Bo-Jo the Ho-Ho Can’t Tell One Scot From Another
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| Alistair Carmichael |
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| Crab |
On Wednesday, Boris was unable to tell one Scot from another, assuming that Liberal Democrat former cabinet minister Alistair Carmichael is a Scottish Nationalist. Big Al, who lives in Orkney, asked a question in Parliament about beef labeling, which is important to his constituents in the farming and fishing communities of Orkney and Shetland. Boris admitted to not having a clue, saying in his characteristic mangled English: “I can only say that it must be governed by one of those things that is currently governed by the laws of the European Union, to which he is bound to return an independent Scotland, should that catastrophe ever arise.” Big Al, of course, is a committed opponent of Scottish Independence, leading the fight against it in the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition until 2015. He has been in Parliament since 2001, the same year Boris first became an MP, and of the 59 Scottish consituencies, is one of only three non-SNP Members of Parliament. Hearing a Scottish accent, however, Bo-Jo went straight into an attack on Scottish Independence. Carmichael was unimpressed. “Downing Street staff literally give Boris a sheet of paper with MPs’ pictures, names and parties and still he gets it wrong,” he said. “That in itself is a bit worrying. It makes me wonder how he might cope with the nuclear codes.”
Ian Blackford, the SNP's leader in the Commons, implored Boris to visit Scotland - maybe because the more the Scots see Tories, the greater Nicola's support will be. So on Thursday, Boris popped up to Orkney, it being sufficiently out of the way, (and Liberal Democrat) to avoid the SNP.
On arrival in Stromness, Boris went through his prepared routine. No one loved theTribesmen more than him. Which is why they were better off in the union because without Westminster they would all be dead from Covid. And all talk of another independence referendum was just nonsense because they'd had one back in 2014.
Meanwhile down in Edinburgh, Sturgeon was conducting her weekly coronavirus press briefing. No, she didn’t want to score any political points during an ongoing global pandemic but she did think it was inappropriate for the prime minister to have come up to Scotland while people were still dying to crow about how much he had done for the union when the UK as a whole had the highest mortality rate in Europe. And she would have been happy to have met Boris if he had been polite enough to request a meeting and she would also have reminded him that though the money from Westminster was very welcome, it was still only borrowed money. So if Scotland had been independent, it could have borrowed the money itself and probably spent it a whole lot better as it had dealt with the coronavirus much better than England. But as this was a public health briefing, she wasn’t going to say any of this. Nicola accused him of politicising the pandemic, adding that leaders should not use the crisis as "some kind of political campaigning tool".
Back in 2014, Gordon Brown similarly and equally futilely tried to win Scotland away from a vote for independence. Stanislav was caustic about his performance:
stanislav up in Scotland is, best part of
England, for sure, but maybe not for long, eh. NutterTribesmen is
running about like Old Testament prophet and scaring decent Jock - not
pisshead, gingerbastard wifebeating child molester layabout - but
decent respectful bloke, half to fucking death. Could be fucking murder
up here. And worse than that, Gordon Snot is from grave dug-up and
arriving at meeting of proper human being, Jock-human-being anyway. Until now has been OK Snottywise, comes out from coffin once a week and helps out but not very much, down at local Oxfam.
See: https://mrishmael.blogspot.com/2010/05/snotty-in-retirement.html
See: https://mrishmael.blogspot.com/2010/05/snotty-in-retirement.html
mr ishmael on Quantitative Easing
BANDITRY A LA GRECQUE.
I remember, when Mr Gordon Snot and Mr Alastair Darling were saving Usury's arse for a grateful, captive world, thinking to myself, not for the first time, What is this shit? This is way beyond Capitalism's bottom-of-the-deck cardsharping, this is risk-free brigandage, the bandits have bushwhacked the wagon train and the wagon master is helping them loot the chuckwagon, ransack the pioneers' belongings, fuck all the women, steal all the horses and enslave all the children while offering them a vote of sincere, heart-felt thanks, before inviting them back, next time, Sir Fred, please.
It seemed that a maelstrom of counterfeit assumption, heretical supplication and zombie arithmetic was pulling everyone into its crazy vortex; the circulation of worthless, fiat currency bog-roll notes was threatened and Devilish anarchy must ensue, unless, that is, Organised Crime was given a free pardon and trillions of pounds from the poor box; only if the criminals escaped punishment could Civilisation survive; unless the Worthless were excused, exalted and beatified everything we held dear - shopping, extortionate mortgages and the supernova illusion of debt-as-prosperity would become, well, worthless.
