THERE WAS LOTS OF TALK ABOUT FIRING OFF NUKES IN THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN. BUT THERE WAS NO TALK ABOUT THE THOUSANDS LEFT ALL BROKEN UP BY FIGHTING BLAIR'S WARS: ABOUT LADS LIKE MIKE.

A couple of weeks ago the BBC staged their much trailed election debate in Leeds. Except it wasn't an actual debate of course. Not in the traditional sense of two contenders taking each other on. No. Not that. It was more a case of Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May being in the same building. At the same time. In West Yorkshire.

The BBC took the opportunity to give the floor to a procession of angry old white men with brick red faces. Each and every one was outraged by Jeremy Corbyn's visible reluctance to press the nuclear button. There was much talk of North Korea or 'some idiot in Iran.' It was made clear to the viewer the defence debate was all about our treasured nukes and who would be the best person to let them fly.

This is odd really. In the last two elections there has barely been a mention of the prospect of nuclear war and all it entails. Maybe this was because all parties shared an equal enthusiasm for ending life as we know it in the name of looking tough for the tabloid media. Thankfully a note of sanity was introduced to proceedings when a young lady wondered aloud why so many people in the room seemed so very keen to murder hundreds of thousands of people.

Why indeed?

What was completely missing from the 90 minutes of so called debate was any talk about our recent adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. You would have thought these wars would have been rather more relevant than the hypothetical question of whether it might one day be a good idea to burn alive an unknown number of innocent civilians in an as yet unknown location.

But no. Iraq and Afghanistan are already yesterday's news, as are the 150,000 men and women who fought in the name of political show boating. Time to move on, right? That was then, this is now. The red faced white men seemed to have little to say about our recent humiliating defeats in far away lands.

This is nothing new of course. Wars come an go and they are soon forgotten. The ones we lose are very, very soon forgotten. And those who did the fighting and the dying?

Who.....?

They certainly warranted no kind of mention in the big debate. Instead it is left to the likes of First Base to try to pick up the pieces of thousands of utterly fractured lives. We are the king's horses and king's men.

They are Humpty Dumpty.

Iraq and Afghanistan were the wall where the great fall happened.

The cameras were rolling when they sat on the wall. Every night we watched them in dusty streets and shallow drainage ditches. We watched the air strikes called in. We watched the coffins coming home. We heard all about the desperate lack of helicopters and body armour.

Not any more. Old news is old news and humiliating defeat is best forgotten. How much better it is to focus on 'some idiot in Iran' and a Prime Minister who stood tall in the House of Commons and told us all she would be more than willing to murder a hundred thousand people if that was what it would take to demonstrate strength and stability.

And the mess of Iraq and Afghanistan? The fallout? Oh bugger that. Too much like hard work. Too much of a bad look.

So in the end the job of being all the king's horses and all the king's men is left to the likes of First Base. It is for us to take the day trips into the dark corners where the fading memories of Helmand and Basra now reside.

This was how I spent yesterday afternoon: an excursion into one of the dark corners. One of the forgotten places where the mess of Blair's wars have been swept to one side. And hidden. And forgotten.

It isn't a long drive. Only a third of a mile. Over the river and the speed bumps. A familiar small sign into an unremarkable road.

'HMP Dumfries'.

Then 'No visitors' beyond this point'. The car park is quieter than usual. Sometimes I have to turn around and park where I can. But not today. Today there are places enough.

It is still lunch hour for the primary school next to the jail. High pitched kids' screams go along with manic football and hop scotch: maybe even games of war, but probably not. Not any more. Not like it was in my primary school days when we used the lunch hour to play out John Wayne and Rob Mitchum doing their thing at Iwo Jima or Omaha Beach.

I ring and the big lock clicks. The first time I visited the jail I didn't know to listen out for the click. I got an annoyed voice through the speaker. But now the click is more than enough. I guess it means I'm an old hand.

Which I am. What will this be? My tenth time? Fifteenth? Journeys through the wire to see the young men who once manned the front lines of the great War on Terror.

A familiar face loudly greets me from the desk. Big Tam. Once upon a time a 'Tanky', all primed and ready to meet the advancing Red Army on the North German plain. Back in the days when Germany was split asunder by the kind of wall Trump can only dream of.

We pass the time of day as he copies down the key details from my driving licence. And today there is something new. Just stand here can you, whilst we take your picture. I stand. Soon my mugshot is on a computer screen. And now it is on a freshly minted plastic ID card announcing me as a fully accredited visitor to the Scottish Prison Service.

Airport style metal detection. Do I have a phone? Just go through here. That's it. I am not on my own. With me on their way through the security checks are three hard faced women. Stick thin arms wrapped in tattoos. Saturday night clothes on a Tuesday afternoon. Clattering heels on the polished floor. Eyes as unyielding as pebbles on a beach.

A female warder takes one look at them and puts on her disposable gloves. Ah, the endless mini humiliations of the fifty year war on drugs. The hard faced ladies are guided to the waiting area. But I am already on my way, for I now have my freshly minted SPS ID card dangling from my neck.

Tam locks and unlocks a series of heavy doors as we make our way to the Link Centre. Prisoners in sweatshirts and joggers nod to him and grin. Usually I know a few of them, but not today. As ever the atmosphere is easy. Relaxed. Dumfries is everything a jail should be. And we the tax payer still own every brick. The vultures of the private sector are locked out every bit as securely as the 170 cons are locked in.

My man is already waiting. Shall I call him Mike? Why not. I have already met him twice on the outside. Then it was all about trying to calm him down enough to keep him from ending up where he has ended up.

Here.

For 80 days. 40 if he behaves himself. He looks like a teenager in his sweat shirt and joggers. His hair is shorter and his complexion is healthier. He is far from what most people picture when they envisage one of the warriors who fought our War on Terror.

I guess he might just about tip the scales at ten stones. Maybe not. He is the kind of Scottish lad who has manned the British front lines for hundreds of years. All attitude and red hair. Stuck out ears and at least three 'fuck's' in every barked out sentence. He exudes the constant lariness of the Glasgow scheme where he once cut his cloth.

And I know only too well what is coming next. And it comes. The tirade. The long list of people who are nothing but pure cunts so they are. The police, the psychiatrists, the social, the Sheriff, his ex. Molten, spat out words. Three 'fucks' to every sentence.

I sit back and let him run. It won't last forever. And it doesn't. He dances his angry dance and then his tensed up limbs start to relax. He tells me about going pure fucking mental in his cell. Trying to punch ten shades of fuck out of the metal door. Anger rising up and through him in waves. Milk over boiling out of the pan and all over the hob.

Medication cut back. But then a grudging admission. Maybe it is actually working a bit better when taken three times a day like it says on the bottle. Instead of gubbing the whole fucking lot as soon as he steps out of the chemist. Why? Maybe a half hearted suicide attempt? Maybe yet another fuck you. Fuck everyone. Fuck it all. Fuck knows.

