BY EFFIE DEANS We have all rather forgotten about Brexit in the past few months. Whatever damage Brexit might have done to the economy is trivial compared to what Covid has done. Being locked up in our homes with an illness killing thousands with no end in sight has rather put other matters in perspective. If we can manage Covid and we will have to, … Continue reading No Deal & Scotland
BY EFFIE DEANS Recently the Shetland Council declared that it would explore autonomy. Could Shetland declare independence either from the UK or from Scotland? Could it declare that it was autonomous from either? In terms of law the answer is No. Shetland is part of the UK territory and does not have a unilateral right to declare either autonomy or independence. Anyone who doubts this … Continue reading Shetland Independence?
BY EFFIE DEANS The Committee on the Scottish Government Handling of Harassment Complaints has come to a halt. It cannot proceed further at the moment because of witnesses not attending and evidence not being supplied. The Committee (otherwise known as the Salmond Inquiry) is waiting for responses from the Scottish Government, SNP Chief Peter Murrell (Nicola Sturgeon’s husband) and Alex Salmond. Linda Fabiani (an SNP … Continue reading A Gun Soon To Smoke
BY EFFIE DEANS Sir Keir Starmer wants voters to believe that Labour has rediscovered its patriotism and that it loves Britain as much as everyone else. He wants us to believe that Labour is different now than it was when it was led by Jeremy Corbyn. It is clear that Starmer is a much better leader than Corbyn. He is a more moderate leader and … Continue reading New Leadership, Same Fossils
BY EFFIE DEANS The other day I wrote about my experience on a trip to the Highlands. I didn’t expect it to be particularly popular article, after all Gaelic is a minority language spoken on a daily basis by about eleven thousand people mostly in the Outer Hebrides. But suddenly my timeline was filled with raging Scottish Nationalists. Not one of them addressed the substantive … Continue reading Losing Our Way Part II
BY EFFIE DEANS For a few years as a child while my father helped build an oil rig, I lived in a very remote part of the West Highlands near to where Boris Johnson tried to go on holiday with his family. There were less than twenty children in the school and around one hundred people in the village. The elderly people could speak Gaelic … Continue reading Losing Our Way Part I
Ingredients: Honey Cream Blackberries Honey Lemon Juice Scotch Whisky Instructions: Muddle some blackberries, fresh squeezed lemon and honey in the bottom of a shaker tin, and let the honey dissolve a bit in the blackberry and lemon juices. Add a dram of a scotch. Top the drink with a float of hand whipped cream and honey. Continue reading The Black Scot
BY EFFIE DEANS How many SNP MPs do you know who claim to be English? Well why not? They live in London. Perhaps they might claim that their residence in England is only temporary. That their main residence is in Scotland. Well what about the approximately one million people born in Scotland who live elsewhere? Nearly 800,000 of these live in England. How many of … Continue reading Scottishness Dissimulated
BY EFFIE DEANS Few people in Scotland probably know very much about Belarus, a small landlocked country of 9 million to the east of Poland. But then again, few people in Belarus know much more about Scotland than that men wear skirts, play bagpipes and imitate Scrooge McDuck. People in Belarus are frequently blissfully unaware of the parts of the United Kingdom. They describe the … Continue reading Europe’s Penultimate Dictator?
BY EFFIE DEANS The British Government has already ruled out a second Scottish independence referendum during the course of the next Parliament. It was in the Conservative Party manifesto and the Conservative Party won a large majority. That should be the end of the matter. Constitutional matters are reserved. The Scottish Parliament should be getting on with devolved issues and using the increased powers it … Continue reading How to Stop Scottish Nationalism
BY EFFIE DEANS I remember discussions in 2014 about whether Scottish independence would create a border between Scotland and the rest of Britain. Scottish nationalists insisted vehemently that there would be no border and that we wouldn’t notice crossing from Scotland into England just as an Austrian doesn’t notice crossing into Germany. Six years later and we discover what we knew all along. The SNP … Continue reading A Scottish English Border?
BY EFFIE DEANS Where I come from in Aberdeenshire there was no such thing as sectarianism. No one in school ever asked me about religion. I neither knew nor cared which church if any anyone else went to. There were no marches here until very recently. We were able to “stand free” from all of that or so we rather smugly thought. Christianity is becoming … Continue reading Sectarianism on the Rise
