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Sunday, 8 December 2013
Monday, 11 November 2013
Friday, 8 November 2013
Saturday, 26 October 2013
Friday, 25 October 2013
Sunday, 20 October 2013
Saturday, 19 October 2013
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
Tuesday, 15 October 2013
Monday, 14 October 2013
Sunday, 13 October 2013
After Alphonse Mucha
Thursday, 10 October 2013
Monday, 7 October 2013
Thursday, 3 October 2013
Wednesday, 2 October 2013
How many more years
[Download as A4 poster / Read on Wings over Scotland]
When I was a child I was taught of a long ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea. When I grew up, I realised that the defenders where not of my country, they were of what was then my country's neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country's past, but of the past of my country's neighbour.
When I was a child, I was taught of a document, written by medieval nobility to maintain their power and limit the interference of their king. The document's concepts were difficult to understand and little but the age of the document left a lasting impression. When I grew up I realised that the document was not written by the nobility of my country, it was written by the nobility of what was then my country's neighbour. I found it hard to understand why I should have been taught such a thing, that for many hundreds of years was at best only tangentially relevant to my country.
When I was a child, I was taught of a writer, a bard of great renown, whose works inspired untold numbers around the world. The writer's words and meanings, written such a long time ago in a language I could barely understand, were difficult to interpret, yet gamely I worked on. When I grew up, I realised that the bard was not of my country, although died a decade after his country and mine were first part-joined. I wondered why the work of a writer who was not of my country should be so influential on the language that is most spoken in my country.
When I was a child, I was taught a language named after the country that neighbours my own. I never understood why the language I spoke should be named so.
As an adult, I learned of a long ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were bad men and they lost, defeated by defenders whose number was half that of the attackers. When I thought back to being a child, I felt a degree of confusion, that I should not have been taught something that was so integral to the foundation of the country in which I live.
As an adult, I learned of a document, written by medieval nobility to maintain their power and proclaim the very existence of their country. The document's concept was clear, containing an unequivocal statement of rights. When I thought back to being a child, I found it hard to understand that I should not have been taught such a strong statement of my country's nationhood and right to exist, written at a time when both were under dire threat.
As an adult, I learned of a writer, a bard of great renown, whose works inspired untold numbers around the world. The writer's words and meanings, written some time ago in a language I could barely understand, were difficult to interpret, yet gamely I read on. When I thought back to being a child, I wondered why a writer of such import to my country, was not a part of my language education and why it was he wrote in a language I was not taught.
As an adult, I learned of a language, named after the country in which I live. I was stunned to discover that it was a language in its own right, more than a mere regional dialect of the language named after my country's neighbour, to be shunned from the classroom, fit only for the uncouth of the schoolyard.
Do not get me wrong. I am glad that my education included some of the history and culture of my neighbours. To be taught naught but the history and culture of my own country would have been deeply unfortunate, parochial, demeaning. However, to have had the history and culture of my own country so thoroughly eradicated from my education was wrong.
To be denied one's history and one's culture is close to being denied one's right to exist. It is to be dominated, crushed like a rebel by a mighty empire. It may well be the case that the culture and history of my country is no longer so thoroughly excised from the education of my country's children, however it is not something of which I have any knowledge.
What I do have knowledge of, is not simply the commonly-seen ignorance of my country's worth, I also have knowledge of the equally common, and far more corrosive, denial that my country has any worth at all.
It saddens me greatly to be aware that so many of my fellow subjects have so little knowledge of their country and have so little confidence that we can run our own affairs. For a long time, through the denial of our past, through the denial of our culture, through the denial of our country's very right to exist, we have been denied all that countless numbers around the world have as their birthright.
It is time we acknowledge the worth of ourselves, as a nation and as a people, no better and no worse than so many others. We have a rich heritage and a strong culture, if only we could recognise it. We have the right to exist and we have the right to make the decisions that are best suited to our country.
It is time we stood up and recognised our worth. It is time to break from imposed ignorance. It is time to be the change.
Monday, 30 September 2013
Sunday, 29 September 2013
Wednesday, 25 September 2013
Tuesday, 24 September 2013
Monday, 23 September 2013
Sunday, 22 September 2013
Indyrally 2013
Sunday, 15 September 2013
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
Scotland says aye!
(Adapted from the Yes Edinburgh North and Leith graphic.)
Download as A4 poster.
Download as A3 poster.