I ask him if the paranoia is starting to beat a retreat yet? After 21 days off the dope? And he rears up and defends his beloved cannabis as stoutly as he once defended his Forward Operating Base in Helmand. He is outraged about me questioning his best friend. It keeps him calm. It keeps the rage in check. It loves him like he loves it and that's all there is fucking to it. So fuck off, right?

I shrug. Maybe best if we agree to disagree. Work in progress. I park the cannabis thing and we talk about how it is going to be when he gets out. Not much attitude now. Points have been proved. No more bravado required. Instead he allows himself to be a frightened young man who can't understand where the person he used to be has gone. And who is he now? And will it always be this way, one minute angry enough to kill, the next minute crying like a bairn, and the minute after that laughing like absolute fuck.

And suddenly he is honest about his terror that he might actually kill someone when the red mist takes a hold. I do my shut up and listen thing. Then we make arrangements for when he gets out in a couple of weeks. He says he will come straight into First Base. No fucking way is he going to make a beeline for the lads to blow all his liberation grant on vodka and dope. No fucking way.

Maybe not. We'll see. I wouldn't put the mortgage on it. Mike's brain is still a bowl of spaghetti. The memories of Helmand are still upon him like gnawing rats. It isn't going away. Not nearly. And he is still at the stage where he is hanging on the belief that all the medication and booze and dope will one day bring him some quiet. Some peace. Some relief.

They won't of course. Instead these false gods will see him in and out of the jail until he knocks them on the head and stops looking for chemical short cuts.

I hope he'll get there. And I hope he'll get there before he destroys his health and earns himself a criminal record to make any kind of employment all but impossible.

I hope so. He's lucky to have landed up in HMP Dumfries where there are plenty of good people to look out for him. And I am confident we will be able to cobble together enough resources to help Mike to get himself onto the right track. So long as he wants to do that. Time will tell. But resources are getting thinner all the time as the memories of the War on Terror start to fade away leaving tens of thousands of guys like Mike in pieces.

We finish up and I am guided back through all the heavy doors to the reception area. The hard faced women are nowhere to be seen. I leave my shiny new badge on the counter, ready for the next time. Ready for the next Mike.

Outside play time is over the sun is out. I light up and take the smoke as far down as it will go. And I think of the great debate where the BBC allowed defence talk to revolve around mass murder in the name of 'some idiot in Iran'

And no time to consider what we all might do for the likes of Mike.

Same old, same old.      

IS RICHARD ARKLESS WORTH GETTING WET FOR? COURSE HE BLOODY IS! COME ON, GRAB YOUR BROLLY AND GET IT DONE.

It is just by one in the afternoon and I am finding it hard to shake a nagging end of the world feeling. The ceiling in the First Base kitchen is leaking faster than the Trump White House and we are up to four buckets on the floor and counting. Well, not counting actually. We only have four buckets.

Outside the rain is relentless. And the grey is relentless. And the feeling of general doom is relentless.

It seems our beloved United Kingdom is once again about to look out for the tax dodging 1% because the media has told them to look out for the tax dodging 1%. The word from EU types in Brussels is bleak. They now feel it is 90% certain Theresa May will flounce out of the up coming negotiations before the leaves turn to autumn gold.

Wonderful. Cue accelerated decline and the remorseless rise of the hate everyone and everything right. And pensioners from John O Groats to Lands End will fit an extra lock on their doors and post out their votes to stop all hope in its tracks. Those who have little future to live out seem ever more hell bent of ripping away any kind of future from the coming generations. No wonder they so love the idea of a leader who would let the Trident missiles fly without a second thought.

There is not a thing any of us can do to change the world today. If every person in Scotland cast their vote for the SNP it would change nothing. Not today.

Not yet.

We would still be required to provide a home for the UK's weapons of mass destruction.

We would still have our taxes skimmed to cover the costs of Hinkley Point and HS2 and a make over for the Palace of Westminster.

We will still be completely and utterly ignored about everything.

And even with all 59 seats and 100% of the vote, almost every paper on the news stands would hail a vast Tory win for their new Boudicea, Queen Ruth.

So what to do today? Vote or build a bloody Ark? How tempting it is to say stuff it.

Well this blog is parochial. If you are reading this from a screen in Dumfries and Galloway, the view from your window will be every bit as dreich as it is from mine.

If you are reading this blog of mine it is pretty well a racing certainty you won't be thinking about whether or not to don your wet weather gear to go out to vote for good old Ruthie. Tories tend to avoid my musings, can't think why.

Which means if you are about to get soaked to the skin, it will be in the name of SNP, Labour or the Greens.

Maybe you might consider this. I think the bookies have Labour at 100 to 1 and the Greens at 500 -1 here in Dumfries and Gallowa . It's there or thereabouts. There is really is no point getting wet for either.

So. Is it worth making the effort for the SNP? Well you'll have to make your own mind up about that one.

For what it's worth, I will thrown in my own penny's worth.

Maybe it isn't about a vote for the SNP. Maybe it is actually about a vote for Richard Arkless. And here is where I DO have an opinion.

Rich became a mate of mine during our efforts for YES in 2014. Unlike me, he went the extra mile and stood for election and won. He's only had 2 years to prove himself but in my view he has more than done so.

Over the last two years we at First Base have had plenty of calls from his people. The calls have been made on behalf of doomed, desperate people who have either walked in off the street or phoned in their crises. Rich doesn't ignore them. Instead he goes out to bat for them. All of them. Each and every one.

Does he always win on their behalf? Of course he doesn't. Nobody could. But he gives it his best shot and none of us can ask for any more than that.

And none of us can ever be confident things are always going to be tip top in our own lives. Every day at First Base we see lives which have been ruined in the blink of an eye: a redundancy letter, an inexplicable withdrawal benefits, a collapse in health. If you're life suddenly crashes and burns through no fault of your own, you might well need someone who is willing to try and look out for you.

Well if you live in Dumfries and Galloway that guy is Richard and you have until ten o'clock to keep it that way. I know nothing of Rich's Tory opponent. Maybe he's a top bloke. I have no idea. I reckon it's a case of a bird in the hand always being worth more than one in the bush.

Rich is exactly the kind of MP we are always saying we want. He isn't a career politician. He is very much from the real world and he absolutely gives a shit.

He's worth getting wet for. So come on, grab the bloody brolly and get it done.

AT 2.30 THIS MORNING I GOT TO THINKING ABOUT ANDREW.

At 2.30 this morning I got to thinking about Andrew. And yes, this is a pretty vague sentence which needs a whole bunch of tightening up. Key details? Why Andrew? Who is Andrew? Why 2.30 am? What was the trigger? Who the hell cares anyway?

OK. Fair enough.

