LongTimeLurker

No idea on any Graham Fyfe angle my paranoid red-dotting friend, but think it's interesting that John Fyfe would surface again in blazer terms after what was in that Daily Record article I linked and after all 63 west region clubs subsequently smoothly moving over to the WoS and avoiding the acrimonious split that Burnieman and co wanted. Looks from the outside like the SFA board and the west region blazers led by Gordon Roney probably came to some sort of arrangement on what the SFA would sign off on where the emergence of the WoS was concerned to avoid any further aggro in the pages of Scotland's chimpion. The LL probably weren't really calling the shots after a certain point on issues like having four sixth tier conferences and SJFA memberships being retained in other words. That's pure speculation on my part though. The one detail that doesn't neatly fit that scenario is Felix McKenna's reaction to the four sixth tier conferences not happening. He would be more the SJFA blazer clique though, and not necessarily fully in the loop if Tom Johnston had been largely sidelined post-PWG collapse and was just going through the motions waiting for retirement by that point.

John Fyfe was previously a west region blazer: https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/ayrshire/scottish-junior-football-chiefs-hint-21601673

Would be good if there could be a complete decomissioning of mindsets where grades are concerned and we could have a revitalised holy grail with the LL and EoS on board even if the HL isn't interested. Takes two to tango on why that isn't likely.

When you consider the sheer number of times this sort of stuff is happening at clubs across the central belt, it should be obvious to all that there are severe social problems in Scottish society and that the more liberal approach towards criminal justice issues of the last few decades is not working out too well in practice. Although attaching bricks and throwing the culprits into the canal was clearly not meant as a serious suggestion but as a way of venting exasperation, it would be good to see some actual action from the political class to address this sort of stuff for a change instead of the usual three monkeys routine and generally sweeping it all under the carpet. Don't think forgiveness should be too high on the agenda. There should be more of a realisation in certain circles that actions can have severe consequences. The reason things have got so out of kilter is precisley because those sorts of consequences are not being applied often enough.

The 22% thing looked dubiously high. Suspect this explains why.

There is a proposal from the HL that is supposed to be ready for the north region to sign off on. The North Caledonian League has already agreed to it and the word from them is that it could be implemented as soon as this season if the north region agree to it.

Is the not following England bit about COVID-19 regulations or national teams in sport?

...unless you are the north region. There's no playoff format veto for the EoS where Highland League tier 6 feeders are concerned.

If it had been the language of instruction at school and it was being routinely used in the media it would be easy for us to write sair heid rather than sore head. Scotland was too busy with its junior imperial partner plundering role to do that sort of thing in the 19th century when literary languages like Bokmal and Nynorsk Norwegian were being standardised elsewhere and for whatever reason there is no enthusiasm in the present day for emulating what the Catalans did post-Franco. What to do with Scots is an awkward one for the SNP because a sizable portion of their activist base are panloaf speakers (for the sake of argument lets call them Torcuil and Catriona) who often still retain negative attitudes from an earlier era about Scots. There is a strand within Scottish nationalism that has latched onto Gaelic instead and try to push it as a national language rather than the reality of it being a local Highland/Hebridean one. Hence why Gaelic gets plastered all over Scottish government websites and Welcome to Scotland signs, etc in an empty token we're no #$%^in English sort of way. Then there are large portions of Scottish history that are being actively dumped from the collective memory. Edited highlights about Bruce/Wallace talked about obsessively minus the invasion of Ireland by Edward Bruce and the Balliols briefly returning post-Bannockburn, but Knox and the Reformation almost never mentioned even though it explains why Scotland retained an ongoing level of significant adminstrative autonomy post-Union. All kinds of emotionalism from Fergus Ewing about Culloden OK, but Jenny Geddes and the Covenanters never mentioned...

Maybe the difference is that the chances are actually quite high that you will wind up under a bus at some point if you don't look both ways before stepping off the pavement? Most people are asymptomatic or have very mild symptoms when they are infected with the virus. In the absence of a rapidly implemented vaccine, which was never particularly likely to happen, COVID-19 will run out of steam once herd immunity is achieved. The idea behind wearing face masks and social distancing etc was to flatten the curve to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed as that unfolded. There was no expectation that the risk of winding up on a ventilator was going to be completely eliminated, because normal life can't grind to a complete standstill.

