Floods from Typhoon Sanba in Maoming, southern Guangdong province.Photo: AFP
This is article 22 in our internationally collated series on Climate Change. The reports on outlook and immediate future get bleaker as each article is published, and yet humankind remains in an eternal state of war or greed, or greed borne out of war and devastation. For the rest of us it’s a state of stasis or chaos.
Earth’s “vital signs” are worse than at any time in human history, an international team of scientists has warned, meaning life on the planet is in peril. Their report found that 20 of the 35 planetary vital signs they use to track the climate crisis are at record extremes. As well as greenhouse gas emissions, global temperature and sea level rise, the indicators also include human and livestock population numbers.
Many climate records were broken by enormous margins in 2023, including global air temperature, ocean temperature and Antarctic sea ice extent, the researchers said. The highest monthly surface temperature ever recorded was in July and was probably the hottest the planet has been in 100,000 years.
The scientists also highlighted an extraordinary wildfire season in Canada that produced unprecedented carbon dioxide emissions. These totalled 1bn tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the entire annual output of Japan, the world’s fifth biggest polluter. They said the huge area burned could indicate a tipping point into a new fire regime.
The researchers urged a transition to a global economy that prioritised human wellbeing and cut the overconsumption and excessive emissions of the rich. The top 10% of emitters were responsible for almost 50% of global emissions in 2019, they said.
A church engulfed in wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii.Photo: Matthew Thayer
Dr Christopher Wolf, at Oregon State University (OSU) in the US and a lead author of the report, said: “Without actions that address the root problem of humanity taking more from Earth than it can safely give, we’re on our way to the potential collapse of natural and socioeconomic systems and a world with unbearable heat and shortages of food and freshwater.
“By 2100, as many as 3 billion to 6 billion people may find themselves outside Earth’s livable regions, meaning they will be encountering severe heat, limited food availability and elevated mortality rates.”
Prof William Ripple, also at OSU, said: “Life on our planet is clearly under siege. The statistical trends show deeply alarming patterns of climate-related variables and disasters. We also found little progress to report as far as humanity combating climate change.
“Our goal is to communicate climate facts and make policy recommendations. It is a moral duty of scientists and our institutions to alert humanity of any potential existential threat and to show leadership in taking action.”
“For several decades, scientists have consistently warned of a future marked by extreme climatic conditions caused by ongoing human activities. Unfortunately, time is up … we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.”
Prof Tim Lenton, at the University of Exeter in the UK, the co-author, said: “These record extremes are alarming in themselves, and they are also in danger of triggering tipping points that could do irreversible damage and further accelerate climate change.
“Our best hope to prevent a cascade of climate tipping points is to identify and trigger positive tipping points in our societies and economies, to ensure a rapid and just transition to a sustainable future.”
The scientists said: “We are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023, [which caused] profoundly distressing scenes of suffering to unfold. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered.”
No, not Gaza city, a neighbourhood in Derna,Libya, after Storm Daniel. Photo: EPA
The report highlighted severe flooding in China and India, extreme heatwaves in the US and an exceptionally intense Mediterranean storm led to the deaths of thousands of people in Libya.
The report said that by mid-September, there had been 38 days with global average temperatures more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, which is the world’s long-term goal for limiting the climate crisis. Until this year, such days were a rarity, the researchers said.
Other policies recommended by the scientists included phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, ramping up forest protection, a shift towards plant-based diets in wealthy countries and adopting international treaties to end new coal projects and phase out oil and gas.
“We also call to stabilise and gradually decrease the human population with gender justice through voluntary family planning and by supporting women’s and girls’ education and rights, which reduces fertility rates.” Big problems need big solutions. Therefore, we must shift our perspective on the climate emergency from being just an isolated environmental issue to a systemic, existential threat. Although global heating is devastating, it represents only one aspect of the escalating and interconnected environmental crisis that we are facing – eg, biodiversity loss, fresh water scarcity, and pandemics.”
Rescuers check flats during Storm Babet over Brechin, Angus. Photo: Andrew Milligan
Dr Glen Peters, at the Global Carbon Project, said recently that the preliminary estimate for global CO2 emissions in 2023 was a rise of 1% to yet another record. Global emissions must fall by 45% to have a good chance of staying under 1.5C of heating.
In September, a different analysis of the Earth system using nine planetary boundaries concluded that this planet’s life support systems had been so damaged that Earth was “well outside the safe operating space for humanity”. The planetary boundaries are the limits of key global systems – such as climate, water and wildlife diversity – beyond which their ability to maintain a healthy planet is in danger of failing.
NOTES: Article by Damian Carrington, Guardian Editor. ***************************************************
Plotters of a federal UK: Keir Starmer, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.Photo: PA
This is a well researched roundup by Byline writerJosiah Mortimer. Since inception, the Labour party, first formed in Scotland, now an avowed colonial party closer to the Tory party than some of its adherents would like, has promised to shut down Westminster’s second chamber, the House of Lords. Later they altered that to stopping the election of hereditary peers.
Only last December, Starmer backed plans for a “new second chamber” which would have “electoral legitimacy”.The closer Labour nears to becoming the new UK government the more it waters down its policies.Colonial Labour warns Scottish voters they have no intention of increasing civil rights for what they treat as a resource rich territorial colony.
The new Rutherglen MP Michael Shanks might as well be in the Tory party when he announced Scotland’s oil, gas and water are better deployed in England than Scotland. Then again, Westminster politics is all about England. All Labour has left is an empty echoing slogan, “Change is coming”.
WATERING DOWN LABOUR’S COMMITMENTS
In an apparent reversal of commitments to overhaul of the House of Lords, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and his team are reportedly weakening the party’s plans for an elected second chamber, amid criticism from unelected members of the upper house. According to the Guardian, the party is set to postpone its delay its goal of replacing the Lords with a fully elected second chamber, despite Sir Keir throwing his weight behind proposals from former PM Gordon Brown last year. The initial commitment for a fully-elected chamber is being shelved to prioritise key legislative objectives, the Guardian paper reported, including implementing a “new deal” for working people.
At the heart of that push is scrapping zero-hours contracts and elimination of qualifying periods for basic employee rights, such as sick pay and parental leave. A year ago, the Labour leadership was vocal about its dedication to a radical overhaul of the second chamber within the first term. Gordon Brown’s Commisson on the UK’s Future, published with Sir Keir last December, pledged: “We propose a root and branch reform of our centre of government. To create a new and more responsive centre we must clean up Westminster, rooting out unearned privilege and addressing unaccountable power.
“That is why we put forward detailed proposals for abolishing the current undemocratic House of Lords, the fundamental reform of which has been the official goal of successive governments for a century, and replacing it with a democratic chamber that is permanently closer to the British people.”
But several shadow cabinet sources tell that moving to a fully-elected second chamber now appears too difficult and would take too much political capital and time.
A narrower path
Labour is now apparently poised to consider a narrower scope of amendments to the unelected house, including limiting the number of peers from its current 800, bolstering the authority of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (which vets nominees), and “possibly” phasing out the 92 hereditary peers remaining,. The aspiration for a fully elected second chamber hasn’t been abandoned, but it does seem to have been kicked down the road as a now “long term” goal.
The Lord Speaker, John McFall, a former Labour MP, has been prominent in his attacks on sweeping Lords reform. He’s used media appearances to advocate “incremental” changes to the chamber, a view that is gaining traction among the Labour high-ups – and apparently influencing the climbdown in ambition. While a Labour source played down newspaper reports, a pro-reform Labour peer said they were concerned by it, telling Byline Times: “I never thought for a minute [an elected Lords] would be a first term [priority]. But I didn’t think it would be dumped from the manifesto.”
No more powers for Scotland
It has also come under fire from other opposition parties. The Scottish National Party’s Tommy Sheppard MP said: “It’s increasingly clear the only change the Labour Party is capable of offering is changing their minds every five minutes.” Labour has also ruled out more powers for the Scottish Parliament, instead focusing on devolution to local councils and mayors.
“Sir Keir Starmer is now ditching his pledge to abolish the House of Lords in order to stuff the place with Labour donor and cronies. Westminster does not – and will not – offer the change Scotland needs. The system is broken, and cannot be fixed,” Sheppard said.
