Notes from Jockistan

imageBy Mike Small

Yesterday Chris Roycroft-Davis was not a happy-chappy.

“When George Osborne, Chancellor of the United Kingdom, today presents a Budget that will be welcomed by millions of voters, there’ll be a spectre at the feast. The Ghost of Salmond will haunt the Commons chamber, a grim harbinger of the havoc that lies ahead if the polls are right and the SNP is about to toss a caber in the works. No matter what Osborne plans for the British economy, and no matter how much the majority of us approve of his Budget, the Scottish Nasty Party look set to become a malign political force.”

Alongside this tirade, foaming at the mouth from The Express – one of England’s most hate-filled tabloids (in a very competitive group) comes other wonders of the Union. A Chancellor who with one hand tosses out the threat of a further £12 billion cuts to benefits, while with the other finds £1 million to stoke a nationalist fantasy of an Agincourt celebration saying

“It is also when a strong leader defeated an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists. So it is well worth the £1 million we will provide to celebrate it.”

Despite the almost constant jeering from scribes and circle-jerk unionist hacks about Bannockburn, it’s not remotely conceivable to imagine a Scottish Minister standing up and jeering about such an obvious profligate waste of public money in times of austerity simply as a goad to another county within the increasingly embarrassing ‘Union’.

Is it?

This is just becoming a sordid culture war in which one side has to play by an impeccable standard – and the other has free reign to heap abuse on people for simply expressing their democratic wishes. It’s a dangerous path to go down.

Chris Roycroft-Davis again:

“We are just seven weeks away from a nightmare scenario in which a minority party of ultra-Left barmpots and crankies will be able to dictate how the United Kingdom is governed – against the democratic wishes of the rest of us. A poll in the Guardian yesterday showed that 43 per cent of us are worried about who’ll be running the UK. Many are already sick of the excessive subsidies English taxpayers send over the border. Is it part of Cameron’s overseas aid policy to let Jockistan have even more?”

It’s not really worthy of a response, but the overseas bit is worth noting.

The virus of a racist sensibility is festering in England and contaminating the body politic. It’s present in the Bernard Manning discourse that passes for public debate and it’s now rarely contained in utterances and images from red top rag to the Bullingdon Club Cabinet. You see it in the daily drip drip from UKIP or the Daily Mail’s recycling of incredible Migrant Watch propaganda against babies.

Is there no alternative to this degenerating further?

A positive vision, of hope and equality would be the only basis for that. Racism takes hold when people are desperate and wanting to blame someone else.

But the supposed alternative doesn’t seem, well, very alternative.

Only last week Gordon Brown stepped out of the shadows (again) quoting Hugo Young’s memorable words “the British past we cannot forget and the British future we cannot avoid” – before declaring that “Our destiny is not a bit player on someone else’s stage, or a spectator hectoring from the wings, but always setting the agenda”.

It’s 2015. This idea of Britain having some kind of innate destiny is just more weird Parody Politics. It’s Churchilian pomp whilst Danny Alexander clutches a yellow briefcase and people cheer suicide in Telford.

rUK or ‘England’ as it will be known, doesn’t have a great future, it’s stripped its own resources and flogged them off to the lowest bidder. It’s bankrupt and indebted and in denial.

Brown mews: “An England that glories in isolation is not the England that I know and love.” On economics Labour seems no different. Yesterday Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, admitted that Labour would not reverse George Osborne’s Budget measures, including the flagship measures on savings and Help to Buy. 

Speaking in response to yesterday’s Budget, he said simply “There’s nothing … I need to reverse.”

Remember the Tories are planning to cut spending by 5.1 per cent in 2016-17 and 4.6 per cent in 2017-18. That’s greater than in any year since austerity began in 2010, and nearly twice as much as the average cut over the past five years (2.8 per cent). The cuts scheduled for next year are more than four times greater than the cuts Britain is facing over the next twelve months.

And the sick thing is we know it doesn’t work. The stunning fact of the week is this: In 2010 George Osborne inherited a debt of £760 billion. He has reduced it to £1260 billion in 2014.

