Common Weal

[Tutankhamen]

3 hours ago, pandarilla said:

I don't think mcalpine is constantly bitching about the snp leadership. Yes he'd like them to engage more with left wing policies but he's clearly trying to get those policies out there at all levels of the party.

This new campaign i linked to is very much a grass-roots one.

Is it comrade dick or just ya dick?

[O'Kelly Isley III]

Laughing at (with?) this post. Fair play I can't disagree with much of it. A few mates of mine were taught by Stuart Waiton at Abertay, as if they hadn't suffered enough.

Waiton's continued presence in the Glasgow Herald could be the catalyst for me ceasing to buy it. That and the growing number of right-wing columnists with their unremitting stream of prejudice masquerading as fact.

[renton]

4 hours ago, pandarilla said:

I don't think mcalpine is constantly bitching about the snp leadership. Yes he'd like them to engage more with left wing policies but he's clearly trying to get those policies out there at all levels of the party.

This new campaign i linked to is very much a grass-roots one.

Well not quite, McAlpine has hardly been missing the wall in his last few tirades against Nicola Sturgeon. At one point he implied that Sturgeon was a useful idiot for the Unionist 

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

9 hours ago, invergowrie arab said:

I used to chuck them a fiver a month. i thought they had a part to play post Indyref and they have done some some good work like the early work around the National Investment Bank. I never quite got why they didnt throw their lot in with the Greens other than they would be a part of a party machine and not controlling it.

I eventually got pissed off with them for 2 reasons. McAlpine and Commonspace. 

McAlpine, and a good few others like Shafi etc seem to be constantly annoyed that the SNP wont adopt policies that are wildly unpopular with the SNPs own membership and the wider electorate. Scotland seem to be full of these people like Lesley Riddoch who are "in" politics and have really strong views on what the SNP should do but wont actually join.

Personally I find MacAlpine thin skinned and with a massive ego but that''s by the by. 

Commonspace was the killer though. Haggerty managed to f**k off two of the best young jn Michael Gray and Robert Somyne and replace them with university socialist society bellends like Clark, Jamieson and Bell. Haggerty herself never had an original or fully thought through opinion in her life. Her editorship of commonspace was a disaster. They went through a phase of being a kind of libertarian platform so were giving columns to the likes of Stuart Waiton, pro-child smackers  and TERFs.  I felt a bit sorry for her with the whole Sunday Herald thing, it was obvious from the get go they were running it down by putting her in charge.

They have had a hilarious New Labour style rebrand into the dullest most generic website you have ever seen and it is now basically a blog for Shafi and MacAlpine https://sourcenews.scot/  I think this suits MacAlpine as he likes to issue pronouncements rather than be challenged on anything he says. Thats why he left Twitter

They seem to operate in this really weird space in politics where they want to be seen as completely woke and yet share the same space as the UDI / usethemandate zomers

Anyway - I'm sure on the whole they are no harm but if I was looking for a left/green use of my time and money I would be punting it to the Green Party.

 

Having been at Glasgow as the same time as Gray, I don't see the distinction. A trully unsavoury character 

[invergowrie arab]

1 hour ago, Genuine Hibs Fan said:

Having been at Glasgow as the same time as Gray, I don't see the distinction. A trully unsavoury character 

Yeah he is a bit of a strange one but I think he is a genuinely good journalist.

[pandarilla]

I fucking love lesley riddoch.

Basically anyone that gets on the mainstream telly and is remotely left wing is good in my book. Maybe we should all be a bit less picky.

[Tutankhamen]

6 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

I fucking love lesley riddoch.

Basically anyone that gets on the mainstream telly and is remotely left wing is good in my book. Maybe we should all be a bit less picky.

She's a class act.

ya dick

Edited May 12, 2020 by Tutankhamen
Eff the SFA

[The_Kincardine]

4 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

I fucking love lesley riddoch.

Basically anyone that gets on the mainstream telly and is remotely left wing is good in my book. Maybe we should all be a bit less picky.

Question to you, Pandy.

Do want Scotland to be independent (whatever its politics)  or do you want to live in a socialistic state?

[Genuine Hibs Fan]

8 hours ago, invergowrie arab said:

Yeah he is a bit of a strange one but I think he is a genuinely good journalist.

Tbh my opinion is probably coloured by one specific incident. I shouldn't go into it too much but suffice to say there was a flat party, one of my best friends was naked and in floods of tears, and a certain someone locked himself in her bedroom and jumped out the window when challenged about his behaviour 

[pandarilla]

Question to you, Pandy.
Do want Scotland to be independent (whatever its politics)  or do you want to live in a socialistic state?

I want both.

Over the years I've realised that i have almost no connection with Britain (maybe a slight touch every 4 years at the Olympics but that is genuinely it). I am a Scottish man, and i want to be led by a Scottish parliament. A real one.

Britishness changed under thatcher. Any sense of a working class connection was destroyed, and since then money and greed has dominated.