That's the way I see it too. A modicum of competence from the Westminster parties in carrying out federal style politics and devolution should have kept the genie in the bottle. Scotland under normal circumstances lacks the raw material for a strong nationalism. At this point though with all the lunacy over Brexit, there's a strong case for giving independence a whirl. All the rational arguments for the Union have been severely undermined by the likes of Farage and Rees-Mogg.

Was tempted to work a Swiss German angle into my posts a couple of times but was wary of trying to spell Schwyzerdutsch. A lot of German "dialects" diverge more from the High German standard than Scots does from English and some still have lots of speakers across all social classes like in Switzerland. Really separate languages in many ways in other words. Just not developed as a literary language for whatever historical reason, so not taken seriously as languages. There's nothing hugely out of the ordinary about Scots in European terms in other words. Just find it interesting that it isn't pushed by Scottish nationalism more and forms of Scottishness often get pushed instead that are arguably an outgrowth of imperial era state propaganda that was internalised by a signifiant segment of the population, but was usually viewed with complete disdain in left leaning working class circles. The SNP had a hard job getting beyond the Tartan Tory label for that reason.

^^^that was quick for someone that doesn't care. Over and out for now unless something intelligent gets posted.

All too predictable that virginton would try to turn me into some sort of uber-Unionist stereotype even though the post ends with a strong hint of how I would be leaning on a referendum right now (hint: it isn't Better Together, if that means living under UKIP lite policies in Westminster terms). As for people who watched Braveheart and thought it was a documentary. They are not too hard to find: That looks more like a bizarre post-imperial identity crisis to me than anything else. People in other countries are laughing at you not with you.

Is that what is actually happening though? The Torcuil and Catriona types latch onto Gaelic instead and plaster it all over Scottish government websites in an empty token sort of way because they are almost completely anglicised linguistically. Their forebears preferred being a junior partner in crime where imperialism was concerned to separate nationhood and were happy to embark on a project of making Scotland very similar to England culturally to fit into the whole imperial escapade. Now there is no empire left to pillage having a separate state with a leadership role for themselves is more appealing than being Scotlandshire in North Britain. Instead of normalising a watered down "modern Scots" in a Catalan sort of way to justify a separate nationalism, phony kilts and bagpipes nonsense that was originally promoted in the 19th century to rehabilitate Jacobitism to try to stop the proles having bolshy Presbyterian ideas about having the right to vote has been latched onto and started to get taken seriously by the sort of people that watched Braveheart and thought it was a documentary. I find that only marginally more appealing culturally than Jacob Rees-Mogg, so would prefer to see an option that makes devolution work well in a federal sort of way. If the Westminster parties are completely incapable of providing that though and Little Englander Brexit mentalities are going to hold sway down south, the Union is like having a larger conjoined twin with special needs...

At no point have I suggested that Scots doesn't exist. I grew up speaking fairly broad Scots by central belt standards some of the time but only with certain people and only in certain social situations. My mother used quite a bit of Scots around the house and my grandfather even took the time to teach me how to count to ten in it when I was knee high to a grasshopper. No teacher ever did that and it's the lack of official support in that setting (fower and seevin would have went down like a lead balloon with the teacher and probably would have been ridiculed by the rest of the class) that makes it a working class vernacular rather than a standard literary language. I have relatives in Shetland that still speak a form of Scots completely fluently although they'd prefer to call it Shetland. The full traditional vocabulary and grammar. Another few decades and the last fluent speakers like them will all be gone. You can call what's left in the central belt "modern Scots" at that point if you like but don't hold your breath on it ever getting standardised under the SNP like Bokmal Norwegian was to enable Danish speaking Norwegians to have a national language that could be taught in schools and used in the media post-independence. The number of living fully functioning languages is going to drop drastically over the next couple of centuries and having standard English as the competitor is pretty much mission impossible no matter what happens on independence.

You could make the same statement about Neapolitan or Bavarian and they aren't leaving Italy or Germany any time soon. Having a spoken vernacular in working class circles that deviates significanty from the prevailing literary language is nothing hugely out of the ordinary in many parts of Europe. You only get taken seriously as a language once you move beyond the realm of vernacular speech and it gets normalised, people get taught in it at school and actually use it in newspapers, books, TV programmes and internet messageboards like this one. None of that is happening with Scots under the SNP. Only Gaelic gets pushed to that sort of extent but only a wee bit because it's only spoken in real life by a couple of geriatric crofters called Calum and Dougal. That's why I stated that there is no language issue driving Scottish nationalism.

