Skip to main content

More bullying bluster from Alex Salmond

The Economist is a serious magazine, but it is also known for a sense of humour.


The latest edition carries a pretty well balanced article on the costs of a separate Scotland.


There are obvious pros and cons about the idea of independence. I myself, on balance, am against a totally separate Scottish state, but I will admit that there are some positive aspects. It is just that on balance I don't think the potential benefits of independence stack up against the potential costs. 


Many of my SNP friends obviously think differently- and we have many good natured debates about it.


Alex Salmond, on the other hand, thinks that any one who does not support his version of the Scottish separatist agenda is solely motivated by the basest motives and is probably either a traitor (if Scottish) or an Imperialist (if from elsewhere in the UK).


His typically bombastic attack on the Economist "they will rue the day they thought they would have a joke at Scotland's  expense"  is a typically humourless piece of victimhood.


The fact is that while many Nats are prepared to have a real debate on the pros and cons of independence, Salmond himself is not. His view is that since all would be rosy in the "free world", we do not even need to consider what the downsides might be.


It is totally dishonest- any fool can see that a fair debate needs to recognize the pros and cons- and The Economist article does precisely that- and even under some cases it recognizes that independence is not only justified but necessary. Yet it is also a serious examination about what the costs are- and that is what Alex Salmond cannot stand.


He is not being straight with the Scottish people- and as a result loses his rag when someone challenges his cloud cuckoo land political and economic assumptions.


Humourless and arrogant- Salmond has already poisoned the Scottish national debate- but sooner or later the Scottish people will be asked to judge on these issues- and they will remember that Salmond put up a barrage of bullying bombast when he should have engaged with his critics.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...