Jim Lynch

As I am starting to write this on Monday 30th November I take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy St Andrew’s Day – I am a slow writer at the best of times. SNP Conference The SNP Conference is on at present, and I have it on Zoom, but I am not able to watch and write The Flag at the same time. However I did go through to the next room to watch Nicola’s Speech, which I followed avidly, and one part jumped out – £500 for every member of the NHS payable in this financial year. The master stroke is that sheRead More →

I just had my 86th Birthday, Fri 23 Oct, so I am waxing philosophical: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,Creeps in this petty pace from day to day until the last syllable of  recorded time.And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.Out out brief candle, life is but a poor player , who struts and frets his hour upon the stage , and then is heard no more.It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” I used to think this was from Hamlet, who seems to soliloquise a lot, but it is from MacBeth;  IRead More →

What a lot of items to choose from in this week’s Flag, so I thought I would give a few details as to how it was created. The Flag is an offshoot of the Scots Independent Newspaper. The SI, as we use the shorthand, was founded in November 1926 by Scots living in London.  The first page was written by James Clark;  I met his son Duncan, at an exhibition of the  Scottish Political Archive in Edinburgh.  The SNP was not officially in its present form until 1934, approximately 6 months before I was born! (The Scottish Political Archive is at Stirling University, and isRead More →

Well, I did not think I would be able to do another Flag, but here I am again. Since the last Flag I did, 3 Jan, my life has changed quite a bit; on 20th January I fell at a pedestrian crossing in Corstorphine.  I was picked up by a lady, Karen O’Shaughnessy, and the Pedestrian Crossing attendant. Mrs O’Shaughnessy kindly brought me home. My son took me to the Western  General Hospital who found I had a broken arm;  we also went to Edinburgh Royal and got a brain scan which was OK.  The next day I was taken in to the Western General. Read More →

When I started this yesterday I should have qualified it by stating how things changed rapidly when in a General Election. I ended up commenting on how hectoring Andrew Neil was to Nicola Sturgeon, talking over her, not listening to answers and generally being more obnoxious than he used to be – or am I just being forgetful? However the next day he did the same to Jeremy Corbyn; Mr Corbyn, like Nicola, kept a calm sough and did not shout back. I wait to see with interest how he behaves against his beloved Boris. To my wife’s great astonishment I did not watch theRead More →

Among all the cantrips in the weeks up to Halloween Operation Yellowhammer has emerged yet again; to remind readers, this is the panic created by the Government and its toadies to get a deal of any sorts through the House of Commons or be faced with a No Deal scenario. This will be forced on it by a greedy dictatorial EU – well that is their interpretation. Mrs Theresa May was the one who decided to move Section 50, think that is the section, and then had to go bonnet (ladies do not wear caps!) in hand to the EU to agree the terms ofRead More →

Consider the Liberals of the field, they sow not neither do they reap, but never was Solomon in all his glory as arrogant as one of these. Apologies for this misquotation from the Bible – think it should be “spin” not reap, but they actually do spin, if not in the Biblical fashion. I was watching the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday, followed by Politics Scotland with Gordon Brewer. Jo Swinson, Leader, aspiring to be Prime Minister I think, was saying she would not enter into any pact with Johnson or Corbyn. Marr did not quite pin down how her tactics would work, but withRead More →