I want a much more socialist society, one that cares for the most vulnerable, and puts self interest and greed at the bottom of the priority list. The fact that Scotland is much more likely to see that than the uk is all the more reason to campaign for independence.

I'm under no illusions that there are plenty of tories in Scotland. But they're not going to be a majority (anytime soon). I think they're also a slightly less poisonous version of tory than in the south. They're more small c Conservative, and i can respect that.

My dad was a big part of the trade union movement that grew stronger after the war. He is a communist, campaigned for the Labour Party, and had no time for Scottish nationalists back then. But even he's realised that the future of any socialist change is with independence.

[AUFC90]

I'm not a socialist but still want independence. Whatever party that runs Scotland afterwards will be voted by everyone in Scotland and will do what benefits Scotland first and foremost. If they don't they'll be booted out by everyone that lives here too Not hoping that 30 million people in another country do it for us.

In control of our own destiny has to better than this ? Surely to f**k ?

I genuinely don't understand the unionist position and this is someone who started as a no voter in the first place.

 

Get this union in the bin.

 

 

[NotThePars]

1 hour ago, pandarilla said:

Britishness changed under thatcher. Any sense of a working class connection was destroyed, and since then money and greed has dominated.

I want a much more socialist society, one that cares for the most vulnerable, and puts self interest and greed at the bottom of the priority list. The fact that Scotland is much more likely to see that than the uk is all the more reason to campaign for independence.

I think the SNP, and independence, have both benefitted immensely from the collapse of the welfare state across the UK and Labour's inability to meaningfully defend it. I've read, listened to, and engaged in enough discussions about the Act of Union, the Jacobites or William Wallace as catalysts for Scottish nationalism but I don't think any of the traditional myth-making moments have enough power combined as Thatcher's neoliberal turn has in galvanising the movement for Scottish independence.

Re the latter part I've quoted. I haven't seen anything since 2014, and maybe with a more critical eye to pre-2014, that suggests Scotland is going to become a socialist society but the collapse of Corbynism - and the level and range of opposition involved in destroying it - just highlights how fucked and right-wing the UK as a state is.

[pandarilla]

I think the SNP, and independence, have both benefitted immensely from the collapse of the welfare state across the UK and Labour's inability to meaningfully defend it. I've read, listened to, and engaged in enough discussions about the Act of Union, the Jacobites or William Wallace as catalysts for Scottish nationalism but I don't think any of the traditional myth-making moments have enough power combined as Thatcher's neoliberal turn has in galvanising the movement for Scottish independence.
Re the latter part I've quoted. I haven't seen anything since 2014, and maybe with a more critical eye to pre-2014, that suggests Scotland is going to become a socialist society but the collapse of Corbynism - and the level and range of opposition involved in destroying it - just highlights how fucked and right-wing the UK as a state is.

We're going to be slightly more left wing than whatever Westminster throws up, surely?

I agree, i can't see us meeting my hope for a socialist state. But it'll be a whole lot better than those who currently hold the power and the purse strings.

(the snp have to tread a difficult path at the moment, to avoid scaring the horses. I understand that, but it's frustrating)

[cdhafc1874]

They should try engaging positively with the grassroots of the party then , the ones who make policy, the ones who rightly or wrongly overwhelmingly backed the Growth Commission recommendations, instead of constantly whining about Sturgeon and Swinney then.

The latest episode of the SNP CWG completely fucking off the YSI and Stuart McDonald is another example of them being about stunt and protest.

People seem constantly surprised that the SNP are political party who need to win elections by appealing to a broad base of people rather than being a radical campaigning and protest vehicle.

I don't think anyone in the SNP would deny a thumping win at Holyrood and then getting over the line in the next Indyref is the plan.

As i said no issue whatever with CW on the whole 

A lot of folk in the SNP CWG group are people who should be in the Labour Party or the SSP but aren't cos a) 'Scottish' Labour haven't backed independence yet or b) the SSP don't do anything to serve their own personal political aspirations.

 

The YSI have a fair few roasters in their ranks also.

[ICTChris]

Saw this tweet today and was reminded there was a thread on this lot

[Crùbag]

36 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

Saw this tweet today and was reminded there was a thread on this lot
 

 

 

Saw that. Horrific.

Never liked McAlpine much but didn't realise he was this much of a dick.

 

File under: Wings, George Galloway.

[renton]

4 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Robin McAlpine going all Pope Emeritus

https://commonweal.scot/statement-board-common-weal

Should probably read "Robin was told he had to ask to step down before he sunk the whole fucking operation"

[renton]

11 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

As if anyone would notice

True enough. I actually think they do some good stuff on the technical aspects, and at least start to generate some interesting ideas occasionally.

[NotThePars]

If we’re continuing the papal theme then it’s a matter of time until McAlpine sets up as an anti-pope somewhere on Bath Street. That St Stephen Church.

[invergowrie arab]

I wonder how many people in Scotland are still drawing a living from forgotten direct debits pledged between 2012-14?