THE HIDEOUS ANTICS OF THE TABLOID PRESS MIGHT WELL DELIVER OUR INDEPENDENCE ON A PLATE.

This has felt like a real game changing week for the cause of Scottish Independence. At long last we seem to be getting onto the ground we need to be on. I remember clearly giving talk after talk back in 2014 where I tried to sell the idea of 'Brand Scotland'. How we need to pay attention to what the rest of the world thinks of us. How we need to sell what we have to offer with all the vibrant enthusiasm of a Mumbai street hawker. How we need to stop being constantly obsessed by the way those south of the border are looking at us. At our aspirations. I can't say my message always played all that well!

Well here's how I see it.

Every time some second rate hack steals a minute or two of limelight to sneer and mock the very idea of an independent Scotland, we allow our hackles to rise up. Smug right wingers like Julia Hartley Brewer or Katie Hopkins are presented as having some kind of huge influence on events and we duly react as if they actually have a degree of importance.

Well, they haven't.

They barely deserve to be classified as bit part players. At some stage we were always about to wake up to this tawdry reality. These are low grade click bait who are paid to pander to the worst instincts of retired people in Slough who are spitting angry about a Sikh family moving in three doors down.

I guess as a white settler who headed north to Scotland to escape the growing race hate in my home town of Blackburn, I tend to see what is going down in England more clearly than some of my fellow YES travelers. The poison has been there for years. The Brexit vote was merely the pin which popped the balloon and allowed it to seep out into the light. For many years the tabloid press has been patiently stirring this toxic pot whilst slowly but surely bringing it to boiling point.

There has been a clear agenda for the last few decades as London has been sucking the blood of the rest of the country. Every year 49,999,000 English people get a little bit poorer whilst a thousand or so of the gilded rich sail off into their British Virgin Island sunsets. The big worry of the one percent has always been that this monumental act of larceny might become a thing with the the 49,999,000 who are being so royally screwed over. So the tabloid editors who have been tasked to find a way to get the public to look in the opposite direction to the scene of the crime have always been on the look out for new and different people to blame. We all know the list. The miners, the Scousers, the IRA, benefits claimants, immigrants, Islamic nutters, the EU and now, of course, the pesky Scots.

There is no escaping the fact that this nasty undertaking has by and large gone pretty well. After all, me and my fellow Liverpool fans were successfully blamed for something we didn't do for almost thirty years as a result of our being branded as part of the 'enemy within'.

I recall an extraordinary stat from the 2014 campaign which demonstrated the breathtaking reality of the UK's 'London First' policy. The average spend on transport per head of population in London in 2013 was over £3000. In the North East of England it was £40. The Geordies really should have been marching south with their pitch forks. Instead they allowed themselves to be brain washed into blaming foreigners for the abject poverty of their region. The extent of the brain washing only became apparent on June 23^rd when the North East proved to be very much at the top of the xenophobia charts.

Job done.

We Scots have been up to much the same thing for the last couple of decades. We blame London, not foreign people, for most of our ills. The big difference is that we are absolutely right to do so! Potholes on the roads of Hartlepool have nothing whatsoever to do with Polish nurses. The fact that the income from Scottish oil was used to build the M25 DID have absolutely everything to do with London. It was London's motorway. It was London's call.

Because we have rightly looked to London not foreigners as the main reason for many of the things wrong with our country, we have turned into a much nicer place. We haven't been duped into blaming the blameless. Nobody up here blames immigrants for so many people needing foodbanks. Instead we blame the Department of Work and Pensions. As in the very people who have actually caused so many among us to need a foodbank for their daily bread. Polish nurses have never taken the food from anybody's table. Well, I'm pretty sure they haven't.

In a nutshell, up here we see the real perpetrators. We see who they are and where they are. We have not been deflected. As a result we have become a better place to be. It is no accident UKIP can't get a toe hold up here. Or the BNP. Those charged with keeping the grubby secrets of the super rich have known this for years. The Daily Mail never runs the same headlines up here as they do in their English editions. They know there is little appetite for racist poison north of Gretna Green. Instead they focus on being cheerleaders for Ruth Davidson.

In 2014 it seemed to me we should have spent more time shouting from the rooftops about how every different we are from our southern neighbours. I understand why we didn't. We instinctively realised any criticism of England would soon be spun into us being mouth-frothing IRA style separatists. Fair enough. I get it.

Brexit has taken away any need for such roof top shouting. The rest of the world is waking up to the clear difference between England and Scotland. The rest of the world is very much aware of the extent to which we have become chalk and cheese. Which brings me to the collection of events of the last week.

A big one for me was the news that several mainstream Polish newspapers encouraged their countrymen in England to up sticks and head north to Scotland. Why? Because it is a nicer and safer place for them to be. And the papers didn't just encourage them to migrate north. They went further. They encouraged their fellow Poles to claim their right to vote in Indyref 2 and to do their bit to launch an independent Scotland out into the world.

Then there was the German MEP who is known to be a close ally of Angela Merkel going out of his way to say any Scottish application for EU membership would be fast tracked.

Then there was the Spanish Foreign Minister who for the first time went out of his way to go very public about Spain having no intention whatsoever of vetoing any Scottish EU application.

Then there was Nicola's smooth American tour played out to packed out rooms. Smiling faces and optimistic thoughts all round. It would have been a good look at any time. The fact she was doing her upbeat stuff in the States at the very same time as Theresa May was peddling yet more bombs to the Saudi royal family only made the gulf between London and Edinburgh seem all the wider.

And all the while the tabloids were screaming like spoilt kids, mainly about how Britain can give Spain a proper kicking whenever we like. You want a say on the future of Gibraltar? Oh really. Tell you what Pedro. Try this one on for size. Let us quote you some wise words from the good old boys of Millwall football club – come and have a go if you think you're hard enough.

Get in!!!

EN – GER – LAND!! EN – GER – LAND!!! EN – GER – LAND!!!

Bunch of garlic munching toss pots....

Look. We've got Michael Caine. Who've you got you sad bastards? Manuel from Fawlty Towers?

Andrew Mitchell, Cameron's overseas aid wallah returned home from a visit to Yemen with a few troubling questions. He had been to a school bombed flat by the Saudi air force. The British tax payer had stumped up hundreds of thousands of pounds to build the school. Then the British government had trousered hundreds of thousands of pounds for the not so smart bombs the House of Faud used to send the school back into the stone age. Andrew asked where was the sense in any of this? All our gallant PM wanted to talk about was Easter eggs.

Oh, and old school blue passports.

Our tabloids enthusiastically followed Ruth Davidson's lead and started to spit feathers about Nicola ignoring her 'day job' and flying the Saltire across the Pond to America. Maybe she should have hawked a few smart bombs. Go on Nicola. Go and get yourself a proper day job. You don't go to foreign countries to make nice. You go to foreign countries to sell top dollar military hardware. Capiche?

And at the very same time Liam Fox heroically flew the flag for each and every one of his fellow proud Brits in the Philippines. He did the regulation beaming photo call with their psychotic President and gushed on about how we share so many values. Like executing drug addicts? Really Liam?

The good news is the the rest of the world is noticing all of this. Slowly but surely more and more people from all corners of the planet are taking the opportunity to make nice about Scotland. They are beginning to see us as a beacon of hope in the darkening world of Trump and Putin. We might not be all set to become the next shining city on the hill, but I reckon we can aspire to be a shining village. Brand Scotland has never enjoyed such widespread recognition. And acclimation.

