Picking up where Grant Thoms left off in last week’s Flag in the Wind, the European Election results were announced on Monday. It always feels a bit odd to go home after a long polling day effort… and wait. I must admit it was nice to soak in the bath and put my feet up rather than face an early morning at the count, but the not knowing is very strange! In my own branch of Shettleston, David Linden had knock-up teams pushing through polling districts from early on polling day until most voters were heading for their beds. We got a keen response fromRead More →

As I write this on the eve of the European Parliament poll, Scotland is about to vote to elect its 6 Members of the European Parliament. On Monday lunchtime, we will know how Scotland has decided. I hope that the opinion polls are correct and that the D’Hondt system of allocating seats will reward the SNP and possibly the Greens with 3 and 1 seat. This would be an emphatic lift for the YES campaign – even though we say the European elections are nothing to do with the referendum. The media will dissect the result to suit their own agendas. Three seats for theRead More →

Noam Chomsky once said, “The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.” I think Nigel Farage may be aware of this truth, as is Better Together – the self- styled “Project Fear.” And this use of fear is what mires our political debate: whether about Europe or the Independence Referendum, it is the lowest denominator of political rhetoric. In the USA, negative campaigning is perceived to work. So if Project Fear and Farage were not bad enough, Labour and the Conservatives are importing US spin doctors David Axelrod and Jim Messina.Read More →

On Sunday mornings I usually get up around 9 am and hesitantly approach my letterbox with a degree of trepidation. My normal Sunday papers were the Sunday Herald and the Sunday Post. A week or two back I was so incensed by the Sunday Post cartoon showing Alex Salmond in the dock being grilled by a scholarly legalistic Alastair Darling, that I cancelled that paper. It had been my parents’ choice in my younger days, and after I got married I just carried on; as my sons grew up they avidly scanned the football pages. So after probably over 60 years readership (these last 10Read More →

After losing so many Yes campaigners throughout the country in recent weeks I was getting a bit depressed. Too many were being taken that had worked hard for independence and with such a short time left, weren’t going to see it happen. We had been asked if we could act as chauffeur on Saturday night and to be honest, with the low feeling and the cold, damp, misty weather we could have seen it far enough. However we had a mission. We had to collect Dr. Norman Allan in Banff and ensure he got to Strichen. The mission was secret. He was to be toldRead More →