Austerity doesn’t work – it’s an ideological tool to exert financial violence – and – whilst the UK press are obsessing with ‘the Jocks’ a rampant English nationalism is emerging that wants to splash £50 million on English football and £2 million on Agincourt and Waterloo. It’s bread and circuses without the bread.

We live in a country where homelessness has doubled since Osborne became chancellor but where:

No senior figure has been held criminally liable or has even been disqualified for the practices that helped to trigger the financial crisis, partly because the laws that should have restrained them were slashed by successive governments. A former minister in this government ran HSBC while it engaged in systematic tax evasion, money laundering for drugs gangs and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Instead of prosecuting the bank, the head of the UK’s tax office went to work for it when he retired.”

Every stupid bigoted cartoon will be fuel to the flames. Another got for Jockistan, another penniless immigrant politicised.

It’s an untenable prospect. Britain has become just a grim, sightly sick idea.

 

 

Comments (47)

Leave a Reply to Kenny Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

  1. John says:

    The Conservatives are systematically dismantling everything that ‘old’ Labour built whilst ‘new’ Labour stand back and watch. The Lib dems allow themselves to be humiliated. What options are left for the poor people of the rUK?

    1. Annette says:

      Only one, as far as I can see: Greens

  2. John Page says:

    I remember years ago trying to read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent…….I thought it was a bit far fetched………….so much for my judgement…….

    Bread and circuses but no bread………….what a turn of phrase

  3. alistairliv says:

    As an old punk I think the Sex Pistols nailed it back in 1977 “There’s no future in England’s dreaming’.

  4. scotsgeoff says:

    Well said.

    A sorry, sorry state of affairs.

    And the news from Telford is truly depressing and shocking.

  5. There wasn’t anything in this piece, I hadn’t read in separate places, but it’s both good, and depressing seeing it altogether.

    Good that we remind ourselves, how this is being portrayed south of the Border, but my God, how depressing society is becoming, and yes, it may be that people are looking for scapegoats, but how come that’s the Scots?

    Why are people in England not doing what we are doing, and why can’t they see they are misguided- is it solely their MSM diet?

    1. david agnew says:

      They literally have no alternative. I suspect there will be a lot of folk in England staying at home on May 7th.

  6. Annette says:

    I think what worries me most here is to imagine the political position of a man from whose point of view the SNP are “ultra-left.” I think his brain would implode if he had to describe me.

    1. MBC says:

      True Annette. The SNP are a moderate centrist party. England has truly lost its political compass if it thinks the SNP is far-left.

      1. Dean Richardson says:

        I don’t think the majority of us in England see the SNP as any kind of extremist party (at least I hope not). I think the ‘far-left’ comment from that numpty at the Express is a mixture of hyperbole and paranoia designed to scare and provoke. Unfortunately, it works in some cases. I believe that Nicola Sturgeon made a speech today that included a comment that the English people shouldn’t fear the SNP. She’s right. It’s the LibLabCon cartel we need to fear. As one or two people have said, England’s biggest enemy isn’t the smaller nations in this kingdom, it’s the British ruling classes.

  7. Alan says:

    The chancellor seems a bit confused about the Scots role in Agincourt. He should read the Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Baugé. I wonder if he’ll have another million to celebrate that in a few years.

    1. Jim Bennett says:

      I had never heard of this, Alan. Thank you! Apparently it gave rise to the phrase: “Verily, the Scots are well-known as an antidote to the English.”!

      1. Alan says:

        Jim,

        I wasn’t aware of it either until I looked it up. I just figured that if you looked at the history the chancellor’s take on Agincourt would be more mythology than fact. History tends to be selectively retold and embellished for ideological purposes. (The Scots, like everyone, are plenty guilty of this as well.)

