And another thing…

SHORTLY after taking power at Holyrood, the SNP Government, after a costly and extensive search for a new corporate slogan for Scotland, came up with the dazzlingly original  “Welcome to Scotland”. You have to wonder what slogans were rejected…

However, the words which now greet everyone arriving at one of Scotland’s airports might be more appropriate than first thought. During the 2007 Scottish Parliament elections, then First Minister Jack McConnell vetoed a proposal from Labour’s ad agency which featured a photograph of a wire fence in which a large hole had been cut. Below was the text: “SNP immigration policy”.

Brutal and uncomfortable stuff, but, like much of such discarded propaganda, it revealed a basic truth. The SNP pride themselves on having an “open” immigration policy. Essentially this means that if you can make it to Scotland’s shores from anywhere on the globe, then whatever your background and whatever your circumstances, Scotland will welcome you. This, of course, is regarded as insanity by most Scots, but they don’t dwell on it since, mercifully, the Scottish Government has no say over immigration matters.

But is this “openness” the reason why Alex Salmond, an MP of 23 years’ experience, chose to plead the case of a failed asylum seeker who was illegally working in his constituency? Or was it simply that his workload as First Minister prevented him from paying the necesary attention to this particular case?

A spokesman claimed Salmond was “duty bound” to represent the man. He was not. He was “duty bound” to inform the immigration authorities, and possibly the police, of the man’s whereabouts and activities. The spokesman also said Salmond was unaware that the man had been facing drug charges and had broken his bail conditions. I’m prepared to believe this last point, since, in my own experience of people seeking help with the immigration authorities, they are strangely reluctant to divulge such pertinent information when they approach me.

I offer you a prediction: if the broadcast media pick up on this story today, the claim that Salmond was “duty bound” to represent his constituent will not be repeated by him or his office. He knows it to be untrue and he would be a fool to compound such a serious mistake with such a pathetic excuse.

SCOTLAND’S First Minister loves this time of year.

You can tell: no sooner has December arrived than Alex is taking every opportunity to teach us the real meaning of Christmas – namely that there is no “Season of good will” while we toil under the yoke of the hated English!

And just in case you feel the urge to be jolly or festive, this official Bute House Christmas card will remind you that the fight for Freeeeeeedom! is a serious business and that everyone engaged in The Fight must be of serious mind. No smiling allowed.

Hat-tip to Wrinkled Weasel, who has a rather more sinister interpretation of the First Minister’s choice of card.

MAN OF the people, that’s Scotland’s First Minister.

But only if by “the people” you mean his personal dentist and the owner of his favourite restaurant, both of whom have been wined and dined by Eck at the public’s great expense. The Herald’s Tom Gordon dishes the dirt here.

OUR Dave has said Alex Salmond should not take part in any televised leaders’ debate during the election campaign, and of course he’s dead right.

Having representatives of the opinion polls’ “others” category would make the whole exercise pointless (and yes, I count the LibDems among the “others”). A head-to-head between Gordon and Cameron would make sense and would be worth watching. Bring in all the others – SNP, UKIP, BNP, LibDems, Cornish Nationalists, etc – and you might hear from Brown or Cameron once or twice in the entire debate, while we’ll be privy to what British foreign policy might be under a UK government led by Alex Salmond or Nigel Farage…

Perhaps the nats are being goaded into taking legal action against the broadcasters by those who don’t want the debates to ahead at all.

PS: Good luck with trying to stop Scottish viewers tune into Sky or BBC North East on their Sky boxes, by the way. Thanks to STV’s ludicrous decision not to buy the latest series of Agatha Christie’s Marple (in order, apparently, to show rubbish American films – not Scottish-made programmes – in its place) we’ve been setting the old Sky-Plus box to record BBC ITV London every Sunday at nine for the past few weeks. It’s called progress.

HITLER managed to “put the Jews in their place”, according to this video of radical Islamist scholar, Yusuf Qaradawi.

According to this paper, written by Qaradawi, the beating of wives is acceptable. And here, Qaradawi writes that western tolerance of homosexuality “put man in a position even worse than animals” and suggests that capital punishment is an appropriate response to homosexuality.

But, according to Osama Saeed, who leads the Scottish Islamic Foundation, Qaradawi is an “eminent scholar”. Saeed has complained that the BBC accurately reported Qaradawi’s relelant views of violence against women and homosexuals.

Oh, and did I mention that Saeed was last week formally endorsed as a parliamentary candidate for the nationalists in Scotland?

In doing so, the nationalists have become the first “mainstream” party in the United Kingdom to endorse an Islamist candidate. 

Saeed, a former aide to Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, and whose organisation was given £400,000 of public money by Salmond shortly after it was set up, subscribes to the fundamental principle of Islamists throughout the world: the re-establishment of a worldwide caliphate.