Since money no longer properly exists and is only borrowed into existence I didn't see why Mr Snot couldn't just arrest all the criminals, throw them in jail and print-up enough bogroll money for everybody to have enough to be going on with while we sorted-out a non-criminal solution, one in which grubby shysterism, shorting, commodity speculation, sub-prime lending and insider dealing are not seen as the preserve of the nobility, an expression of modern-day chivalry. The thieves and extortionists, Mr Snot seemed to say, are our very salvation, peace and pretend money be upon them. He never listened to me, Snotty. And look where it got him. Look where it got his party, the useless gibbering, snot-eating bastard. Here, thanks to Snotty and the numbskull jumped-up Jock councillor, Darling, be the triumph of Usury Unbound. Here be Descent into the maelstrom; here be the very government owned by Shylock.
There is an order of succession in public life - as the night follows day, bad is succeeded by worse,the idle slut-prince, Brian will succeed bed-hopping, Don't-Rock-The-Boat Brenda the Cruel; Bush Senior was succeeded by Spunky BillClinton, Clinton was succeeded by Dubya Chimp, Chimp was succeeded by Obama; crook-torturer follows crook-torturer, wickedness upon wickedness. And the Brown Miracle of Financial Deliverance followed on his predecessor's Great Deceit. The fictions of a filthy, fucked -up pornographer-drunk, read into the public record, annotated by treacherous spooks and applauded by a rotten legislature set the world on fire. After Iraq they could get away with anything. And they did.
Look at how all the filth of the world coalesced and encrusted in a giant skidmark at Gleneagles to make poverty history, braindead rock'n'rollers orgasming to the sounds of Pinkl Floyd's dire, icy precision. Oh, wow, man, they're back together again, somehow the world is a better place, already. Talkin' 'bout my generation, Cuntishness Unbound, the Baby Boomers. And look, now, at Poverty's millions, fleeing to a new life at the bottom of the Mediterranean; just as much as Tony'n'Imelda's Snotty Brown's nail-bitten fingerprints are all over this global catastrophe
Is Brown worse than Blair? Of course he is, he could have gainsaid Iraq and he didn't, his moral compass pointing due career. A Presbyterian Privatiser Brown was no more socialist or social democrat than my dog, Harris. Post-Brown, post No More Boom And Bust, criminals prosper, are ennobled and the poor and lame are whipped through the streets, slandered and scourged by filth like Murdoch, Desmond, Rothermere, the Barclay Twins and now by Harriet Soursister, her ponce husband, the union parasite, Dromey, and reptiles like Chukka Wotsisname. The poor must pay and pay, what otherwise is the point of them? After the notional treasuries were handed over to GlobaCorp the old idea of capitalism involving risk or failing became ridiculous
And as it is here and in the United States of Atrocity so it is on what we call the continent.
.........................................................................
IN THE BEGINNING WASN'T THE SMILEY FACE.
Dwelt I within Uncle Sam's brash and brutish embrace I would say Fall when I meant Autumn. Both nouns represent the same planetary shift and probably both evoke the same romance - the same season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of fallen leaves jewelling the ground; of days growing short, of thankfulness for Harvest and of a reluctant battening-down after Summer's lazy license; Autumn, though, latin, does it for me, with a poetic power at which Fall only grasps, Au-tumn, the first syllable ajar with wonder, the second snapping firmly shut, sealed like a frozen lake; Fall, a shortening of leaf-fall, like so much American English is vague, childish and a bit lazy, like Uncle Sam, himself.
Dwelt I within Uncle Sam's brash and brutish embrace I would say Fall when I meant Autumn. Both nouns represent the same planetary shift and probably both evoke the same romance - the same season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of fallen leaves jewelling the ground; of days growing short, of thankfulness for Harvest and of a reluctant battening-down after Summer's lazy license; Autumn, though, latin, does it for me, with a poetic power at which Fall only grasps, Au-tumn, the first syllable ajar with wonder, the second snapping firmly shut, sealed like a frozen lake; Fall, a shortening of leaf-fall, like so much American English is vague, childish and a bit lazy, like Uncle Sam, himself.
I
was struck by Wilde's Division-by-Language when packing, for the
hospital, an edition of Lapham's Quarterly, from Fall, 2014. It just
irritated, that momentary correction, forced upon me, like trying to
read those kiddy emoticons with which people now litter their prose, an
entire keyboard's worth of which this i-thing contains, it only pops up
by error and I remove it quickly, like birdshit from my windscreen;
corrosive, like real birdshit, of any polished surface, is this cheery
infantilism-as-style and if my resistance to such signifies my growing
separateness from the main, indicates my aversion to a linguistic lowest
common denominator, frames my cleaving to the difference between noun
and verb and points to an irrational irritabilty I would counter that
language, as well as being the vehicle for mr yardarm's rage is also not
only no less than but actually the mother of mr mike's equations, mr
mongoose's engineering tolerances and the wellspring of mr tdg's
elegant, remorseless logic; why should we demean it with Twittering
amputation, abbreviation and pictogram? We would not so treat a
calculation of load bearing, a flight plan or even the odds on a wager,
why do we so eagerly conjoin in the mutilation and enfeebling of our
language?