2.30am. We finished a box set and moved over to the news. And there she was. Our wretched Prime Minister playing her Daily Mail cards one by one like a desperate gambler drinking in the last chance saloon. The woman who had started out as a vicar's daughter promising to look out for the 'just about managing' had finally completed her journey. No more Mrs Nice Lady. Oh no. Tightening polls meant it was time for her to play the tough on terror card. It was time to promise to scrap human rights and come down hard on brown people. 

Christ don't you get tired of this wretched tale being played out over and over again. Some outcast maniac manages a blood drenched public suicide. He duly takes number of innocent civilians of all creeds and colours with him on his journey to the next world. Cue the Prime Minister of the day. Step out in front of the cameras, in front of Downing St so long as it isn't pissing it down. Fix the camera with a beady stare and tell the evil cowardly terrorist swine they will never succeed. They will never make us change our way of life.

And then what does the PM do?

Oh yeah. They change our way of life. We are told our democracy is sacred and the forces of evil will never challenge our freedoms. You know how the script goes. Hitler didn't manage it, nor did the IRA, nor will the long beards....

And then there comes the 'but.....'

Our democracy is sacred but..... well here's the thing... you see when I called this election all the boffins said I would win it by a country mile and everyone would love me and they would hate Jeremy Corbyn and I wouldn't have to talk to any actual people and......

Well.

They lied you see. And the plebs seem to actually want to listen to what that bearded communist has to say. Traitorous bastards. And all my own MPs are queuing up to stab me in the back. And.....

Well I have to do something. Can't you see? So bugger the sacred democracy. I'm calling a pause in the name of respect for the dead. Oh, you might say I am doing exactly what ISIS want me to do by suspending campaigning and thereby allowing them to interfere in our beloved democratic process. Well to be frank, I couldn't give a shit. I need a moment, right? I need to give the Daily Mail something for the front page.

Anyway. Next up. They will never, ever make us retreat from the beloved freedoms we have enjoyed for hundreds of years. We are the Sceptered Isle where the Magna Carta was dotted line signed! This is the very green and pleasant land where every citizen is allowed to speak freely and be safe from being locked up without trial! Hitler wanted to change all that but we had Spitfires!

So here is my message to all of you long bearded murderous bastards. If my people vote for me and my team, I will make sure there is less free speech and more people will be locked up without trial. For longer. So there. Pow!!! Boooosh!!!!

Here is my very clear message. If you attack us we will suspend our democratic process and chip away at the freedom of our citizens. How do you like that? Think that will get you anywhere? Oh and by the way, I will also make sure the people we lock up without trial will be brown people who prefer to worship their God on a Friday.  

Oh you think all of this will only make you stronger and more popular do you? Well I dare say it will. Am I bothered? As if! The Daily Mail will like it. They'll love it. Capische? 

So that's the 'why' part. Why it was at 2.30am I got to thinking about Andrew.

The trigger.

So I guess I best get to the 'who' part. Who was he? This Andrew. AKA 'Gizmo'.

I guess he is best described as one of my ghosts. And there are far too many names on my ghost list. Over the fourteen years of First Base my ghost list has grown to sixty of so. The ones who didn't make it. All the clients dead years and years before their time. Overdoses, suicides, ruined health. If there was a memorial in the town centre it might well carry the words 'In loving memory of the victims of the Trainspotting Generation'.

Over the course of my 55 years I have met all manner of remarkable people. They have come in all shapes and sizes. An old drinking pal recently turned up as the Government's head lawyer in Gina Miller's Brexit case. Another mate who I shared a stage with in my last university drama went on to win an Oscar. I once gave the late, great Bob Paisley a thirty mile lift to and from an after dinner speech. As a charity manager I have spent time with party leaders and crime bosses and the survivors of fifty years worth of British Wars. As a writer I have spent time with old IRA war horses and refugees and locked down lifers in HMP Shotts.

Some famous, some infamous. Some good and some not so good. Remarkable in many different ways.

Andrew would always make it into my top ten. I guess he is the most chaotic individual I have ever come across. I think of him as a 21st Century version of the Artful Dodger. 

He must have been twenty or so when I first came across him at the reception counter. And boy, could he talk. Talk for bloody Scotland, so he could. A million miles an hour in the twang of Glasgow. Tales of a life revolving around ten bags of smack a day. Ducking and diving. At least two petty crimes an hour. Seven days a week. Every week.

He blagged me out of a copy of my book 'The Cull' on that first day. Time passed and he was back demanding a signature and asking if he was my inspiration for the character Ricky Macintosh. I told him he wasn't but he was having none of it.

He over estimated the things a small town author can achieve. He was forever bringing us waifs and strays. Lost souls from the streets. Come see Mark and Carol. They will show you how to make it right...

He became a fixture. An ever present handful. He would turn up more or less every day fully expecting a bollocking for his latest idiocy and most of the time getting one. For someone who had spent so little of his life in school he was one of the smartest people I have ever met. In another life he might have been the greatest City trader of them all. He might have been almost anything. Instead he lived his messed up life from minute to minute in a breakneck haze of smack and blue valium.

And he had a heart the size of the Galloway Forest. If someone hit rock bottom on the pavement, Andrew would sit with them all night. In the rain. In the biting cold of winter. Because he would never leave anyone behind.

He was forever in and out of jail. Two months here and eight months there. I went to visit him in Polmont and Dumfries. And every time he would tell me how it was all going to be different this time. And every time his good intentions would crash and burn within half an hour of his liberation and he would duly arrive at First Base monged out of his head.

And he would get yet another bollocking as his head lolled to his chest.

The day we got the news was as bad as a day can get. A light had been extinguished. He was found dead in a front garden and he left a gaping hole. I don't recall exactly how old he was. Twenty five or thereabouts. Laid to rest on a grey winter's day as the crows looked down from the bare trees. His family played the Verve for him. 'The drugs don't work.' They didn't. Not for Andrew.

So why did our Prime Minister's promise to strip away our civil liberties get me to thinking about Andrew at 2.30am?

Here's how.

One day he crashed through the door fresh from another short stretch in HMP Dumfries. For once he wasn't off his face. Instead he was blazing with indignation. He was a torch bearer. He was demanding justice. Because if there was one thing Andrew hated over all other things, it was injustice.

I had to calm him down. Sit him down. More or less push a fag into his mouth. Slow him down.

And so it was he told me the story of his new African pals. There were three of them and he had got to know them well in the jail.

They had arrived in the Republic of Ireland a few few months earlier en route to claim asylum in the United Kingdom. They thought they had done their homework. They had checked out the atlas. There was the island of Ireland. And there was the bigger island of Great Britain. So they got themselves to Larne and took the ferry and duly presented themselves to the authorities in Stranraer.

Ah. 

Oops.

It was time for a geography lesson for the fleeing Africans. They were told they had actually crossed the border three days earlier when they had taken the bus from Dublin to Belfast. Not that there had been a border crossing or anything like that. If they had looked closely they might have noticed how the lines in the middle of the road stopped being yellow and started being white.

Whatever.