T-shirts, phone cases, tote bags and much more merchandise is available with this design on it. Proceeds will go to the Yes Scotland campaign.
High priase
Has to be said, Mr @stewartbremner has the potential to be the Yes campaign's Shepard Fairey. #indyref
— Kenny Farquharson (@KennyFarq) August 27, 2013
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Monday, 12 August 2013
Say goodbye
It's just as well I don't care about sport… pic.twitter.com/yF9QD9mVSV
— Stewart Bremner (@stewartbremner) August 12, 2013
Thursday, 8 August 2013
Thursday, 25 July 2013
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Monday, 13 May 2013
You can't trust Gordon
Saturday, 11 May 2013
Indeh Kitteh want fisheh
Indeh Kitten want fisheh #indyref #yesscot #indehkitteh twitter.com/stewartbremner…
— Stewart Bremner (@stewartbremner) May 11, 2013
Thursday, 2 May 2013
Tuesday, 26 March 2013
Do you want to debate this?
Monday, 25 March 2013
Friday, 22 March 2013
Don't trust Johann
Johann Lamont, leader of the Labour Party in Scotland, supported the Iraq war in 2003.
Official Report Debate Contributions: Plenary, 16 January 2003: "The lesson that we should take from the North Korean situation is that we must act against Saddam Hussein now if he has weapons of mass destruction, as a time will come when Iraq's having such weapons will create a danger for the entire international community."
Official Report Debate Contributions: Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2013: "I believed that action needed United Nations endorsement and I was and am on record as saying that, if that endorsement had not been forthcoming, I would have voted against the war if I had been in the House of Commons. However, if I am absolutely honest, given that my argument was based not on weapons of mass destruction but on Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and what we did to the people of Iraq after the first Iraq war, I am still not certain what I would have done."
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Official Report Debate Contributions: Plenary, 16 January 2003: "The lesson that we should take from the North Korean situation is that we must act against Saddam Hussein now if he has weapons of mass destruction, as a time will come when Iraq's having such weapons will create a danger for the entire international community."
Official Report Debate Contributions: Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2013: "I believed that action needed United Nations endorsement and I was and am on record as saying that, if that endorsement had not been forthcoming, I would have voted against the war if I had been in the House of Commons. However, if I am absolutely honest, given that my argument was based not on weapons of mass destruction but on Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and what we did to the people of Iraq after the first Iraq war, I am still not certain what I would have done."
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Thursday, 21 March 2013
Monday, 25 February 2013
It is time to speak
Those feelings are something that many who believe in an independent Scotland have almost certainly encountered at some point in our lives. Up until recently I very much felt that way and to this day I am still wary of mentioning my Scottish independence yearning in some circles.
To be fair, most of us born in or around the island of Great Britain probably have that socially-conditioned reflex to Not Talk About Politics. This is something that those of us who favour independence are simply going to have to get over, in order to win the 2014 referendum. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to that guilty secret.
My own personal guilty independence secret was born in the dark decade that was ruled by a certain 'iron lady'. As a child in the '80s I was not fully conscious of the world around me, yet like all kids the world around me had an enormous impact. I grew up in a single parent family, in a council house, under Thatcher. It left indelible marks that reveal themselves in adulthood as a deep leaning towards what, apparently, is now called social democracy. I'm led to believe this is a common leaning in Scotland.
The Thatcher period also gave rise to a feeling that England is quite different from Scotland, that what England wants is often not what Scotland wants and yet Scotland has little choice but to like it or lump it.
The first time I really became aware of our lumps was when I saw a (probably) surprised grey man in a grey suit elected to continue in Thatcher's footsteps. Blair followed, of course, and while the lumps for a while had the appearance of being smaller, they clearly were not. The divorce between what Westminster was doing and what was in Scotland's best interests only grew.
By the mid-'90s, I had acquired a viewpoint that aligned roughly with that of the Green Party. This followed the return of the Scottish Parliament and, with its semi-proportional representation, for the first time in my life I was able to vote for a party that I broadly agreed with. Here was progress. I even joined the Green Party.
The Greens, even back then, were advocating independence for Scotland and it was the first time I properly considered the viability of such an idea. Previous to this, the idea of independence as far as I was aware was solely that of that tired old drum-beating group of mismatched separatists, the Scottish National Party, and their endless talk of 'our oil'. No one I knew took them seriously. They were a joke party that occasionally somehow landed a seat at Westminster.