There is a scene in Amadeus, a fanciful film about Mozart, in which one of his Royal patrons complains to Wolfgang that his music is terribly good but would be better without quite so many notes in it. But Majesty, retorts the frustrated composer, it has exactly the right amount of notes in it, no more and no less.
Notes on a stave, though, are unmistakeable instructions; with speech or writing, what you want to say and how say it can cancel each other out.
I find talking on the telephone a torment and I do it, more or less, only with tradespeople, with whom I can scramble to an understanding.
Conversation with someone I can see is hard enough, even my closest operates on a different wavelength, speaking meaningfully without visual clues is proving more and more difficult and so I don't do that much talking, these days.
Paul McCartney, having been rebuked for describing John Lennon's death as a drag, said that he wished he had an editor in his brain, to read his words before he uttered them, because a drag meant one thing to him but something less to others.
I knew just what he meant, I'd like an editor, a sub editor, a censor and a professor of conversation studies inside my head. This talking business, it is the very Devil.
Writing things down, as I often remark, levels my head and eases my mind.
It doesn't happen often in my life but there is a place to which the words find their own way; it is not fixed, nor is it locatable, there is no cerebral sat-nav, I cannot key-in a postcode; it is a No-Man's Land, between the the intuitive and the mechanistic, the left and the right brains.
There is a scene in Amadeus, a fanciful film about Mozart, in which one of his Royal patrons complains to Wolfgang that his music is terribly good but would be better without quite so many notes in it. But Majesty, retorts the frustrated composer, it has exactly the right amount of notes in it, no more and no less.
Notes on a stave, though, are unmistakeable instructions; with speech or writing, what you want to say and how say it can cancel each other out.
I find talking on the telephone a torment and I do it, more or less, only with tradespeople, with whom I can scramble to an understanding.
Conversation with someone I can see is hard enough, even my closest operates on a different wavelength, speaking meaningfully without visual clues is proving more and more difficult and so I don't do that much talking, these days.
Paul McCartney, having been rebuked for describing John Lennon's death as a drag, said that he wished he had an editor in his brain, to read his words before he uttered them, because a drag meant one thing to him but something less to others.
I knew just what he meant, I'd like an editor, a sub editor, a censor and a professor of conversation studies inside my head. This talking business, it is the very Devil.
Writing things down, as I often remark, levels my head and eases my mind.
It doesn't happen often in my life but there is a place to which the words find their own way; it is not fixed, nor is it locatable, there is no cerebral sat-nav, I cannot key-in a postcode; it is a No-Man's Land, between the the intuitive and the mechanistic, the left and the right brains.
mr ishmael's essays:
Stan Over Scotland drafted 21/08/2014
snotty in retirement published 23/05/2010
Banditry a la Grecque drafted 14/07/2016
In the Beginning wasn't the Smiley Face drafted 12/08/2015
16 comments:
Scotland the Fucking Tedious under the Nats. That's what's so unforgivable: the relentless dullness of the Cause in their hands. It's just about the freedom to be bossed around and mind-numbed by one's own traffic wardens.
Another piece of dazzle on language, from Mr I.
"I knew just what he meant, I'd like an editor, a sub editor, a censor and a professor of conversation studies inside my head."
Not quite what he had in mind, of course, but he's got one now - an editor, anyway - and the Best Of anthology is at early proof-copy stage. So while it's not exactly imminent, the book should be generally available in a month or two, all being well.("Snotty In Retirement", which Mrs Ishmael has linked to in this post, is one of the selections.)
v./
I wonder what Mr Ishmael would have made of the shit we are in now.
Great news Mr Verge.
mr yardarm,I often wonder that myself. Bo-Jo is, of course, richly comedic and mr ishmael made great sport with him when Bo-Jo was Mayor of London. The man who reduced Snotty Brown to voluntary work in a charity shop in Kirkaldy would have quickly dispatched Bo-Jo; the cack-handed mismanagement of the anti-pandemic measures would have been thoroughly and mercilessly exposed, the destruction of civil liberties, suspension of court sittings, the bombast and fake humility of the Black Lives Matter adherants, the invention of new money and the destruction of the economy... and yet, the dreadful reality of a new virus causing a prolonged and painful death for the sick and the vulnerable elderly could only have moved him to the deepest pity. He was himself most unlikely to survive had he contracted Covid. He was remarkably stoical about his medical problems, as his regular readers know, and bravely dealt with diabetes and its attendant ills, which included cardio-vascular disease, a triple by-pass and diabetic neuropathy. Pulmonary fibrosis was the cause of his death six months ago, but his mind remained sharp and he continued writing to you all, his beloved commentariat, until the day before he left us.