They had already missed their window of opportunity to make an asylum claim. Three days had already passed. Too long. So it was a case of sorry, but no.

But what do you do with three Africans who have missed their window without knowing it? Why, you lock them up of course. Do you? What crime have they committed to warrant being thrown in jail? I mean you can't just lock people up because you feel like it. Can you?

Well you can actually.

How?

We'll use the anti-terror legislation. Shouldn't be too much of a problem. When all is said and done they are foreign, black and they have no money for a decent lawyer. So, yeah. bang 'em up. Who gives a shit.

Well Andrew gave a shit. He was absolutely raging. He was ready to storm the castle. He told me I had to do something about it and for the umpteenth time I told him there was nothing I could do. I suggested he make an appointment to see his MP. 

He never did.

And the Dumfries Three? I have no idea what happened to them. I very much doubt if they ever had any kind of trial. They must have been shoved onto a plane and sent back to whatever fate awaited them I guess.

Three more statistics nobody much cared about. Except Andrew. And Andrew never did get the chance to make the world a better place. He blew it. He rolled the dice one time to many.

And he is still sorely missed.

And his outrage is still relevant. It always will be. Our Prime Minister is asking us to be turkeys by once again voting for Christmas. She says we don't need to worry about our civil liberties because the State can be trusted to only use new powers to go after the bad guys. And of course the British State can be trusted to always get it right. Because there was never a Guildford Four or a Birmingham Six.

Or a Dumfries Three.

Andrew was a smart kid. He knew in his bones what was right and what was wrong. He had been locked up enough times to fully appreciate the true value of liberty. Of civil liberty.

Andrew found it very easy to see the wood from the trees. Will the rest of us share his 20/20 vision? I doubt it. I guess we will make like sheep and do what the tabloid press tells us to do. We'll toss away our freedom because we have never known what it is to lose it.

Unlike Andrew. 

If only we were all as smart as Andrew the Prime Minister wouldn't be given the time of day.    

'YES' NEEDS TO LEARN HOW TO ACCEPT JUST HOW COMPLETELY WEAK THE UNIONISTS REALLY ARE. THEN WE'LL WIN. HANDS DOWN.

We seem to have been subjected to an awful lot of talk about being strong of late. Most of this has come from our gallant Prime Minister of course. As far as Mother Theresa is concerned, being strong is a matter of practising her very best Cruella Deville face in front of the mirror and then going out in front of a few hand picked party types and duly telling us all how strong she is.

It seems this rather pathetic performance is more than enough for the fawning press to tell us she has to be the strongest thing mankind has seen since Thor worked out how to do thunder. You can almost feel the ISIS leadership out in Raqaa quaking in their Jihadi boots.

It seems there are different kinds of strong. There is saying your strong and actually BEING strong. Then there is saying your strong but when push comes to shove you get a proper kicking because it turns out you aren't so very strong after all. And then there is saying you're strong when you are not strong at all but somehow getting away with it by being bloody convincing.

I guess the best place to measure these various kinds of strong is in the context of war. The place where the metal meets the meat is the ultimate proving ground: it is the place where there is suddenly nowhere to hide.

The American military make no bones about telling us all about how strong they are. Is this a bunch of hot air? Actually, no. They rule the roost on land, in the air, on the sea, under the sea and in space. They are the undisputed top dog. Any country on planet earth daft enough to have a go at the Land of the Free will get absolutely marmalised. Fair enough over the recent years they have had their problems keeping a lid on things once they have done the conquest thing, but they are still overwhelmingly powerful.

They can back up their words with deeds whenever they choose.

Saddam Hussein found out the hard way what a lousy idea it is to pick any kind of a fight with the American war machine. He is a fine example of someone who spent many years banging on about how strong he was but when push came to serious shove, his regime collapsed like a house of soggy cards. Mussolini was much the same. He strutted about like a peacock for years with all manner of talk about iron this and steel that. But when he sent his supposedly mighty Fascist army into Abyssinia, a bloody nose was the least of his problems.

Then we come to the most interesting category - those who make out they are strong when they are actually seriously weak and yet they still manage to get away with it.

Ladies and gentlemen, in this regard I give you none other than Herr Adolf Hitler. In the 1930's Hitler's Germany was the ultimate paper tiger. The Treaty of Versailles made sure Germany's wings were clipped on a permanent basis. This made it hard to the glorious Fuhrer to pull off his tough guy superman act. It was all very well throwing a big rally in Nuremburg, but how do you convince the world you have a mighty war machine when in reality all you have is bunch of skin heads who get their rocks off by kicking Jewish pensioners.

So Hitler started out on his great con trick. It went something like this. You take a VW Beetle and fit a cardboard shell around it and lo and behold once you paint it up it looks like a Panzer Three. Repeat the process a thousand times and you can present a mightily impressive Panzer Army to an utterly gullible watching world. Neville Chamberlain certainly bought the big con in 1938 when he served up Czechoslovakia on a plate.

But in 1940 push came to shove and the glorious Fuhrer faced the prospect of shitting or getting off the pot. Fair enough Poland was in the bag, but France and Britain were starting to flex their muscles. On paper Hitler was completely screwed. We had him well and truly outnumbered in every area. We had three times as many planes and four times as many tanks.

Unfortunately he had the drop on us in one very key area. Our generals were over promoted aristocrats whereas the Wehrmacht was led by the genius of Guderian and Rommel.

Our solution was to hide behind the Maginot Line and wait for the Germans to come to their senses. Had we invaded Germany in the spring of 1940 the Wehrmacht would have fared little better than Saddam Hussein fared in 2003. But we didn't invade. Instead we waited in the certain knowledge we had more tanks and more planes and the Maginot line was impregnable.

And it probably was impregnable. We never got to find out because Rommel and Guderian went round it and did what was supposed to be impossible as they blitzkrieged their way through the Ardennes forest.

Panic set in and the British and French armies basically legged it. So much for all that numerical and mechanical superiority.

However it was in Holland that Hitler's big con really played out. The German battle plan relied on three big gambles all coming good at the same time. First they had to do what was supposed to be impossible by successfully driving their Panzer armies through the Ardennes forest. Second they had to secure their southern flank with a pretend army made up of old fellas and Hitler Youth pretending to be a genuine fighting force. Thirdly, they needed to invade Holland with virtually no equipment.

This was the biggest gamble of all. They crossed their fingers and sent their army of cardboard tanks forward. They filled the skies with screaming Stukas and hoped the Dutch army would fall for the big con and leg it.

They did and the rest was history. The German invasion of Holland and the Low Countries was the final act of the greatest 'Long Con' in history. 

By the time summer arrived Hitler's equipment problem was a thing of the past. We left most of what he needed on the beach at Dunkirk.

So what has all this got to do with our long march to an Independent Scotland? Quite a lot actually. Right now the forces of the Union are a lot like Hitler's army in the spring of 1940. From a distance it looks like they have a hell of a lot of tanks. But a closer look very quickly reveals the fact that most of them are made out of cardboard. The problem is that we keep making like the Dutch army and falling for the big con.