Nobody beyond our shores has the slightest interest in what the likes of Ruth Davidson or Katie Hopkins have to say about anything. They couldn't care less. Instead we are seen as a brave little country determined not to be dragged down into the xenophobic swamp by our big bully neighbour.

And they like it.

We need to live up to their expectations and stop listening to anything the Unionists have to say. It is time to act like a people who know our time is coming and the 300 year long era of 'London First' is all but done.

As the support of the world swings behind us, the petulant ranting and raving of the dummy spitting right wing press will seem ever more pathetic. If you doubt this, just take another look at the cartoon at the top of this blog. Unlike the image below, the cartoon from the top of this blog was not from the 1930's. It was from the last week.

It really was.

The Mail printed the cartoon because they seriously believed lots of their English readers would like it. Find it funny. Make their Cornflakes taste just that little bit better. Oh how priceless! Look at this Harriot! Those jolly chaps at the Mail are comparing refugees fleeing for their lives to monkeys. Bloody classic.....

They print this filth to sell papers. Just like they accused me and my fellow Liverpool fans of urinating on the dead to sell papers.

It saddens me to see the likes of Nigel Farage are leading England down such a dark path. Every day I thank my lucky stars to have got out of Dodge in time. What appears on the front pages of the British press does not go unnoticed abroad. The fact that our second best selling rag compared boat people to monkeys won't have gone unnoticed.

Thankfully most of the world now sees very clearly this is an English thing. Thankfully they now see just how different we are to our Southern neighbours.

Thankfully the rest of the world is more and more on our side with every passing week. And that is a really, really big deal.

When I bang on about Brand Scotland next time around, something tells me everyone in the room will get it.   

This WAS the Daily Mail in the 1930's. Oh for the good old days!

WE'VE ASKED NICELY FOR INDYREF 2 AND LONDON HAS SAID 'NO'. LOOKS LIKE IT'S TIME TO UP THE ANTE

So here we are. We have had our vote in our very own Parliament and we've won it by 69 to 59. We have followed all the rules and we have ticked all of the right boxes. We have been polite. In fact we have been absolutely as nice as ninepence.

Excuse me London. It's Scotland here. I wonder if you have a moment. You see, we have just had a vote. In the Parliament. Our Parliament. And by a majority of 69 to 59 our elected Parliamentarians have made a decision.

We would like another Independence Referendum please. Here is our letter. We've checked all of the spelling and everything. 

So can we?

No,

Not now. Now is not a good time. We're not saying never. Just not now. In case you hadn't noticed, we have rather bigger fish to fry. So maybe it would be a good idea if you stopped being such a bloody nuisance and got on with your own frying. I do believe Mars bars are a particular favourite of yours........?

But.....

No, there are no buts. We're in charge in case you hadn't noticed. Do as you're bloody told.

Oh Lord. After all the excitement of the vote and those pictures of Nicola with her shoes kicked off and......

But there is no 'and...'. We asked nicely and they said 'No' with a trademark sneer. 

Excuse me, but haven't you seen the poll? Here. Have a look. It says 61% of Scots believe the decision about a second Referendum should be made in Edinburgh.

Oh do shut up. 

So what next? There is talk of cards up sleeves. Maybe there are. Or maybe we have been firmly put back in our box.

Is this a new situation for a small country living under the thumb of Whitehall? Maybe we might be able to find some inspiration? Well this is where we are kind of lucky. You see, this isn't any kind of new situation. Countries have been dragging themselves away from London's clutches for over 200 years. Some were huge like America and India. Others were our size: Ireland and Israel. Some were home to black and brown people who didn't speak English. Others were full of white people who did. They came in all shapes and sizes and one way or another they all made it. Surely we can find some clues about what to do next if we have a dig through their old playbooks.

To be honest, the lessons of history are hardly crystal clear. Some ploys worked and other ploys were an absolute disaster. Getting really, really mad and kicking off doesn't tend to be such a good idea. The Boers tried it in 1900 and 30,000 of their women and children wound up dying in Kitchener's concentration camps from disease and starvation. The Irish went for broke in Easter 1916 and ended up with a bombed out Post Office and some great rebel songs but no freedom. 

In 1954 the Mau Mau decided it was time for no more Mr Nice Guy. They arrived in the night at isolated farms in the Aberdare Mountains of Kenya and started slicing and dicing white settlers with their machetes. London went predictably mental and a couple of years later over half a million Kikuyu were banged up in disease ridden concentration camps.

The lesson to be learned? Oh that is simple enough. If you pull out an old Lee Enfield rifle, London will send in the tanks and start rounding up your people and putting them in camps. It's probably worth remembering the grand opening of the Long Kesh internment camp was only forty or so years ago.

So kicking off and going full on William Wallace isn't the best idea. But putting up and shutting up is an equally bad idea. So is there a middle way? 

Absolutely. In spades. The middle way is all about taking London to places they really, really don't want to go. We need to take them to places where they feel really, really awkward and unsure of what to do. 

And to do this we need to take a few leaves out of the playbook of the absolute master when it comes to this kind of stuff. Of course I am talking about the great Mahatma Gandhi.

Lets head back to the mid 1930's. This was very much the time when the British Empire had reached its high water mark. It was the time when the whole sun never setting thing was all the rage. And of course India was the Jewel in the Crown. Lots and lots of promises had been made over the years. Only twenty years earlier London had said if the Indians would volunteer to dig our trenches in Flanders the King would be well disposed to take a proper look at their Independence claims. To be honest, it didn't go so well. The Indian troops came home with Spanish flu and over 20 million wound up dying. And all the talk of being favourably disposed to granting Independence.....?

Now is not a good time.

Ghandi knew only too well kicking off and getting violent was a truly lousy idea. The Indians had tried it 80 years earlier in 1857 and it hadn't turned out well at all. As the dust settled on the Indian Mutiny, London embarked on a blood soaked decade of revenge which would have made Hitler purr with pleasure. Unsurprisingly the exact records of just how many million Indians London killed by way of payback have been mislaid. It was certainly more than ten million.

The Mahatma was a peace and love kind of guy. So he did himself some out of the box thinking and came up with an idea of pure genius. In the mid 30's Indians were not allowed to produce their own salt. To make a bit of salt could land you in jail. Why? Because there were vital votes to be had in those Cheshire swing seats and the salt mines needed the massive Indian market to be viable. 

So Ghandi wrote out a press release. He said he would be walking across Gujarat to the sea and once he reached the sea he would make some salt. At first nobody took much notice. But as the miles rolled by, more and more people joined him and by the time he reached the coast he had 20,000 in his wake and the world's press were waiting to take the pictures for their front pages. He became a rock star all over the world.

All of a sudden London found itself between a rock and a hard place. Of course the cheeky little wog was breaking the bloody law and needed a jolly good thrashing. Obviously. But on the other hand there were an awful lot of reporters kicking around....

What to do? In the end London did exactly what Gandhi wanted them to do. They decided to crack the whip. They locked him up along with thousands of his followers whilst the world press took lots of pictures. It didn't take London long to wake up to the fact they had been well and truly played. They let Gandhi out and changed the salt making law but it was all too little, too late. He had shown them for what they were and it wasn't a good look. And within thirty years the sun had well and truly set on the an Empire which was supposed to have been good for another thousand years.

