DISGRACE

There can be few Munguin readers, I imagine, who haven't by now heard of the furore over Wings of Scotland's suggestion on Twitter that Siobhan McFadyen was a disgrace. 

Stuart was reacting to her "pack of lies" article on the possibility of a second Scottish referendum. And she in return went ballistic. 

As you can see, however, from the above Tweet, McFadyen seems to think it's OK for her to use the term "disgrace" in the same way.

You can read all about it here, here,  here, and here, on Wings (or just look at the last few Wings' posts now that Blogger has got round to fixing the side bars).

I've read the Express articles and they were, without doubt, a disgrace. They bore not even passing resemblance to the truth, and like much of the Express coverage in the run up to the European election, they could easily have been taken, particularly by the average avid Express reader, as an incitement to violence. 

(It's not any surprise that there has been a massive rise in violence towards disabled people, and foreigners of any kind, in the recent past since papers like the Express [the Daily Mail and the Sun in particular, and their Sunday issues] have run campaigns of hatred against scrounging hordes of sick, disabled and foreign people, here apparently to deprive good hard working British family folk up and down the country, of what is rightly theirs!) 

Actually, far from abuse, and this may have annoyed McFadyen more than anything else, many independentistas by way of answer posted photographs of peaceful, happy rallies, or pictures of Nicola with bairns, with captions ridiculing McFadyen's piece.

She's become a laughing stock. Then again she works for the Express! It goes with the job.

Of course, when a complaint is made against someone, I think that Twitter is quite within its rights to suspend that person's account while it investigates.

However, it seems that Twitter isn't too good at communications. It seems near to impossible to get in touch with them. They investigate in their own good time without any interference from anyone. These of course, are the benefits of being big and powerful.  I'm pretty sure that when Twitter does investigate it will reinstate Wings' account.

In fairness there have been calls from some other unionist journalists to do so. Maybe McFadyen is a disgrace even to them.

Stuart isn't well known for political correctness. He doesn't suffer fools gladly and he calls a spade a spade. I make no bones, sometime it makes me cringe.

But he is one of the real and powerful driving forces of the independence movement. In the years he has been publishing, for all the hard stuff he's handed out to people, no one has ever taken action against him.  Now one has ever sued, including lawyers who could do so at no real expense.

He backs his stuff with hard facts and links to where he got them and he appears to have an encyclopaedic memory. Perhaps that's why no one sues him.

How the unionists must hate him.

He is quite simply, irreplaceable.

INSULTS AND THREATS MORE LIKELY TO BE FROM UNIONISTS

Today Stuart Campbell has been defamed in the Scotsman.

Stuart, as we all know, is perfectly capable of taking care of himself. He has, as you will see from the link, demanded an apology and a retraction, and I have no doubt he will go to the Press Complaints Commission should one not be forthcoming. You don't mess with the Rev!

I actually wonder at the stupidity of the editor at the Scotsman. Bending the facts slightly is one thing. Lying through your teeth, another. Five minutes of research would have saved him making a fool of himself. 

But more widely the bias of the press is becoming worrying and vilification of "cybernats" but not of "britnats" is damaging the debate.

Let's be fair. Most people probably (and I'm no exception) say things in blogs or on Twitter, momentarily forgetting that they are public domains. Anyone can see an open blog and, depending on who is following whom, Twitter can have a massive impact. 

But, although from coverage you'd never have guessed it, a poll carried out for the Daily Express in March of this year showed that Pro-Independence supporters are far more likely than Unionists to receive hate mail or suffer insults for their political beliefs. 

Credit to them for publishing the poll (unfavourable as it is to their side), even though the tone of the article makes little of the findings, and is illustrated by a picture of a unionist who has been insulted. However it does include this paragraph: "In a worrying development for the Better Together campaign, 21 per cent of those planning to vote Yes have received abuse or threats compared to just eight per cent of those planning to vote No."

Not being a reader of the Express, I'd not heard of that poll until today, when I read about it on Scot Goes Pop. Can you imagine how many other papers and TV channels would have run with the story if it hadn't shown such an imbalance for their side? The BBC would have been overjoyed and dedicated a whole dumbed down programme to it.