Tom Brake, director of democracy group Unlock Democracy added: “If Labour is scaling back plans to reform the House of Lords to make time to address our calamitous voting system, which is the biggest obstacle in the way of tackling long term issues, like climate change and the cost of living crisis, then we can live with this.
“Sir Keir was spot on when he said ‘millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count’ and ‘I’m utterly convinced about this: the Westminster system is part of the problem.’ We now need to see his plan of action to address this.”
Many other activists have hit out at the changes. Klina Jordan, Chief Executive of Make Votes Matter, told Byline Times the row-back was “worrying.” “The public, Rishi Sunak, and even Keir Starmer himself have identified that Westminster isn’t working.”
Polling results
Recent polling for Make Votes Matter found that only 1 in 25 people thinks the UK’s political system needs no reform at all. However, similar polling by Opinium for the group showed that the public sees proportional representation for the Commons as nearly three times more important. Jordan hopes that the shift away from Lords reform will focus Labour minds on the need for PR.
And Jessica Townsend, co-founder of activist coalition MP Watch branded Lords reform “the mildest” change Labour could put forward: “Voters are clear that our democracy isn’t functioning and the reputation of politics is at an all-time low…We also hope that the Angela Rayner plans which stemmed from the Brown Report recommendations to improve integrity don’t get similarly sidelined.” But Liz Crosbie, Project Director at reform campaign AllianceNow UK noted that of all the challenges to UK democracy, House of Lords reform is the “hardest to popularise”.
The Clunking Fist
Gordon Brown’s constitutional commission, launched after a long delay last year, was reportedly instructed to avoid talking about electoral reform for the Commons. That shifted the focus to devolution and Lords reform. Crosbie called for “citizen-led reform” instead of a top-down approach. “The days of grandees and Royal Commissions are over.”
However, a little-noticed change at the Labour conference in Liverpool earlier this month saw delegates vote by an overwhelming margin to ratify the National Policy Forum document – which will feed into next year’s Labour manifesto – containing strong criticism of the current “flawed” voting Westminster system – a driver of “distrust and alienation” in politics. It is the first time in a generation that Labour has condemned Westminster’s voting system, following a major grassroots and union campaign.
NOTES: Do you have a story that needs highlighting? email josiah@bylinetimes.com
Plans make it easier for young people to buy in the Highlands and Islands
The debate over the ownership of second homes seems neverending. Those either rented or as the owner’s holiday cottage, blight villages with empty property, decimate communities, and stop a new generation owning a home, all a constant sore on Scotland’s rights to protect its culture and land. About 25,000 second-home owners face a doubling of council tax bills next year under plans to free-up housing for local residents. Big tax premiums on owning holiday homes are aimed at encouraging owners to sell their properties or rent them out long term.This is not a novel ideal. Both the Welsh government and the local authority in Cornwall have already approved plans to double council tax on holiday homes to deter second home purchases.
The proposals: Second homes empty for long periods, or allowed to become derelict, may also be compulsorily purchased and converted into private rentals. Councils will be encouraged to spend the extra income from the higher tax bills on affordable homes.
Council tax statistics from last September showed that there were 24,287 second homes in Scotland — 1 per cent of the housing stock — with a further 18,000 classified as empty. Most councils last year scrapped the previous discount of up to 50 per cent historically given to second home owners as part of plans to deter holiday home purchase. Concerns had arisen over how many homes were being bought for investment purposes in a booming property market without being let out at all. Allowing councils to charge up to double the full rate, as many do with empty homes, would raise about £9.5 million, according to the SNP.
The current plans mean owners of a Band F holiday home in the Highlands and Islands could see their council tax rise next year from from £3,044 a year to £6,088. After that the levy could rise even higher if local authorites are allowed to charge up to double the full rate. That could see the same property in the Highlands and Islands incur a tax of more than £9,000 under the current system.
The proposals are outlined in the Scottish government’s rural housing action plan, which is designed to make it easier for young families to buy starter homes in the Highlands and Islands, as well as encourage young people not to leave rural communities for work elsewhere. Housing shortages for local families and workers are a significant issue in many holiday hotspots where second home ownership is forcing up property prices.
Official figures show that there are more than 24,000 second homes in Scotland. More than a third of them are in three local authority areas — Highland, Argyll and Bute, and Fife. The council tax in all three councils is about £1,400 a year for a Band D home, rising to about £3,500 for Band H.
Under existing legislation, second homes, broadly defined as dwellings which are not a main residence, are given a 50 per cent discount but 25 of Scotland’s 32 councils have already been allowed to charge the full amount. The new legislation would allow for bills to be 200 per cent of the standard council tax charge.
Opposition
The Tory party feels, as is its obsession, that Scotland should not do anything England does not do. They use the usual scare, identification and administration of tax rates on second houses will be costly and difficult to control. This is the ‘Scotland too poor and too thick’ argument.
Opponents to new crackdowns on second home ownership are concerned that doubling council tax will deter investment and the flow of income into remote areas. And then there is the ‘have pity on the poor second home owner’ argument. Fergus Ewing, the MSP for Inverness and Nairn, currently disconnected from the SNP hierarchy, and a former cabinet secretary for rural economy, argues, “These proposals will punish those who have invested hard-earned cash in homes and will lead many to invest abroad instead. This will drive money out of Scotland, damaging many local economies with less money going to local builders, shops and tradesmen.”
The action plan document states:
“The growth of online platforms has fuelled the trend for residential homes, particularly in tourist hotspots, to be changed from primary homes to short-term lets or second homes. Making the best use of existing housing can make a significant contribution to increasing the supply of permanent homes. This could be by limiting the number of second homes, changing the use of properties used for tourism to private rental.”
The action plan also proposes giving local authorities compulsory sale and purchase powers to bring derelict land and empty properties back into use. The plan says: “In 2024 we will take forward work to consider the justification for and practical operation of compulsory sales orders, particularly in light of our commitment to reforming compulsory purchase orders.”
Paul McLennan, the SNP housing minister, adds: “The rural and islands housing action plan will deliver the right homes in the right places, generate sustainable local economic growth and help rural and island communities to thrive.”
Readers are, as always, free to debate the pros and cons of owning two houses.
Daniel Barenboim is a classical pianist and conductor and co-founder, with colonial theorist Edward Said, of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Here is his opinion on the Israeli – Hamas conflict that threatens the Middle East with chaos and drag all of us into another war.Music is one way to bring people together – we are all equal human beings who deserve peace, freedom and happiness.
Events in Israel and Gaza have deeply shocked us all. There is no justification for Hamas’s barbaric terrorist acts against civilians, including children and babies. We must acknowledge this, and pause. And we must urge Israel to uphold international law as it prepares to invade Gaza. But then the next step is to ask: what now? Do we surrender to this terrible violence and let our striving for peace die – or do we insist that there must and can be peace? I am convinced that we have to move on and keep the larger context of the conflict in mind.
In 1999, I formed the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with my friend Edward Said, so that young musicians from across the Middle East could gather, talk and perform together. Today, ourmusicians in the West-Eastern Divan and our students in the Barenboim-Said Academy are almost all directly affected by the conflict. Many of the musicians live in the region, while others have many ties to their homeland. This strengthens my conviction that there can only be one solution to this conflict: one based on humanism, justice and equality, and without armed force and occupation.
Our message of peace must be louder than ever. The greatest danger is that all of the people who so ardently desire peace will be drowned out by extremists and violence. But any analysis, any moral equation we might draw up, must have at its core this basic understanding: there are people on both sides. Humanity is universal, and the recognition of this truth is the only way. The suffering of innocent people on either side is absolutely unbearable.
The images of the devastating terrorist attacks by Hamas break our hearts. This impulse to empathise with the situation of others is essential. Of course, and especially now, one must also allow for emotions such as fear, despair and anger – but the moment this leads us to deny each other humanity, we are lost. Every single person can make a difference and pass something on. This is how we change things on a small scale. On a large scale, it is up to politics.
We have to offer other perspectives to those who are attracted to extremism. After all, those who find a home there are usually people who are completely without prospects, who are desperate, who devote themselves to murderous ideologies. Education and information are equally essential, because there are so many positions based on absolute misinformation.