Check out this picture. It's familiar, right? The great Unionist demo at the launch of the SNP's election manifesto last week. We all got to see plenty of this picture. It was plastered through every Unionist paper and presented as clear evidence of an unstoppable Tory surge. The SNP have passed their peak! Nobody wants another Referendum!

The Unionist media were the dive bombing, howling Stukas and the motley crew with the banners were the cardboard tanks.

We needed to make the most simple observation in the world. There are only about ten of them! This isn't a protest. It is a lousy ten people with a few banners they haven't even made themselves. Without the wall to wall media coverage, they would have been nothing more than they actually were. Ten people. Nothing.

If the Dutch army stood and fired their guns in 1940 it wouldn't have taken ten minutes for them to realise the advancing Panzers were in fact nothing more than VW Beetles wrapped in cardboard.

Exhibit two. 25,000 people march through Glasgow waving banners they actually have made themselves. It is the biggest rally Scotland has seen in years and years and years. It is absolute proof positive there is an ever strengthening mood for Independence. It is 2500 times bigger than the pathetic crew the Unionists put onto the streets of Perth a few days earlier. All the Unionists could do was to make sure their media pretended the rally had never happened. Instead they filled their pages with fawning gough about how strong and stable Mother Theresa is.

Just imagine if 25,000 Unionists had marched through Glasgow demanding to stay in the United Kingdom. Bloody hell! There would have been  twenty page pull outs and special editions. They would have produced commemorative mugs by the thousand. The BBC would have dispatched Sophie Rowarth to do a piece to camera in Sauchiehall street whilst shaking from head to toe with a quivering orgasm.

So let's take a moment here and check out the relative strengths of the opposing sides. As the last picture shows, YES is young and energetic. We can put thousands out onto the street.

The Unionists? Well last week they proved they can just about manage to fill a minibus and pay some printing bills. Things have changed since Indyref One. Back then it was YES versus the Tory Party, the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrat Party. Now the battle lines are rather different. 

Now it is YES versus the Tories.

So what are their strengths? Well it sure ain't numbers. Just how many people in the UK are actual Tory party members is a well kept secret. What we do know is that it isn't many and the average age is seventy plus. They aren't really a party at all in the traditional sense. They are a pretend party - a funnel through which the money of big business can work it's magic and make sure the interests of the super rich are well looked after. Mother Theresa's state visit to Scotland was a classic case in point. The best they could manage was a shed in a wood somewhere in the back of the Aberdonian beyond. The biggest crowd they could lay on was about thirty. Is this really a party? Of course it isn't. It is a VW Beetle cleverly wrapped in cardboard and painted up to resemble a Panzer Three.

Basically they have three big strengths. Number one, old people tend to like them. Number two, they own 90% of the media and Josef Goebbels would no doubt purr with pleasure at the way they get the editors to dance to their tune. Number three, they have all the money in the world. The only non Tory politician in living memory to have persuaded the big corporations to cough up their cash was Tony Blair. Enough said.

The YES side not surprisingly spends plenty of time railing against the endless bias of the Unionist media. Fair enough. It sucks. But maybe we should look a little deeper. Every time some hack from the Scotsman or the Mail or the Telegraph is wheeled out to say Scotland is succumbing to a vast Tory surge, we kind of assume lots of people are paying attention. These are famous papers, right? Sure they are. But just how much of an audience to they really command? 

Last week I was fascinated to see where Stuart's brilliant 'Wings over Scotland' now sits in the league table of online places where Scots go to read stuff. Here you go.

Not bloody bad, don't you think? On the one hand you have a bunch of mega newspapers owned by some of the richest people in the world. On the other hand you have Reverend Stuart in his flat in Bath. It looks to me like Goliath is getting another kicking!

So I did a bit more Googling and worked my way to that esteemed Unionist rag, The Scotsman. They have been a venerable fixture since the early nineteenth century. Today they still have a hundred plus on the payroll. Surely they must have a mighty voice which can be heard the length and breadth of the land....

Or have they?

Daily circulation? 

22,000. 

As compared to Stuart's 480,000. And then I got to thinking about my own efforts and how they might compare to this age old fixture of the Scottish media scene. 

Well, here's a screen shot of my stats page.

Bloody hell. 

136,000 readers in the last month. As in six times more than the Scotsman. And when all is said and done, who am I? Just a two bit blog artist from sleepy Dumfries. There must be plenty more out there like me.

To fair I don't get 136,000 readers every month, but I seem to get more and more all the time. Maybe in reality our voice is already louder than theirs. We just don't know it yet. Just like we can't seem to admit to ourselves just how weak they really are. We assume they are strong because they keep on telling us how strong they are. Our problem is we are daft enough to listen. And unless we learn to accept just how completely weak they are, we will always be in danger of making like the Dutch army seventy seven years ago and running away from a bunch of cardboard tanks.

History will show we are now living through the last rasping breaths of the British Empire. We are London's last significant colony and they are hanging on with an ever weakening liver spotted hand. 

They're old, they're weak, they're all but done. They are yesterday's news. They are an empty shell. We just need to learn how to look at ten people holding ten banners and see them for what they really are - ten people holding ten banners.

And then they will collapse into a sorry heap.   

WHEN 95,000 PEOPLE TURN UP TO READ AN OBSCURE BLOGGER'S THOUGHTS ON THE BBC'S 'FOODBANK' NURSE, IT SURELY PROVES THE ARMY OF 'YES' IS STRONGER THAN EVER

Over recent months those of us who support the dream of an Independent Scotland have had to absorb wave after wave of discouraging news. It seems our Parliament doesn't count any more. A Holyrood vote for another referendum has been deemed to be less important than opinion polls. Now is not the time! Our lords and masters have better things to do than bother themselves with our yapping. We have been told in graphic detail about the Tory surge sweeping across our land like an unstoppable Tsunami. We have been told - firmly - support for independence is wilting with every passing week.

Oh, I nearly forgot, our schools are worse than the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nicola Sturgeon's obsession with Independence is the reason why a whole generation of young Scots are incapable of spelling the word 'THE.'

Night after night, a familiar cast of messengers are paraded across the evening news to tell us there are new sheriffs in every Scottish town complete with blue rosettes on their jackets and Theresa May posters on their walls. There is Mother Theresa herself doing her well rehearsed mummy knows best routine. There is Ruth Davidson wearing her trademark smug look, like the class bully who has just sneaked a dog turd into the bag of the Pakistani boy who is annoyingly good at maths. There is David Mundell who is.... well he's David Mundell.

And then of course there is every newspaper in the land bar two. And the TV. And the pigeons on the window ledges and the blackbirds in the hedges and the kittiwakes gazing out into the vastness of the Atlantic...

There is everyone. 

From wall to wall. 