        So Henry V invades France because he believed he is the rightful king of France. He wins the Battle of Agincourt. But by all accounts, orders his men to kill French prisoners during the battle (is that going to be part of the celebrations?). The Auld Alliance appears to have been largely dormant at the time of Agincourt. It’s only in the continued struggles in the years following the battle that the French Dauphin appeals to the Scots for help. The Scots don’t actually appear to have done very much at the Battle of Bauge. The battle appears to have been won for the Scots by Henry’s incompetent brother, and heir to the throne. But the French saw the Scots quite positively as a result and the battle cemented the French-Scottish relationship. A year after Bauge Henry returns to France to clean up the mess created by his brother and dies of dysentery.

        So here’s what the chancellor said (according to the Scotsman):

        “He revealed that £1 million each will spent on marking 600 years passing since the 1415 Henry V led English victory over France at the Battle of Agincourt, and Napoleon’s loss in 1815. Announcing the plans in his budget, Mr Osborne referred to Shakespeare celebrating the Agincourt win as a “victory secured by a ‘band of brothers’”. He continued: “It is also when a strong leader defeated an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists. “So it is well worth the £1 million we will provide to celebrate it.””

        Given that:
        1. The Scots weren’t involved in Agincourt and the alliance was rekindled not defeated as a result of Agincourt and its aftermath,
        2. When the alliance was rekindled the first thing that happened is that the Scots won a major Battle, killed the heir to the English throne, and the relationship between the Scots and the French was cemented, and
        3. Henry V died of dysentery when he returned to France to restore order,
        one has to ask where’s the joke on the Scots? The joke depends on misrepresenting the history of the period. But what’s knew? They seem quite good at misrepresenting the present so misrepresenting 600 year-old history is just par for the course.

    2. Craig B says:

      Or the Siege of Orléans to be commemorated a few years after that. http://jean-claude.colrat.pagesperso-orange.fr/2-ecossais.htm

    3. majormacbloodnok says:

      Falls on 22 March – that’s my Sunday sorted.

  8. Robert Graham says:

    must be costing a bleedin fortune these and i use the term loosely newspapers printing a different version on either side of the border i wonder how much longer until they drop the pretence unless they continue to imagine we can’t see the bile i think most of them imagine we either can’t read or if we could we wouldn’t understand anyway ,well boys n girls we get it and believe these words YOU will be getting it soon ! reap what you sow GIRUPY just a thought ha ha

  9. jacquescoleman says:

    Excellent article. Cannot for the life of me understand why they were so desperate for us to stay. Was it just our oil, whisky, limitless natural power sources, and water? In the future those resources will be priceless.

  10. maxi kerr says:

    He wants to splash £50 million on English football to keep up the entertainment to pacify the ignorant masses. The Roman Emperors did the same thing and supplied more Christians for the lions to eat for their baying legions.

  11. Neil McAdam says:

    The quote about Agoncourt and the celebration of it is key.
    Why did no-one from the SNP interject and say “well done. You just made the case for English nationalism. Vis a Vis Scottish independence.”
    I have no tears of frustration left.
    Only anger and hatred.
    How far we’ve come.

    1. ian says:

      I dont believe it will ever come to this but the Irish got rid of England at the point of a gun and you can fully understand why when you read this stuff.We have to push on and get our positive message of hope out loud and clear to the non engaged and the apathetic mass.We are fighting for our very existance as an individual and seperate people, otherwise we are lost.

  12. Valerie says:

    SNP are generally described, in an objective review of their policies as centre left. If I can be bothered arguing with some of the more rabid English newsthreads, that are populated by the SNP bashers, I generally just enquire whether they think free tuition, prescriptions, elderly care etc. are bad things, and if not, why don’t they have them? It actually shuts most of them up, esp. when I say we pay for it all ourselves.

    If they are angry, they need to start directing it properly.