To reiterate quite clearly: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a political conflict between two states over borders, water, oil or other resources. It is a deeply human conflict between two peoples who have known suffering and persecution. The persecution of the Jewish people over 20 centuries culminated in the Nazi ideology that murdered six million Jews.
The Jewish people cherished a dream: a land of their own, a homeland for all Jews. But from this dream followed a deeply problematic – because it was fundamentally false – assumption: a land without a people for a people without a land. In reality, the Jewish population of Palestine was only 8%by the end of the first world war. Therefore, 92% of the population was not Jewish, but Palestinian – a population grown over centuries. The country could hardly be called a “land without a people”, and the Palestinian population saw no reason to give up their land. The conflict was thus inevitable, and the fronts have only hardened further over generations. I am convinced Israelis will have security when Palestinians can feel hope – that is, justice. Both sides must recognise their enemies as human beings and try to empathise with their point of view, their pain and their hardship. Israelis must also accept that the occupation of Palestine is incompatible with this.
For my understanding of this more than 70-year-old conflict, my friendship with Said has been key. We found in each other a counterpart who could take us further, help us to see the supposed other more clearly, and understand them better. We recognised and found each other in our common humanity. For me, our joint work with the West-Eastern Divan, which finds its logical continuation and perhaps even its culmination in the Barenboim-Said Academy, is probably the most important activity of my life.
In the current situation, I naturally ask myself about the significance of our joint work in the orchestra and the academy. It may seem little – but the mere fact that Arab and Israeli musicians share a podium at every concert and make music together is of immense value. Over the years, through this commonality of music-making, but also through our countless, sometimes heated discussions, we have learned to better understand the supposed other, to approach them and to find common ground. We start and end all discussions, no matter how controversial, with the fundamental understanding that we are all equal human beings who deserve peace, freedom and happiness.
This may sound naive, but it is not: for it is this understanding that seems to be completely lost in the conflict on both sides today. Our experience shows that this message has reached many people in the region and around the world. We must, want and will continue to believe in our shared humanity. Music is one way to bring us closer together.
“The apartheid state of Israel is all about caging the Palestinians, until they die a slow death or leave. It’s pure ethnic cleansing, occupation and apartheid.”Yanis Varoufakis
On reflection, I go further than Varoufakis; it’s beyond apartheid, it is now genocide. South Africa depended on its Black population to keep things running. They were the valuable workforce. Israel has never needed the Palestinians for anything. England needs the Scots, our invention, our resources, oil water and gas, and soon water; that’s why they insist on calling us British. So, like the Scots in the UK, in fact, any oppressed people anywhere, the Palestinians are regarded as second-class citizens unless they switch to the oppressor’s faith and ways and values. If they don’t and want to live in the occupied territories, Israel feels motivated to get rid of them.
Demanding over a million people leave Gaza City, old, young, the ill, the non-ambulant, and do it within an impossible 24-hours command is no different from Scotland’s organised Clearances – dragged out our houses, the buildings destroyed so we coud not return to them, people driven out of their homes and left to survive the elements. Over a million to pack up and go is the second time Palestinians have been ordered off their land, the last time in 1948.
Any sympathy with either side has to begin at the beginning, otherwise empathy is fake, it ignores the root cause of this murderous tragedy.
I am not an expert on Middle East politics, but I was brought up among relatives of the Jewish faith and lived off their kindnesses and unlevened bread when times were hard. And I have visited Gaza for a short few days, and worked with Isreali Educational Television (IET) in Jerusalem on a drama project. When there, I visited the Mount of Olives, and bumped my head on the entrance into the claimed crypt of Jesus of Nazareth, a painful thump – the entrance was designed low to force one to bow, and if you straighten your back too soon, give the arrogant a reminder of who is boss. That was twenty years ago.
When the handsome head of IET invited me to dinner to discuss the mechanics of the production I asked why Israelis were not content to remain in the original greenbelt they had been given in the 1930s? Her answer took my by surprise. It was the first indication there existed a large portion of Isrealis who were at odds with their government’s hard-line policies. (You saw many only recently congregate to defy regressive changes to the power of the Israeli Supreme Court.) My friend, the chief broadcaster for schools and universities said:
“Ah, we Israelis are a peace loving people; a piece of Lebanon, a piece of Jordan and a very large piece of Palestine.”
Where to begin?
I could begin with the Old Testament where Jews point out the Holy Land is their sole province, their homeland. But I think it more interesting to begin with the Peel Commission, a British solution of the 1930s to a problem called back in the day the Eastern Question, by then considered insoluable.
The Peel Commission was a full Royal Commission of Inquiry into Palestine, headed by Lord Robert Peel, appointed in 1936 by the British government to investigate the causes of unrest among Palestinian Arabs and Jews. The unrest was easy to define, Jewish settlers took over Palestinian farms with the backing of the UK but with both sides claiming land rights, impossible to solve.
A solution had to be found to avoid what some considered a another potential world war exploding just after the First World War had ended. The solution involved partition. Discontent in Palestine intensified after 1920, when the Conference of San Remo awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. With its formal approval by the League of Nations in 1922, this mandate incorporated the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the civil and religious (but not the political or national) rights of non-Jewish Palestinian communities.
Palestinian Arabs, desiring political autonomy and resenting the continued Jewish immigrationinto Palestine, disapproved of the mandate, and by 1936 their dissatisfaction had grown into open rebellion.
The Peel Commission
The Peel Commission published its report in July 1937. The report admitted that the mandate was unworkable because Jewish and Arab objectives in Palestine were incompatible, and so it proposed that Palestine be partitioned into three zones: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing the holy places. Although the British government initially accepted these proposals, by 1938 it had recognized that such partitioning would be infeasible, impracticable and probably incite an uprising.
Westminster ultimately rejected the commission’s report. Nevertheless the British authority approved a set number of Zionists – so named by their militant leaders – could be settled in Palestine, and duly placed a strict limit of 75,000 a year, which was soon and easily exceeded. The Jewish lobby was given the most green, the most fertile area of Palestine. The conflict was set.
If the powers of the day thought the three-part solution was the answer, Palestinians thought otherwise. They revolted. Britain, still in charge, decided the Arabs – as they were collectively lumped, (the racist gibe ‘torags’ often used, from the Indigenous Tuareg Arab people) had to be taught a lesson. Using trains to carry British soldiers to the pockets of rebellion, the British generals ordered Palestinians to be tied to the front of locomotives, and along the outside of carriages, this to stop hit and run attacks on trains that T.E. Lawrence had taught the arab tribes as a disruption tactic to the movement of soldiers and weapons. The word spread that the British State was not impartial but a brutal master.
The uprising
The expected uprising took place. One British officer got word that a few Jewish farmers had been attacked. (I am unsure if any were killed, but they were seriously wounded.) In good colonial fashion, the officer decided a reprisal was necessary.
He asked his staff the co-ordinates of the nearest Palestinian village and sent in troops and tanks. Villagers were massacred, men, women and children shot on sight, houses raized to the ground, and those villagers left alive taken capture for interrogation and torture, a village that had had no association with the attack on a few Jewish farmers.
From that minute on the Palestinians realised the British State was not their friend. The Jewish community realised the same effect had taken place but in their favour, they could do as they please exactly because the British and the West would protect them.
Bombing the King David Hotel
This has been the way down the decades until now, Israel takes over territory with the tacit approval of the West. This supports can be seen by the number of nations who illuminated their key buildings with the Israeli flag without sensing or testing the change in public feelings – the public, if not our leaders, understand there has to be a better way than Benjamin Netanyahu declaring war and death reprisals.
Even when Zionists are the terrorists, the UK is in there somewhere. One eample: the extreme wing of the Zionist fashion blew up the King David Hotel in Jerlusalem knowing British officials were in it, the UK and US still leaned toward the idea of a Jewish settlement. The hotel was the British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the building bombed in a terrorist attack on 22 July 1946 by the militant right-wing Zionist underground organization the Irgun during the Jewish insurgency. 91 people of various nationalities were killed, including Arabs, Britons and Jews, and 46 were injured.
