Monologues of Demagogues

Bell Pottinger’s anonymous London offices

Demagogues, there are so many overflowing with racial resentment you can pluck them out of the air – or any BBC chat show – pull the pin in their back and hear them cackle pre-recorded racist tosh. If you broke them in half you’ll find neo-fascist in hard sugary letters all the way through them.

There is Nigel Farage, running around Europe glad-handing far-right extremist parties while denouncing European unity – most nations would have confiscated his passport by now; Theresa May telling Scotland to keep its nose out of the United Kingdom’s business as if Scotland has no part to play in the United Kingdom; Boris Johnson, his mouth full of crotch-rubbed cricket balls, telling Europe to keep its nose out of England’s affairs simultaneously demanding the EU negotiates a trade deal to keep poor England afloat.

And in the background there is Trump giving Britain’s racists the confidence to crawl out of the toilet bowl, unblocking the U-bend to flush away Muslims and migrant workers. The power elite who stole the nation’s taxes and hold tight to our wealth, sip their Prosecco smug in the knowledge they have Brits blaming anybody and each other for the perilous state of the nation.

In a talk, novelist John Le Carré, former MI5 and MI6 employee, about as far-right in political sympathies as one can get without having written Mein Kampf, castigates Trump for his 1930s-style fascism. “It’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.” Johnny Foreigner is a fascist. Big surprise. But there’s always an Englishman to stop him in his tracks.

Where was the criticism of his own nation?

A surfeit of democracy

It isn’t enough to deny Scotland a second plebiscite on autonomy. Westminster’s neo-fascists plot a method of denying Europeans in Scotland the right to vote in another referendum lest they secure Scotland’s long-halted freedoms. Non-Brits living in Scotland must become non-persons at the earliest opportunity.

If a semblance of a democratic system is retained to appease the Bitch of all Parliaments, a system whereby long-term residents can register to be given a vote, they are to be frustrated from doing so by any means possible. Our choices are to be severely limited. This is the way white supremacists in the USA dealt with black Americans trying to exercise their democratic rights in the early part of last century.

The symbol of Bell Pottinger

Is there a difference between the shockingly unethical conduct of PR firm Bell Pottinger and the unethical conduct of unionists during and after Scotland’s first Referendum? (That’s a rhetorical question.)

For the uninformed, Bell Pottinger is a corporate PR company with close links to the Tory Party, the same breed that helped brief against Scotland’s hopes for a democratic society.

The company was expelled from the Public Relations and Communications Association, the industry regulatory body, for whipping up racial hatred in South Africa on behalf of its client, the Gupta family, accused of corruption on a grand scale. The scandal has forced Bell Pottinger’s chief executive, James Henderson, to resign, followed by an exodus of clients. The chances of it surviving beyond Christmas are extremely remote.

When the disgraced bank HSBC withdraws its account you know Bell Pottinger must stink to high heaven. But here’s the thing: what it did was immoral but not illegal, exactly what was said of corrupt banks who stole our national wealth to sustain their existence.

The same self-serving reasoning was given for black propaganda thrown at Scotland, often staged by flaky think tanks, two-bit advertising agencies, and phony political movements. One such ‘movement’ was the No Borders ‘mass movement’ campaign. The movement was more or less one man and his bowel movement, one nice man in a nice house, promoted by another nice man from the nice BBC, neither hung out to dry for their false claims. Apologists say what they did was not racist, only misguided. Aye, right.

What Bell Pottinger undertook to do on behalf of its clients in South Africa was stir up racial tension. It did it to take the heat of some skulduggery by the Gupta family and its links with government contracts. By all accounts Bell Pottinger has a history of taking on unsavoury clients and briefs.

In the UK the pawns of Westminster stirred up as much racial tension as they could muster against Scotland bedevilled as they were faced by a resolutely civic campaign for greater rights. Their cheapest gob spit was to call sound political argument in favour of self-determination anti-English.

There’s no difference

What was the unionist ‘Better Together’ campaign by a thinly disguised cabal composing and disseminating racist fabrications to a willing press and media, damning  pro-independence historians as Braveheart eccentrics and the man in the street as ‘sweaties’, a racially offensive jibe at Scots.

That’s how fascists have worked down the decades. Separate a dissenting group, a ‘tribe’ and then eviscerate it. Make the population focus on its imagined misdeeds and not your nefarious behaviour. The Better Together campaign was the equivalent of a low-grade PR consultancy taking on a commission from the UK government. It used neo-fascist tactics. It stirred up racial hatred to divert attention from their hidden agenda – in the UK’s case, retain control of Scotland economy and above all, its oil.

