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Charles Bannerman

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Everything posted by Charles Bannerman

  1. Could you shout that a bit louder Jock?
  2. The reluctant, bizarre, short term conclusion at least has to be that Trump is good for your pension fund. Overnight the Asian markets have gained more than they previously lost and Europe has opened higher again. It will be interesting to see what the Dow does later.
  3. Interestingly, despite predictions of instant financial carnage, which did happen earlier in the Far East, the Dow closed substantially up 1.40%, the FTSE 1.00% and the DAX 1.56%.
  4. Not too many will remember this, but when Ronald Reagan was elected on 1980 at a particularly tense period of the Cold War, all was doom and despondency but he ended up winning that Cold War. Trump is several degrees of roastership removed from this, but we may yet be pleasantly surprised.
  5. How stupid of me, Davie, not to appreciate that, uniquely in the world, Scotland DOESN'T have a large cohort of life's less fortunate who are currently expressing their general pissedoffness by espousing maverick causes and thereby, for the moment, converting them into an unfortunate mainstream. But indeed, to return to the USA. Thos nation has guaranteed world peace for the last 75 years, travelled to the moon and amassed an unprecedented number of Nobel Laureates but has now, via inflicting on the planet the invasion of Grenada, the bombing of Libya, American Football and McDonalds, descended even further to the depths of placing us at the mercy of Donald John Trump. Think about it - had his mother's family not decided to emigrate, his half-clone might instead have been standing for Provost of Stornoway on a ticket of banning mosques, declaring Sabbath football a capital offence and sowing a minefield to separate off the Catholic Southern Isles.
  6. So let me get this straight. Other places have naturally dodgy boltholes for politically illiterate cranks but not Scotland. Instead we have the squeaky clean, cuddly SNP. The only difference between the SNP and other crank political movements benefiting from the current global brainstorm is that, unlike Trump, UKIP, the French Front National etc, the SNP claims to be a left rather than a right wing pressure group. It expediently made the transition some years ago when it realised that, in Scotland, left wingery was more likely to assist its sole objective. Nothing to do with ideology - this was pure, cynical political opportunism but it still doesn't detract from well established historical parallels.
  7. I certainly agree with all of the above, but it must be added that what has led to the election of Donald Trump is the very same passing phase of social lunacy throughout the West which has also led the politically illiterate towards kneejerk support for various other crank causes such as UKIP and the SNP. Were it not for this kind of political behaviour, which also manifested itself post-recession/depression in the 1930s, roasters of this kind would never have progressed past their natural status of comedy minorities.
  8. I hereby formally launch the NAME THE BREXNATS campaign! No, not quite all 400,000 SNP voters who chose Leave but the 5 SNP MSPs in addition to Alex Neil who dared to defy Party Central and had an original thought of their own hence also contributing to defying the myth that June 23 was an affront to the whole of Scotland. We deserve to be told!!
  9. In 1997 the Labour Party, desperate for electability, volunteered to open a Westminster Branch Office in Edinburgh to look after some of the local stuff which, in recent years, those running the Branch Office have signally failed to do. The big ticket items like Defence, Foreign Policy and the Constitution were not farmed out in this way. That is why the SNP had to get permission to hold the 2014 referendum and that is why they will again require the same permission should they ever manage to incite enough grievance and unhappiness to make it seem worth the risk to them. The Branch Office has NO locus in terms of constitutional matters. It therefore appears that any approval of any change by elected members would be done at HQ, with no input either appropriate or necessary from any group of people tasked with local administration of hospitals, police, schools etc. It's interesting, though, that an EU thread should again drift in the direction of the separation issue. Interesting but hardly surprising given that, since the Euroreferendum result, the SNP - scenting the potential for another gripe - have spontaneously transformed themselves from being simply "pro-EU in the hope of a split vote" to full blown, frothing at the mouth, Junckeresque Euro-obsessives, desperate to throw any vestige of sovereignty in the direction of Brusssels. This is despite perhaps 300-400,000 SNP voters actually having voted Leave and also despite only a 67.2% turnout, which hardly suggests that the Scottish electorate is remotely as *rsed either way as the SNP now claims to be. After all, only 41% of the Scottish electorate cared enough about Remaining to bother to go and vote to do so. On the other hand, it emerges today that SNP former Cabinet Secretary Alex Neil was not among them. He has now revealed that, contrary to the edict of Party Central, he voted Leave and he claims that other SNP MSPs did likewise.
  10. I wonder how many of them would be left to provide their families and chums with well paid lackey posts if Theresa May were to call a General Election off the back of today's judgement? I mean, surely even many of your most diehard SNP voters must be able to see what a complete spectacle they have made of Scotland on the big stage. On the other hand, if most of them did get back, that might actually make a bit of a case for separation because if the Scottish electorate were to be capable of being as making the same utterly stupid mistake twice in a row, the UK might be well rid.
  11. No it ain't. The constitution is a reserved matter and, just as you chaps need permission to hold your second visit to the bookies with the money you lost in 2014, (to which end you are getting so artificially pumped up with Brexitrage), the sovereign entity after the event is also the Westminster parliament. By the same token, you wouldn't expect any proposed closure of Fort George to be vetoed by Holyrood because neither is defence a devolved matter. (Mind you the irony there is that a lot more than Fort George would need to be closed in the face of the pitiful armed forces that a separate Scotland would have, but let's not be party poopers for Drew Hendry's latest grievance against Westminster.) So the bottom line is that if one Westminster sanctioned referendum has been judged to require Westminster Parliamentary approval, then (if it ever received sanction at all , never mind ended up on the Dark Side) so should another one by the same token.