Britain had a tight control of Jewish immigration into Palestine during the Second World War – Jews fleeing Nazi Germany could find no sanctuary there.
After the Second World War
The Second World War arrived out of the poverty left in Germany caused by the carnage of the First World War that left Germans impoverished with mass unemployment. There followed the hell that was Nazism that begat the Holocaust. My uncle Hymie was one family member given sanctuary in Scotland. By the end of the Nazi era the United Nations was in no mood to attack Zionism or its leader Menachem Begin, founder of Likud – deemed a terrorist party – and eventually sixth Prime Minister of Israel.
Before the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Begin was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He had been hated by the British politicians and newspapers, called a terrorist for his bloody tactics, but once prime minister was accepted by world leaders as a respected politician if not universally admired.
Begin’s most significant achievement as prime minister was the signing of a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, for which he and Anwar Sadat president of Egypt, shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Isreal bombing Gaza city. Photo: Mahoud Hama
The UN Record
The United Nations history of Palestine records this:
“The decision on the Mandate did not take into account the wishes of the people of Palestine, despite the Covenant’s requirements that “the wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory”. This assumed special significance because, almost five years before receiving the mandate from the League of Nations, the British Government had given commitments to the Zionist Organization regarding the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, for which Zionist leaders had pressed a claim of “historical connection” since their ancestors had lived in Palestine two thousand years earlier before dispersing in the “Diaspora”.
During the period of the Mandate, the Zionist Organization worked to secure the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The indigenous people of Palestine, whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia felt this design to be a violation of their natural and inalienable rights. They also viewed it as an infringement of assurances of independence given by the Allied Powers to Arab leaders in return for their support during the war. The result was mounting resistance to the Mandate by Palestinian Arabs, followed by resort to violence by the Jewish community as the Second World War drew to a close.”
Useless Brits
Yes, Britain once had full control of Palestine. Wherever Brits go, they leave in their wake a divided population, followed by thousands of deaths and book-ended with de rigeur partition. We saw it in India, in Iraq, in Ireland, and their attempts here in Scotland, by military might, and the most pathetic attempt in Scotland being the claim Orkney wants its own independence.
Since the first Zionists were given land in Palestine, angry reaction by the people who were forced to abandon their farms and olive groves was put down brutally. But soon, the incomers had weapons and UK and US support with more weapons promised when needed, (on loan from the US to stay within its constitution) including the nuclear bomb. This last revelation saw jailed for 19 years Mordechai Vanunu for alerting the world to Isreal’s acquisition, its existence denied by members of the Israeli parliament. (It was a gift from France.) Israel can be just as vicously cruel on its own as on its perceived enemies.
With money and weapons pouring in, ready to use on the Palestinian population who had next to no weapons, having lived off the land and barter for as long as they could remember. Since then the history of Palestine has been one of Israelis gross disproportionality.
How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years, half of whom are children, reduced to a subsistence level, deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water and electricity, use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns and infantry units to slaughter unarmed civilians, and not expect a violent response? These and other questions have seen thousands of people demonstrate against Israel this weekend.
Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.
Prime Minister Netanyahu, a man of no fixed conscience, warned Palestinians in Gaza to “leave now,” because Israel is going to “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.” This is a statement of genocide.
Genocide
Where are Palestinians in Gaza supposed to go? Israel and Egypt blockade the land borders. There is no exit by air or sea, which are controlled by Israel. The collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers. We used it against Native Americans and later in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it against the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia, the British in Kenya and Malaya. (King Charles plans to apologise to Kenyans on his state visit.) The Nazis used it in the areas they occupied in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe. Israel follows the same playbook. Atrocity for atrocity. An eye for an eye. But it is always the occupier who initiates this macabre dance and trades body bags for a bigger pile of body bags.
This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. This is to state the historical facts. Hamas and Palestinian fighters see their actions as a liberation movement. Israel sees its expansionist policies as legal and necessary.
The Jewish intellectuals a hundred and more years ago, knew the Palestinians would not accept invasion, so they decided to reduce their ambitions and establish a cultural centre in Jerusalem that would rejuvinate Jewish unity. But since 1967 and Isreal’s systematic policy decisions of expansion into Palestinian land to take what is valuable, the USA and UK have been with them every step of the way.
The US and UK vetoed UN calls for Jewish people to give back Palestinian land. But since Israel destroyed Arab nationalism, an American ideal, the USA has become Israel’s best friend. Israel chose expansion with the help of the USA. The miracle witnessed belongs to the Palestinians. Palestinian resistance has been phenominal as has Scots over 300 years of oppression by its bigger neighbour.
Someone said old men start wars, young men and women fight them. It’s a generalisation, but it holds a lot of truth.As I write this, Israeli forces are bombing fleeing Palestinians and the places they were were told to reach for safety. We are watching western leaders standing back to allow Israel space to own all of Palestine.Like Scottish nationalism, our small country pride, the people of Palestine want to create a better world for themselves, one where a real social democracy thrives.Reality can change for the better for Palestinians if the West allows it, now, as it did many times in the past. History does not have laws. Historyis determined by human will and decisions.
NOTES
The three state solution: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing holy places.
The two-state solution: Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, the international community has focused on ways to bring about a two-state solution that would end the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and end all further claims to the conflict.
The one-state solution:Sometimes called a bi-national state, this is a proposed approach according to which one state must be established between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Proponents of this solution advocate a single state in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.The term one-state reality describes the belief that the current situation in Israel/Palestine is de facto one-state.
YES campaigners in Sydney react to the failed referendum. Photo: Jenny Evans
As regular readers will know, this site publishes anything that has a relevance to the struggle of Indigenous Scots to reclaim their autonimous rights, anything in literary form from around the world that shows the lengths a controlling administration will go to impede progress for the ethnic minority that once lived off the land – and respected natural things – as free nomadic tribes. In this instance Australia appears to have fallen at the final fence to bring justice and shared governance to Indigenous Aboriginal Tribes. There was a long campaign and lately compulsory vote to include the ethnic minority in the Australian constitution. It goes without saying that the White usurper wrote the constitution.
NO ABORIGINIES IN THE CONSTITUTION
Australians have resoundingly rejected a proposal to recognise Aboriginal people in its constitution and establish a body to advise parliament on Indigenous issues. Saturday’s voice to parliament referendum failed, with the defeat clear shortly after polls closed.
To succeed, the yes campaign – advocating for the voice – needed to secure a double majority, meaning it needed both a majority of the national vote, as well majorities in four of Australia’s six states. One can argue the vote was loaded.
The defeat will be seen by Indigenous advocates as a blow to what has been a hard fought struggle to progress reconciliation and recognition in modern Australia, with First Nations people continuing to suffer discrimination, poorer health and economic outcomes. More than 17 million Australians were enrolled for the compulsory vote, with many expats visiting embassies around the world in the weeks leading up to Saturday’s poll.
The vote occurred 235 years on from British settlement, 61 years after Aboriginal Australians were granted the right to vote, and 15 years since a landmark prime ministerial apology for harm caused by decades of government policies including the forced removal of children from Indigenous families.
The referendum had been a key promise that Labor party [in Australia it’s ‘Labor’ not Labour]took to the federal election in 2022, when it returned to power after years of conservative rule. Support for the voice to parliament had been strong in the early months of 2023, polling showed, but subsequently began a slow and steady decline. All major polls had foreshadowed that the NO campaign would succeed and the voice would be rejected. Nationwide support for the voice was hovering at about 40% in the week before the vote, with coverage of the campaign being overshadowed by the outbreak of war in the Middle East in the crucial final days.
The concept for the advisory body, which would have included Indigenous representatives from each of Australia’s six states and two territories voted in by their local Indigenous electors, was developed and endorsed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in 2017. A majority of Indigenous voters supported the proposal, according to polling. It was envisaged to provide Australia’s government with non-binding advice on issues affecting about 4% of the population who identify as Indigenous. While such an advisory body could have been created through legislation, the proposal was designed to enshrine its existence in the constitution so it could not be removed by future governments.
Exactly what the voice advisory body would look like and how it would function were to be determined only once the concept had won approval. Opposition to the voice seized on this ambiguity, adopting a campaign slogan of “if you don’t know, vote no”. But reasons for the decline in support were broad.
