This is the second guest post ever on Grumpy Scottish Man so huge thanks and a huge welcome to Panda Paws for taking the time to write a blog, for this blog. As the last time I will approve comments as they come in and Panda Paws will be able to reply as appropriate. Again sharing our thoughts and opinions is how we learn and grow so please take the opportunity to share your thoughts if you wish to.
There’s an old joke that if you ask an Irishman for directions, he’d reply “well I’d not start from here”. When it comes to gaining Scottish independence however, you pretty much would start from here. Scotland dragged out of the EU against its will (and its vote), a higher % of people voting to remain than voted No in 2014. The promises of devo max reneged on and the original Smith Commission proposals for enhanced devolution gutted. An Internal Market Act that trashes devolution rendering it worthless despite us being promised that the Sewel Convention would be made statutory. The eleventh year of consecutive Tory rule despite them not winning a general election in Scotland since 1955. Boris Johnson as PM; just let one that sink in. A complete charlatan leading a government that is mired in corruption and that signs international treaties with its fingers crossed behind its back. The UK government is generally mistrusted across the world at the moment and in soft power terms is at it weakest since Suez.
So independence support should be soaring right? Nope according to a new poll commissioned from Panelbase by Scot Goes Pop’s James Kelly.
Should Scotland be an independent country?
Yes 47% (-1)
No 53% (+1)
(Before Don’t Knows are stripped out, the numbers are: Yes 44%, No 50%, Don’t Know 5%)
Not exactly stirring stuff is it. How is independence support not at record levels given the state of the Westminster government, and the catastrophe of Brexit? Principally because the so called party of independence are doing hee and haw to take advantage of this period of exceptionally favourable circumstances.
We have a Scottish government run by two nominally pro independence parties and nothing is being done to promote nor plan for indy. That’s not just my perception, that’s the result of a FOI request asking what work has been done in the past 3 years to promote indy, the reply to which was nadda, nix, nil. Well never fear, at least a number of groups including inter alia Common Weal and the Scottish Sovereignty Research Group (SSRG) have compiled policies and strategies to achieve independence. So the SNP could adopt and adapt them.
Good one PP!
We have seen Nicola Sturgeon bouncing around the fringes of COP26 held in the country she is FM of, in the city she holds a seat conspicuously not talking about independence or even the “standing up for Scotland” she normally drones on about but seemingly acting as an unpaid brand ambassador for Irn Bru. Indeed she even took down the Saltires in Bute House and anywhere near COP26.
And then getting her photos taken with lots of famous folk. According to Susan Dalgety. the FM tweeted 84 pictures of herself with the great and the good during COP26. Meanwhile the government she runs makes a mess of practically every devolved area. No-one can be allowed to overshadow the FM so she promotes hangers on and sycophants rather than nurture those with ability. If Nikla doesn’t like you or is intimidated by you, you are thrown to the wolves as Joanna Cherry could attest. This results in poor quality governance but continual re-election as people vote based on their indy preference, not based on performance.
The Scot Goes Pop polling mentioned above indicates that the SNP would have around 53-55 of Scotland’s MPs in a new UK General Election. Well Whoopy do. What use would that be in a parliament of 650? I mean a great income stream for those elected but what about the people of Scotland stuck in a corrupt and colonial UK? We already have a pro-indy majority at Holyrood anyway. Or do we?
Emma Roddick a newly minted list SNP MSP, parachuted to the top of the list via a process that a QC stated was potentially illegal thinks the people voted for the SNP because of GRA reform. In a response to a constituent she stated
So there you have it folks you weren’t voting for indy, you were signalling your agreement with GRA Reform. That might come as news to the voters themselves… But they aren’t important or rather they aren’t important until the eve of an election when the SNP are looking for votes.
Our national male football team (sorry Emma penis havers’ team) was previously renowned for spurning opportunities to qualify for major tournaments. We even had a name for it – “Scotlanding it”. It is my greatest fear that the government elected to deliver independence is Scotlanding it to the nth degree. So come on Nicola why don’t you prove me (and the rest of us who fear the same) wrong? I’d start from here, so why won’t you?
grumpyscottishman.wordpress.com 
Hellishly frustrating is the NuSNP.
To be honest, I suspect that a large part of the drop in support for independence is due to the selfie queen herself. Many people will look at her governments absolute (deliberate) failure to govern Scotland well and improve the lives of Scotlands’ residents, that they would not touch indy with a bargepole.
