It’s good to talk, as they say, and I’m enjoying the engagement that we’re getting from the Scottish diaspora as well as from various knights and peers of the realm. As regular readers will know we have been engaging with COSCA over the course of a couple of posts here and here. They have written a nice reply which you can see here.
It is clear from their repeated posts that they have no idea of what it means to be Scottish today. They believe that we are all aligned with our respective clans, yet the betrayal of the people by the clan chiefs ensured that the clan system was dismantled for ever. We that are left in Scotland, the “also rans” as Alistair says in his comment, couldn’t care less about our clans. Yes we know which ones we “belong” to but otherwise we really couldn’t care less. For instance I am clan Gunn, an internet search can provide the chief’s name but I really don’t care who it is. I owe him no allegiance.
Malcolm MacGregor, who likes to inform us that he has knelt before the queen, hits the nail on the head in his comment: “400 attending a clan convention,” the current population of Scotland is approximately 5.29 million so that’s a whole 0.0075% of the population. That’s how much we care about our clans. But our apathy has forced the current chiefs to look elsewhere for support, that’s why they head for the diaspora. The next thing you know they’ll be trying to solicit donations to preserve their crumbling seats.
I have no problem with the diaspora and their heritage, it is a shared heritage after all. But to be fawning over some person because they are the clan chief sickens me in the same way that someone using some ancient feudal title, such as baron, sickens me. For it is the monarchy, and by extension the peerage, which is the root of all corruption in this country. The good folks of USA managed to throw off the yoke of the monarchy in 1783, we are still inflicted by it.
As Alistair points out, Scotland today is “a pale shadow of what it was,” but that is deliberate. It has been the policy of the UK government to bleed Scotland and redistribute the money to England for centuries. It has also been their policy to try to destroy the Scottish culture. For instance the entirety of Scottish history which was taught to me at school was Culloden. Everything else was English history. That is what we wanted to change, what we hoped that we would change, during the referendum.
If you receive your world view from our media then it is inevitably biased against us, that is why we started this blog. You will find that almost all media outlets are against Scottish independence. They are almost all against the SNP, yet the majority of the Scottish people still voted for them and they will probably be the largest Scottish party at Westminster after the May general election. Why do you suppose that is?
It is because we want a fairer society for ourselves and our children. A society that is free of barons and knights, kings and queens. A society which would rather spend £100 billion on improving the lives of the people than weapons of mass destruction. We may have lost the battle, it was like our Dunkirk. We are regrouping and we shall venture once more into the fray. In the famous words of Churchill, “we shall never surrender.”
As for giving the bard bad press, how do you work that out? He provides me with some of my best inspiration:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ev’n devotion!
Scottish Republican Socialist Movement