Voters at St Kilda primary school polling centre in Melbourne.Photo: Asanka Ratnayake
The referendum question, to amend Australia’s constitution to recognise the first peoples of Australia by establishing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament, was deliberately vague. The failure of Australia’s previous referendum in 1999 – to become a republic and acknowledge Indigenous ownership – was seen to have failed because it put forward a specific model to voters.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and his ministers were prominent faces of the yes movement, and while Labor did not lead the campaign, the government’s focus on the referendum was seen alongside its handling of other national issues. It weathered accusations that it championed the voice push while failing to deliver tangible improvements for citizens facing cost of living pressures and a housing crisis hurt the yes side. Meanwhile, the Liberal party in opposition formally backed the no vote, with senior Indigenous members speaking out against the voice.
Arguments against the proposal included that no such representative body was needed, that it was introducing race into the constitution, and that the voice would divide the nation. Opposition also emerged from the far left of progressive politics and a minority of grassroots Indigenous activists, who rejected the voice while calling for more significant reconciliation measures, including a treaty with Aboriginal Australians.
Indigenous advocates from each side of the debate reported receiving a surge in racist abuse and prominent Aboriginal personalities across Australian media also complained of the toxic nature of debate and online vitriol.
There is an eight-year gap in life expectancy for Indigenous Australians compared with non-Indigenous Australians, a suicide rate twice the national average, and comparatively poorer outcomes for health, education and infant mortality.
74% voted YES of 11,000 Indigenous People in Northern Territory’s Lingiari.
POST SCRIPT
Regions with a high proportion of Indigenous Australians overwhelmingly voted YES in the referendum – including the community where prominent no campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s family is from. The YES vote in polling catchments where Indigenous Australians formed more than 50% of the population was, on average, 63% in favour. The knowledgeable will know Indigenous Scots voted 53% YES in Scotland’s 2014 Referendum, and of the NO’s 37% wanted greater political powers short of full autonomy. There is a hunger for liberty that will not be satisfied with colonial brush-offs. Sad to report, Indigenous groups are saying reconciliation is dead, and they will remain silent.
NOTES
Howard Cairns, our man in Australia, adds this: The Liberal Party (Tory) leader Peter Dutton (an EX-Policeman with the appeal of Lord Voltemort) and their partner’s in crime the Country Party (with check shirts and gumboots) both decided at the beginning that they would push the NO vote. They seem to think this would damage the Labor party when the next election is held. They may be right, time will tell.My opinion is that the typical Australian has learnt from the previous behaviour of the English Colonialists. They feel they need the Aborigines who were here for up to 65,000 years should stay where they are in poverty stricken, rundown villages without jobs, health services but with Alcohol and drug problems, and nothing to do. Support for Yes was strongest in the inner suburbs, while the majority of outer suburban, regional and rural voters said No. But analysts say the reasons why voters rejected the referendum question is more complex.
Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese vows to forge a new way forward to close the gap in life outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, after voters resoundingly reject a Voice to Parliament.
Members of the Osage Nation with President Coolidge, 1924.Photo: Bettmann
It crossed my mind one day that Martin Scorsese might hold a little professional envy: he made his reputation seemingly as a man who shoots movies about Mafia mob types, Italian gangsters in New York, yet the two greatest movies on that subject were shot not by him, but by Francis Ford Coppola, Godfather 1 and Godfather2. (For most of it’s second half, the third in the franchise is generally accepted as a mess.) Scorsese has Goodfellas to his name, a less operatic chart of Mafia types on the make and the take, but a superb study nevertheless of greed, people out of control. Did he ever feel envious of the success of the Godfather films? For the record, here is what he said:
“There are certain films in the history of cinema that seem to capture the collective imagination worldwide. They become milestones, reference points for all other works before and after. Their virtues rely on masterful storytelling as well as on the epic scale of their subject matter. The Godfather saga, in its three parts, is one of these creations—a monumental work that has haunted me for years. Constructed like a symphony and directed by a master as a great conductor directs his orchestra, it reaches its highest points of lyricism, for me, in The Godfather, Part II—my favorite of Francis Ford Coppola’s pictures.
“I admire the ambition of the project, its Shakespearean breadth, its tragic melancholy in its portrayal of the dissolution of the American dream. I admire its use of parallel editing to accentuate the paradoxes of the historical analysis, Gordon Willis’s dark-hued photography, the actors’ performances, the accuracy of its period reconstruction. It is particularly the film within the film, the story of young Vito Corleone and his journey from Sicily to the Lower East Side, that touched me in a deep, personal way.Perhaps I saw a bit of my grandparents in that journey; perhaps I recognized my old neighborhood; perhaps I shared the sadness of the dream turning into a nightmare, of the spectacle of the ancient patriarchal family unit trying to survive its own destruction from within. Perhaps all this and more—the rituals, the feasts, the music, the minor characters—touched an intimate chord within me.
“Its use of language is extraordinary. Sicilian dialect becomes more than a secret code for initiates; it is an umbilical cord connected to an archaic society that carries its ancient rules into the New World. By defining us and them, we guarantee our survival.”
When asked if he liked the television drama series of The Sopranos, and would he want to make more Mafia stories, he dismissed the idea: “I only ever watched one episode of The Sopranos because I could not identify with that generation of the underworld. They live in New Jersey with the big houses? I don’t get it. They use language – four-letter profanity – in front of their daughters at the dinner table? I don’t get that. I just didn’t grow up that way.”
When you give his oeuvre more thought you notice his subjects are mostly adult social issues and not concentrated on a single obsession. His latest project, much publicised, is all politics and shot as an epic, digital magic and all. The veteran director wants Killers of the Flower Moon to show not only the killings at the heart of the saga, but also the rich culture of the Osage Nation.
AT THIS AGE WHAT CAN I DO?
Martin Scorsese has worked in, and often reinvented, every genre in film, testing the boundaries of the musical (New York, New York), the biblical epic (The Last Temptation of Christ), the comedy (The Kingof Comedy), the thriller (After Hours) and the biopic (Raging Bull) until each unmistakably resembles a Scorsese picture.Well, almost every genre. At 80, the director has finally circled back to the genre that has shaped his film-making more than any other: greed and politics wrapped up in athe western format. It’s a subject on which he talks fast.
“I grew up on the American genres of the 1940s and 1950s. I had asthma as a child. I couldn’t do any athletics, I couldn’t go near animals, I couldn’t go outdoors and be around vegetation because I got attacks. So, for me, seeing westerns, either in colour or black and white, was a major fantasy outlet. Growing up, I watched all the different aspects of the westerns, particularly John Ford’s films, Howard Hawks’s character-driven westerns, the psychological westerns of Anthony Mann, the westerns that showed respect for indigenous people by Delmer Daves — Broken Arrow, The Last Wagon. As a kid aged nine or 10, I thought everything was settled. It wasn’t until 1974 [that] I happened to visit the Pine Ridge Reservation in Dakota; I was very shocked and disturbed by the poverty and the conditions in which the Oglala Sioux were living. It was traumatic. I realised that there was much more going on than the mythology that we were fed. You know, I always wanted to make a western, but I thought the western genre really ended with Sam Peckinpah and The Wild Bunch. The western became something else, something about form, something that doesn’t reflect the values of America today.”
Scorsese happened upon David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI as he wrapped Silence, his Jesuit missionary drama from 2016. Grann’s painstakingly researched work chronicles a horrific secret campaign waged against the Osage Nation in the 1920s after the discovery of oil deposits under their barren Oklahoma reservation briefly made the tribe the wealthiest people in the world; their fortune precipitated a series of mysterious murders. Scorsese immediately wanted to bring this “terrible tragedy unknown outside tribal peoples” to the big screen but wasn’t initially sure how. Early drafts of the script cast Leonardo DiCaprio as the FBI agent who comes to Oklahoma to investigate.
“Myself and [my co-screenwriter] Eric Roth talked about telling the story from the point of view of the bureau agents coming in to investigate,” says the director. “After two years of working on the script, Leo came to me and asked, ‘Where is the heart of this story?’ I had had meetings and dinners with the Osage, and I thought, Well, there’s the story. The real story, we felt, was not necessarily coming from the outside, with the bureau, but rather from the inside, from Oklahoma.”