  12. Before the referendum, I don't think too many people expected a Leave vote in something that David Cameron was basically doing to appease his Eurosceptic wing so there probably didn't seem to be any compelling need. It would now also be interesting to see whether this judgement would act as a legal precedent in the event of any future Scottish referendum also going the way of The Dark Side? As a result, between one thing and another, it leaves an interesting choice for the Nats. As rabid Europhiles (albeit largely and recently converted by expediency), do they support the judgement? Or are they privately bricking it that this could rob them of their current whinge and at the same time create a possible legal precedent for the future? "Scotsman speak with forked tongue!"
  13. I found myself standing beside Daisy in a taxi queue late one Saturday night some weeks ago. He was going in the same direction as I was so we shared. By now Daisy is bound to have been inducted into the Kinlochbervie Hall Of Fame alongside his venerable dad Lachie. That Inverness Cup Final at Grant St (5-2 v Ross County) in December 1995 was Daisy's finest hour. Iain Stewart got MoM for a hat trick but it was Daisy's day. Usual stuff... the head went down and Daisy charged off down the left wing to stunning effect. Daisy was a stalwart of what I call "the early Pele period" when Caley Thistle, slightly belatedly, got on its feet and began to succeed for the first time. We used to have a standing joke in the press box in these days. Any time a Kinlochbervie fish lorry went along the A9 during the game the call would be: "come on Pele... get Daisy subbed off. His lift is here."
  14. That will be the FM output you'll be getting with the blocked football on Medium Wave. Tonight it seems to be the relatively unusual hybrid format of live commentary from Ross County v Celtic plus Open All Mics-like interventions from the other games. Presumably on Saturdays when the football is on both FM frequencies and Medium Wave as well, the blocked diaspora get no Radio Scotland at all - or do you get Off The Ball when it's on air since there's no apparent reason to block it. Mmmm... maybe I could have expressed these last few words a bit better.....
  15. I have to say that I'm not aware of anyone who has been pursued to the ultimate degree by these people but have also heard other anecdotal reports that thy eventually go away if you ignore them.
  16. I hope they get back safely without breaking down and with the heads of the occupants intact.
  17. At "Killer Prices" I bet you still don't have it!
  18. I sure walked up there a few times of a morning... in an era when it was more like the top photo!
  19. I believe that's the Highland Hotel in the background. This will be a WW1 photo, or shortly after. Early in WW2, the Highland was HQ for part of the 51st Highland Division.
  20. KILLER PRICES! Gone after 50 years.
  21. The teacher to the left of IHE in the photo is Jim Selbie and to the right is Gordon Harvey who is still alive and well and cycling about Inverness.
  22. Morrisons is FAR better for parking!
  23. This is nothing to do with TK Maxx. Smart Parking are merely their anti social, objectionable neighbours. I believe they come from down Yngwie's way. The evidence of a lot of people's experience is that if you ignore them, the b******s will go away after they have sent you a couple of threatening letters purporting to be from debt collectors. The best thing TK could do is to issue a public statement totally disassociating themselves with these cowboys. Maybe Highland Council could be a bit more proactive in the public interest as well. But on the other hand Highland Council seem unable even to get that chancer in Eastgate to remove his scaffolding after about 4 years or to do anything about these "dig a hole and walk away" utility company chancers whose latest obstruction is on Culduthel Rd.
  24. Polls will inevitably swing a little about a general trend but inevitably and obviously that trend is now away from separation. We now have to wonder what will happen as people get more and more fed up of the Nats banging on about this irrelevance while Scotland's public services go ever more t*tsup on the Nats' watch.. or at least lack of it. I really do wonder how many pairs of tartan knickers Nicola has now bricked at having to appease Lodge Disloyal Mel Gibson 1314 on the one hand but at the cost of thoroughly p!ssing off the mass of sensible voters out there who just want decent schools for their kids, to sleep safe in their beds at night and their grannies to see a GP in less than a month. And that's a wonderful Catch 22 type point in DD's second paragraph! In fact, in general, the Nats are pinning their hopes on Brexit but in turn, Brexit makes a separate Scotland even more unworkable than it was in the first place. I believe that support for having a second vote also stands at about 39%...hardly a "mandate"! The Inverness Courier online poll on this has been quite hilarious. For weeks it sat around 30% in favour of another go and was steadily dropping through 28 when the issue of Referendum 2 went very public. Overnight - and clearly as a result of a spontaneous orgy of Cybernattery - this jumped to 61% but ever since, has been dropping back again and currently says 55% as a more representative slice of the electorate again begin to dilute that Cybernatic distortion.
  25. Another realistic and down to earth post from DD and I'll choose the three points above from a number of very valid ones. "Conversation about independence"? Of course they've been having one!..... among their own members and supporters at the likes of their party conference and that lunatic message board I spoke about yesterday. That way they only have to listen to what they want to hear because they have absolutely no answers to any sensible questions that may be put to them from outwith. I have seen absolutely no evidence at all of any face to face public "conversation" by way of SNP supporters chapping on doors or stopping people in the streets or holding the promised Town Hall meetings. I will continue to live in hope because I REALLY want to discuss this issue with SNP supporters. As for the EU vote, the SNP need to get a grip and understand that Scotland is simply a region of Britain - which voted to leave. Certain areas of it didn't, others did. If the SNP feel so strongly about the "disenfranchisement" of constitutional non-entities (please note the hyphen) then why didn't they start whingeing about independence for Glasgow and Dundee after September 2014? Bring it down to an individual level. I didn't vote for Drew Hendry or for Feckless Fergus, but I still have them as my MP/MSP. I suspect in their sad delusional state, the SNP do actually BELIEVE that they care what is best for Scotland - simply because they are utterly incapable of separating Saltire waving Party from State.... which is always a very dangerous delusion on the part of a Nationalist party.
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