No arguments on that. My original point was that Westminster and the parties that still support Scotland's ongoing post-devolution partipation in the Westminster system had to be deeply off-putting to vast swathes of the population and generally Jack McConnell and Henry McLeish levels of inept to get to where we are now, because in the absence of a language issue Aragon or Andalucia style politics would be the normal destination post-devolution.

What gets spoken in Methil isn't fluent Scots, but a jumbled up mix of Scots and English. Transianka (?) is the Belarus phrase for that sort of thing. Lukashenko sometimes goes full Buchan fermer mode on television in addresses to the nation. No SNP politician has ever done that because Scots is way too far gone to be the rocket fuel for nationalism. Belarus still has some Belarusian language newspapers and schools alongside Russian ones. We have nothing like that even with the SNP in power. Our elite ditched Scots 400 years ago, so Gaelic gets latched onto instead even though it had a status similar to Saami in medieval Norway in a Scottish context pre-Union of the Crowns.

In terms of a monthly fee it would be under 2 quid per inhabitant per month and this is a number that will no doubt have been generously inflated to fit the preferred narrative. Meanwhile Netflix costs...

Really? The Andalusian/Aragonese scenario of mainstream parties of the larger state still dominant with nationalist/regionalist parties in the 10-30% range was where Scotland was politically as recently as 20 years ago and where Donald Dewar and co very much expected it to remain post-devolution. The d'Hondt system was supposed to make an SNP majority impossible. Scotland doesn't have a language issue to fuel nationalism the way Catalonia does. Even anti-nationalist and all around Soviet nostalgist Alexander Lukashenko sometimes makes speeches in Belarusian (his mother tongue given he grew up on a collective farm) whenever Vlad is pissing him off over oil and gas prices. How often does Nicola S make speeches in Scots and would she even be able to string a complete sentence together if she tried? Scotland is like Aragon in having its medieval era state language almost extinct bar a few fermers in remote areas in terms of being spoken fluently and habitually and in having it completely marginalised as the language of instruction in schools rather than normalised and co-official like Catalan.

The irony is I get lots of grief about being a Mason Boyne or William Ulsterman type on here despite being a pro-devolution secular humanist, while people who are actually in the Orange Order (won't name names) don't wind up having various independence obsessed mouth breathers stalking them from thread to thread complete with red dotting frenzies. Labour and the Lib Dems had ten years in coalition to figure out what to actually do with devolution and failed dismally. Jack McConnell and the East Fife player who was so forgettable I am struggling to remember his name, Henry McLeish got there in the end, actually look talented compared to what Labour have now. Didn't have to be that way, if the Westminster parties could adjust to federal style politics. Scotland could have been more like Andalucia or Aragon rather than Catalonia, if the Scottish angle could have been effectively catered to. All a more shrill style of anti-Holyrood Unionism probably does at this point is help the SNP finish the job, because competing nationalisms feed off each other.

I'm arguing that the sum is actually chickenfeed in the larger scheme of things and not worth getting excited about unless you have an axe to grind about devolution for other reasons.

20 quid each per year for the population of Scotland. Anyone taken in by this line of thinking should consider how easy they find it to spend that sort of sum. The SNP's centralist tendencies in a Scottish context have actually streamlined a lot of state institution administration compared to how things used to be when Westminster ran the show under the Scottish Office. Police Scotland replacing eight separate constabularies all with their own Chief Constable, for example.

They are the Vox to Douglas Ross's Partido Popular type posture. Their analysis is that the only way to defeat the SNP is to collapse Holyrood and turn things back to pre-1997, because the existance of Holyrood is what put the wind into the SNP's sails in a big way in the first place. In Spain even though Madrid bitterly opposed the indepdence referendum the mainstream big two Tory and Labour equivalents both still favour keeping Catalan autonomy intact, which means there is highly likely to still be a pro-independence government in Barcelona on an ongoing basis and an ongoing constitutional tension. Putting a few politicians in jail and forcing others to be in exile wasn't enough of a backlash for the Vox types who hanker after simpler Francoist times a bit like how a lot of UKIP types still hanker after the Empire. The irony is that all this mob and any George Galloway leftist splinter group probably succeed in doing under d'Hondt is put a significant portion of pro-Union votes out of play on the regional list calculation making it easier for the SNP to achieve an outright majority at Holyrood with under 50% of the vote.