No other mainstream media seem in the least interested in publicising some of the nonsense that emanates for the keyboards and Twitter Accounts of BT/UKOK/NO supporters. Like this little gem (above) for example. 

I read with dismay some of the words written by Jamieson yesterday, and dismissed them as trouble making ramblings. I just hope that he doesn't have a point.

WELL, WE FILLED THE HILL

Munguin and Humza Yousaf, Minister for
 External Affairs and International Development

WOW. JUST WOW!

I don't think any of us expected it to be that amazing. Well, I didn't anyway.  I've never been on a march before. I'm more a 'write about it' kind of person than a 'go on a march' kind of person. 

But I'd wanted to go last year, and couldn't because I'd previously arranged to take an old lady out for a run in the country that day! So I swore I would go this time, come hell or high water.

So in some convivial and comfortable company, Munguin and I set on in the car yesterday. And we hadn't a clue what to expect. Our companions hadn't been before either.

What we found though was better that we had dared hope for.

I don't know about numbers. At one stage the BBC said 8,000. Then they said "more than 8000". A police inspector there on crown control (not that control was needed from what I could see) suggested 30,000*. I'm useless at judging numbers so I don't have a clue how many there were. But there were a lot.

We were among the first to arrive
so Munguin got a badge

The atmosphere was amazing. People just seemed to like one another, maybe because there was a common goal. But all marches are, I suppose, have common golals, and it doesn't seem to me that they are as warm as this one was. People were talking to people they'd never met before, sharing stories, sharing biscuits and snacks. I saw no evidence of any trouble, nor of any drinking, nor indeed much litter (although with all the leaflets that were being handed out, I imagine that the hill will need a bit of a clean today). There were people of all ages. Kids I suppose who didn't have much choice, but teens, through to people who were clearly in their 80s or even 90s. The place was a sea of kilts. 

There were people of various ethnic backgrounds (lovely to see Asian Scots in kilts), and I was blessed by God and by Allah within a few minutes... not bad going for an atheist!

We marched (well OK, dandered) next to a group from Orkney, under their flag, and one of the ladies was telling me that there was a contingent from YES PAPA STOUR!. Among the more surprising banners we noticed one from Free Venice! 

Il y avait partout des affiches avec le mot "OUI", and I had the chance to say a brief "Bonjour" to Christian Allard, our first French-born MSP. 

Munguin holds top level talks with
Stewart Hosie and Shona Robison
respectively SNP Finance Spokesman
 and Minister of Sport 

It took a long time to get  everyone to Calton Hill. We sat three quarters of the way up where we could see the screens and hear the contributions and people kept on coming and coming and coming. The sound system was excellent and the speeches were inspiring, funny and kinda homely. Margo was brilliant. Elaine C Smith was awesome. The music was bang on. Just enough, not too much.

I'd never heard Dennis Canavan speak before, but he was passionate and I found what he said chimed with the way I felt. A kind of modernised Old Labour.  

If there was a downside for me, it was that despite the Munguin T-shirts and Munguin looking around all the time, we didn't meet any of you lot. And that was a disappointment!

Brilliant banner on the North Bridge,
right outside RBS

As the photos show, Munguin himself, was rather busily occupied having top level meetings with government ministers from Holyrood, opposition spokesmen from Westminster and the Rev Stuart Campbell, who gave him a badge, of which he is more than a little proud, but I'd really hoped to have a blether. (Talking of that word, did anything ever come of "Blether Together"?) 

Thanks to Shona, Stewart and Humza for good naturedly humouring our proprietor. He's having the photographs framed expensively for the boardroom!

So sorry I missed you guys, but there's always next year.

I don't know where they will hold it though. Anyone up for the top of Arthur's Seat?

* Police have now confirmed that the number was around 30,000.

And the best response from the No Campaign, in the form of the Scotsman,  was to publish article on an 8 month old report, saying that if we vote for independence, the rest of the UK will try to redraw maritime borders and it could take up to ten years to sort it out. It seems that they want our oil. It suggests to me that that has been central to London's argument all along.