(Sane)People cannot and will not “wheesht for indy” while Rome is burning around us. Had the selfie queen presided over an improvement in the lives of Scottish residents, I am certain the results would show a more positive view of independence, but we have a cuckoo in our indy party nest ( or is it 50 odd cuckoos?) that are hell bent on trashing Scotland.
I mean, just look at our ever decreasing devolved powers. They have royally ( deliberate phrase) screwed each and every one up since 2014.
Then look at her COP26 antics. What a howling embarrassment and to be frank, good god, giving the unionists major ammunition. I mean FFS optics!!!!
I’m an ALBA founder member and proud to be so(first political party member in my life), but I fear that unless/until the NuSNP multiple frauds see some daylight, we have a hard battle ahead of us but I will not change my mind on an Independent Scotland till the day I fall off my perch.
We need to get some sunlight on the Nu(unionist)SNP. grr and now weak pishfart is spouting babble on the news, yet another embarrassment to Scotland.:(
Like you I fear we have a hard battle ahead for indy. Whilst newSNP isn’t popular on twitter, in the real world too many are unaware that their focus is anywhere but indy. Certainly Sturgeon’s popularity ratings are way down on what they were and when the affects of GRA Reform hit eyes might be opened.
As Bruce would say, thanks for commenting.
Sturgeons job for her london masters
1 destroy Alex Salmond
2 destroy the Yes movement
3 destroy the SNP
4 destroy the apetite for independence
5 destroy the Scottish economy
as i have said previously she is making a bloody good job of it. She even also being able to fool the unionists yep she s that good.
Every day is a day less she will be in power and hopefully the seeds she has sown the harvest she will reap. Only a unionist gatekeeper would remove the flag of thier country, just a quisling
John
Her behaviour is perplexing to put it mildly. I can’t say for sure why she does these things, I can only say for sure I certainly don’t see her leading us to indy.
Thanks for commenting.
Great article PP.
It’s honestly starting to look like Nikla and the Nu SNP are so wedded to GRA reform to deflect from lack on movement on Indy.
James Kelly’s polls clearly demonstrate that only a minority is in favour of Self ID.
Any normal party might acknowledge that it’s a vote loser. Any normal party might also acknowledge the loss of thousands of members. The list of issues and incompetence continues to grow.
They may claim they’ve a mandate except of course it was for a nebulous GRA ‘reform’ (which WM has introduced having dropped the Self ID aspect).
We can now see that Sturgeon’s SNP is obstructing Independence and this extremely unpopular legislation is just another tool in the arsenal to divide us.
As a slight aside, we all know Emma Roddick is a fan of Self ID. Had it not been for the fact that she ‘identified’ as ‘disabled’, she wouldn’t have gone to the top of the list candidates and therefore not in a job.
Just another of Sturgeon’s chancers.
Thanks Nally, glad you liked it. GRA reform or more honestly Self id is a huge vote loser and I wonder how long it can be kept under the radar. So many are unaware of it. They certainly didn’t vote for it. I don’t have a lot of time for Roddick, she’ds the very definition of over promoted. So sooner was she elected than she tweeted the following
““Probably a point to be made about new MSPs being expected to live, travel, dress, spend money like an MSP for a month before they receive a salary…
“Hello, unplanned overdraft… Will be asking in induction tomorrow if advances are an option.” (tweet 10th May 2021)
I’m not sure how you live and spend money like an MSP. Is it different from everyone else spending money?
To be fair though she does qualify as disabled due a mental health condition. That said I’m against self id into any protected characteristic but hers is diagnosed and bona fide.
I mentioned this post over at Yours for Scotland so hopefully anyone who has liked my comments here will here come and read it.
Excellent stuff, PP.
It all kicked off in 2015, with all the elements necessary to the Scottish trans warrior ‘oven ready’ to quote someone. It is not that the GRA issue is a distraction, nallyanders, from independence, but that independence would be a distraction from the GRA issue. Margaret Thatcher deliberately, coldly and with intent, changed British society forever. What we have now is down to her, then carried on by her successors in Labour and in the Tories. Nicola Sturgeon is equally wedded to changing Scottish society forever. Both these women will have brought such terrible consequences to bear that the UK/Scotland will be wide open to corporate expansion and colonisation: the next wave of predatory capitalism. That is the intention. It was always the intention.