Others have dipped into Gandhi's playbook with great success. In 1955 at the very same time as hundreds of thousands of Kenyans were festering in the British concentration camps, a dignified lady called Miz Rosa Parks took the Washington Government to a place they really didn't want to go. Rosa was the smartly dressed black lady who took a seat in the white section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Over the next ten years the press from all over the world took pictures of American policemen beating the living daylights out of peacefully protesting black citizens. It wasn't exactly the image America Plc was looking to beam out across the globe. Within ten years the new Civil Rights laws were on the statute books and burning crosses was no longer deemed to be an acceptable thing to do.

So what can we do? Right now. How can we take London somewhere they really, really don't want to go? Well it seems very clear we need to leave the claymores in the cupboard. As a white settler myself living in rural isolation, I very much hope Nicola doesn't choose the Mau Mau machete approach! The last thing we want to do is to give Theresa May an excuse to build herself a 21st version of Long Kesh in Falkirk.

We need to find a way to be civilly disobedient in a way which will make London squirm. I have a couple of ideas I think the Mahatma would approve of.

How good would it be if the Scottish Government unilaterally declared its intention to take in the 3000 refugee kids London has U turned on. By the way this isn't my idea, it belongs to Lesley Riddoch. You see, we are absolutely not allowed to do this. Showing humanity and decency is not a devolved power. Just like the Indians were not allowed to make their own salt. And were we to do it, London would once again find itself between a rock and a hard place. What are they going to do? Send a detachment of the paratroopers to arrest Nicola and her Cabinet? Take us to the European Court of Justice? The right wing press would of course call us every name under the sun for being traitorous swine. And the rest of the world? Oh I am pretty sure the rest of the world would be very much on our side. 

Just imagine how much Theresa May would hate it. Would she find a way to show a bit of class? Or would she choose instead to pander to the Daily Mail and make a complete mess of it? 

So we ask the question once again. Can we have a referendum please? And if London continues to dig in the heels and and tell us to bugger off, then we will have to crank up the pressure another notch. This one is my idea.

The Government in Edinburgh makes an announcement to an increasingly fascinated world. No longer will we allow any nuclear bombs to be transported on Scottish highways. Police Scotland will therefore be instructed to set up and man permanent roadblocks outside the bases at Faslane and Coulport and no vehicles carrying nukes will be allowed through. 

And if a few hundred protesters choose to turn up to give the boys in blue a helping hand, then all the better.

Over to you Theresa. What do you do? Stick or twist? Send in the SAS to clear the way? Go all out and invade us? Or maybe you might find the easiest thing to do is to back down and start wiping the egg off your new Thatcher face?

It's time to up the ante guys. It's time to make their lives a misery.   

NOW IT IS GAME ON FOR INDYREF 2, MAYBE YES NEEDS TO BE A LITTLE LESS NICE THAN WE WERE LAST TIME.

So, that's it done. The starting gun has been fired, There were no unforeseen nightmares in the Scottish Parliament. The vote for Indyref 2 was comfortably carried by 69 to 59. Which means it is time for all of us on the YES side to get our game heads on.

Once again the Unionists couldn't have done a finer job of making our argument for us. They seem so very convinced the way to keep their beloved Union together is to be be as arrogant and nasty as possible. Well, best of luck with that one guys. Please carry on.

Now the phoney war begins in earnest. We will hammer home our right to have a referendum at a time of our choosing and they will look down their patrician noses and tell us to go and sit on the naughty step. Do they really think this is a stance which will play well up here? I doubt it. Surely they cannot possibly be that stupid? 

It seems clear to me this determination to shoot themselves in the foot as many times as possible is driven by pure desperation. We all know it is a lousy idea to try to ignore those nasty letters from the credit card company. Does this mean we always open them and face up to the unpleasant truth? Of course we don't. Instead we hide the nasty letters under a pile of junk mail and pretend they don't exist. It is a truly lousy idea but we do it all the same. I think the ludicrous Unionist reaction to the prospect of Indyref 2 is much the same. Oh my God, this is a nightmare! Just put it off for Christ's sake.....

The smart move would be to show a whole lot of class and say of course the people of Scotland have the absolute right to determine their future at a time of their choosing. We wouldn't dream of denying this. How could we? We are the very cradle of democracy after all. The mother of all Parliaments. We have nothing but respect for our Scottish brothers and sisters and this is why we will try as hard as possible to persuade them not to desert us.

Think about it. Such a reaction would give us a few headaches. Such a reaction would firm up the resolve of instinctive remainers. Such a reaction would make the UK feel like the kind of place where everybody's voice is heard with consideration and good manners. Had Theresa May taken time out to think before she spoke, she might have recalled how a smiling Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in London and told Thatcher how he was about to become her worst nightmare. How? He told her he was going to take her enemy away. 

Ever since 2014 the Unionists have squandered opportunity after opportunity to hang onto the British Empire's last significant colony. On 19 September 2014, Cameron might have walked out of Downing St and said something along the lines of 'we promised the nearest thing to Federalism and by God we are going to be true to our word.' Imagine if they had actually delivered the dreaded 'Vow' and kept their promises. The prospect of Independence would have been pretty distant. 

But he didn't do any such thing of course. Instead he pandered to the right wing nutters in his party and rabbited on about English votes for English laws. 

Once again the unionists have blown a golden opportunity. Had they been gracious and happily allowed a referendum at a time of the Scottish Parliament's choosing, our job would have been a great deal harder. But they didn't because such a course of action would have meant upsetting the Daily Mail and it is now abundantly clear that pleasing the Daily Mail is the only thing Theresa May cares about.

So they are going to play out their tough guy Tory act. The Daily Mail will cheer them to the rafters and the people of Scotland will hate it. So carry on guys. Carry on and on and on. The more the merrier.

We now know the Referendum is coming which means we need to start getting our ducks in an orderly as soon as possible. We came close in 2014, but we didn't win. 

They won.

And this time it can not and it must not happen again. If they win again, our future is seriously dark. Yesterday we stepped into the last chance saloon. This is the last chance we are going to have to hop into a life boat before the Titanic slips under the sub zero waters of the North Atlantic. The world is splitting into camps and we still have the chance of joining with the good guys. If we allow the unionists to win the day, we have to accept a future in the camp of Trump and all the other right wing xenophobes who are inching ever closer to full on fascism. 

If we are to win, we need to take a long hard look at why we lost last time. Whole books have been written on the subject and many very obvious answers have been found. 

Next time there are a few things we need to do differently. 

Better. Smarter. 

Of course we will need to rekindle all of the vibrancy and optimism we unleashed last time. The optimism of the YES campaign won over a significant majority of the under 50's. Sadly it seemed to send the over 60's further into the arms of Better Together. It is a sad fact of life that many older folk resent the sight of younger folk having a good time. When a bunch of teenagers outside a Spar shop to have a laugh on a warm summer's evening, who is it who calls the cops to complain? 

All of us on the YES side will love the sight of huge crowds of optimistic young people asking for a brighter future. Sadly many in the silver haired generation will see things rather differently. And if we don't find new and imaginative ways to talk to our No voting elders, they might well once again carry the day for the unionists.

This of course is a huge problem. We are strong on social media and hated by the mainstream media. Is there anything we can do to persuade the likes of the Mail and the Sun and the Express to give us a fair hearing? Nope. Hell will freeze over first. The tabloid press will tell lie after lie after lie and there isn't a thing we can do about it. These are the papers the older generation read. More to the point, these are the papers the older generation trusts. It is the habit of their lifetimes. Will the BBC step up to the plate to offer proper balance? After last time it seems highly unlikely.

So how on earth are we to get a hearing from the older generation? How do we make the case for a future they have little stake in? It ain't easy but we absolutely have to come up with a solution to the problem. 