  13. Gordie says:

    I suspect that the traditional press don’t represent the people in England or their opinions. They do what the British press does up here try to influence their audience. No doubt some people will be taken in by this anti-Scottish propaganda but the key for the SNP and wider indy movement is to keep a positive and respectful tone in everything they do. That way a comparison can’t be avoided between what we stand for and the pictures that are painted about us as described in the above article. The SNP member who tried to humiliate Ruth Davidson with his bitter post on twitter does us all a disservice in that respect. We have to understand the rules of the game in the UK. Racist and homophobic sentences that are posted by Individuals are evidence that can and should in many instances be used in court at a later date. Theft by bankers doing the bidding of their company’s owners goes unpunished.In fact their thieving and fraud is rewarded by the state by taking money and resources from us and giving it to them. This provides a tremendous opportunity for policy making for the Indy movement to develop. Amongst those policies should be NO to bank bailouts and the creation of a Scottish central bank with democratic control over the creation of money by that bank.

    1. ian says:

      I would disagree to a point having family who live in the South and South east.They are all part of the problem due to their apathy and their belief in what they read in the tabloïds and what the see and hear on the BBC.I have seen that look in my familys faces when the situation in Scotland is mentioned that “how can you possibly get by without us”look.You cannot engage them as they are generaly not well informed and are not really interested, its a very frustrating exerise.

  14. Gordie says:

    or at least that’s what I think!

  15. Richard Harris says:

    I think the on-line (Labour) viciousness of the reaction to Jack Monroe leaving Labour for the Greens speaks volumes. Labour is now as much a sect as a party, deeply insecure, venal, self-referencing and bitter. “The paranoid style of British politics” indeed. Miliband is just a veneer lightly glued onto centre right chipboard and Blair continuity cork. Rachel Reeves is not some flaw or splinter, she’s the whole grain.

    If it was an ‘economy’ bookcase even Argos wouldn’t sell it.

    1. Brian Fleming says:

      Pedant corner: is it not more of a cult than a sect?

      1. Brian Fleming says:

        Is this a new policy on moderation, or have I been naughty?

        1. bellacaledonia says:

          You’ve not been naughty – we’ve been flooded by trolls, smears, defamataory comments, racism and abuse. So, for now, we are in pre moderation. Sorry.

  16. Johnny come lately says:

    There is no other word for it. Britain is indeed sick, the problem is there is nobody minding the shop. The country hasn’t just been asset stripped; it is in the process of being totally emptied. As for the anti-jock rhetoric.
    The damage the MSM and politicians have done to The Union is quite simply irreparable. I don’t know what they are thinking. Is it a case of deflection or just that that the powers that be have actually themselves given up on the Union?

  17. Peter Arnott says:

    As historical commemorations go….to spend a million celebrating a battle England won in the course of a war England decisively lost (I don’t think Anjou is in England anymore) and to jibe against Scots who weren’t there at Agincourt, but definitely were there 7 years later when Jeanne D’Arc handed them their arras…is par for the bleeding course.

    1. jacquescoleman says:

      And it was French in England v French in France. Even Shakespeare was taken in by the later English spin.

  18. Tinto Chiel says:

    @alistairliv 21.09

    Sadly, my friend, the England reflected in these increasingly crazy remarks suggests, “God save the queen/ a fascist regime.”

    What astonishes me is that these ranting Scotophobes merely heap more votes onto the SNP, yet they seem unaware how damaging this is for their beloved, ridiculous Ruritanian Union.

    Keep it up, hacks.

  19. gerry parker says:

    Bellacalledonia writes

    “we’ve been flooded by trolls, smears, defamataory comments, racism and abuse.”

    You must be doing something right Michael !

    🙂

  20. hamish says:

    Do not trust those with double-barrelled names.

  21. emilytom67 says:

    How can anyone ever contemplate voting for any of these,there is a huge amount of institutionalised paedophilia in the established government of the UK,almost to a man they have sat on their hands and said/did nothing the elected MPS/MSM hardly a cheep from any of them.

  22. Reblogged this on scottishmomus and commented:
    ‘Better Together’ or the new rhetoric now that the Indy vote is in the past. If you’re not right you’re left behind. Right wing media strikes again. Its funny really in a sort of sad, pathetic, racist, terrifying, incredible way.

  23. Kenny says:

    What is interesting is that with his house bubbles and ballooning debt, Osborne has declared economic war on the British people. Any normal medieval monarch would have beheaded this overpromoted fraud on a public square.