In May, when Killers of the Flower Moon premiered at Cannes, the principal chief of the Osage Nation, Geoffrey Standing Bear, appeared on the red carpet alongside Scorsese. “On behalf of the Osage,” he said, “Marty Scorsese has restored trust. And we know that trust will not be betrayed.”
That trust began in 2019, when the film-maker met about 300 members of Oklahoma’s Gray Horse community. An unprecedented collaboration ensued. “I always said if I ever get involved with anything that has to do with indigenous people, I’d better know who the people are or, at least, feel comfortable with them as human beings,” says Scorsese. “And that’s what happened. When I first met Chief Standing Bear I was nervous. We went into his office. We started talking. I think what he needed from me was to know that I wasn’t going to take advantage of him, that I wasn’t going to sensationalise the story, particularly the victimisation of the Osage, particularly the violence.
“I know that a number of the people in the community pointed out that they had seen the movie Silence. They felt that a heart was there. I say this hesitantly. But they felt that they could trust white. I tried to do my best to come up to that trust — it was not easy. But it was very comfortable working with them. I depended on them. They’d tell me something; I’d write it down and put it in the script.”
Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon pivots around the marriage of Ernest Burkhart, a first World War veteran — played, after a switch of character, by DiCaprio — who has returned to the United States and to the employ of his scheming cattle baron uncle, William K Hale (played by Robert De Niro), whose plans may be being facilitated by the Ku Klux Klan and the Freemasons. Urged on by Hale, Burkhart courts and marries an Osage heiress named Mollie Kyle (a mesmerising Lily Gladstone). While she and Burkhart build a life and have children together, some of her family are killed, horrifically, with no little assistance from Burkhart. “It’s not a whodunit,” Scorsese says. “We know exactly whodunit. The audience is way ahead of us.” The fortunes of the dead Osage women duly pass to their white, opportunistic husbands.
After Kyle and various elders visit Washington, DC, to plead with President Calvin Coolidge to intervene, a former Texas Ranger named Tom White (played by Jesse Plemons) arrives on behalf of the Bureau of Investigation, the 1930s precursor to the FBI.
“When I read the book I was fascinated by the kind of mentality these schemers had,” says Scorsese. “And the horrible beauty of that mentality is how they justified everything. They thought, ‘This culture is on the way out. They don’t know the value of money. We take advantage of them and they are fine with it.’ As De Niro says, ‘There’ll be an outcry when they are gone, but people will forget.’
“What I realised too was that guys like Bill Hale were operating like people I knew in the Lower East Side in New York when I was growing up. Only not as smart. Because, out there, you could do anything. And they did. You have the Klan and the Masons behind you. You could pretty much get away with anything, the way certain politicians feel that they can now.”
A scene fromKillers of the Flower Moon: Robert De Niro and Jesse Plemons
The casting of Lily Gladstone, who deserves to take home the best-actress Oscar next spring, has proved to be one of Scorsese’s best ideas. Her remarkable quiet nobility on screen is complemented by a textured family history: she is descended on her father’s side from the 19th-century Blackfoot chief Red Crow and on her mother’s side from the British prime minister William Gladstone.
“We need allies,” Gladstone said in Cannes, praising Scorsese, DiCaprio and De Niro. “Native people are used to having anthropologists coming in, curious about everything that we do. These artistic souls … cared about telling a story that pierces the veil of what society tells us we’re supposed to care about. Who else is going to challenge people to acknowledge their own complicity in white supremacy? We’re speaking of the 1920s Osage community; we’re talking about the Tulsa riots. Why the hell does the world not know about these things? Our communities always have. It’s so central to how we understand our place in the world.”
De Niro has compared his character to Donald Trump. Scorsese acknowledges a through line between De Niro’s nefarious Bill Hale and Ethan Edwards, John Wayne’s compelling anti-hero in The Searchers, a film that has long been a cornerstone for the director. Paul Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver reworked John Ford’s 1956 film against a scuzzy New York backdrop; in Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Harvey Keitel discusses Ethan’s showdown with his Native American rival Scar; the final, pointedly dreary codas of The Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas echo the door-framed exile that closes Ford’s film.
“It’s one of my great favourites,” says Scorsese. “There are certain issues with it, like indigenous people played by white actors. The attitude towards the female and indigenous characters is very, very hard to take. But what’s really great about that film is Ethan Edwards. When the film came out, some critics loved Ford’s films but stopped at The Searchers. What was Ford doing with a character like that? But in 1956 he represented the world around us. He represented base racism. He doesn’t belong anywhere any more. He shoots the eyes out of a dead Native American to kill the soul of the man. You can see the incredible hatred on John Wayne’s face. All the fear of sexuality and the conflict of cultures. It’s a very brave presentation of the conflict in postwar America.”
Rather too much is made of Scorsese’s aversion to superhero films and the Marvelisation of the movieverse. It’s frequently overlooked that the veteran film-maker is as effusive about emerging talents as he is dismissive of corporatisation. As an executive producer he has, in recent years, ushered Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s Murina, Josephine Decker’s Shirley, and Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman into cinemas.
Today, he says that the director Ari Aster helped to inspire the tempo of Killers of the Flower Moon. That timing is crucial for a film that flies by even though it’s almost three-and-a-half hours long. “I very much like the style and pacing of good horror films like Ari Aster’s Midsommar or Beau Is Afraid. The pacing of those films goes back to the B films of Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie. Just going a little slower. A little quieter. I was very concerned about allowing scenes that were not narrative into the story, scenes to do with the Osage culture – leaving in those scenes of custom, like the baby namings, the funerals and the weddings – so we could begin to understand a little more about the people. I felt confident that a lot of people would allow themselves to be immersed in the world of the film. One has to take these chances. At this age, what else can I do?”
NOTES
Killers of the Flower Moon is in cinemas from Friday, October 20th, with previews on Thursday, October 19th.Thanks are due to Tara Brady of the Irish Times for the bulk of this interview. A review of the film will follow soon.
A march – perhaps surrounding single targets will be more effective
It was only a matter of time before a respected columnist would see Scotland as a loser once more. Kevin McKenna has long supported and reported on the movement for national liberty, often wisely, often with good humour, but now sees the return of a colonial party desperate to govern Scotland again as the end of independence.
He blames the SNP entirely – in that he is not entirely correct, though the party’s propensity to breed and then chase squirrels has no equal, but in doing so he disregards the Scottish psyche. While SNP must take the greater share of the blame for the rise of Labour, we should kep in mind it’s made up of Scots, in the main.This is an understandable reaction to a by-election defeat after years of wins and a party that is now a beleaguered rabbit warren faced by stoats and snares at every opening. Note, McKenna removes Alex Salmond’s time as First Minister, an era of exciting radical advance and political progress. We thought anything was possible.
He does not blame voter frustration, short memory or fickleness, all elements in voting habits.Scots reluctance to utilise civil disobedience as a weapon in its cause – bar a few brave souls soon mocked – does not enter his mind either, a meekness, an ability to accept the inevitable and learn to handle it, in the Scots psyche born of over three hundred years of colonial rule. Living in the best of all possible worlds has been inculcated into us for generations, so much so, we fight for England’s causes, interests and benefit, rarely our own.
What we read and hear about daily, in newspapers, radio, television, plays and documentaries, is all about England. The media, agent of the British State, feeds on itself by choosing the narrative, promoting it, and taking no responsibility for the falsehoods it promotes.The powerful BBC News department picks its news from the morning unionist owned newspapers that McKenna writes for, not one of them in support of Scotland’s civil and constitutional rights. A man is bound to get downhearted by the onslaught of propaganda that surrounds him.
If he thinks the march for freeing minds is finished, just stops in its tracks and doesn’t express itself in other ways, he is ‘part of the problem’, as politicians are apt to say these days. No march for liberation evaporates because some prominent person experiences a day of melancholy, a day for a visit to Father Confessor. McKenna works for newspapers that are also part of the problem. That is enough to depress and shut down any open mind. Scotland needs a strong media voice, Scotland wants for a central daily functioning National Liberation Movement. The British media was never going to provide that castle of defence and attack.