I guess we need to start by asking some simple questions. Who do the older generation listen to? Well, there is the tabloid press and the BBC. Can we do anything to get them onside? Not a chance. So who else? Family. Grandchildren. Now here we might just be onto something. Grandparents almost always love their grandchildren. It is one hell of a bond and we need to find as many ways as we can to use this bond.

I was chatting with Joan McAlpine MSP last week and punted an idea. What if we were to commission a range of twenty large postcards. Each would carry a drop dead gorgeous view of Scotland. You know the kind of thing. Lochs and glens and stags. The kind of thing which would look great on any mantlepiece. All of the cards would be pre-paid and on the back they would have a strap line something along the lines of 'Please let me have the future I dream of.' And then? Then we persuade as many youngsters as we can to fill in a card and send it to their grandparents. And not just one. One a week. Two a week. And when they next meet up with their grandparents, there is bound to be a conversation about all the postcards they have been receiving. 

Basically we use modern communications to sign up youngsters to do their bit via the social media. Then we use old school communications by using the Royal Mail to deliver the postcards. And finally we use even older school communications as young YES supporters have a face to face chat with their grandparents. 

How many votes might something like this turn to our side? Who knows? What we do know is every vote we can win from the silver haired generation will count double.

In hindsight, I wonder if we were rather too nice last time around. It is hard not to wholeheartedly agree with Michelle Obama when she says 'if they go low, we go high.' It is hard not to agree because she is so very right. But there is a problem. Last time they went low and we went high and they won. Just like Trump won having plumbed depths nobody ever thought would be plumbed. We are about to be in a street fight and maybe we need to use a few of the techniques of the street fighter.

The other day I heard some interesting stuff about the famous £353 million a week the NHS was promised by the Leavers in the EU referendum. There was an awful lot of thinking behind this very blatant nonsense. They started with the gross annual UK contribution to the EU. £353 million a week. Then they very deliberately decided to ignore all the cash we got back in the form of projects and rebate. They did this because they knew the media would immediately jump all over them. Of course it isn't £353 million a week!! The net figure is actually £200 million!!'

This very deliberate lie guaranteed the £353 million stayed on the front pages for the whole of the campaign. If they had put £200 million a week on the side of their bus, it would barely have got a mention. They rightly calculated the lie would become the story and the story would run and run. And what did the public get from it? Simple. They got the fact we were sending a whole bunch of money to Brussels and they didn't like it.

Clever, clever, clever...

Could we on the YES side copy some of this? I think we could. Maybe things like this. Imagine if these billboards were to appear all over Scotland.

"LONDON STOLE £100 BILLION OF OUR OIL MONEY TO BUILD THE M25. NO WONDER THEY WON'T GIVE US OUR FREEDOM!"

I don't know the actual figures. They don't really matter. What matters is the Unionists would go absolutely mental and say things like 'It didn't cost £100 billion, it was only £50 billion,...' or  'We didn't steal the oil money because it wasn't Scotland's oil money, it was the UK's oil money...' It would run and run and run. And what would people take from it? Simple. They used our a whole bunch of our  money to build a motorway around their capital city.

Bastards!

Or maybe this.

'TAKE BACK CONTROL! USE THE £50 MILLION A WEEK SCOTLAND SPENDS ON TRIDENT TO PUT PENSIONS UP BY £50 A WEEK!"        

Cue all manner of wailing and gnashing of teeth. 'Scotland doesn't spend £50 million a week on Trident, it only spends £30 million a week.....' 

Oops.

I know it would be nice to always occupy the very highest of the moral high ground, but when the opposition fights so very dirty we might have to do a bit of it ourselves. 

Whenever the next referendum comes around one thing is certain. Winning will be absolutely everything. We can't simply repeat what we did last time. We need to be better. And maybe we will need to be just a little meaner. We know they will have absolutely no scruples whatsoever. It might just be time to drop a few of ours. 

One thing is for sure. The YES side will be deploying a few of the dark arts even though this will be none of our doing. Is this a riddle? Maybe. 'A riddle wrapped inside a mystery in an enigma'. Remember the quote? It was Winston Churchill describing Russia. The rest of the quote runs '...but there is a key. The key is Russian national Interest.' I have no doubt who's side Vladimir Putin will be taking in the coming Referendum. So long as an Independent Scotland plans to evict the Trident submarines, we will be receiving the full support of Vladimir's merry band of cyber warriors whether we ask for it or not!  

ISIS WANT THEIR OWN THERMOPYLAE. WE'RE GIVING IT TO THEM ON A PLATE

Donald Trump continually assures us everything is on track with his project to make America great again. Well, good for him. And a part of this vision is his determination to see his country start winning wars again. This particular element of the Donald's big dream makes the rest of us feel a tad edgy. Basic logic dictates that to be able to win a war you need to find yourself a war to fight. Of course it is rare for America to find itself in the position when it hasn't got a war going on somewhere. Right now the bad guys are of course those long bearded bad boys of ISIS and in his election campaign the Donald promised his supporters he was going to 'bomb the shit out of them'.

So is this about to be the first evidence of Trump helping America to turn the corner and get itself back on the road to greatness again? Well Donald certainly thinks it is. This kind of language comes straight out of the many 'how to succeed in business' self help books he must have read over his years of borrowing loads of money and losing it all. 

First is first, second is nowhere.

Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.

You know the kind of thing. It is the beating heart of the American dream which has always worshiped at the alter of winners. Trump is pretty sure his can take the tacky bravado which has served him so well down the years and to succeed where the likes of Hitler, Napoleon and Alexander the Great failed. There will be no lost wars for the Donald. Only the sweet taste of victory.

Because winning is everything, right? We know this. That's why the 1% own more or less everything and the rest of us make like schmucks.

The problem is that what works in the testosterone fueled world of American capitalism doesn't always play out the same in the world at large. Sometimes a heroic defeat can have a much greater potency than an easy victory. The right kind of heroic defeat can be like money in the bank. A canny investment for the future. It can mean the chance to fight and win another day.

I don't think Donald has quite got his head around this. He isn't alone of course. A common feature of many modern leaders is their complete inability to read history. They like to live in the now. They like to live in their own bubbles. Well many, many moons ago I got myself a 2-1 in History and I still think it is a pretty good idea to look back before being too cocky about the immediate future. I vividly recall reading a superb article by Robert Fisk on the day GW Bush rolled into Iraq. Fisk urged readers to get a hold of a copy of 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' by TE Lawrence. As in Lawrence of Arabia. The book provided a perfect manual on how to get a result in Arabia. It showed how Bush and Blair were sleep walking into a prolonged nightmare which would do for them in the end.

How right he was. 

The lesson Tony and GW should have learned wasn't exactly difficult. If you go into the Muslim with overwhelming force and all guns blazing, the people who live there will see you as Crusaders and they will fight you to their last breath. No matter how many battles you win, you will never win the war. So we won a bunch of battles and we killed half a million people and we lost the war. Just like TE Lawrence predicted all those years before.

When a war becomes a battle for survival, heroic defeats can be pure gold. They inspire everyone else to dig deeper and fight on in honour of the memory of those who fought with such heroism. A heroic defeat can have a much greater impact than an easy victory. Big victories won by overwhelming force are seldom remembered with any kind of reverence. Heroic defeats are a different matter altogether. They are remembered forever. Statues are erected. Public holidays are called. Movies are made and re-made. 

