Bella Caledonia covering Danny Alexander's appearance at a No meeting in Newtonmore. It's comical at times.
http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/04/18/mentalists-in-newtonmore/
http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2014/04/18/mentalists-in-newtonmore/
We've got to vote yes and beat these lying bastards we just have to.
DairyQueen
Well-Known Member
That's a really good article.
The figures can't be that big if he is working with spreadsheets.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
If I'm gone by the time Beaker publishes his memoirs can someone burn a copy for me. Ta.
DairyQueen
Well-Known Member
Anyone seen the resignations from CBI? Come what may in September, the fact that CBI are losing member right, left and centre can only be a good thing.
A well-known Labour Party front disintegrating would be no bad thing.
A well-known Labour Party front disintegrating would be no bad thing.
geminisnake
a complex mass of conflicting ideas
Not seen it but they bloody deserve it. Taking the No side without asking the members?
The organisations mentioned in the article have to remain neutral so they had to resign. So it's meaningless.
Frankie Jack
Not a bloke..
It's meaningless that yet another large body committee has taken the No side without asking their members?
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
What's meaningless? That a pretty influential body is split over this? That's not meaningless, it's indicative.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
It's not meaningless at all. For big government organisations like that to make that decision over the Easter weekend AND announce it is quite momentous. Not to mention that the CBI is, as butchers says, fairly influential. They can't make the decision to become politically involved without at least speaking to the membership.
Umm.. they were forced to. According to the article the three organisations must be apolitical. So there's no reflection or impact on either side of the debate.
equationgirl
Respect my existence or expect my resistance
I disagree. There's plenty of politicising that goes on within the organisations named. Whilst they may not align themselves with a single issue or party, it still goes on.
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