From Gretna to Mallaig. 

We are told the people of Scotland have finally got over their acid trip and realised London rule is the only way ahead. My god, what were we all thinking of! Of course we can't manage on our own. What a ridiculous thought. No wonder Mother Theresa looks like she is so cross with us. Who wouldn't be? I mean they are good enough to give us our very own parliament and what do we go and do? We only go and vote for another referendum. Which nobody wants. As in absolutely nobody. Not even the kittiwakes. We are like the teenager who is told he can invite a couple of nice friends round when his mum and dad are visiting friends only to open the doors to all the nasty boys from the scheme to come in and take drugs and generally Ned it up.

All over Scotland, people are slowly but surely coming to their senses. We have had our fun but now it is time to grow up and accept life cannot be one long festival. We are finally accepting being a proper grown up people means voting Tory and putting Mother Theresa posters on our bedroom walls. Those of us who lost our sanity and hoped for Independence need to get treatment and learn how to understand what is good for us.

So we need to accept the new reality. We need to wake up and smell the coffee. We need to get with the programme.

Or else.

Come on now class. Repeat after me....

Now is not the time.....

Nobody wants a second referendum......

Nobody wants Independence any more.......

We all love the Tories......

We all think Ruth is just completely super.......

And David Mundell's beard makes him look like a proper statesman.......

And we all hate Nicola Sturgeon because she's.... well she's just a cow......

Of course this is the whole point of propaganda. If you say it over and over and over and over again, people actually start to believe it, especially when everyone seems to be saying the same thing. And let's face it, over recent months it really has seemed like every man and his dog has lined up against Scottish Independence.

And at times I am sure I have not been alone in staring at the screen and shaking my head in wonder at the thought of anyone buying what Mother Theresa and Ruth Davidson are selling.

And at times it CAN get a little discouraging. We have to dig beyond the TV and the newspapers to find out 48% of us still support Independence. We have to remind ourselves of some primary school maths to realise 46% support for the SNP is actually quite a lot more than 24% support for the Tories.

Well my fellow 'YES' travelers, here is something which I think should give you plenty of heart.

You no doubt watched the 'foodbank nurse' do her stuff on the BBC's Scottish leaders debate. And you no doubt watched the unionists have a collective orgasm as they celebrated the First Minister's humiliation. 

A few days ago I wrote a pissed off blog about it. As a food bank manager, I was worried people might stop donating food if they thought we were were doling out free grub to people earning thirty grand a year.

My hope? To be honest I didn't set the bar very high. I just hoped the word would spread around locally and food donations wouldn't fall off a cliff. I would have been more than happy if four or five hundred readers had turned up at my page to read what I had to say. My main hope was for one of the local papers to pick up the thread and take my concerns to a much larger local audience.

So what happened next rendered me well and truly gobsmacked. As I write this, 95,437 people have read my take on the sorry tale of the BBC's pet food bank nurse.

95,437!

It is a figure which needs putting into proper context. I am not remotely well known. I am a food bank manager from bloody Dumfries who has written a few books which nobody seems to want to buy. I am a one man band of the garage variety. I'm an inconsequential middle aged bloke in a sleepy little town. And yet 95,437 people pitched up to read what I had to say.

That is 2% of the population of Scotland for Christ's sake. Had my blog been a UK wide thing, the equivalent number of reads would have been 1.2 million.

So I have do some Googling to check out what kind of readership the Unionist rags enjoy. And you know what, what I found kind of made my day. 

Check it out. These are daily circulation figures.

The Scotsman - 32,000
The Scottish Daily Express - 44,000
Daily Telegraph (Scottish Edition) - 15,000
Scottish Daily Mail - 91,000

Wow. With all of their massive resources and sense of entitlement this is all they are actually good for. And yet their journalists are wheeled out by the BBC every night as if they speak for everyone. 

Now I am not making out I am anything special here. I'm not. The fact that the number of people who read my blog was more than any of the listed unionist rags get on an average day is not evidence of my words being anything special. What it is clear evidence of is that support for 'YES' is absolutely still alive and kicking. There can be no other reason.

So take heart. All this talk of a Tory surge and a collapse in support for Independence is nothing more than last ditch propaganda. Just because they all say it doesn't mean it is remotely true. If it was true, they would sell more papers. 

These last few days have been pretty interesting. I have been called a fascist, a cybernat, a bully and even sectarian! I can't say I have lost any sleep. Instead I feel well and truly buoyed up.    

95,437 reads of my blog show the army of 'YES' is well and truly in tact and ready to roll. They might have almost all the media on their side but it won't make any difference in the end. 

The Taliban have a saying which is chilling in it's truth.

"They have all the clocks but we have all the time...."        

By the way....

The number is now 96,236.

THE SORRY TALE OF THE HIDEOUS UNIONIST NURSE, THE BBC AND THE SCREWED OVER FOOD BANKS

Once upon a time I was a big fan of the BBC. What a long lost era it seems now. As a much younger man I travelled to plenty of countries where any kind of free press was a pipe dream. Most of these places were locked down behind the Iron Curtain. Crumbling high rise blocks and monumental factories belching clouds of brown smoke up into the grey skies. Aggressive cops and pot holed roads and nothing in the shops. And hushed conversations with frightened looking guys of my own age in back street bars. Talk of Keegan and Dalglish over great beer at tuppence a litre. Talk of the BBC World Service and hidden radios and keeping a careful ear out for heavy boots thundering up the crumbling concrete steps. 

Half forgotten days when listening in to the World Service could mean five years of hard labour.

Those times when the Beeb was a genuine voice of freedom to millions all over the world living hard, locked down lives. And yes, it made me proud. It was very much the best of British. How well it compared to the new breed of Thatcher loving tabloids who cheered on every swipe of a police baton into yet another miner's face.

Yeah, yeah. I'm showing my age. I have reached an age where I seem to show my age all the time. I guess over the next few hundred words I will be showing it again. So be it. 

The recent case of the hideous Unionist nurse and the BBC is depressing on so many levels. I think it is the complete and utter tawdriness of the whole affair which reminds me so strongly of East Germany.

It appears this loathsome woman pitched up for the Edinburgh edition of Question Time only to leave fuming because she had been deprived of her big moment. So she got in touch with the Beeb and reminded them of what she was yearning to tell the world. Juicy, juicy stuff. The poor beleaguered NHS nurse driven to a food bank by her Dickensian level of pay.

It's worth taking a moment here. The BBC receives north of a billion quid's worth of our money to be the balanced, level headed, professional deliverer of the news of the day. It's a hell of a budget. It is a budget massive enough to guarantee they are the permanent top dog. It means they have vast resources.

So what? So this.

It means they have enough people to look into things properly. So here is how things should have gone if the BBC remotely resembled the organisation they claim to be.