The trans warrior are merely the foot soldiers of a movement that will finally kill the NHS stone-dead and turn it into the American model. The exploitation, the psychopathology is all there, wrapped up in rainbow ribbons. Young women today are going to have to start from scratch and fight for their rights all over again. I heard a young lady on one of the politics programmes exalting the enterprise of (mainly) young female students who are embarking on a sex career to augment their grants for studies. Wow! The grants are so low that people can’t live on them, so they give men blow jobs as a sideline in capitalist enterprise.
You couldn’t make it up. When some slob decides in the future, just as you are waiting for that promotion, girls, to go viral with your photo and details of what you did at university, you might then realise that being a handmaid/Auntie isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. By then, of course, it will be all too late for you, and some man – even on in a fetching frock – will have taken your promotion, your husband and children will learn about your extra curricular activities, and, whatever they told you when you were sweet eighteen, women are always slags – the natal ones, that is. No one is going to condemn the most discriminated against section of society to ever walk the planet: men of varying proclivities. Nah, it’ll just be you who will face the music alone – as per.
There ain’t no equality, girls; it’s a myth – like sex work being work. Nah, it’s exploitation. Like slavery and sending small children up chimneys, and the same kind of people are still making the big money – chaps who don’t do empathy in any shape or form.
Thanks LornCal – daunting to follow in your footsteps as guest blogger. However we agree on so much I have to remind folk we are two separate women 🙂
The latest abomination is of course the Durham University guide to sex work. Not sure
“Come to Durham University to train as a prostitute” is the best slogan for the recruitment literature.
Sex work is exploitation, dangerous and unacceptable in any civilised society. This is not okay. And for Durham to say – well the students are doing it anyway and we want to help them… If students are drug dealing, are they going to introduce dealing seminars? If students are so strapped for cash they are selling themselves, maybe they could introduce more bursaries or a money advice centre. Just saying.
You are right it’s always the women that are stigmatised, never the pimps and never the johns.
Thanks for commenting.
That is frightening, LornCal.
OP
LornCal barely covers the surface of it. It’s a frightening time for women. Thanks to those women who have spoken out at great cost and to the transpeople who have said “not in our name” and have also faced abuse for their support.
The SNP’s latest set of accounts claims 104k members. I would place money on that being a fabrication along with the figure given for the Chief Execs wages.
OP
104k – aye right! Which period does that relate to?
Good article thanks PP.
Glad you enjoyed it. Thanks go to Bruce for giving me (and LornCal before me) a platform for our views.
PP: yes, indeed, were it not for the courage and tenacity of the bloggers on this and many other issues, and the same of the many women and men who have endured loss of career because they have supported this insanity, we would not be in any position to fight back. They all deserve a medal. What should never be in doubt is that the trans lobby has a very powerful voice, backed by mountains of corporate money.
What I think should be highlighted, too, is this: why are we electing people to government or opposition, both in Scotland and in the UK, who push this trans agenda? Would we be voting for a candidate who states that he or she believes that the Earth is flat or that the Moon is made of cheese? Do we think that people who believe that the human species is not binary, that sex is assigned at birth and that gender, which has never been defined anywhere, let alone in law, trumps all, are fit to be representatives of the people on issues such as green energy and climate change, on all the other major issues that define our age, issues that will require a great deal of reason and sanity to solve?
If the aim of GRA reform is to treat all people in equal fashion, why is it necessary to remove all of women’s and girls’ rights, pre empt the law and break it, to do so? Do we want people who neither understand the law nor will listen to legal advice representing us? Do we want people as our elected representatives who believe it is a good thing for abused women to be faced with a man in the rape crisis centre they flee to, or that women who are in prison for low-level crimes that do not involve violence should have to shower with convicted rapists and violent men? It is time that we started asking what game these power-hungry, deranged people are playing with our lives and whether they are willing to eat their own sanctimony and vacuous self-righteousness that they force down our throats?
If it wer’nae for the bloggers, whit wad dae…? Thank you all.
Lorncal
Between 2012-218 436 “women” were convicted of rape. Rape that’s a crime that is defined as penetration by a penis. I do not know where these prostate owners were imprisoned. How does it help trans people for their identity to be abused by predators looking for easier sentences or not even be jailed at all or even worse jailed with their victim of choice who can’t escape and will be accused of bigotry if they complain after sexual assault?
I believe this will become Scotland’s Magdalene Laundries scandal equivalent. In the future people will ask HOW did this happen and WHY was it allowed?
And yes thank you bloggers. And thank you to the Joanna Cherrys, the Rosie Duffields, the Kathleen Stocks, the Helen Joyces et al for putting your heads above the parapet.