    The greatest threat to this island is not Russian bombers or religious militants, it is the economic policies of George Osborne. To all intents and purposes, if you consider the damage he is doing to the United Kingdom, he is Terrorist No. 1.

    But I do not expect the Daily Express to see that. To that mindsight, the only “terrorists” are furriners… whether they speak with a Glasgow accent or have an olive skin. Interesting: who has killed more Brits? Iain Duncan Smith or Saddam Hussein?

  24. Darien says:

    Great article. The sooner the English kick us out their pseudo ‘union’ the better. De facto independence in May.

  25. jeans-jacques says:

    The invasion of France was only possible because James I had been captured in 1406 in transit to
    France. He was released in 1422 on payment of 40000 pounds. As he was educated at English expense
    this could be seen as an early imposition of tuition fees.

    1. Dervon says:

      get over yourself. Britain, the last time I looked, wan’t that bad a place to live, why don’t you board a plane sometime?If there has to be a stoush then leave the histrionics, the claymores, and English bowmen. The English and Scots have always stretched each other, dialectically, and are better off struggling together. Visit a public library, or take a day off university and realise they have more to offer together than apart.

  26. Wull says:

    Too late to comment, I suppose. But why not – even if no one reads it …

    Somebody above mentioned Joan of Arc. I am reliably informed, by someone who knows about these things, that she was asked during her trial by an ecclesiastical court: ‘Do you mean to say that God does not love the English?’
    And that she replied: ‘Of course God loves the English. Especially when they are in England.’

    By contrast the English tabloids – which, thankfully, are not to be confused with God, even if they may be under the illusion that they are such – do not seem to have any love for the Scots, even when they are in Scotland.
    With regard to ‘love-bombing’ they seem to be better at the ‘bombing’ than they are at the ‘love’ bit.

    In yet another contrast to these dreadful tabloids, one of the most heartening aspects of the independence movement during the referendum campaign was its complete lack of anti-English sentiment.Also the emergence of the ‘English Scots for Yes’ group, showing a welcome diversity of opinion and openness among English-born people resident in Scotland, who were not homogeneously in one camp or the other. There was a real feeling that we can get over ancient visceral antipathies which do no one any good, and serve no useful purpose in our modern situation. The English tabloids show that irrational, visceral anti-Scottishness remains a real problem in some sections of the community in England. Scotland is becoming much more advanced and sophisticated in this, as in most respects.

    With regard to that old ‘love-bomber’, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the whole United Kingdom: did he really, honestly say what the Scotsman attributes to him? If so, he sounds like the latest and most high-profile Tory MP to renege on the Conservative Party and join UKIP.
    He wants to celebrate Agincourt as the moment when ‘a strong leader’ – think of Nigel, chaps: the modern-day Henry V – ‘defeated an ill-judged alliance between the champion of a united Europe’ (England’s champion, Nigel-cum-Henry, wouldn’t be having any truc with a dastardly Union like that one) ‘and a renegade force of Scottish nationalists’.
    And who were these ‘renegade Scottish nationalists’ reneging on? I suppose George wants us to think they were rebelling against their own country, a UK projected backwards to 1415, three centuries before the UK ever existed. In 1415 Scotland was independent, and the only way Scots could be ‘renegade’ would be to fight against their own country. That was certainly not the case when they fought for their French allies in other battles during the long war of which Agincourt was only one part.

    George’s grasp of English history is amazingly tenuous and ill-informed. He seems to be trying to do something with Agincourt which the SNP desisted from doing with Bannockburn. In 2015 the whole of the UK is expected to celebrate a one-off victory in a war that England lost 600 years ago. And to do so as an anti-European, anti-French, anti-Scottish – therefore anti-UK – festival. How exactly the UK’s Scottish, Irish, Black and Asian population, and its many other UK citizens of European and non-European descent, are supposed to join in in this ‘England-bashes-everyone’ party has not been set out, but George is convinced it’s well worth it. He must be Nigel’s poster-boy by now.