Got a moment boss? Thanks. I have been speaking to a woman called Claire Austin. She an NHS nurse, yeah? Been one for years. She was in the audience at Question Time but David couldn't squeeze her in. She's a bit pissed off actually. Anyway. She says her pay is so bad she needs to go to a food bank.

Bloody hell. NHS nurse needs food bank? I'm liking the sound of this. OK. Excellent. You best do some checking. Got your note book? Good. Here's your list.

1. How long has she been working as a nurse?
2. What pay scale will she be on?  
3. Where does she live?
4. Where is her nearest food bank?
5. Who runs it?
6. What are their rules for referrals?

Oh yeah, nearly forgot! The usual, right. All her social media. Facebook. Twitter. All of it, right? We don't want an accidental nutter on our hands. Two hours enough? 

Sure boss.

Time passes.

Knock, knock...

Yeah..

Hi boss. The foodbank nurse....

Sure. In you come. Grab a pew.

I'll go through the notes if that's OK with you?

Fire away.

OK. It seems she actually IS an NHS nurse, though she does quite a few shifts for an agency. BUPA.

The starting salary for a nurse in Scotland is £22,000. She's no spring chicken. If she's been at it for eight years or so I'm told she'll be pulling in over £30K. Then there's all the BUPA shifts on top.

So minimum wage times three, right?

Right.

Go on.

She's actually living in Stockbridge.

Christ. Stockbridge! As in average house prices of half a million right?

Right.

Go on.

I've been onto the local food bank. Obviously they can't breach client confidentiality but they are pretty adamant they wouldn't be doling out emergency food to anyone over £30K a year.

I bet they are. Social media?

I think we've dodged bullet sir.

Go on.

Let's just say it's an eye opener. Convertible car. Lots of pictures of her living it large in fancy restaurants. She spent New Year in a five star hotel in New York.

For fuck's sake. What does the bloody woman take us for? A bunch of complete twats? Just tell her to fuck off. Well. You know. Politely. 

Will do boss. Pity really. It would have been a good story. If it had been true......

Oh yeah. Story of my fucking life. If we could cover the made up stories we would be box office every night. C'est la Vie. Keep at it.

How nice it would be if the BBC was still the kind of place where facts were checked before being thrown out into the world. 

Sadly a rather different set of facts drive the BBC's agenda when it comes to domestic news coverage.

1. The Tories look nailed on to be in power for at least the next ten years.
2. When it comes to all of that lovely billion quid's worth of licence fee money, the Tories very much have their grubby mits on the purse strings.
3. The Tories are in the pockets of a whole bunch of right wing media barons who hate the licence fee and resent the BBC and yearn for the day when Auntie is forced to become 'pay for view'.
4. The best way to hang onto their swag is to attack whoever the Government deem to be the bad guys. Like the SNP. Like Corben.

So it was the prospect of putting the First Minister into the firing line of the Walter Mitty nurse was just too good to ignore.

You absolute fucking beauty! So what's she like? Will she bottle it or will she stick the knife in?

Oh she'll stick it in all right. Wait till you see her. You'd cast her as the nurse in Misery. What a face on her. You could cut bread with it.

Fucking love it. Love it, love it, love it. We'll have that jumped up little bitch hopping like she's on hot coals. It's done. Line her up. Nice one. Won't go unnoticed this.... yeah?..... 

Thanks Boss.

Sheila. Dial up London will you? get me Freddy on the line.....

Freddy!!!! .......Yeah, good...... Fucking excellent actually.... get a load of this... we've got this nurse lined up for tomorrow night.... a right hard nosed bitch... and .......

Brownie points all round. Smug glasses of port in oak panelled rooms where it is still OK to say 'Wog'. Pats on backs and invites to a decent spot of shooting in August. Expenses accounts waved through and pensions to die for and maybe, just maybe... well.... maybe even a 'K'......

And of course I feel pissed off on so many different levels.

I'm pissed off for being put in a position where I have to feel grateful to the Scottish Sun for exposing the dreadful woman. And I really hate feeling any kind of gratitude to the Sun.

As a YES man I am constantly pissed off at the endless, wall to wall Unionist state sponsored, tax payer funded propaganda.

But I am most pissed off as a food bank manager. Every year I accept invitations to talk to at least twenty community groups - church congregations, Rotary Clubs, Women's Institutes. And every time I have to explain how we don't get ripped off by armies of scrounging chancers trying it on for a bag of free grub.

I run through our referral rules. We do emergency food. As in last resort food. We often see people who are receiving their benefits in full who are finding life tough. Obviously they are. Living on £60 a week isn't anyone's idea of a picnic. Do we give them a food parcel? No we don't. Is this because we are hard nosed people who tell our clients to learn how to bake bread and soak broth mix and generally buck up their ideas?

No.

We say 'no' because we have no choice. Were we to give emergency food to everyone out there who is trying to survive on State benefits we wouldn't be handing out 5000 emergency food parcels a year: we would be handing out 50,000 emergency food parcels a year. And we couldn't manage that. No chance.

So we need to draw a line. Which means we have to tell people trying to get by on £3000 a year we cannot help them. So what do you think we would do if the likes of Claire Austin came in asking for our help because she was struggling to get by on thirty grand a year?

Aye. Well. No prizes for guessing.

This is why food banks like First Base are the collateral damage of this tawdry tale. We are completely reliant on the £45,000 worth of food our local community donates to us every year. Without this generosity we would have to turn people away. And these would not be people earning thirty grand a year. These would be people with not a single penny to their names. 

By allowing Austin to peddle her lies on prime time, the BBC has helped to sow a few seeds of doubt. What's going on with these food banks? What do they think they are playing at doling out free grub to people earning £30K a year? I don't earn £30K. I don't earn £20K!

And the next time the viewer passes our collection bin in the supermarket they stop and think for a moment. Then with a small shake of the head they put a box of cereal back in the trolley.

Austin's nasty lies might well cost us thousands of pounds in food donations. Because as the BBC know only too well, people don't look deeply into stories. They merely absorb the bullet points. Food banks give food to people on £30K a year. Which isn't right. So I'm not giving any more. Why should I? I don't earn that kind of money?

So thanks for that. I can't see you losing any sleep about it. Instead you can dream of that lovely final salary pension....

And you never know......

Maybe just maybe.......

A 'K'...........   

IT'S TIME FOR 'YES' TO STOP BEING SO BLOODY MEEK AND GET OURSELVES RIGHT INTO SOME WESTMINSTER FACES.

I am quite sure I am far from being alone in feeling like smashing something up every time I am subjected to a dose of election coverage. It has already gone a long, long way beyond pathetic. The Unionists drone on about how rubbish Scottish education is and how the polls say nobody wants Indyref 2. Our lot go all meek and mild and polite and say the schools are really not all that bad and let's not forget how wicked the 'rape clause' is.

Oh Christ. The bloody 'rape clause'. I am sick to the back teeth of hearing about the 'rape clause'. Oh, of course it is horrendous. Duh. But to go on and on and on about it is playground politics of the worst kind. How many people in Scotland will it affect? I guess it will a couple of hundred at most. Is this really the sum total of what we have in our armoury? If it is, then God help us. 