Why has a party which has made such strides in establishing its “moderate” credentials allowed itself to become the only party in the country trying to elect an Islamist to parliament?

I suspect that if you were to speak to nationalists at every level in the party, from leafleter to Salmond himself, you would find an ignorance, or even apathy, about Islamism and the threat it poses. It’s more important, they will claim (probably only privately), to have an articulate young Muslim fighting a seat that is currently held by Scotland’s only Muslim MP, Mohammad Sarwar, and which will be fought at the next election by Sarwar’s son, Anas, as Labour’s candidate.

Perhaps Saeed’s views on separate state-funded Islamic schools and his support for clerics’ extremist views will play well in the seat which has a high population of Muslim voters, they have concluded. If so, then endorsing an Islamist is a small price to pay for the prospect of winning the seat, surely? That’s a very patronising and ignorant view, of course, so highly likely to be held by the SNP.

Salmond and the rest of his party are turning a blind eye to Saeed’s views. Either that or they fully understand the illiberal and intolerant nature of Islamism and wish deliberately to entrench it in Scottish and British society, or see such infection of the body politic as a small price to pay for winning some votes.

Or perhaps, like the Scottish media, they believe that different standards should be applied to Muslim and non-Muslim candidates, or at least tolerated? This is a dangerous and sensitive area to write about, after all, and no-one wants even to risk being accused of racism. “Islamism? Isn’t that the same as Islam? Well, it’s a cultural thing, isn’t it? All very complicated…”

No electoral prize could justify the endorsement of an Islamist as a Parliamentary candidate. There is a huge difference between Islam and Islamism. Islamism, the view that Islam is a political as well as a religious movement, has found its voice in controversial organisations such as Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Association of Britain (for which Saeed acted as spokesman for a number of years) and Al-Quaeda.

No socially liberal, progressive, democratic party would ever have endorsed Osama Saeed as a parliamentary candidate. Following his endorsement by the SNP, it’s fair to say that no socially liberal, progressive, democratic party yet has.

HAT-TIP to Alan (Cockers) Cochrane of The Daily Telegraph for highlighting a quote from the Richt Honourable Alex Salmond MP, MSP, First Minister of Scotland which, at the time, held none of the significance or irony it now does:

The Scottish banks are amongst the most stable financial institutions in the world.

He’s an economist, you know…

HAVING become a recent convert to Twitter, I was intrigued to see that none other than the Richt Honourable Alex Salmond is a Twitterer too (no, I said Twitter…)

I discovered this gem through a rather fine blog of which I’ve only just become aware, A Leaky Chanter (which I believe may be some sort of musical instrument. Or maybe a cup. Or a shoe…)

SCOTTISH business leaders have sent proud Alex Samond homewards to think again on the so-called local* income tax (LIT).

“The wrong tax at the wrong time,” is how Norman Quirk of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce described this particular tartan tax. It is “a tax on labour at a time when government should be pulling all the levers to ensure that the economy is running at full throttle.”

Having failed to implement so much of their 2007 manifesto, LIT is an important battle for the SNP government; if they manage to implement it, and push Scots’ income tax up to three per cent more than what everyone else in the country is paying, we would lose jobs and inward investment. Then Alex and co. will turn round and blame England. Genius.

* “local” as in “not local – national”

LINDSAY Roy, the new MP for Glenrothes, was introduced to the House a short time ago, immediately following Prime Minister’s Questions.

Hard to say if he felt intimidated or not -the House isn’t usually that busy when new members are introduced. But he got an enthusiastic welcome from our lot, less so from the SNP for some reason.

In the run-up to polling last week I was contacted by a couple of journalists asking for a steer as to what result to expect. I told them what I thought: the SNP would take the seat, though not with the kind of majority they might have expected at the start of the campaign. In fact I was deliberately ignoring the positive response I had found on the doorstep; my pessimism was rooted entirely on the fact that we had lost Glasgow East even when we controlled the council and had retained the Scottish Parliament seat at the 2007 elections. In Glenrothes we had lost both to the nationalists.

So on polling night I deliberately avoided the results programme and went to bed early, unwilling to look at TV images of the smug faces of the nationalists at the count. It was Carolyn, next morning, who told me the result. I was stunned. Stunned and very, very happy.

So to any journalist who feels a bit peeved at my giving him misleading information, I apologise. It wasn’t spin – it was honest, common or garden west of Scotland pessimism.

REMEMBER that clip of the movie Downfall, which has been re-subtitled dozens of times to make it relevant to more recent events, including Labour’s loss of the Glasgow East by-election? Well, inevitably someone with far too much time on their hands has produced a version to reflect the result of Glenrothes. I don’t advise watching it; it’s coarse and foul-mouthed, not to mention disrespectful of a number of members of the SNP government. 

You can refuse to watch it by not clicking here.