    I have long been convinced that the UK is imploding by its own momentum. But – sadly – it seems even England itself is doing so. This kind of fatuous myth-making based on false and chauvinistic misinterpretations of the past indicates just how deep the crisis really is. There can be no future for an England like this. What is going to happen to it after the UK eventually breaks up, as it certainly will? This really should be a matter of real concern for all of us. Scotland is going to have to help her southern neighbour in every way possible, especially to get over it. I am confident we will show the genrosity required, and rise to the challenge, for the good of both nations.

  27. Wull says:

    That should be ‘generosity’, of course.

  28. Iain Hill says:

    The People’s Big Society
    A slap in the face for heartless governments ?
    Solutions instead of slogans?

    Increasing numbers of people in the UK are becoming alarmed at the plight of the poor, not only the crushing financial hardships inflicted on them, but the apparent lack of any redress against the fiats of cruel bureaucracies, or indeed any great sympathy from the general public.

    The frustration and disgust many of us feel are not a sufficient response. People need to be rescued by practical financial support, not just dismissive comment by the well-fed, uncaring plutocrats who sadly constitute our government. Since privatisation is a la mode, let us at least partially privatise the welfare system.

    I am proposing that concerned citizens who can afford it should voluntarily sign up to make a regular, modest financial contribution to a continuing independent fund to help those in severe need. As a slap in the face to the outgoing government, I considered the title of “The People’s Big Society”, then “The Duncan Smith Memorial Fund”, but my iPad rebelled at that point.

    Supposing we all signed up to an emergency relief fund of this sort. Churches, trade unions and voluntary organisations like credit unions could either donate corporately or encourage small regular donations from their individual members.

    To give an example, I, being a reasonably affluent individual, might offer to contribute say £50 a month. Those who consider themselves “rich” might consider £100+. Large organisations might give considerably more, while good hearted “ordinary” people might manage just £1 or £2, as they do for the animal charities promoted on TV. Donations from political parties should not be accepted, although their members should be encouraged to contribute as individuals.

    This idea has a number of attractions:

    Quick, direct assistance to people desperately in need
    An opportunity to publicise more widely the shameful misdeeds of the powerful, and
    Possible reversal of some cruel decisions, through shame, and pressure on agencies not to repeat them
    Resuscitation of some public morality within agencies (tho less hopeful about that)
    A revival of social solidarity in a society which has forgotten it

    If this proposal were to meet with an enthusiastic response, there are further issues to be tackled:

    Governance of the fund
    A sponsoring organisation to administer it
    Criteria for assistance
    Creation and maintenance of a volunteer pool
    Publicity – of successful interventions
    – of the decisions creating the need
    National fund or local, for each community?

    This may all seem a bit utopian, but is based on reasonable success in an actual project. In the early 90s, the local authority for which I worked wished to assist children in Romania. Auditors, by instinct the most compassionate of people, promptly vetoed any overseas expenditure, so we turned to our own staff, asking them to make small, regular donations, by deduction from salary, for as long or as short a period as they wished. The results were astounding, and before we knew it we had almost £1m., available to a specially constituted trust, and free of any mean-spirited restrictions. It can be done, and was done !

    For me, the ability to help people, often in dire need, against strictures or sanctions which are too often gross, spiteful and inhumane, and the opportunity successfully to expose heartless government or corporate action, justify the small contributions involved. The food banks have shown us that people do care, and prefer to contribute what they can, instead of simply demonising the poor as the government and media clearly wish us to do.

    Is there an organisation with the capacity plus willingness to promote this?

    22 March 2015

  29. Justin Fayre says:

    Please Bella and others.
    Please read The National front page of 11 March 2015 and then read Michael Moore’s ‘Stupid White Men – Introduction and Pages 1 – 15. ( The following from Page 5 turned my stomach)

    ‘This entire incident stunk to the high heavens but the American media ignored it. It took the British Broadcasting Corporation to dig deep into this story.
    It’s a sad day when we have to look to a country 5000 miles away to find out the truth about our own elections’
    I think that sums everything up. A septic diseased institution representing a septic diseased institution.
    We need to beg for UN intervention.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.