With the return of our parliament, the SNP were no longer quite the joke they had been portrayed as. Still, as someone who grew up in a Labour-dominated area, I was suspicious of them. The Green Party, however, I could get behind and if they thought independence was good, then maybe I could give it some serious thought.
Sometimes with distance comes perspective. From late 2005 onwards, I spent nine months living on the south coast of England. I was listening to a lot of Radio 4 then and through that whole time I heard Scotland mentioned on the six o'clock news only twice. Once the country was mentioned in an item about a proposed smoking ban in England (Scotland's having been introduced a few months earlier) and the other time in a laugh-at-the-foreigners moment at the end of one broadcast, when we got to hear about how some deer had wandered onto the A9 and that the road had to be closed.
The impression I gained wasn't so much that Scotland was being dismissed, or put down (even though during a previous period working in England, I had been called a 'Jock' several times) – rather that Scotland wasn't even worth mentioning. It was an afterthought or simply even a joke. A cliché.
When I moved back to Scotland, I thought again and the more I thought and the more I read, the more independence seemed the best solution for Scotland. As a kid and then a young adult, an independent Scotland was no more than a day dream, brought on by fits of romanticising the past, or as an unreasoned reaction. Now as an adult, with full and clear rationalisation, with a care for both how people and the planet are treated, the idea of independence became a concrete belief.
When the SNP won the 2007 election, here was the beginning of a chance to rid ourselves of a distant and uncaring rule. By 2012, a second SNP government established the right to carry out a straightforward yes or no referendum on independence.
In a fair world, most of us who want independence could relax at this point and let the politicians put forward their cases and let the question be asked. Sadly, we do not live in a fair world. It has become clear to me that, as I follow the 'independence debate', both sides are not being given an equal opportunity to put forward their cases. Even that self-declared bastion of impartiality, the BBC, recently noted “…we are not in an official referendum campaign and therefore do not have to balance it out between yes and no.”
Added to this, we witness British nationalist politicians and their supporters wasting no opportunity to personally insult Scotland's First Minister, or attack its government. January even saw Scottish MP Anas Sarwar claim in a debate in the House of Commons that the Scottish Parliament was "not a democratic place" and that it was a dictatorship! Astonishingly, the claims went unchallenged and uncensured.
This suggests that the British establishment in its various forms is attempting, as it did in 1979, to snuff out Scotland's aspirations. Clearly those of us who share those aspirations cannot sit back and hope that our viewpoint will prevail. If we want to see an independent Scotland, then we all are going to have to do something to help it come about. As Margo MacDonald MSP noted last year "If a third of scots believe in independence… every one of us has got two years to persuade another one Scot and then we’re home and dry."
I've been trying to do this since hearing Margo speak in September and I will admit that it is not always easy – I'm no great debater and have a better way with the written word than the spoken. So while I am still trying to encourage three people to vote yes (two of whom I'm pretty sure I've persuaded), I put other skills to use, as well as placing as much positive information in my social media feeds as seems sensible.
Fear of change is one of the biggest obstacles we face in our task. While the Yes campaign has been doing its bit to make the change to independence seem relatively unobtrusive, the No campaign has equally been doing its utmost to stoke fears about each and every aspect of independence that it can, not least by calling it 'separation', a term so partial that it was banned from use in a debate at Westminster.
As supporters of independence, we have the job of allaying those fears. We need to put aside our impulse to Not Talk About Politics and start having conversations, with our families, our friends, our colleagues and with anyone who might be open to listening (and maybe even some of those who are not). We need to find out what fears are stopping people from seeking independence and, with a little preparation or investigation, address those fears, because there is not one fear that cannot be reasonably put to rest.
In my experience, it takes time and patience. We are at this point making a case that is opposed by our mass media and that can be hard for a lot of people to accept. However there is clear evidence that among those who do not get their news from mass media outlets, support for independence is increasing. A recent Ipsos-MORI poll showed that not only is support for independence growing in the age range of 18-24, support increased from 27% to 58%!
One on one, or in groups, we can make the change because in my experience persistence pays off. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to do all that we can to bring about independence. It is time to admit that Scottish independence is no dirty secret.
Friday, 15 February 2013
Don't trust Dave
A4 poster
Thursday, 14 February 2013
England was simply enlarged to incorporate Scotland
Sunday, 10 February 2013
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