We've had a few of our own down the years. We all love watching Zulu every Christmas. Most of us have heard of Rorke's Drift. Not many of us have heard of Ulundi where a punitive force of Brits taught the locals a lesson they weren't about to forget in a hurry. We had Gatling guns and cannons. They had spears. Ulundi duly became one of the many forgotten massacres we carried out in the name of Empire which we now prefer to not to talk about much.




To this day we recall our gallant defeat at Dunkirk with much more fondness than our turning point victory at El Alamein. 

History is filled with any number of examples of heroic defeats which become inspirational for future generations. As things unfold in Mosul, I think it is worth looking at two in particular.

First up is the Spartan stand at Thermopylae. On one side was a monumental Persian army made up of over a hundred thousand infantry and cavalry. On the other side were 300 Spartans who blocked the narrow road to the heart of Greece. We've all seen the movies. The Spartans took the idea of defying the odds to a whole new level. The narrowness of the strip of land between cliffs and sea meant the vast numerical superiority of the Persians could not be made to count. Wave after wave of attackers were sliced to bits as they met the Spartan shield wall. The Persians won in the end. Of course they did. But the Greeks were duly inspired by the heroism and sacrifice of the 300 and they duly united around the magnificence of the defeat and found a way to turn it all around at the battle of Marathon.

Nobody remembers Emperor Xerses and his vast army. Instead we watch blockbuster movies about King Leonidas and his 300 hundred Spartans. Maybe winning isn't everything after all.

Fast forward to 1863. A company of 63 officers and men of the French Foreign Legion were patrolling a forgotten corner of Mexico in an unnoticed colonial war. Their leader, Captain Jean Danjou knew there were enemy forces in the area. He didn't know how many. The Mexican commander, Francisco De Paula Milan, knew all about the presence of the French and he knew exactly how many they were. 

63.

Not enough.

Milan laid his trap and waited. The company of Legionnaires duly walked straight into the trap and found themselves holed up in a hacienda and surrounded by a force of 3000. Danjou gathered his guys about him and got them to swear an oath. The oath? Oh that was simple enough. Fight to the last man. Fight to the last breath. No surrender. And for what? For a few square yards in a forgotten war fought thousands of miles from France. Danjou had been around the block a time of two for the Legion and had a wooden hand to prove it. As it happened, he was killed early in the battle but his guys were true to their word.

They fought on and on and on. After eight hours there were only five men left and the farmhouse was ablaze. For the umpteenth time, Milan called a halt to the fighting and offered the Legionnaires the chance to surrender. When they had been down to 12 men, the officer in command had given a one word reply to the offer of surrender: 'Merde'. This time the French chose a different option. 

They fixed bayonets and charged. All five of them. Not surprisingly it didn't go so well.

As defeats go, Camerone was about as complete a defeat as you could find. Once the dust settled there was only one man left alive.
But it didn't take very long for the legend of Camerone to make its way back across the Altantic to France and to this day the men of the Foreign Legion stop whatever they are doing on April 30 to celebrate their most legendary heroic defeat. Danjou's wooden hand remains their most treasured possession.

For a hundred and fifty years, armies all over the world have been terrified at the prospect of coming up against the men of the Foreign Legion for a very simple reason. Legionnaires never give up. Their reverence to the 63 men of Camerone means they never throw in the towel. The legacy of that particular defeat is still strong and so long as there is a Foreign Legion, it will always be strong.

Which brings me to ISIS. To Mosul. To right now. 

Donald promises to bomb the shit out of ISIS. What does he think his air force has been doing for the last few years? Recent Pentagon estimates suggest at least 40,000 ISIS fighters have been killed care of American airstrikes since the campaign began. I would have thought such a figure is more enough for them to have had the shit bombed out of them. Obviously not as far as the Donald is concerned.

Now the net is being tightened around Mosul. We see it on the days when the home news is quiet. Not much happening today? OK. Nae bother. We'll fill up with five minutes from Mosul. It's always good for padding out.

A couple of weeks ago I listened to a World Service podcast whilst I was splitting some logs. The topic was Mosul and the battle which is taking so long to win. And suddenly I stopped what I was doing and listened a little harder. The presenter described the forces facing each other. 

In the blue corner was a mixed force of just over 80,000 - British and American Special Forces, British and American fighter bombers and drones, The Iraqi Army, the Kurdish Peshmerger, and various Shia Militia groups.

In the red corner.....

400 ISIS fighters.

400.

As in 80,000 and two air forces versus 400.

As in a force of just a hundred more than King Leonidas commanded so many centuries ago.

The 400 know they aren't going to win. They are completely surrounded now and they have a simple choice. It is the same choice as the Spartans had at Thermopylae and the Legionnaires had at Camerone. Fight or die? Nobody is in much doubt as to which option they will choose.

We don't hear much about the 400 against 80,000 part of the Mosul story. We hear lots of stuff about how they are filthy terrorists and cowards. We hear how they are nothing more than human cockroaches who deserve to be exterminated. Who need to be exterminated.

And of course they will be exterminated. With extreme prejudice. Because 80,000 against 400 is a foregone conclusion. But does this mean we will win? Or will the legend of the 400 who fought down to the last man go on to sustain ISIS and similar groups in the years to come? It seems to me the guys with the long beards are rather better at reading history books than our leaders. They will capture the heroic defeat on their mobile phones and bequeath it to history. They will become legends among the millions who feel they are being oppressed by the Crusader nations of the West.

ISIS are not looking for victory in Mosul. Instead they are creating their very own Thermopylae. From where I am sitting, it looks like we are playing ball every step of the way. In a few weeks we will beam pictures around the world of a bombed flat city and 400 dead guys. Sadly we seem incapable of understanding how this looks from the other side of the fence. We will see the dead 400 as nothing more than so many cockroaches. Many in the Muslim world will see them very differently. 

I wonder how they will be remembered in a few hundred years? 
 

  

KEEP ON SENDING ALL YOUR HATE, CONTEMPT AND DERISION NORTH OF THE BORDER GUYS. YOU'RE ONLY GOING TO MAKE 'YES' STRONGER. AND STRONGER...

The last few months have been pretty rough for those of us who like to think we are in touch with what Abe Lincoln once called the 'better angels of our nature.'

Brexit, Trump, Farage, Putin, Le Pen.... 

And for a while the world seemed to be turning darker with every passing week. Those who tried to highlight the alarming similarities between the world right now and the world in the 1930's were screamed down by the rampant followers of Trump and Brexit. Never before had Farage seemed so horribly smug.

And slowly but surely, people stopped uttering that most dreaded of sentences - 'it couldn't happen again.' Those are words which should never be spoken. The next Srebrinica is always waiting around the next corner.

Always.

When Nicola Sturgeon took to the airwaves to throw down the new Indyref gauntlet at the feet of our Westminster masters, there was no dancing in the streets. I watched three different news programs that night. Reporters had been dispatched to the streets of Scotland to feel the pulse of the public. I guess there must have been about twenty pavement interviews and surprise, surprise not a single one of the people they dug out were within a country mile of voting 'Yes' next time around.

All the news channels carried the same message. The good people of Scotland don't want another referendum. They hate the idea. They are frightened by the very thought. They know in their bones their country is far too small, poor and pathetic to even consider cutting the umbilical cord. I turned and said to Carol 'you would never guess the polls are 50/50.'

Never in a month of Sundays.

The common theme of the news that night? Contempt and derision. A lack of patience with an unruly child. When will they bloody well grow up? A jolly good slapping is what they need...