McKenna’s evidence for our drowning of the collective soul is worth a read. He says the regressives sicken him. Join the vomit queue, Kevin.He blames individuals but does not mention what the SNP got wrong, a list of profound faults that is legion. The faults were always there, easy to spot lying on the surface. Take heart; near the end of his diatribe McKenna gives a date when resolve will coalesce into determination once again, for Scotland’s maladay, its depression, the loser syndrome, will only last a ‘decade’.Well, some of us have no intention of waiting that long.
INDEPENDENCE IS OVER
by Kevin McKenna
For those of us who retained a sliver of hope that independence might yet be achieved in what remains of our allotted timespan the result of the Rutherglen and Hamilton West by-election marked the dying of the light.
The bloated career-wing of the SNP will continue to proclaim Freedom and lay all of Scotland’s ills at the doors of Westminster. But they are now little more than a zombie party, twitching and jerking in a twilight zone where nothing grows and the only sound to be heard is the proclaiming of pronouns.
Their primary purpose – achieving independence – is now beyond reach. And so, they have become pointless, a political chimera. There is no longer any reason to vote for them. Three days after the by-election, you’re tempted to say they’re in denial, but that would be to presume that they honestly believed what they were saying.
First, they attempted to take refuge in the relatively low turn-out, as if that explained why Labour gained more than twice as many votes as the SNP. Who is to say that if more people had voted, they’d have voted for the SNP? What I heard repeatedly from early on in the contest was that a significant number of SNP supporters – for a number of reasons – were refusing to vote for the party.
Some of them had been sickened by the party’s needlessly cruel treatment of their former MP Margaret Ferrier. Nor had they appreciated being reviled and gas-lighted by leadership glove-puppets for believing that there can only ever be two sexes and that a transwoman is, well … a transwoman. And some voters hadn’t forgotten that Mr Yousaf still has questions to answer about his own integrity when he chose to miss a crucial vote on equal marriage.
Of course, once you’ve been persuaded of the case for independence there’s no going back to the Unionist cause. Not really. Just over 10 years ago, along with many others from Labour-supporting backgrounds, I made the journey from No to Yes. We’d felt that independence offered a historic opportunity to decouple from an entity that seemed to have been annexed lock, stock and PPE gowns by the greed and profiteering of unfettered capitalism.
Before long though, it became clear that the SNP’s pledges to deliver something better were worth about as much as their commitment to independence. The party was being hollowed out by a malevolent coterie who targeted gender-critical feminists.
They began to gather under ‘progressiveness’ – a meaningless and shape-shifting label indicating radicalism. It was anything but. Rather than devise and shape policies that might have improved the lives of those living in the poorest neighbourhoods they opted for elitist self-indulgence: the smacking ban; the absurd Named Persons legislation; the plain daft Offensive Behaviour at Football legislation and the Stasi-influenced Hate Crime bill. All of them betrayed a profound disdain for working-class people.
Their late affiliation to the Scottish Greens merely rubbed these communities’ noses in it. These impostors have cost the Scottish people millions of pounds pursuing policies that disregarded the economic distress they would yield for working families.
By now, some of us were reduced to justifying a vote for the SNP by saying that once independence was achieved we could be rid of them. But that didn’t really wash either. That sound you hear in the distance is a stampede of well-shod hoofs belonging to the SNP’s Westminster contingent seeking a nice Holyrood list placement or a job with the party’s favourite lobbying forms.
Expect a glut of political podcasts from these political desperadoes. But you’d get better political insight from re-runs of the Teletubbies.
It was reported by several news outlets last week that Mhairi Black, who has graced Westminster for the last eight years, had forced party officials to endorse her parliamentary aide’s bid to succeed her as MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South. Even if true, she’s done little more than follow the recruitment template favoured by the party leadership in the Sturgeon era: don’t promote the best and most able; only party apparatchiks need apply: the more supine and acquiescent the better.
The first opinion poll following last Thursday’s by-election humiliation for the SNP indicates that Scottish Labour are now narrow favourites to win the 2026 Holyrood election. Even if they don’t win outright though, they will gain enough seats to sink independence for at least another decade.
So, what now? The SNP’s professional wing have begun to tiptoe away from independence, knowing that their best hope of maintaining their lifestyles is to self-identify as common-or-garden social democrats. Good luck with that. Anas Sarwar has a five-year start on that dissimulation.
What a waste the last 16 years have been. The SNP have left nothing other than an ugly stain on Scottish public life: intolerant, illiberal and regressive. They have inverted what it means to be truly progressive and reduced the struggle to combat inequality to an identity parade.
They have failed to reduce the education attainment gap and failed to devise an industrial strategy that would boost employment in sectors where conditions are favourable: oil and gas; tourism and renewables. Our attempts to make a handful of boats seem to have been influenced by Laurel and Hardy.
Their only success has been in making Scotland European champions in lethal addiction. That and enriching a wretched suite of arms-length NGOs with the proviso that they bend the knee to the cult of Nicola and her chosen successor.
Those of us who can never now vote for this party are left in a quandary. Can we vote once more for Labour, even though they continue to resist the very thought of independence and are about as radical as Jeremy Clarkson? And then hope that while the cause of independence sleeps for the next decade or two, that at least – in the meantime – the SNP will be shot of Humza Yousaf and those indolent lickspittles who betrayed this movement?
Mind you, those chiefly responsible for destroying this generation’s hope for independence have done not too badly. Nicola Sturgeon has secured a £300k book deal and her successor, though his reign may be short-lived, has got his picture on Time magazine. A parade of highly-paid former advisors have found employment as lobbyists or with global strategic communications firms. Others pretend to be journalists.
They all said they wanted Scotland to be the best wee nation in the world, but they made us something else: the best wee country in the world at rewarding abject failure. They sicken me.
NOTES
Kevin McKenna is a frelance columnist for the Herald and other newspapers.
Glencoe: European pottery and silver and bronze coins.Photo: Gareth Beale
A hoard of coins linked to the MacDonald chief – which may have been stashed away as he tried in vain to escape the Glen Coe massacre – has been discovered underneath a fireplace. The 17th-century collection of 36 coins included international currency, and was hidden beneath the remains of a grand stone fireplace at a site believed to have been a hunting lodge or feasting hall.
The site belonged to Alasdair Ruadh “Maclain” MacDonald of Glen Coe, the clan chief from 1646-92, who, along with his family, was a victim of the massacre that followed the first Jacobite rising. The MacDonalds took part in the 1689 effort to restore the Catholic James II of England and Ireland and VII of Scotland, after his deposition by his Anglican daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange.
As government forces quelled the rebellion and sought to enforce peace terms, the clan was targeted ostensibly for being among those to have failed to take an oath of allegiance to the Protestant monarchs in time. An estimated 82 clan members were killed on 13 February 1692; including Maclain and his wife, but there is evidence more died who fled to the mountain areas in freezing winter snow. As massacres go, it was a small one, but one that has stood as a symbol down the ages, a prime example of mankind’s cruellty – the act of genocide.
Artefacts discovered at “the summerhouse of Maclain”, included European pottery, and silver and bronze coins, dating from the 1500s to 1680s, found during a University of Glasgow dig in August. Lucy Ankers, the archaeology student who found the hoard, said: “As a first experience of a dig, Glencoe was amazing. I wasn’t expecting such an exciting find as one of my firsts. I don’t think I will ever beat the feeling of seeing the coins peeking out of the dirt in the pot.”
Currency from the reigns of Elizabeth I, James VI and I, Charles I, the Cromwellian Commonwealth, and Charles II – as well as France and the Spanish Netherlands and the Papal States was also found. Historians believe whoever buried the coins may have been killed during the massacre, since they did not return for them.
Other finds from the structure included musket and fowling shot, a gun flint and a powder measure, as well as pottery from England, Germany and the Netherlands and the remains of a grand slab floor.
In January 1692, after the rising and the failure of the clan to pay homage, approximately 120 men from the Earl of Argyll’s Regiment of Foot arrived in Glencoe from Invergarry, led by Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. Historians speculated the coins may have been buried two weeks later – on the morning of the massacre. Survivors ran up a side glen during a blizzard, and may have encountered the property.
