Scottish hatred and bigotry

There are many many Scots I know and have known who whilst in no way perfect beings are steadfast in their being part of the whole in exactly the same way that I am part of the whole. The whole of course is our United Kingdom. Scots are not a conquered race, an oppressed and subjugated minority or an economically persecuted cohort. They are not Palestinians in Israeli conquered territory, Sunni Moslems in Iraq or Catholics in Northern Ireland. They are equal partners, co-citizens in every way, and in reality get a bigger slice of the national cake than the rest of we Britons. So why have substantial numbers of Scots lost their civility and painted their arses with metaphorical woad in an outpouring of nasty, bigoted, racist and vicious anti-Englishness?

Two letters to the DT cover my concern:-

SIR – Having spent two of my tours in the Army stationed in Scotland, I have watched a militancy at first confined to the Scottish Socialist Party extend throughout the SNP. It is now manifested as intolerance of any cooperation between the British nations, which underpins the Union of the crowns.

Scotland is dying, without even the tears of its people, as an intolerance akin to sectarianism threatens the nation we knew. Gone now, it seems, among politicians north of the border, are the broad views of the Scottish Enlightenment and the global influences which they set in train.

In the last days of this election campaign, can concern for the common weal not overcome spite for imagined wrongs?

Lt-Col Nicholas Cooper (retd)
Barford Saint Martin, Wiltshire

SIR – I am a proud Scot and Unionist and am incensed at being branded a Quisling by Neil Hay, the SNP candidate for Edinburgh South.

The men in my family fought valiantly for Britain in two world wars and, with comrades in arms from England, Ireland and Wales, and the gallant Commonwealth forces, defeated the Nazi evil.
I also deeply resent Mr Hay’s comments that the elderly cannot even remember their own names. What I do remember well is that before the SNP came to prominence, the people of Scotland were united. No one was afraid to voice an opinion for fear of reprisals, even death threats, from those who held different views.
Our 300-year Union was the envy of much of the modern world and there was harmony, not acrimony, in proud Alba.
If Nicola Sturgeon was half the woman she boasts of being, Mr Hay would no longer be an SNP candidate.
Anne Catherine Ferguson
Easter Broomhouse, East Lothian 

It is the casual violence - the English beaten up on the streets just for being English whose broken and battered faces appear in the papers, or English homeowners forced from their homes by violence and death threats - casual violence not condemned by the SNP, and in many cases carried out by SNP supporters, that makes being English in Scotland today as uncomfortable as being Jewish in Nazi Germany in 1935.

Miliband destroyed by QT audience

It was the dawning shock and panic that crept into Red Ed's face last night as he realised that he was taking fatal punches from the balanced BBC audience that made it a Cognac moment for me. They didn't just belt him once, they kept landing killer blows - and the more he refused to admit any Labour culpability in destroying the UK's economy by borrowing, the more vicious the audience pummelling. 

I suspect the unresolved row over the BBC's biased leftie audience for the previous election QT may have prompted some due diligence amongst the programme's producers. That matter is far from over - not least of which my own very precise FOI requests for specific communications between programme makers and ICM. Which will go all the way to the Information Commissioner if the BBC refuses to hand them over. 

Cameron and Clegg both also took hits from a gloves-off audience whose general disrespect towards these giants of the political class reflected the attitude we all know in real life. They weren't above accusing the politicians of lying - and Dimbleby wisely kept quiet. 

All in all the best yet of the televised offerings - and a benchmark against which to compare future offers.

Miliband's crass stupidity puts Labour in the gutter

I was once offered a site manager with a severe stammer. I've known so many site managers that I can pretty well size them up straight away - and I thought this bloke was a tosser. However, I stopped myself sending him back on the grounds that I was seeing the disability, not the man. To make headway in an industry short on loving empathy with such a handicap must count for something, so I kept him. It turned out he was a tosser, and I should have followed my instinct and sent him back at the start. 

Miliband's lunatic proposal to make Islamophobia an aggravated crime puts Labour in the gutter in its pursuit of the Muslim vote. Both Allison Pearson in the Telegraph and Douglas Murray in the Speccie do a more than adequate job of Fisking Red Ed's destructive stupidity and I need not repeat the reasons here. 

