Fans of Nicola Sturgeon will not be drawn to read Joanna Cherry’s new memoir. Which is a pity, for Keeping the Dream Alive reads like a much-needed antidote – or at least balance – to Sturgeon’s own autobiography, published last year, a book that painted her as a much-abused feminist saint whose only concern was for the welfare of others and, above all, for the project of Scottish independence.
Cherry is having none of that. Page after page of delicious details concerning the internal machinations at the highest levels of the Scottish National Party (SNP), in the decade that followed the independence referendum, are a godsend to Scottish-politics addicts.
It’s the ugly kids doing the entertainment bitchfest. Always has been, always will be:
Time and again, Cherry complains of being ignored or humiliated by seemingly trivial and spiteful acts by some of her Westminster colleagues. For example, she claims that the tradition of “prayer cards”, where members can use small green cards to reserve a specific seat in the chamber if they’re not present for prayers at the start of the session, was exploited by the party leadership, which would regularly ensure that every place on the front bench was reserved for other front-bench colleagues, forcing Cherry to ask questions and make statements and speeches from the more junior position of the back benches.
This is it, there is no other. This is how ag subsidies are decided, this is how the price of ‘leccie is decided. It’s all whinges over who gets two slices of glace cherry on their cake instead of only one.
It’s a wholly awful method of running a place. As we can observe…..
We’re seeing it now in real time. Keith got his mate a nice job and ignored all the security advice.
Mate is sacked for being an Epstein gimp and the net has closed around Spanner.
My chief concern is how much damage Lammy will do to the bus when he is thrown under it.
I had been convinced that nothing prior to 2029 could shift the shameless limpet from the position he craves (as long as the superinjunction remains in place).
However the prospect of an utter wipeout in next months locals might yet encourage 20% of MPs to commence action, particularly as in many cases their natural loyalty is now nearer the multicultural greens. What could be more natural than defenestrating an unpopular and ineffective white male leader?
That’s the problem with leading what is effectively a coalition of minorities and pressure groups, a marriage of convenience. Their loyalty is nearly as fickle as his own.
(as long as the superinjunction remains in place).
What super-injunction? Much though I wish there was one, I can find no evidence to support the claim…
In which case the concerted lack of curiosity by our media about a strange sequence of attacks on the property of our national leader is so absolute as to render superinjunctions unnecessary.
That is the magic of superinjunctions.
In recent years, super injunctions have become rare, with courts preferring anonymised injunctions (which hide the names but not the fact that an order was made). Moreover, if a Starmer super injunction exists, is it not likely that an opposition MP would have mentioned it under Parliamentary Privilege by now?
Such as those brave Tories, like Jenrick and Braverman who were ordered not to reveal the importation of 130,000 Afghans, and who complied with that order?
With Starmer’s alleged superinjunction, an opposition MP only has to ask the PM whether it exists and await his answer…the media would then start digging.
Though they could have spoken out under Parliamentary privilege, Jenrick and Braverman would have been prosecuted if they had mentioned the matter outside of Parliament which the media would have persistently tried to get them to do.
“A super injunction is a … UK court order that prohibits both the publication of sensitive information and the reporting of the fact that the injunction exists.”
OK, so nobody knows whether one exists. So I can chatter about a hypothetical one without breaking any law since I obviously can’t know the truth about its purported existence.
Is that right?
And do these things, existent or non-existent, apply also to Scotland? And if so that should surely be unconstitutional under the Act of Union. What on earth is going on? Which totalitarian PM introduced these bloody things?
Oh bloody ho. “Superinjunctions did not have a specific, formal “insertion” date into English law via legislation, but rather emerged through case law developments in the late 2000s … They are not a statutory creation, but a form of “judge-made” law that expanded upon existing privacy laws following the Human Rights Act 1998.”
1998! So fuckers like Blair and Starmer were behind it! Perhaps Blair’s moll too, since she was another “human rights” creature. Wot did Dick the Butcher say?
I will miss Starmer when he’s gone. Best recruiting sargeant for Reform UK there has ever been, with the added bonus that he’s destroyed Labour and sending them to the same graveyard as the Tories in a little under 2 years in power.
Don’t imagine whichever pygmy Labour picks as PM next will be any better. Might be a little easier on the ear though. Starmer’s adenoidal tones are really getting on my nerves.