The next morning I wrote a blog and announced to the online world that I was bang up for the fray. And then? Well the 'and then?' bit is always the most interesting part of any blog. In the past, most of my blogs about 'Yes' have been popular. Would it be different this time? Was I throwing out my enthusiasm into an online world of jaded indifference? I tweeted the link to all the usual suspects but not many were much interested in helping my words on their way.

And then....

Well right now the blog is well on the way to being read over 10,000 times. Is that a lot? I have no idea. It is certainly a lot for me.

Almost from the moment I hit the 'publish' button it seemed as if the sun had broken through the clouds and for the first time in ages and the forces of darkness appeared to have been stopped in their tracks.

Over the pond, Trump had his worst day so far. All of a sudden he seems a whole lot more shambling and pathetic and a whole lot less threatening. Check out this link for a magnificent list of all the things that went pear shaped for the Donald yesterday.

Bloody great, right? 

And things just kept on getting brighter as the unexpectedly warm sunshine burnt away the dark clouds. The utterly hideous Gert Wilders was completely humiliated in the Dutch election. The latest Fascist bogeyman was only able to scrape together 13% of the vote. What a sickening blow for all the crowing Brexiteers and their warnings of an EU in terminal decline. 

In France the equally ghastly Marine Le Pen seems to have run into a brick wall and stands little or no chance of doing a Donald. 

Back in London a whole series of cracks started to open up in the seemingly mighty wall of the rampant Tory party. The Electoral Commission went public on fact they are all over the half of Theresa May's backroom team like a metaphorical rash. May herself suddenly seemed less of the ice queen and more of the bad tempered harridan. A few critical paragraphs in the Daily Mail proved to be more than enough to send her into a panicking tantrum. Her answer to having a bad day? She threw her friend and Downing St neighbour 'Spreadsheet Phil' under a double decker bus. It rather looks like Nicola has got well and truly under her skin. 

The most encouraging thing of all for those of us on the 'YES' side of the coming argument has been the reaction to the prospect of IndyRef 2 that has come from south of the border. Last time many said we were 'love bombed' by England. Oh please don't leave us Scotland. We all love you. We really, really do. Look we're even building a cairn in Gretna Green just to prove it. We love your kilts and your Iron Bru and your haggis and and your..... well you know... all of it. And we promise never to laugh at deep fried Mars bar jokes ever again. And we promise never to suggest you are all smack addicts and subsidy junkies. It was only locker room banter. Honest. And of course we have done a few things we regret, but that is what relationships are like, right. Yes, yes, we know we always used Scottish soldiers when we needed some cannon fodder, and yes we probably should have gone a bit easier after Culloden, and in hindsight we maybe shouldn't have used the 4000 prisoners we took at the battle of Braemar as slaves in Barbados. But that is how it is with relationships, right! Good times and bad times. But you can't divorce us now. Not after 300 years. How can you even think about it.....

Love bombing. Tacky, tawdry, toe curling, yes. But I guess they did their best to pretend the passion still burned strong.

Especially with oil at $100 a barrel and the UK balance of payments well and truly up the Khyber.

Well it doesn't look like we're about to get any love bombing this time around. This time carpet bombing looks like the order of the day. We are about to get a lot more of Theresa May fixing us with her best Cruella Deville stare and telling us to stopping playing silly games and to concentrate instead on running our silly little country.

This time around we are about to be put on the hit list of the English tabloids. We will be put in the firing line along with all the other enemies of England's green and pleasant land. We now are the betrayers of Brexit. Stab in the back merchants. Traitors who should be lined up against a wall and shot. We are every bit as bad as the Muslims and the benefit cheats and the EU 27 and the supreme court judges and Michael Hesseltine and the remoaners and the European Human Rights Convention and Polish people and......

Oh it's a long list and we are well and truly on it. 

Just check out this charming chap who took to the airwaves yesterday to let the world know exactly what he thought of the Scots. For those of you of a nervous disposition, I best warn you to brace yourselves for a minute and a half of racist bile.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/you-fg-jock-cs-englishman-10033610#ICID=sharebar_twitter

There is going to be a whole lot more of this kind thing. And every time this kind of meathead pulls himself out of the swamp to splurge this kind of garbage the 'YES' vote will just keep going up and up.

And up.

It won't be so very long before we start to hear about Scots getting abuse when they look to pay for their goods with Scottish notes in English shops. It won't be a majority. It won't even be anything more than the tiniest minority. But that won't matter. It never does. Instead it will change perception. It will give clarity to the choice on the table. Do you want to be a part of a ghastly club where immigrants are despised and shadowy billionaires call the shots? The world of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage? Or do you want to be a part of something better? All of a sudden the economic questions won't seem quite so overpowering. All of a sudden it will be all about right and wrong. Do we want light or darkness? Do we want hope or hate?

I'm pretty sure the good folk of Scotland will choose the better angels of our nature.

The future is bright guys.

THE UNIONISTS REACTED TO THE NEWS OF INDYREF 2 WITH WHITE FACED ANGER. NO WONDER. THEY KNOW THEY ARE STARING DEFEAT IN THE FACE.

So that's it guys. The time of 'will she, won't she?' is done and dusted. She has. IndyRef 2 is no longer an 'if'. As of yesterday it became a 'when'. 

In the wake of Nicola dropping her bombshell, the airwaves were filled with shouty people from England telling us how we really, really don't want a second independence referendum. It seems London once again knows best. What could the SNP possibly know about the way the Scots feel? 

I am pretty sure most of my fellow travelers on the 'Yes' side of the argument will have been punching the air with relief. Is this the ideal time to fire the starting gun? No, of course it isn't. In an ideal world we would have waited for a year's worth of polls showing a 60% plus majority for our independence. But the world of 2017 is a long, long way from being ideal. The big worry was always the 2021 Scottish Elections and the 'Yes' side losing a majority in Holyrood. And then what? Who knows. A bird in the hand is a hundred percent better than a bird in the bush. Right now we have the ability to take our chances. Of course Indyref 2 isn't about to be any kind of slam dunk, but now is a whole lot better than never.

Yesterday we were treated to a preview of the Unionist line which will become horribly familiar over the coming months. The Scottish people don't want this..... the last referendum was horribly divisive.... you're economy is a joke .... your schools are a joke... your hospitals are a joke .... your parliament is a joke... you're a joke.....

The British economy is a magnificent rolling juggernaut. 

The Scottish economy makes Zimbabwe look like Finland.

They never learn do they? They could have taken the news with dignity, respect and class. Now that would have been a bit of a problem. But they didn't. They were no more able to resist being condescending than a crack addict is able to resist the next pipe. 

Theresa May had the chance to take the news with a bit of statesmanship. It was her big opportunity to look the people of Scotland in the eye and start to punt a positive view of our treasured Union. Instead she did what she now seems to do all the time. She pandered to the Daily Mail.

She sneered and did her mocking headmistress act. Big mistake lady.

Of course the sneering was as predictable as winter snow falling on Moscow. What was rather more interesting was the white faced anger most of them completely failed to hide. Wow, were they ever raging. 

David Mundell was hopping about like a man who had spilled a mug of boiling coffee in his crotch. He was absolutely beside himself. This was probably quite understandable. As Secretary Of State for Scotland he was supposed to be the Tory with a finger on the pulse of the Northern Province. Had he been telling his Prime Minister not to worry, it was all an SNP bluff? And were his ears still on fire from the screaming angry phone call from Number 10 he had just endured? 

You useless, worthless, pathetic piece of shit!!! You said she would never do it! Christ I wish I could fire you..........

