I say what I must say. You don't have to listen.
Alex Salmond has been magnanimous and generous in victory to the three other party leaders following their resignations.
I am cut from lesser cloth, I’m afraid …
 |
| From Alex Salmond and The Three UK Stooges - plus Patrick Harvie |
George Macaulay Trevelyan was the great nephew of Macaulay and the last historian writing in the Whig traditions. The Whigs were the forerunners of the Liberal Party, but God knows what they would make of the present LibDems and apparatchiks like Danny Alexander.
Here is an extract from his History of England (1937) -
A guerilla chief of genius, a tall man of iron strength, who suddenly appears on the page of history, as if from nowhere, defeated at Stirling Bridge an English Army under its blundering feudal chief, the Earl of Warenne, of quo Warranto (link) fame. Thence William Wallace broke ravaging into Northumberland and Cumberland.
This unknown knight, with little but his great name to identify him in history, had lit a fire which nothing since has ever put out. Here, in Scotland, contemporaneously with very similar doings in Switzerland, a new ideal and tradition of wonderful potency was brought into the world; it had no name then, but now we should call it democratic patriotism. It was not the outcome of theory. The unconscious qualities of a people had given it reality in a sudden fit of rage.
Where is Scotland’s rage against what the Labour Party did to it over 13 wasted, blighted years and the ConLib coalition is doing to it now?
Where is our democratic patriotism now?
It cannot be summoned for the tattered, bloodstained flag of a vanished empire, Great Britain, great no longer…
It can be summoned for the spring of 2011 – a momentous year for the nation of Scotland.
Vote for your ain folk – vote for the Scottish National Party, not for The Three UK Stooges – Gray, Goldie or Scott.
The Holyrood opposition parties and Unionists everywhere have more or less abandoned rational argument about Scotland’s capacity to function as an independent country. Instead, they fall back on what they think of as their best line – “What happened to Alex Salmond’s Arc of Prosperity?”
Bankrupt of real arguments and bereft of new ideas, they are nonetheless determined to maintain Scots in a dependent, mendicant mindset by trying to convince them that Scotland could not survive on its own.
The IMF (The International Monetary Fund) does understand global economics and has some respect for figures, unlike The Three UK Stooges – Gray, Goldie and Scott.
I have taken some figures from their April 2010 database for Iceland, Ireland, Norway – the arc of prosperity – and the United Kingdom (IMF link) and their report for the years 2009 and projections for 2010 to 2015. It shows the GDP (gross domestic product) based on PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) and per capita GDP. The tables themselves can be viewed at (link) but I have presented them showing the top country – Norway in every year - as 100 and the others as a percentage of that, to give an instant feel for the relative positions.
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
Norway 100 100 100 100 100 100 100
Ireland 75.1 73.7 74.1 74.5 74.9 75.4 75.8
Iceland 72.3 69.4 69.6 69.8 70.1 72.1 73.7
UK 65.9 66.2 66.8 67.5 68.2 68.8 69.3
Anyone can check these, and other figures for themselves. What this clearly demonstrates is that, in spite of a global collapse, the three countries in the arc of prosperity are all still doing better than the pathetic performance of the UK, and are projected to do better for the next five years by the IMF.
There is another arc at work here – the Arc of Economic Nonsense talked by The Three UK Stooges, Gray, Goldie and Scott.
Norway, of course – most comparable to Scotland - is comfortably top of the heap because nobody stole their oil, and they run their own country and their own affairs.
Posts