Hi, PP. Largely agree with everything you say. I’m sorry, but the past couple of months have wiped out any residual empathy I have, and I no longer care. I have never wished any trans person ill, would never wish any trans person ill, and was sympathetic for a long time until the objective couldn’t be hidden any longer, and I believe that they are almost all complicit in the cruelty that has been acted out against women, children and, yes, men, too. I find it disturbing that so few speak out against what is being done to women, when people have lost their jobs and incomes through not being willing to worship at the altar of this madness. No man can be a woman and vice versa. That is the base from which we have to move forward. Gender cannot even be defined in language, let lone law.
The backers of this movement are corporate capitalists – a different species of predator from the sexual one – and the leaders of Stonewall and its Scottish allies know perfectly well what they are doing, as do our spineless, supine politicians, if they are not so lacking in mental strength that they actually believe this nonsense. It is almost unbelievable the extent to which so many of them, from every party, are willing to stand aside and let women, half the electorate, be erased. They make me sick to the pit of my stomach. The foot soldiers are equally complicit if the Twitter spewings of many of them are to be believed, and the extent of the porn/fetish/parpahilic content gives the game away, as does the bile and cruelty and hatred aimed at women. Not saying that there is not gender dysphoria, but it should be treated by the application of mental health counselling, at least to a great extent, and surgery or hormones apply only when everything else fails there should be no validation and no mutilation and drugging of children. There should be no self-ID without a medical diagnosis and definitely no access to women’s single-sex, sex-based spaces and rights.
Well there are a number of transpeople who have spoken out about the madness of self id. Scott Newsome (who has suffered terrible complications since transition) Buck Angel, Debbie Hayton, Kristina Harrison, Toni Roche-Simmons, Miranda Yardley, and Seven Hex all come to mind. Seven was in the car with Marion Millar when she went to court.
“no validation and no mutilation and drugging of children.”
Well quite. TRAs – children will commit suicide if not put on puberty blockers. Also TRAs – there is no need for adults to do anything to be accepted as trans!
“There should be no self-ID without a medical diagnosis”
Well if there is a medical diagnosis it no longer is self id. And I agree medical diagnosis is essential.
“and definitely no access to women’s single-sex, sex-based spaces and rights.”
100% agreement there!
Yes, PP, I agree that are some trans people who have spoken out, but they are not really part of the “we must get into women’s spaces and rights” brigade, and most of them do not support transitioning children. I believe that some have admitted to being autogynephiles, too, even if they are diagnosed with body dysphoria. However, the trans lobby is being led now by men driven by fetishes and paraphilia (and some women, driven by ‘queer’). Non-validation is essential. However they wish to present themselves, no trans identified male is a woman and no trans identified female is a man.
That is where it has to stop, and it has to stop at the age of majority, too, as you say. Completely agreeing with you, PP, but many people just can’t get their heads round this stuff and think they are being kind when they nod this stuff through. It’s unimaginably cruel to children, so erasing of women, turning them into sub-humans and actually dislocating men from their feelings – which is the very opposite of the trans message, which is that it puts men in touch with their feelings. Nah, excessive and prolonged consumption of porn, it is well established, harms men, even if it cannot be proved – yet – that there is a direct link between the most extreme porn and violence towards females.
People need to get to grips with what trans is now: it is a movement that centres sexual fetishes and paraphilia, incel extremism and men’s rights, and everything else – body dysphoria, mental ill-health, female transitioning and child transitioning are secondary to those fundamental elements – and it is driven by porn that is specific to each fetish and paraphilia. Men can buy body parts of women in latex and superimpose them on themselves for sexual kicks. Now, that might be your predilection in his own bedroom, but the TiM has no right to expect the rest of us to participate in public in his fetish.
We all have to fight against this stuff before it is too late and it is pushed through parliament. There has been an announcement that Holyrood (and the SNP) will co-operate with Westminster in getting this insanity pushed through Westminster, too. Who voted for this? Very few.
I wish I could say I was unaware of al the things you listed but unfortunately once your investigate you find out the whole depravity of it all. I’ll always have empathy with those who are the original definition of trans but the new “version” nope. Debbie Hayton has admitted autogynophilia was a component of their transition. However Debbie was assessed and cleared as not a danger to themselves or others and now states they should not be allowed in women’s spaces. I’d help Debbie in any campaign to get trans only spaces though!
Poor Bruce – he’s probably getting quite the education as he approves this comments. You’re right though, folk don’t know the half of it.