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Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nigel Farage. Show all posts

Saturday 18 May 2013

The Farage Affair continues to dominate media

Angus Macleod on Good Morning Scotland, wriggling uneasily over the Farage Affair, trying to square his native intelligence with the Times line. Poor Angus!

But Angus' dilemma is as nothing to the dilemma of Better Together and their media shills - to defend Farage or not? Scottish Tories have already fallen into the hole.

Joyce McMillan provides the calm voice of Scottish sanity and Robin McAlpine, of The Jimmy Reid Foundation, talks hard sense.

Angus Macleod more or less celebrates UKIP vote success in his attempts to justify its news value.

Farage Affair: Alex Massie on Good Morning Scotland

Alex Massie: "Left and Right no longer means very much ..." Don't make me laugh, it hurts my ribs, Alex. But I'm sure you wish it so!

Friday 17 May 2013

The Farage Affair at the Canons' Gait

If a politician from another country comes to Scotland and offers an alien political philosophy to Scots, especially one containing homophobic or racist elements or overtones, they may reasonable be asked to go home, i.e. back to their country of residence, where they vote and live.

I would not hesitate to offer that advice to one from America, England, Wales, Ireland or indeed any country across the globe. I would not hesitate to offer it to a Scot who was an MP for an English constituency and resident in England who chose to interfere in Scottish politics, e.g. Eleanor Laing MP.

(N.B. I do not suggest for a moment that Eleanor Laing is either racist or homophobic, or a sympathiser with UKIP – simply that she is a Scot who is a Tory MP for an English constituency who has made various anti-independence, pro-union comments in the Commons.)

This is not on the basis of race or nationality, but on the basis of politics and country of residence, i.e. where their home is.

But a nasty attempt was made across the media today to conflate this legitimate advice, in the Farage case - who would have been told exactly the same if he had been a Scot - with the undoubted racism of telling someone who lives, works, votes and is domiciled in a country to "Go back where you came from!" based on ethnic or geographical origin.

It was implied by Magnus Gardham in the Herald - “Anti-racists shouted, apparently without irony: ‘Leave Scotland, go back to England” - (approvingly(?) retweeted by Torcuil Crichton of The Record) and by Andrew Neil on The Daily Politics. (see video clip)