And of course David knows he is in for a pretty grim couple of years as the main man in the firing line. And when the Union falls apart after 300 years, his career will be deader than dead. There will be no knighthood and nice cosey seat in the House of Lords for Scotland's last Westminster Tory. He's about to be the fall guy and yesterday you could see it in his eyes.

Theresa May's face also said it all. The anger was in danger of morphing into full on hate. Is this so very surprising? Of course it isn't. Nicola's bombshell was the Prime Minister's worst nightmare for a whole bunch of reasons, none of which she could mention.

Behind the arrogance and the bluster, there must be blind terror in the corridors of Whitehall. The Brexit negotiations look doomed before they start. The EU 27 are going to play hardball over the divorce payments and Theresa May knows she will be between a rock and a hard place from day one. The EU negotiators will demand their pound of flesh and the Daily Mail will do all they can to make sure Britain doesn't pay it. No wonder there is already plenty of talk about the UK throwing a tantrum and storming out of the talks before they really get started.

May knows she has barely a decent card in the hand she is about to play. The shadowy money men who prop up the cardboard cut out party she leads will have already laid down the law. Only one thing matters and only one.

The beloved City of London.

She will be expected to trade everything in exchange for business as usual in the City. Well yesterday Nicola wrenched a few of those cards from her hand. No wonder the Tories decided to grab control of post Brexit fishing and farming policy. Once again these key chunks of the Scottish economy were about to be sacrificed in exchange for business as usual for the City.

Well it ain't so easy now. She might try to buy off the Spaniards with promises of Scottish fish, but her empty offer will be met with mocking laughter. It's not yours to give lady. And if she is seen trying to  sell out Scotland to look after London banks, she will make Independence a near certainty.

Then of course there is the border nightmare. Ever since the Brexit vote, the party line on the Irish border has been problem, what problem! Of course there won't be a problem. The border will remain as open as open can be. Just like the border between Gibraltar and Spain will remain as open as open can be. So how on earth can they say the borders between the UK and EU Ireland and Spain will be wide open but the border between EU Scotland and the UK will be like the Berlin Wall? Well she might try to say it but it won't hold any water.

Another high card is supposed to be the European need for the comfort blanket of the British military in the scary new world of the Donald. All of a sudden throwing the Trident card onto the table won't look so very convincing when their beloved missiles are about to made homeless.

It is about to get a whole lot harder to keep peddling the line about how miraculously great the British economy is, Brexit or no Brexit. A few pesky economists will start to look at what the much vaunted British economy will look like once it loses all of those Scottish exports. All that whisky and oil and beef and timber and fish and...

We may be pathetic and poor, but we export and whole lot more than we import and once Scotland is removed from the equation the economy of the Rest of the UK starts to look like a bit of a basket case. 

Here's a comparison which is guaranteed to piss off the Unionists, not that they are remotely likely to read this. 

1942. Hitler has taken the gamble to end all gambles and invaded the Soviet Union. His beloved 6th Army has reached Stalingrad and the Generals tell him the best option is to by pass the city and keep blitzkrieging their way to the oilfields. Instead Der Fuhrer can't resist a the chance for a toe to toe slugfest. And of course it all ended in tears. The 6th Army was doomed from the get go. They were totally reliant on supplies coming in along hundreds of miles of rail tracks. And every mile of this over stretched supply line was vulnerable to attacks from the partisans who were hiding out in the forests. Stalin had no such problems. His supply line from the factories he had shifted east were just as long, but there were no partisans to blow up the trains. In the end the 6th Army ran out of bullets and food and warm clothes. 

Well, the hard Brexiteers have chosen their very own Stalingrad with the same blind arrogance Hitler showed seventy years ago. And yesterday they had their first supply train blown up. We are the partisans and they know only too well they don't have the spare troops they need to deal with us. Instead they will pour everything into the Stalingrad of the Brexit negotiations whilst we wreak havoc behind the lines.

No wonder Mundell looked like he was ready to throw up. No wonder Theresa May looked like a woman who was dreaming of sending one of her treasured nukes to Edinburgh. 

The nightmare just got serious. After four hundred years, the sun is about to finally set on the British Empire. One by one the jewels in the Crown have slipped from London's grasp. First it was America. Then India. Then Hong Kong. And now the very last colony is about to fly the nest. 

And being angry won't be enough to make it stop. Hitler was angry every time some poor sod brought him the news that another train loaded up with new tanks had been blown to bits in the back end of the Ukranian nowhere. 

So he ranted and screamed until the spittle ran down his chin and onto his jacket.

And then he lost.

It is 310 years since we were bought and sold for English gold. I think it is high time for us to join all the other countries of the world to have walked away from London rule.

Don't you?

Yesterday Nicola added her name to a long and distinguished list - George Washington, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, David Ben Gurion, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Eamon De Valera and many, many others. London was every bit as angry at each and every one of those men as they are with Nicola now. London mocked them and threatened them and rubbished them. And it made not a jot of difference to the remorseless march of history.

Where better to finish this particular blog than with the magical words of Mahatma Gandi.

'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you then you win'

Too bloody right we will.       

WHY I FIND RONALD FIDDLER'S STORY SO TROUBLING.

From the moment I first heard Ronald Fiddler's story a couple of weeks ago I have felt a sort of nagging feeling. Something was a little off. A little troubling. Not right somehow.

I guess you will know who I am talking about from the picture. For a couple of days Ronald's smiling face beamed out of every front page under suitably appalled banner headlines. The coverage was all about shock, horror and disgust. A Brit suicide bomber. This made Ronald the absolute worst of the worst.

For a while I couldn't get a handle on the nagging feeling. Then I worked it out. There were too many uncomfortable similarities. Ronald was a man in his fifties from the North West of England. A Mancunian. And of course I am also a man in my fifties from the North West of England. But not a Mancunian of course. God forbid.

The nagging feeling only grew stronger when I watched Ronald's demise being discussed on the BBC News 24 Paper Review. One of the guests for the night was Tom Newton Dunne who is the senior political correspondent at the Sun. Tom has always come as something of a surprise to me. He is careful, considered, knowledgeable and always articulate. In fact he is everything you wouldn't expect to find working for that particular lying, filthy rag so conspicuous by its absence from the newsagents of Merseyside.

So. What was Tom's assessment of Ronald's final mission? I can't remember his exact words, but they were along the lines of diabolical, cowardly, despicable, appalling. It was the party line. Ronald was a terrorist and that was all there was to say. 

And yet....

Did Ronald drive his explosive packed vehicle into a market place filled with innocent civilians? No. He attacked a military base filled with soldiers. So in a way he was an ISIS version of one of our much vaunted smart bombs. He was what we would term a surgical strike.

And all of a sudden the sheer, unashamed hypocrisy of Tom's words hit me. I had a Kurtz moment. 'Like a diamond bullet straight through the forehead.'

One of our highly trained fighter pilots identifies an ISIS target on the ground and and kills everything in the vicinity care of a 'smart' bomb which has cost the British tax payer tens of thousands of pounds. No civilian casualties. Only soldiers burnt and dismembered. And our reaction? We will marvel at the pilot's professionalism and dedication. We might even comment on his heroism. Fair enough. He's a young guy far from home and he can never know if this is the mission when he runs into an unexpected surface to air missile. He is following the instructions of his political masters and he is following them to the letter.