Dr Michael Given, the co-director of the University of Glasgow’s archaeological project in Glencoe, said: “These exciting finds give us a rare glimpse of a single, dramatic event. Here’s what seems an ordinary rural house, but it has a grand fireplace, impressive floor slabs, and exotic pottery imported from the Netherlands and Germany.
“What’s really exciting is that these coins are no later than the 1680s, so were they buried in a rush as the massacre started first thing in the morning of 13 February 1692? We know some of the survivors ran through the blizzard and escaped up the side glens, including this one. Were these coins witnesses to this dramatic story? It’s a real privilege to hold in our hands these objects that were so much part of people’s lives.”
This is a listings hub of newspaper letters sent to their respective editors. Some are genuine, some from the concerned, some the right-wing Green Ink gang saying the same things to each newspaper, and there is the odd gem. A few belong to unionists and colonial right-wing collegiates, or a phony think-tank such as the discredted ‘These Islands‘. When found or sent by readers (with source, please) they will be added to this page, newist at the head of the list, rather than opening a new topic page for each one.Just place them in the comments section and if appropriate, they will be transferred to the main letters section.
No 5: Herald 24 October 2023
Neil Mackay’s article last Sunday (“How Scots were foot soldiers in England’s colonisation of Ireland”, June 11) presented Dr John Young’s perspective on the (extended) Plantation of Ulster. While asserting that historians have an “obligation to tell the truth” Dr Young did not hesitate to use his personal, extremely selective version of this particular history as the basis from which to condemn any notion that Scotland, like Ireland, has been colonised and abused by the so-called “British” Empire. On this issue, past and present, Dr Young is simply wrong.
By limiting themselves to “facts” historians should indeed aim to provide the truth. However, there is, of course, also a “truth” that is not the “whole truth”. Dr Young is not entitled to omit those facts which contradict his political argument.
England’s incessant political and military attempts, sometimes successful, sometimes not, to colonise Scotland as a vassal state, had been going on for hundreds of years before Bannockburn – never mind the Plantations of Ireland by English and Scottish protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 1650s, Scotland was “annexed” by the London Cromwellian Government. The English Alien Act in 1705 was outright economic blackmail towards the 1707 union; this was not supported nationally. Opposition was vehement, led by George Lockhart and Andrew Fletcher. There are many more facts missing from Dr Young’s assertion that Scotland has not been treated as colony, including, after Culloden, brutal cultural, economic and social oppression – the infamous Clearances – and so on.
However, without the space and word count of your Big Read, to demolish Dr Young’s insidious appeal to ignore reality, all we have to do is jump to the modern history of two thriving ex-colonies, Ireland and India, and their struggle against the ruthless, cynical, asset-stripping, “divide and rule” tactics of that insatiable empire, determined without moral limitation to retain global power and rapacious wealth.
For Dr Young’s information, the last colony – Scotland – has been living through those very same tactics ever since we terrified Westminster’s rotten dregs of empire by daring to come close to independence in 2014. And the whole truth of that – asset-stripping, demoralisation, divide and rule, attacks on leaders, constitutional corruption and manipulation – continues on a daily basis, starkly, within all of our lives. That modern reality of Scotland as the last colony also lies in front of Dr Young but only if he cares to look for the whole truth.”
Frances McKie, Evanton.
No 4: Guardian 20 October 2023
We are shocked to read about the critical situation in Gaza since Israel turned off water supplies to the Gaza Strip more than a week ago. Sanitation services have collapsed, including Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant. With clean water running out (Report, 17 October), more than 2 million people are at risk and are resorting to drinking dirty water, with increasing risks of disease, dehydration and death.
Water is a basic human right, and denying this right violates international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions, constituting a war crime, according to UN experts. The incessant bombing has also led to over a million people fleeing their homes, lacking access to water and food. Israel claims it has restored water to southern Gaza, and the opening of the Rafah crossing from Egypt for humanitarian assistance is significant, although 20 trucks is not much. However, without fuel and electricity, clean water cannot be pumped around Gaza.
We unequivocally condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel. While Israel has a right to self-defence, the collective punishment now enforced on people in Gaza is leading to mass displacement, high numbers of deaths, and unprecedented suffering. This only intensifies the 75-year history of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. We are equally dismayed UK, US and EU are seemingly complicit in their near complete silence on this issue, despite global recognition of water as a human right.
Western governments must call out Israel’s water war crime and call for a ceasefire to prevent the loss of more Israeli and Palestinian lives. We call on Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, the EU and the US to focus on peace and diplomacy and the return of hostages, and building diplomatic channels rather than seeking only military responses. Water in Gaza and the West Bank has long been under Israeli control due to the occupation. Developments have made it a weapon of war, and this must end immediately.
Prof Lyla Mehta Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Dr Alan Nicol Researcher in international water policy
No 3: Herald 17 October 2023
I understand there are several suggestions regarding a name for the new crossing of the Clyde between Govan and Partick. May I suggest The Reid Crossing after the late great Jimmy Reid? He was born and reared in Govan, which he regarded as the centre of the universe. Sadly, he died on 10th August 2010.
He found international fame as one of the leaders of the UCS “work-in” and latterly as a print and film journalist of considerable renown. His rectorial address to the students of Glasgow University is as relevant today as it was when he delivered it on 28th April 1972. I do often wonder what he would make of the current political situation, locally and nationally and indeed internationally. A bridge in his memory would be far more practical than a statue.
I know he would have been both humbled and thrilled at this suggestion. So how about it Glasgow?
Dan Edgar, Rothesay
No 2: Guardian 14 October 2023
Like Zoe Williams (I will never leave Labour – but my new membership card makes me uneasy.) I was disconcerted to be alerted to the ersatz patriotism of the new Labour membership card, with its incorporation of the union jack. On the reverse, the new heading “country first” dominates.
I understand the intention was to signify putting the interests of country above party, but this is nowhere explained on the card itself or in the accompanying email. In the absence of context other than the flag, the phrase conjures up the nativist, isolationist and white supremacist tendencies exemplified by the Australia and America First movements, culminating in the resurrection of the latter by Donald Trump.
Labour unaccountably also seems to have overlooked the resonance with Britain First, words adopted by an offshoot of the fascist BNP and allegedly the inspiration of the killer of Jo Cox.
It is particularly unfortunate that the introduction of this apparently nationalist framing coincides with the appalling carnage in Israel-Palestine. The latter demonstrates the utter failure of a unilaterally imposed settlement to protect the rights of all the people in the area. Labour should be demanding an international response which can never be based on the parochialism of “country first”.
Dr Anthony Isaacs, London
No 1: Herald on Sunday, 08 October 2023
“As the statements of Alexander McKay (“every single project the SNP touches, without exception, fails”, Letters, October 1) and those arguing against self-determination become increasingly ridiculous, it is evident to others that in spite of the recent trials and tribulations of the SNP core support for independence of around half of the population has not declined.
In fact, given the demise of the UK economically, socially and democratically it is only a matter of time (as I suspect Mr McKay and the decreasing numbers beguiled by the long-past days of Empire are aware combined with the UK Government’s court-defying determination to hide polling figures) before more people in Scotland determine that our country can manage its resources better than a UK Government that has failed over decades to level-up England, never mind level-up the whole of the UK.
While governments around the world do not have a good track record of completing major infrastructure projects on time and within budget, if Mr McKay were to take a short drive he would encounter evidence that perhaps the SNP Scottish Government is the exception that proves the rule. There are, of course, examples of projects that have not gone to plan (as has been repeatedly highlighted in the media in Scotland), but the Queensferry Crossing stands as a laudable example across the UK of what can be achieved.
The M74 extension was completed eight months ahead of time and £20 million under budget, which is in stark contrast to the late and hugely over-budget costs associated with budgeted enhancements of the M25 around London. Meanwhile, according to UK minister James Cleverly, £33 billion has already been spent on HS2.
Some arguments can legitimately be made by those wishing to maintain the constitutional status quo, but, as ex-PM Liz Truss has proven, superior economic management by the UK Government is not one of those arguments.”
Grouse Beater 
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