Just want to echo mr bungalow bill - great news, editor verge, and heartfelt gratitude for your dedicated work in bringing us so close to the completion of the anthology. The best memorial mr ishmael and his young friend, stanislav, could possibly have.
Thank you.
Bravo Mr Verge, and Mrs I. Very much looking forward to this.
Very saddening to read of Mr I's ills, but heartening to know his mind was clear. There is no justice. Recently rewatched Amadeus, and although its annoying by being American, its also poignant, nothing more so than when they corpse of Mozart is dumped in his grave. Genius laid waste.
Death comes for us all, mr mike, it is the human tragedy. It is a great blessing if we can make a good death, and, if it is any sort of comfort, mr ishmael's passing was quietly at home, just as he wanted, with Harris and myself at his side.
Just as you were, mr ishmael was profoundly moved by "Amadeus" and the sentence: "Too many notes, Herr Mozart" was part of our family's vocabulary. He was very robust about funerary rites, however, personally wanting no fuss. Doesn't matter to me, he'd say - I'll not be there.
Ho hum, completion of the slaughter by tea tomorrow, mr mike? I'd put a quid on by lunch if it starts on time and you gave me odds.
The Tribesmen are a caution, aren't they, mrs i? And Mr Tory Blather too, I see, has said that a hard, no-deal Brexit will rent the union in twain. Of course, the precise opposite is the truth. (And that's something we should have worked out about him by now.) Scotland outside the EU is welded to England forever. The Barnard teat will be all they have to keep them in Buckie and shortbread.
I was struck one day some years back now by the no-nonsense understanding of the children's grandfather when his wife died. When asked what sort of coffin he would like he shot back "the cheapest possible". In explanation later, he said that it would be looked at for ten minutes and then buried in the ground forever. So I think I am am with mr i on funerary rites. I am glad to hear btw that his passing was a peaceful one. He deserved no less after all his medical trials over the years.
Thanks, mr mongoose. Kind words. Much appreciated.
The Scottish Nationalist Party took all but three of the constituencies in the last election. That is astonishing. Gnasher has an unassailable majority. She would like to think that reflects an overwhelming desire by the Scottish people for independence. I suspect that it means no such thing - it is more about the unpalatability of her opponents. But, I don't know. She could seal the borders tomorrow, should she choose, hold at arm's length England, the corona-stricken senior partner in the Union - but what she cannot do, under law, is to secede from the Union.
I think that the most we should expect but the least we should ask, mrs i, is to cross our bridge when it comes to us without wolves at our heels. I am glad for him, and for you too, that mr i crossed his so. It is a blessing, as the old folk used to say.
The Tribesmen are ruinoulsy popular because Scottish Labour has dropped the ball. A potential disintegration of the union therefore lies at the feet of Labour and not Bojo. The other truth is that the SNP is a shitty, little anti-Enbglish party of bitterness and spite. It is everything that generally Scotland isn't but that the M8 client state is, and what the petty bourgoisie of the same place so desperately want because they have not a historically insightful thought in their stupid, fat, shortbread heads. If I were PM, I'd let Scotland be independent on Monday and beggar it by Tuesday. By Friday, they'd be at the gate begging to be let back in.
I share the same view, Mr mongoose, albeit from 13000 miles away. The Barnett formula has kept Scotland alive for decades. I don't really understand what the "Union" stuff is about? Ditto N Ireland. I'm sure most of England wouldn't notice if Scotland didn't exist. If they want to be independent, well, that's all well and good. Fuck off and good luck. I suggest the truth is that there was never any warm feelings between England and Scotland, or vice versa.
Re the cricket: great decision to leave Broad out of the first test. Fired him up. Although, I would have preferred a closer contest, like the first test.
The Poms, Mr Mike, have lost the first Test of a series something like eight of the last twelve times. It is shoddy and slack but they thereafter overpowered the Windies who ran out of steam more or less. Some average captaincy by Holder though. I do not see him as the tactical titan that he is professed to be.
I like Scotland and go there frequently but love-a-duck how they do like to moan about the English. Many of the very best of them, of course, beetle off to live and work in England.
"The Scottish Parliament". The likes of Birmingham Council have more work to do and generally do it better.
Gnasher is such a fanatic she won`t care about the post independence poverty of her fellow Scots, she`ll float Scotland out of the Union on a raft of Covid corpses. Mr Ishmael often spoke of the Islands being more Norse than like Gnasher`s Toytown Scottish fantasies. Why not fly the Norwegian flag ? If one part of the Union can tell Westminster to Foxtrot Oscar than another part can tell Edinburgh to do the same.
I submit that Johnson and Handjob are the most appalling and damaging government figures in modern British political history. Their top ranking is surely now cemented. They are so dreadful that it begins to look deliberate and I am tempted to cast about for their real purpose. But no; they are just vile, blundering liars.
There have been many shockers down the years. These two fuckers, though.
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