No background, no bottom, absolutely no informing principle but the will to survive, just a plump little bag of squirming appetites
I can’t abide the bloke’s utterly bogus “rectitude”. At least with the fishwife, the gorilla and the pompous bender WYSIWYG, and the fishwife has the undoubted advantage of not being a lawyer.
For me it was when Spanner took down Maggie’s picture in his study. You could see then that he knew he wasn’t up to the job. I’m surprised it’s taken this long for all his missteps to finally become enough to boot him to launch velocity from the job. The book now is on whether he goes before or after the local elections.
Starmer is 63. Thatcher was Literally Hitler to his generation of student lefties and he hasn’t grown out of it. You can add inchoate rage to his unconscious feelings of inadequacy. I bet he’d been fantasising for years about removing that portrait.
Thatcher Derangement Syndrome from the bloody grave. How long has St. Maggie been dead now? 13 bloody years last week is how long.
They won’t forget her until the last Millennial.
Tbf, there is nothing I wouldn’t see done to Attlee and Blair.
Dig up Attlee’s corpse, if need be.
Once, pound for pound, the greatest country the world has ever seen. Engineers, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, sensible bureaucrats (we do need a few), exceptional soldiers… the Jocks produced them off a conveyor belt. They still produce decent soldiers, as a stroll round the pubs of Hereford will confirm, but that’s about it.
I for one hope they one day get their fucking independence.
I don’t think I would be interested in reading about the internal bitching of a parish council, either.
Scotland’s scientific achievements are remarkable for such a small country; but James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell, John Logie Baird, and Alexander Fleming are not in the same league as Newton and Darwin.
Pfft. Engineers > Pointy headed scientists every day of the week.
Engineers deal in tangibles, such as lovely big steam engines with loud whistles.
Scientists deal in speculation, such as Darwin imagining he was descended from furiously masturbating macaques.
Well, he knew his own family best, I reckon. Things get weird in darkest Shropshire.
Newton never had a girlfriend, so how smart was he, really?
The engineer’s peer review is reality. Bracing, that.
So engineers…Scotland produced James Watt and Thomas Telford, but England produced Wren (the triple-skinned dome of St Paul’s is a masterpiece of engineering), Brunel and the two Stephensons. Where Scotland scores highly is on inventors/inventions. Scotland’s early move toward universal primary education (1695) is frequently credited with fostering its unusually high output of engineers and inventors; but Scotland was so backward that many of these engineers and inventors moved to England after the Act of Union.
Scotland was never backward, it was poor. There’s a difference. It was poor because it has some of the worst agricultural land/climate in Europe. Loads of lovely scenery, but you can’t eat that. No wonder they took to the industrial revolution as an Irishman does the drink. It’s a much easier life than cattle rustling and subsistence farming.
In the period 1600-1750, Scotland was backward in two major ways. 1. Agriculture: Farming methods in Scotland had changed little since the Middle Ages, relying on the communal “runrig” system. England, by contrast, had already begun its Agricultural Revolution in the 17th century with enclosed farms and more advanced machinery. 2. The territorial feudalism of the clan system prevented development, and inter-clan fighting was common with loyalty to the chief often exceeding allegiance to the King.
Perhaps Newton was “refracted”.
“Newton never had a girlfriend, so how smart was he, really?” Smarter than most then.
But Maxwell was. Why omit him?
And Lord Kelvin. He was an Ulster Scot
A great man, Kelvin was more a synthesiser than an innovator. And his scepticism about the existence of atoms, radioactivity, and Darwinian evolution has diminished his reputation.
I’m not sure why it should. Scepticism in the absence of proof was the most reasonable position, so long as he changed his mind when proof appeared, if it did in time. JMK wasn’t wrong about that.
Kelvin had a dogmatic personality. If his scientific preconceptions were challenged, his first reaction was to denounce the challenge – later retreating and apologising when he had read the paper. He denounced Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, suggesting it be fraudulent before he had read the paper. And his attitude to evolution had more to do with his daily attendance at Chapel than science.
Fair do’s.
And his attitude to evolution had more to do with his daily attendance at Chapel than science.
And rightly so. It was God who created Science, not t’other way.
