Search topics on this blog

Showing posts with label North of England politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North of England politics. Show all posts

Sunday 7 November 2010

The words of a great English historian on a great Scot

George Macaulay Trevelyan was the great nephew of Macaulay and the last historian writing in the Whig traditions. The Whigs were the forerunners of the Liberal Party, but God knows what they would make of the present LibDems and apparatchiks like Danny Alexander.

Here is an extract from his History of England (1937) -

A guerilla chief of genius, a tall man of iron strength, who suddenly appears on the page of history, as if from nowhere, defeated at Stirling Bridge an English Army under its blundering feudal chief, the Earl of Warenne, of quo Warranto (link) fame. Thence William Wallace broke ravaging into Northumberland and Cumberland.

This unknown knight, with little but his great name to identify him in history, had lit a fire which nothing since has ever put out. Here, in Scotland, contemporaneously with very similar doings in Switzerland, a new ideal and tradition of wonderful potency was brought into the world; it had no name then, but now we should call it democratic patriotism. It was not the outcome of theory. The unconscious qualities of a people had given it reality in a sudden fit of rage.

Where is Scotland’s rage against what the Labour Party did to it over 13 wasted, blighted years and the ConLib coalition is doing to it now?

Where is our democratic patriotism now?

It cannot be summoned for the tattered, bloodstained flag of a vanished empire, Great Britain, great no longer…

It can be summoned for the spring of 2011 – a momentous year for the nation of Scotland.

Vote for your ain folk – vote for the Scottish National Party, not for The Three UK Stooges – Gray, Goldie or Scott.

Sunday 3 October 2010

Baroness Warsi in trouble over electoral fraud

I like political interviews that turn into a train wreck, such as the Eric Joyce/Gordon Brewer one of some time ago – a classic of its kind, but probably unique. (Falkirk voters re-elected him at the general election: perhaps they don’t watch politics on television or read the newspapers. The bold Eric is now a candidate for the Shadow Cabinet.)

Today, it was Baroness Warsi’s turn, with Jon Sopel, not my favourite interviewer, but here commendably tenacious.

The Baroness was plucked from obscurity by David Cameron because she was a North of England working class women of Asian origin with right-wing views and a Tory supporter, God’s gift to a Tory Party desperate to play down its party-0f-the-rich-and-privileged, racist, jingoistic, militaristic image.

The Baroness, who is now probably modestly well-off and privileged, inexplicably decided to give an interview to Mehdi Hasan of the New Statesman on electoral fraud in northern, predominantly Asian constituencies.

 This is not putting your head into the lion’s mouth, it is going in arse first.

Warsi and Mehdi Hasan New Statesman

Her normal interview style of flattening her critics with a non-stop torrent of words failed her spectacularly here, because Jon Sopel is notably economical in his style, and the sweating Baroness descended into frantic gabbling.

Judge for yourself.