Is he in Iraq because of a cast iron belief he is on the right side of the Shia/Sunni hatred that has rolled through hundreds of years in that neck of the woods. I doubt it. He is there because he chose a career with the RAF and has made it all the way to becoming a fighter pilot. And at the moment he releases his high tech smart bomb, he is hurtling through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. So there is a risk, but not a big risk. We have been in Iraq for fourteen years now and we have yet to lose a fighter jet to enemy fire.

Ronald on the other hand had picked a different side. The other side. Was it a career move? Well, I suppose it was in a way. But it wasn't a career which promised a good salary and an excellent pension. We can disagree with his decision to join ISIS all day, but it doesn't alter the fact that Ronald traveled to Mosul to fight for what he believed was right. He could have stayed in Manchester and carried on with his work as a carer. Instead he chose the hard miles.

Do our fighter jet pilots have more right to deliver their smart bombs than Ronald had to become one? Mosul is as far from Whitehall as it is from Manchester. Iraq isn't exactly our back yard. And yet we feel it is our absolute right to send our fighter bombers out there to kill from the sky. We do it in the name of an Iraqi government with a diabolical human rights record who lock up and torture Sunni citizens without any kind of charge. 

Are the Government of Iraq and their Iranian pals any better than ISIS? Probably. There are few worse outfits in the world than ISIS. But the torture rooms of Baghdad are not exactly an advert for human decency.

What did Ronald have in common with his fellow Brits involved in killing people with smart bombs? Courage certainly. Though the courage required to drive a vehicle to your certain death is probably of a higher order than pressing the release button at 10,000 feet. But that doesn't mean the RAF pilot wouldn't also be willing to become a suicide bomber if there was no other choice. 

What is it the Bible says? 'Greater love hath no man, that a man might lay down his life for his friends'. Well Ronald certainly did that. Of course we don't like his friends. We hate his friends. But there is no escaping the fact they WERE Ronald's friends and he most certainly laid down his life for them. Would it really be so very hard to acknowledge his courage? It would appear it is.

A few days later I came across an old black and white NBC documentary on YouTube. It was filmed a few weeks after the Americans had been in their first major engagement in Vietnam in 1965. Their Air Cavalry found themselves outnumbered 7 to 1 in the Ia Drang valley. For a few desperate hours young Americans and young Vietnamese locked horns and displayed extraordinary levels of courage and heroism. Without massive air support, the men of the Air Cav would have been completely overrun, but the fact they managed not to break was remarkable. The fact the North Vietnamese soldiers kept advancing through napalm strike after naplam strike was equally remarkable. Ia Drang was later turned into Mel Gibson's film 'We were soldiers'. 

There were a couple of things in the old documentary which caught my attention. First was the way the presenter framed the coming battle. 'One one side was the strongest military force in the history of the world, on the other side was the toughest guerrilla army in the history of the world.'

So no talk of foul and cowardly terrorists. Instead there was respect. Sure the NVA were the enemy and sure the Americans were out there to kill them down to the last man. But it didn't mean they didn't respect their vast courage. Check out the film via the link below. Go to 6 minutes and 30 seconds. You will find an interview given by Major Charles Beckworth of the Green Berets. He commanded a fire base which hung by a thread for several days as wave after wave of Viet Cong attacked. Again, only huge air power enable the Americans to survive. An interviewer asked Beckworth for his opinion of the VC soldiers he had fought. His answer?

'I would give anything to have 200 of them under my command. They're the finest soldiers I have ever seen."

https://goo.gl/lFr5E3

I wonder what the Major would have made of Ronald? A fifty year old Mancunian carer who had the courage to become a human smart bomb. My gut feeling is that this would have represented the kind of guts to win the respect of the tough Green Beret from Georgia. 

An officer would never be allowed to talk like this now. To do so would kill their career stone dead. The new narrative is Tom Newton Dunn's narrative. Now we call describe courage as cowardice. Now we are expected to portray our foes as being somehow depraved and sub human. We must never show any kind of respect. Is it any wonder our so called 'War on Terror' shows no sign of an end?

The story of Ronald shows how utterly impossible our leaders find it to learn from our questionable history. In 1955 we interned hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu in concentration camps in Northern Kenya. It was our way of taking on the Mau Mau 'terrorists'. Instead we turned a whole country against us and nine years later Kenya claimed its independence.

In August 1971 we launched Operation Demetrius across the six counties of Northern Ireland. We interned nearly two thousand guys and locked them up without any kind of trial in our new Long Kesh prison. And what happened next? Well, most of them were entirely innocent which meant they got really, really pissed off at the way they were being treated. They signed on the dotted line for the IRA and went onto make our lives a misery for the next 35 years. 

In 2003 the Americans opened up a huge prison in the Iraqi desert. They called it Camp Bucca in honour of a New York fire chief who died on 9/11. They interned over 20,000 Iraqi's without any kind of charge. And guess what? They got pissed off. It was hard for the Americans to keep order so they looked to influential prisoners they could work with. Their main man was Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Oh yeah. Him. They gave him a free hand to do pretty well what he liked in Camp Bucca so long as he kept a lid on things. So he made like Gerry Adams all those years before. He turned the camp into a university and he created ISIS.

So why all the talk of internment and how it tends to get people so pissed of that they can't wait to get their hands on a gun and the chance of some payback? Well Ronald was interned. In 2001 he was backpacking is way around Pakistan and Afghanistan. Seldom in history can a guy have been more in the wrong place at the wrong time. Once Bin Laden's planes smashed into the twin towers, Ronald knew Afghanistan had become Dodge and he needed to get out. He tried to cross into Iran but the Taliban were having none of it. His British passport made him a spy in their book so they arrested him and locked him up in a Kandahar prison.

Without trial of course.

We can only imagine what a relief it must have been to Ronald when the US Special Forces turned up. The cavalry, right? Free at last. Well. Not really. The Special Forces guys were more than happy to turn him loose but the spooks in Bagram air base saw things differently. They stuck him on a plane to Guantanamo for two years of 'torture light'.

Without trial of course.

Two years was more than enough for the Americans to establish Ronald was guilty of nothing whatsoever. In fact they had a few kind words for all the information he had given them about the Taliban.

So they let him go and when he got home the British Government gave him a million quid for his troubles. Now this seems pretty compelling to me. The British Government doesn't exactly make a habit of coughing up a million quid to people who have been wrongly arrested. Ronald's case must have been pretty damn compelling. 

And yet ten years later Ronald upped sticks and went to fight for ISIS. And this of course begs the $64,000 question. If we had brought Ronald home in 2001 after the special forces guys had liberated him from the Taliban prison in Kandahar, would he have still gone to ISIS? If we hadn't rounded up Gerry Adams in August 1971, would he have still joined the PIRA? If we hadn't banged Al-Baghdadi up in Camp Bucca, would he still have founded ISIS?

I can't answer any of these questions. Only Ronald, Gerry Adams and Al-Baghdadi could answer the questions and Ronald will never answer any question ever again.

Surely there is an easy enough lesson to be learned here. A good start for our brave leaders would be to take so time out to listen to the words of Major Beckworth of Atlanta, Georgia way back in 1965. 

Showing respect isn't weakness. Trying to understand the other guy's point of view isn't weakness. Owning up to your own mistakes isn't weakness. Pumping out endless propaganda is always a mistake. Describing people you don't agree with as sub human cowards is always a mistake. 

Hypocrisy is always a mistake.

Time to go back to another off message officer from the US Special Forces. This time it is the fictional Colonel Walter E Kurtz of Apocalypse Now fame.

'We train our young men to drop fire on people but we won't allow then to write 'FUCK' on their aeroplanes.... why ... because it's obscene.'