And his scepticism about the existence of atoms, radioactivity, and Darwinian evolution has diminished his reputation
But it shouldn’t. Kelvin was a towering genius who was working with the best knowledge they had at the time. You can read his paper on the age of the Sun. Gloriously wrong, but perfectly lucid and meticulously calculated.
Being wrong is part of the scientific process. Newton was also wrong about gravity (ht Einstein) but that doesn’t detract from his achievements.
Since the theory of evolution can’t be tested, it’s valid to kick the theory about and see if it holds up to thought experiments. That’s one way how we learn.
It kinda can be, though. Thoroughbreeding does that. I saw a programme about how Russians had completely tamed foxes, previously thought to be entirely untameable, within about 20 generations.
And there is that famous long-running experiment in accelerated evolution by transporting people across the Atlantic.
Yes, but breeding less bitey foxes or bigger horses is a long, long way away from proving that Sir Keir Starmer is descended from microbiotic slime. Although he probably is.
Of all the vile bigoted, pernicious bile spouted by the online Right, microbiotic-slimism is, perhaps, according to scholars and research*, the closest to actually being Hitler.
Why can’t you just let the prime minister be his authentic self, you murderer-adjacenter?
*graphs available on request. We use the standard units of measurement. The micro-vileigram. The micro-bileigram. And, of course, the gammon barometer, with its phial of rancid salt-pork water. Available in the middle aisle of all good Little Chefs.
So we’ve got to wait only about another 200 years before some of our imports move on from child rape to mere drive-by machine-gunning of civilians?
What’s not to like?
I think it wrong to say, “Newton was also wrong about gravity.” He was right in his low speed world. He died in 1727.
His belief in the simultaneity of time is still shared with most everybody, like 99.99%.
His belief in the simultaneity of time is still shared with most everybody, like 99.99%.
We live inside a dream.
Yes, a genius. But, with his dogmatic personality, he inclined towards fruit-cakery – not only on the age of the Sun, but in his dogmatic dismissal of heavier-than-air flight and in his 1898 prediction that Earth had only 400 years of oxygen supply left.
…the theory of evolution can’t be tested…
Not true. The ToE can be tested by:
1. observing microbial evolution: E. coli has been tracked over 75,000 generations, with the emergence of new traits—such as the ability to eat citrate—that were not present in the original population.And the predictable evolution of bacteria in response to antibiotics is a direct, repeatable test of natural selection occurring.
2 field experiments: eg by moving guppies between pools with different predators and observing the rapid changes in their colour patterns within just 15 generations.
3. predictive power: Based on the timing of when fish evolved into land animals, paleontologists predicted a “transitional” fossil would exist in roughly 375-million-year-old rock in northern Canada. They went to that specific location and discovered Tiktaalik, a creature with both fish scales and limb-like fins.
Which is not to say that the ToE cannot be refined and developed.
‘With his dogmatic personality’
What you say is what you are.
Newton was undoubtedly a genius, but what many people seem to forget was that he was also ‘a man of his time’ – he spent more time studying alchemy than he did maths and physics.
A lovely proof of the fact that the most difficult thing is knowing what is possible, what isn’t. Which leads to, well, if we know that it’s possible then it’s not too difficult to work out how. But all the effort in science goes into, well, is it or not?
And Learn we did… Proving Darwin’s Thought Experiment the correct one versus the Scientific Consensus™ of the GodBotherers of the time.
The problem for Darwin ( and any of the others..) was that the actual mechanism through which genetic inheritance worked wasn’t known.
They could, and did, determine there *were* “traits” that inherited in a specific pattern, but did not know *what* carried that information.
The main argument at the time wasn’t that traits were inherited, that was established, and actively used in breeding.
It was also well established that sometimes new combinations cropped up, which you could, with luck, stabilise into new breeds.
The GodBotherers™ reasoned that this was a *failure* in “copying the Creation”, and that without the Hand of Man, such failures would not stand the test of Time in natureand would disappear again, because only the Perfection of Creation was suited for Nature.
They called this process “Devolution” , and argued that *only* through the Hand of Man, God’s Chosen, could new species/variants be brought into the World.
Darwin, after his Travels, came up with the insight that this need not be the case at all.