Those hungriest for political office, those greediest for power, are always exactly the people we should never let anywhere near it. Miliband's betrayal of his brother in his lust for office, his manifold and desperate lying to cohorts of the electorate to achieve it and the dishonestly of the image his dags and cronies are attempting to project on the British public all betoken the strength of his avarice for power. By any means. 

Miliband is a ruthless ideologue who will destroy Britain. Be afraid; be very afraid.  

MPs with lighter links to their parties

You may have noticed far more candidates for parliament this time around are playing down their Party links. Oh sure they've got the tribal colours, but their message to their electors is about their self rather than their Party. Thus Caroline Lucas is standing as Caroline Lucas (Green Party), and in Nick Clegg's constituency; 

Coppard, an attractive and apparently gifted campaigner, is running as a local candidate in a seat that has been lacking in representation because the incumbent MP has been off doing other things. Take a look at Coppard’s website. It’s very revealing. Miliband isn’t mentioned once on the home page and the word “Labour” only appears at the very bottom. You might argue that Coppard’s campaign is very similar to a traditional Lib Dem campaign: loudly local and all about the candidate rather than the party. Are the people of Hallam essentially switching from one kind of liberal to another?

The Tories already had trouble with their 2010 intake - perhaps the least-whipable cohort in the Party's history. It may be that candidates recognise the public dissatisfaction with the Big Three and are being tactical, or that they are genuinely independently minded in the mould of Sir Patrick Cormack of "It's country, constituency, party. In that order". It will take their actual performance in the house to tell, but must surely be another nail in the coffin of the old, stale Parties.  

Do You Know What, I hate it already

God knows where it came from, but all of a sudden I can't listen to the wireless or watch television news broadcasts without hearing some cretin prefacing a declaratory statement with 'Do you know what ..'. It's ghastly, it's grating, it irritates the Hell out of me. I hate and loathe it. 

Sorry, I should say, do you know what, I hate and loathe it.

STOP IT! ALL OF YOU!

Model complains that workmen whistled at her. Eventually.

Pippy Bananna, 24, whose 'Facebook' page is dedicated to to over 1,200 'selfie' photographs in various stages of undress, issued a press release through her agent yesterday complaining that she had been wolf-whistled by builders. News media were advised that Pippy would be available for a photoshoot close to the site wearing a bikini if the weather was good. A CD of many shots of Ms Bananna's cleavage accompanied the release. 

Mr Fred Teabag, roofer, 47, working on the site commented "This weird woman has been hanging around the site entrance for about a week now not wearing much at all. It was bloody freezing yesterday so Charlie offered her his duffel coat - he's got four teenage girls, see - but this funny little bloke in bleached wig leapt out screaming 'isn't she worth a whistle, boys? Look at those puppies!'. He kept going on about it until Claude, our gay chippie, gave her a single note, a falling G minor I think. They were quite happy after that and went off."

Ms Bananna's screen credits include valet vacuum girl in DVD release 'Modding the Mondeo' and as dead girl #3 in an episode of 'Casualty'. Her single, released last year, reached 12,543 in the UK charts.

Back to the '70s with Red Ed

Rent controls, Price and Wage controls and central State Economic Planning are three of the failed Socialist dogmas last tried by Labour and the Unions in the UK in the 1970s that led to, er, high unemployment, rationing and economic ruin. Having already screwed the UK economy almost to the point of no recovery once in the past 10 years, wreckers Labour and their mafia Union bullyboys want to do it all again.

Labour have proven time after time that they simply can't be trusted with the welfare of the UK economy. With the best intentions but with incredible stupidity, they have ruined Britain's economy time after time. Labour have never once left government with unemployment lower than when they took power. 

As most readers will know all this I'm probably wasting space writing it, but I'm just astonished - gobsmacked - that Red Ed should be so damn stupid as to propose rent controls at this stage of the campaign. Even Ed Balls knows that all rent controls achieve is a shortage of secure rented accommodation and the degradation of condition of private housing stock as owners can't afford repairs. 

Any idiot not yet convinced should spend a weekend in Porto to see the results of decades of Socialist rent controls; gorgeous 18th century buildings in the city centre roofless and abandoned, others with collapsing facades, defective rainwater pipes, rotten window and doors and sagging, gaping roofs. All because the Socialist idiots thought the levers of power would bring Utopia when we know that what they mostly bring is ruin.