Despatch Dispatch

A Despatch Dispatch.

 Several years before the death of my parents they were the victims of theft by an intruder in their home. A nasty experience and one shared, unfortunately, by many. The intruder was however apprehended and the goods and money stolen returned to them by the police. In the aftermath of this incident I became aware that most of the money returned had been taken from a drawer in their bedroom and amounted to some thousands of pounds. I insisted that my mother place this money in the bank and asked her why and how she came to have this amount. Her reply, which still brings tears to my eyes, was that it was to pay for their funeral and that she had been saving a little every week for a number of years. Neither she nor my father wanted to burden their children with such an expense.

This is an extremely painful memory to share in public and I do so for one reason; namely to underline and reinforce my rage about the publicly funded Thatcher funeral.

Thatcher was a rich woman with well off children who died, in old age, in her bed. This is something we would wish for everyone. Alas, since the world is not fair and unfortunately the meek do not inherit the earth, it is not the fate of many. During the Thatcher years many of her victims died prematurely and without dignity in shop doorways, cardboard boxes, under bridges and on hospital trolleys.

You would think however that even the latest inheritors of her Chicago boys, shock doctrine school of economics would not be so crass and unthinking as to (in these times of austerity) place the burden of this woman’s funeral on the hard pressed public. It seems that they are.

Mr Cameron thinks it is a fitting tribute to the woman who “saved Britain”. She may have saved it for him and his rich friends, but she turned it into a wasteland for the rest of us.  The most divisive political figure of our lifetime, reviled by about 80% of the Scottish population is given a state funded funeral; my parents who were decent, good, compassionate, hard working people went without in order to save a pittance from their state pension in order not to place any financial burden on their children.

This, Mr Cameron, sums up the difference between you and your kind and the rest of us.           

Parallel Universe

Yesterday was a strange day. As I listened with increasing incredulity to the nauseating, sycophantic eulogies to the late departed M Thatcher I was feeling more and more as if I inhabited a parallel universe.

This Alice down the rabbit hole feeling increased throughout the day especially when I received the rationale from a young better together supporter as to his reasons for voting no. He believes that by being together Britain has been able to exert a more benign influence on the world.

More benign than what? Attila the Hun?

I had a long hard think about ways in which Britain has influenced the world. I trolled through a potted history of British foreign policy and in order to minimise the personal distress to myself and others I have edited the worst excesses.

Did this benign influence include: British, lucrative involvement in the slave trade [estimated 10,000 voyages by British slave ships]; Imperial plundering of over one third of the world's resources; Befriending and upholding unelected and despotic regimes to suit vested interests; Deaths from starvation of thousands of Irish people during the famine while rich Anglo Irish exported food to Britain; The 19th century opium wars....deaths not counted; The Highland Clearances 1762....1852; 29 million Indians starved to death, murdered by British state policy 1876; Black Friday, 31st January 1919..Glaswegians demonstrating for better working conditions in the wake of the 1st world war, met with tanks and 10,000 British troops; The Somme 1916; Atrocities by the Black and Tans 1920’s; Bengal famine 1943; The torture, starvation, forced labour, gang rapes and murder of thousands of Kenyans by British forces 1950’s; Sinking of the Belgrano with 323 lives lost [war crime]; Pinochet link to SAS surveillance during the Falklands conflict;1991 Iraq...British support for mass murder from a distance; 2003 Lies, deceit, dodgy dossier, death of Dr Kelly, and the illegal invasion of Iraq (estimated deaths of civilians range between 170,000 and 1,033,000); British remain in Afghanistan [benign intervention]; Arms dealers forming an orderly line to be part of forthcoming interventions..Iran? Syria?

 

Of course we did all stand together against the Nazis during the 2^nd world war. We did indeed, my Dad being one of them, putting his young life on the line based in an airfield in England and feeling he had no choice but to fight against this evil and prevent the invasion of Britain. What my Dad didn’t know however was that the British government and the British aristocracy had a plan B. Their intention was that should invasion of Britain succeed, they would give up Scotland to the enemy in order to protect their green and pleasant land.

 Well the Unionist in question may have only one reason to vote no but I have many reasons to vote yes and ridding me of my association with “benign British influence” is only one of them.

I wonder what the strangeness of today and tomorrow will be?

Maybe we will all slip unseen through the looking glass.

(Inter)Nationalism

I had a recent encounter with a young, new labour, political student on the subject of independence. He was at pains to tell me that we were better together and that while he agreed that Scotland would probably be better off under independence he could not support it because he was an internationalist.

I did have a moment of wry amusement at this earnest young man lecturing me on my political awareness given that he wasn’t yet born when I was suffering from the worst effects of Thatcherism; lying on the road outside Faslane nuclear base; surrounding the base at Greenham Common; defying the poll tax; helping to feed the families of striking miners and so on....His youth however is not his fault  and  it is for each new generation to set its own agendas based on their own life experiences. 

I was compelled, however, to ask him to define internationalism; did he mean that he wanted a one world government; was he campaigning for a European super state? Well apparently not, what he was actually expounding was (his nationalism of choice) namely British nationalism. 

I put it to him that the nation state ( like it or not ) is the natural state of being in the world and that  my preference was to be the citizen of a self governing country with a sense  of social justice and an open , welcoming relationship with the wider world.

He after all, has allied himself to the Westminster parliament where politicians from all the Westminster parties are falling over each other in the rush to be the most narrow, parochial, anti foreign, anti European, border controlling bunch of xenophobes that we have encountered in post war western Europe .

Not my idea of internationalism. I wonder what James Keir Hardie would make of it all? I doubt we could stop him spinning in his grave long enough to ask.