He posited that the Hand of Man wasn’t needed *at all*, but that Nature itself set the survival constraints for changes in a species, and that if Nature gradually changed, species would change with it to match their abilities for the best chance of survival.
And that the Hand of Man ( through selective breeding ) merely placed artificial constraints on survival accelerating this adaptation to an environment.
And that is all he wrote in the original Origins of Species…..
Any and all monkey descendancy and that sort of stuff attributed to him were conclusions by others, mostly his detractors to ridicule him…
And yes, Steve… The whole “Descended from Macaques” thing was conceived by his GodBotherer™ Consensus™ detractors… Who would proceed to organise as “Creationists”.
To ridicule him.
Except that by that time there already *was* sufficient physiological and tentative tantalising fossil evidence that made people say…
“Hold on…. If Darwin is right… then that idea of being descended from Ape-like ancestors isn’t all that…. Lemme have a look at that!!.. We might be on to Something Big here…”
So the very thing you rant against is actually one of the worlds most hilarious “Shoot Yourself In the Foot” incidents… By “Your” side of the Argument…
Reinforced by all the *other* observably evidence pointing to the likely correctness of the concept of Nature forcing function, changes in Nature forcing changes in function, and a clear phylogeny of increasing complexity in Observable Nature, this gave increasing proof that Life indeed started small and simple , and got increasingly more complex.
Which included Humans, as part of Nature.
Which definitely Upset the GodBotherers™, because it removed Humans from their Special Place as “Masters of Nature” and “God’s Ultimate Creation”….
Their reaction was….Quite Spuddian… And still is to this day…
But….. To be fair to the Creationists…. Playing devil’s Advocate…
At the time, as mentioned, people had no idea *what* carried hereditary information, and *how* this mechanism worked.
Various hypothesis were posited from the 1890’s throughout the 20th Century, tested ( with the *then* available analisys techniques ) and sort-of proven and debunked.
Until Watson, Crick et.al. proved beyond a doubt that it was DNA that was the *primary* information carrier for genetic information.
A process that actually took decades and *many-much* fundamental research by many people.
( Note that I used “primary”, because as with all things Biology, things are never that clear-cut… And nowadays we know of several other minor mechanisms that *are* hereditary, and do not rely on DNA…
But DNA *is* the Main Library without which we wouldn’t work..)
This *wasn’t* the nail in the coffin for Creationists people think, though…
Their argument that Creation was the Original Mold, and that everything different was a deviation from that “Perfect State” was stil *logically* valid. ( though particularly stupid in consideration of all the *other* “circumstantial evidence” ( their arguments….) based on physiology and biochemistry towards Evolution. )
The real Nail came in the 2000’s-2010’s with the rise of our capability to fast and accurately sequence DNA, and compare the sequences with computers to find similarities and differences.
And could create phylo*genetic* family trees of species, showing the actual development, evolution, and inheritance through DNA amongst species.
With the final blow to the Creationists the *one* thing they always held out against: We didn’t have actual DNA sequences from Extinct Species, so we were still playing Match the Puzzle and didn’t have actual *proof*.
(again… logically valid, if increasingly stupid..)
Until we did… When it turned out molars ( or teeth in general, and several other dense types of bone) make *excellent* time capsules and *did* indeed contain fragments of DNA large enough to compare to current species… Including Humans.
So while Darwin’s version of Evolution was..faulty… to a point, modern technology and science has* very much* proven that his notions were, indeed, correct.
Sort of that Newton-Einstein thing. Newton got the gist of it, Einstein expanded the notion into a more accurate model.
Both were brilliant, given what they actually had to work with…
Which is why Evolution is now officially a Theory, and not some fancy Hypothesis you can throw a Bible against and ReeEEEeee!!! like a social progressive throwing a tantrum.
Well… You can… Free world… But it only makes you look like an idiot…
I have a very strong feeling that Steve’s jokes about evolution are just that, jokes. Yes, he has strong religious faith too but not in that Creationist sense. Or at least that’s never the impression he’s given me.
Thought long and hard about your remark…
If Steve’s remarks about Evolution over the years amount to “humor”…
Not My Kind….
Helps that I’ve had to …contend… with people actually serious about Creationism for decades…Jokes get Old…
Mind.. I have no problem with Steve, or his Convictions… Free World…
I actually regularly agree with him and love his Lions… We’re just approaching stuff from a different direction and arrive at the same conclusion.. Not Enough Lions™..