When  did we get so petty? How did we drift away from arguing out the huge issues of September 2014 to hoping for nothing better than scoring a few cheap points of Ruth Davidson?

I am waiting for someone to point out the fact that the 'rape clause' isn't the real problem: the idea of dissuading people from having more than two kids is the problem. Fair enough, it might make some kind of bleak Stalinist sense in the polluted, over crowded south east corner of the UK. Up here in Scotland it makes no sense at all. We have one of the most rapidly ageing populations in the western world. Added to this, we have a three hundred year old EMIGRATION problem. In a nutshell, Scotland needs every young person it can get. Even if every young family came up with five kids each we would still be a long way short of having the new young blood we need.

So what is the real problem? Simple. What is right for London and the South East is almost invariably wrong for Scotland. The answer? Well the answer is straight forward enough. We need to get rid of London rule.

The Unionists really must be laughing their socks off at our meekness. Do they lose sleep when we use up every moment we get in front of the cameras to drone on about the rape clause? I don't think so.

We need to find a way to get under their skin. To make them lose sleep. To make them angry enough to throw glasses across the room and kick the dog. We need to be a stone in their shoe. 

So what should we be talking about right now as the days drain away to Saint Theresa's coronation in June?

Nukes.

Nukes, nukes and nukes again.

The Trident deterrent is the biggest Achilles heel we could ever ask for. Now we should make like Graham Souness and start kicking at their weak point until the tendons pop.

So why is Trident a better thing to bang on about than the rape clause? Let's weigh the impact of the two issues. One makes life cruelly uncomfortable for a couple of hundred damaged women whilst the other has the capacity to pretty much end human life as we know it. 

Kind of obvious, right? But what is new? Can we find a new angle or will we merely be banging out thirty year old arguments? Well here's the good news, we have a whole bunch of new ammunition which is all but guaranteed to have any Tory defense spokesman wriggling on the hook like an over privileged worm.

Number one.

Let's go up to the minute topical. Windows XP. Trident runs on Windows XP, as in the very same open door operating system we have just seen hacked to pieces. To be fair, we are not alone in this. Most of the US military also runs on Windows XP. Right now they are running as fast as they can to do an upgrade. In the meantime they have cut a deal with Microsoft whereby the Pentagon has coughed up $31 million to make sure they get the system upgrades they need to be safe. 

So what about us? Surely we will be fine. After all, for the last seven years we have been in the hands of the strong and stable brigade.

Ah. Well. Actually......

You've got it. No deal with Microsoft. No system upgrades. These clowns are spending £100 billion on the nukes whilst penny pinching a lousy few million to keep the operating system secure. 

There's incompetence and there's complete utter mind boggling incompetence......... 

Over the last few months we have learned quite a lot about how good the Russians are at hacking stuff. We should probably take a moment here. Who are we aiming our treasured nukes at? Mainly Russia. Are they happy about this? No, they're really pissed off about it. Would they rather not have to worry about us threatening to burn millions of their citizens to death? I think they would actually be quite keen not to have that worry. Conclusion? I think it is fair to assume they will already have hacked through our Windows XP system and they will now be in a position to shut the whole thing down long before Saint Theresa gets the chance to murder a million Muscovites in the name of strength and stability.

Are they going to advertise this? Of course not. Instead whey will sit back and watch us waste £100 billion on a heap of junk. Wouldn't you?

Next up. 

The maintenance contract. 

This is a real beauty. We own the submarines, but the actual missile system.... well that's a whole different ball game. Technically we buy the nukes off the Americans for top dollar. But there are plenty of strings attached to the deal. A Trident missile needs a full service every 18 months or it won't work. Guess what? We are not allowed to do the servicing. The contract we have signed means only the Americans can do the servicing. And here is the real jaw dropper. The right to withdraw all servicing and thereby render the nukes completely useless falls squarely in the realms of a Presidential decree.

As in Donald Trump. It is entirely his call. If we piss off the Donald, he is in a position to throw one of his trademark tantrums and make our nuclear deterrent little more than a bunch of scrap metal.

Next.

The right honourable Michael Fallon, Her Majesty's Secretary of State for Defence. 

A few days ago Mr Fallon casually ditched decades of cast in stone policy with a single off the cuff statement. It has always been British policy only to use nuclear weapons in retaliation. Never, ever would we be the first to start the madness.

Well. Not any more. We have now joined the first strike club along with North Korea. You really would have though such a monumental change of policy might have required a vote in Parliament. It seems not. Saint Theresa doesn't really do Parliament.

Last and probably least is the inconvenient fact that lots of countries are well on the road to developing mini underwater drones. In a few years time there will be thousands and thousands of these things dodging about under the oceans. So what? So it will mean there will be no possibility of a Trident submarine staying hidden. And if a Trident sub isn't hidden, it isn't worth a light. All kinds of Generals and Admirals have pointed this out to the strong and stable brigade and begged then to stop wasting the defense budget on the ultimate vanity project. They would rather we had a few more soldiers and an aircraft carrier with some planes on it.

Not surprisingly these pleas have fallen on deaf ears.

These are new and compelling reasons why we shouldn't have the abomination of Trident on Scottish soil. So what might we do with these compelling reasons?

Well there isn't much point in raising our concerns politely because the Unionist media will just ignore us.

As per usual.

Instead we need to raise the ante. First up we turn their guns on them and point out how the polls show a clear majority of Scots don't want nuclear weapons in our country.

We accept as things stand we are not allowed to unilaterally vote for their removal in the Holyrood Parliament. Defense is reserved to Whitehall forever and ever, amen.

So what do we do? Well I chucked this idea out a few weeks ago and it only gets more tempting. We could pass a law in Holyrood banning any nuclear weapons from travelling on any Scottish road. Our roads are not devolved. Our roads are all ours. Then we instruct our police force who are also not devolved to set up a permanent road block outside the gates of Faslane to make sure no nukes get in or out.

Oh that would get their attention. I don't think we would have to worry about this particular policy winning a few column inches in the Daily Mail.

Next the Scottish Government could send a nice clear information leaflet to every household in Scotland explaining why our roads will no longer be available for the transportation of weapons of mass destruction. We lay out each and every piece of evidence of gross Westminster incompetence item by item. We quote every senior admiral and general who has spelled out the glaring truth of what an complete and utter waste of time and money Trident really is.

Then it would be time to look London in the eye and ask what they are about to do about it? 

Invade?

Oh really? Again?

Trident is basically a complete fiasco. It is greatest waste of public money in our long history. It won't stand any degree of scrutiny. It wouldn't take so very long for the whole thing to become a monumental embarrassment.

Just take a moment and imagine how good it would feel to watch them flounder about.

It would be better than good. Certainly better than droning on and on and on about the bloody rape clause.