The Snipers Take Aim

Yoo-hoo!  I’m still here!  It’s been many a Chilcot (official definition: “vast expanse of time frittered away in pointless buggering about”) since I last posted.  During this hiatus I’ve had a wee spat with Twitter, which appears to have condemned my blog as “unsafe” on the laughable grounds that it will projectile-vomit malware over your iThingy’s hard drive, rather than the sensible grounds that it’s a farrago of ill-researched ranting.

In this, I’m in the sort of mixed company that would induce salivating ecstasy in any Channel 4 dinner-party-from-hell reality TV producer.  Frances Coppola, epoch-making film director reduced to scraping a living as a financial journalist, was similarly afflicted.  So were Moridura, independentista of adamantine resolve, whose blogs are spoken of in trembling whispers by the favoured few, and his Unionist counterpart Kevin Hague, chief analyst of the “Aren’t Scotland’s Finances Crap?” School, who nevertheless supports “pooling and sharing” with the deranged clots whose mismanagement made them that way. 

Last and definitely least, there was a failed Nazi-hunting misanthrope by the name of Ian Smart, whose long-awaited plummet down the Labour laundry chute you may have missed amidst the palaver about Jim Murphy’s farewell speaking tour and the SNP’s expulsion of Brian Smith for bad-mouthing Charles Kennedy.

Shed no tears for Ian, who’ll no doubt be pontificating on Scotland 2015 as a “non-aligned” pundit just as soon as BBC management can bully their staff into inviting him.  In the meantime, the leadership of the “SNP are Nazis” Zoomer Society passes seamlessly to Dr David Starkey, whose current medication has prompted him to issue a proclamation equating the public baring of knees with a tendency to invade the Sudetenland.

You should never feed a troll, although if I had some dog food and laxatives handy I might be prepared to rustle up a sandwich for Dr Starkey.  If he was trying to stir up discussion he certainly succeeded, the main topic being “Why is this narcissistic, attention-seeking pustule allowed to slather his rancid views all over our mainstream media, instead of being locked in a deserted house with George Galloway and left there until the screaming finally stops?” 

If the SNP really were Nazis, or anything remotely like it, the Daily Mail would probably be amongst their most ardent supporters. Instead, the rag that goose-stepped its way through the 1930s never misses an opportunity to put the boot into Team 56, except during short breaks to renew the snake-venom coating on its steel toecaps.  

Cybernats?  They’re everywhere, burbles the Mail, mysteriously failing to notice their precise counterpart in its own online comments.  Lucy Frazer?  She made it “clear”, it lectures us humourless Jocks, that her comments on Cromwell enslaving Scots were “light-hearted”. Aye right, and no doubt Bernard Manning just appeared to be a grotesque, filthy racist, and was actually dancing on the edge of satire in a pink tutu.

The SNP contingent have given up clapping, and haven’t yet developed a distinctively Scottish form of “hear hear” to piss off Westminster’s animal noises brigade, so the Mail’s had to go back to hammering Mhairi Black for having the temerity to be 20 years old. The hack responsible, Euan McLelland on the “fill the space with any old crap” desk, didn’t even have to hurt his brain by thinking up words of his own; he just nicked bits from her interview on Radio Scotland’s Off The Ball, where she “admitted” to spending some of her salary on food and drink, sometimes buying rounds for her friends, the conniving minx, and often visiting (haud me back, I’m ragin’) McDonalds.

It was a truly ground-breaking article, in that its triviality, stupidity and utter irrelevance was too much even for some Mail Online below-the-line commenters, who for the first time in their lives found themselves uncontrollably typing things such as “So what?” and “None of your business, leave her alone”.  They must have found it a terrifying experience, like being possessed by the spirit of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and the traumatic feeling of cleanliness will no doubt haunt them to their grave.  Meanwhile, the rest of us await Mhairi’s maiden speech, in the firm expectation that it will totally blow the tits off every patronising, condescending jackanapes who’s spent the last month sneering at her, the party that selected her and the citizens that elected her.

This constant sniping from the Mail and others has, ooh, not deliberately surely, helped to obscure the posturing, game-playing and downright piss-taking that’s been going on in the Commons, as our imperial masters have knocked the stuffing out of all attempts to make the Scotland Bill worthwhile.  It always looked like a photocopy of an artist’s impression of a drunk man’s sketch of the infamous Vow, and it feels as if we’re even getting a splurge of Tipp-Ex on top of that.

Full Fiscal Autonomy?  Never thought it had a snowball’s chance, but I could have done without human belisha beacon Sir Edward Leigh’s irony-laden harrumphing, not to mention last night’s final insult, when an amendment to make it impossible to abolish the Scottish Parliament without its own consent and that of the people was squashed, in a quintessential “Up Yours, Scotland” moment.

Ach, there’s more to write about this, but the blog’s now in “shorter and more frequent” mode - stop laughing at the back! – and, anyway, if I went into detail now, still a tad raw, my industrial language would probably shock your delicate sensibilities.  Which, whatever the geeks at Twitter Support may think about it, really would make the blog “unsafe”.

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