But his….”humorous remarks” do poke Bears who have been in the Woods too long…
Bit like you and Metals……. or the Sage of Ely… or…
Good point. Though, like many Scots, Maxwell produced his most significant work on electromagnetism at King’s College, London.
*in England – at King’s College, London.*
Once, pound for pound, the greatest country the world has ever seen.
Indeed. Disproportionately responsible for the social and technological movements that begat the greatest improvement in the human physical condition there has eve been.
God, how are the mighty fallen. Now, all they can do is Spot Trains.
The population today is descended from the ones who didn’t leave. And the ones wo just arrived.
I’m surprised no-one mentioned ontgomery Scott. Now there was an engineer.
Can’t edit. Montgomery Scott.
Not so sure about the sensible bureaucrats. After all, they joined up with the English because their own bureaucrats ran their independent state right into insolvency.
Admittedly that was a long time ago.
Had little to do with bureaucrats, because there weren’t many in the 18th century. It was a popular speculative bubble, much like AI is now.
Something like a quarter of all the cash in Scotland was sunk into Darien. They bet the house and lost.
We ran India on about twenty of the buggers. John Cowperthwaite turned Hong Kong from a swamp to a nascent megacity, virtually single handedly.
There were definitely plenty of shitty Scots bureacrats too, but they produced some good ones.
The Indian Civil Service consisted of about 1,000 to 1,500 senior British officials. While this elite British core was small, it was supported by a much larger subordinate bureaucracy that was mostly Indian, including a wide array of clerks, police, and lower-level officials. The total number of British officials and troops was around 20,000 British officials and soldiers.
In those days the population of India was less than a billion
Page after page of delicious details concerning the internal machinations at the highest levels of the Scottish National Party
A rivetting read. Think I’ll wait for the TV adaptation.
It’ll be after the watershed, what with all the lesbian sex .
I thought Lesbian/gay/queer sex was part of the national curriculum for 5-year olds now. Have I got this wrong?
Nicola Sturgeon and “a friend” (colourised, 2026)
Actually this could be interesting but I doubt Ms Cherry looks past the superficialities.
Nicola Sturgeon is interesting because she’s not interesting. A particularly ugly, man-hating lezzer who looks like Gnasher from the Beano. With the lovable personality of a blood-hungry sewer rat with leptospirosis. And all the quality and intelligence you’d expect from a failed solicitor.
In the course of normal events, Nicola would be serving chips with a snarl in the council canteen. But these are not normal times, so they made her a senior politician instead. They – successfully! – astroturfed a cult of personality around someone who has little personality, all of it unpleasant. Nickla was and is, like the 80 IQ Pakistani who succeeded her, like the horse faced cow who ruined New Zealand, like Justin Turdeau from Canada, a devoted disciple of That Hideous Strength, which some call Davos, some call Globohomo, some call Clown World.
Call it what you will, but look at what she did. She took a populist centre left nationalist party that had painstakingly built a reputation for competency in governance, which had a real chance of achieving its goal of independence… and murdered it.
Salmond was a statesman, perhaps the most talented politician of his generation. He built an extraordinarily successful coalition, with his deft knack for appealing to a broader base than you might expect. So naturally, the SNP tried to fit him up with false rape allegations. His accusers – proven liars, according to the ruling of a jury – are still anonymous by law and people have been imprisoned for talking about them (!) How queer.
The SNP is a woke, joke party now, it’s a 1980’s Ben Elton sketch. They’re STILL prioritising massively unpopular and damaging social cancers such as troonism, Nut Zero, and Rapists Welcome Here.
The strange death of Scottish nationalism parallels the weird autoimmolation of the Conservative Party. These used to be respected institutions, which have been deliberately and with malice aforethought strangled to death. It would have been EASIER to do things that voters wanted. But they took enormous pains to ensure that pleb voters get NOTHING but the shaft. All very deliberate, and in defiance of how democratic politics are supposed to work in theory.
Really makes you wonder: who is it these people work for? Could it be… Satan?
‘Could it be… Satan’
Right first time, Steve!!!!!
“populist centre left nationalist party” – yeah, i’ve wondered about that