Those well-paid monotheists think we have a surfeit of democracy. They conspire to marginalise and if possible criminalise legitimate political aspirations.

Farage shakes hands with Germany’s far-right alternative, Beatrix von Storch

They all live happily ever after

No leading proponent of that anti-Scotland campaign resigned in disgust at what was done in the name of colonial power. The conduct of that campaign might have been immoral but it wasn’t illegal. Ask Orkney Lib-Dem MP Alistair Carmichael, tarred as a serial dissembler by the courts but still an MP serving his servile constituents. Alistair Darling was elevated to the Lords as a peer of the realm. Their ‘sacrifice’ is legitimised.

When a Scot supportive of a corrupt system does it, it magically isn’t racist. Both Darling and Carmichael will reject outright the accusation of neo-fascism, but that’s what it is. They believe in a breed, a superior race.

Bell Pottinger is another corporate PR company that together with Westminster consider the huddled masses have enjoyed an excess of democracy. England will decide if we are European, or an entity called otherness.

A race against time to dominate and control.

Let the Scots in. Keep the Scots out. Stay with us and lead us. Stay out of English affairs. A great wee nation that punches above its weight. A whiny wee nation that is too uppity for its own good. You need England to subsidise your feeble economy. We need Scots to fight in our wars. And so on, and so nauseas, good cop, bad cop.

Racism. It’s unacceptable to call it tribalism unless you’re a miserable journalist of no conscience working for the right-wing press, or a Labour member of the Scottish Parliament. They forget people who spoke of races and tribalism in Germany back in the Thirties were almost always Nazis.

That thing called otherness

We Scots like to think that the fear of otherness will dissipate so long as we commingle one with another. And there is some truth in that assumption. Polish people have been here and accepted since the 1850’s as Scots have been in Poland. Italians are well integrated into Scottish society. Indians and Pakistanis, Islam or Hindu, find life in Scotland to their taste. Hong Kong, Cantonese and Han Chinese generally shun full integration but are a welcome part of the Scottish diaspora. Nordic people feel at home.

We have over 370,000 English for the most part happily domiciled in Scotland, a good many – so analysts aver – voted against Scotland protecting itself and the rest of us from the vagaries of otherism. We have no campaigns to expel them.

There are no billboard trucks running around cities advising non-Scots to buy a ticket to travel home. There is no General Amin telling Indian and Pakistanis they have 90 days to pack up and leave. We are as far way from blood and soil nationalism as Earth is from Mars. Scotland welcomes new blood. But it needs to check it isn’t importing viruses.

Blood and soil and a little compost

Westminster thinks it can impose centralised power over its ethnic constituents and still call Britain the United Kingdom, while keeping a straight face.

The wealth of India fuelled England’s industrial revolution. How many English can tell you that? You’ll not find any school teachers teach students of that fact let alone any Tory politician admit it. As far as England is concerned, it got wealthy all by itself.

They will claim in the twentieth century Scotland’s oil had damn all to do with keeping the British economy afloat. If you believe that, you are just the sort of gullible fool our colonial masters value. As Dean Acheson memorably put it, Britain lost an empire and has not yet found a role. And so it appears determined to hang on to Scotland.

I am tired of  Tory politicians pretending they are a superior race, a superior intellect, a superior culture. English who detest what’s happening need to make themselves heard. Fair minded English are everywhere as repelled as we are at the conduct of their nation, but they need to get themselves organised. Those professing they will move to Scotland to avoid the worst excesses of xenophobia have to do more than look for an escape. They should protest, tell their MPs they won’t take the crap anymore.

Europeans among us are tarred as foreigners. We are told to be scared of North Koreans, of the Chinese, of the Japanese, and yet again of that auld cold war enemy the Russians. England would have us be accustomed to conquest by force. History is ready to repeat itself.

Racism is the order of the day.

English racism is never-ending. It’s everywhere like death watch beetles in lime trees. Some of my countrymen are smitten by the disease.

We want dialogue not monologues from demagogues.

We are all brothers, shout Anglophiles and English politicians in an effort to shame our humanity. We shout back, aye, but we’re men too, and as men we recognise lying bastards when we hear them!

We don’t give a damn if you think ‘No’ means no to full civil rights. We do not want sucked into your colonial mentality – we want a new arrangement without confinement. When we say we want full democracy and the right to exercise it we mean it!

It is time for a new alliance with the English State – and what a hellish state it’s in.

 

 

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