Know Who Your Friends Are

I thought it was a spoof at first until I read it myself but the list of donors to Better Together should be published as an ironic joke book (The Bumper Book of Greasy Palms). Is it too late for Christmas?

Its mixture of Bertie Woosters and rapacious financiers and bankers, dodgy military types and corporate traitors should be available on my Kindle under Humour any day now. You only have to add in the Ian Taylor money linked to Vitol to complete the picture of a miniscule moneyed elite up to all sorts of dubious activities sanctimoniously bleating about the threat to our mighty country. The threat is surely to their money and status and that’s what this ragbag of grotesques are really worried about. This is vested-interest Britain doing what it does best, stuffing dirty fivers in an envelope to defeat the people. “Can you fix it for me, governor? Know what I mean?” Then drop a bundle in his Lucy Locket. Sorted.

I was one of those who prickled at suggestions after the Radical Scotland conference claim that the No’s were the rich Yes were the poor. On this evidence I’m wrong. No is funded by the wealthy, the greedy, the seedy and the undemocratic. I loved the statement from Donald Houston who more or less own Ardnamurchan, an iconic peninsula in our country’s history. It’s the location of Castle Tioram, symbol of windswept resistance, which was burned down deliberately by the Macdonalds in 1715 to prevent it falling again into British Hanovarian hands. Sadly Donald is made of softer stuff. “We have spent 300 years building up a Union between our countries that has achieved so much”, he says. You can almost hear his incomprehension.  It certainly has achieved much for him since he can afford to give £100,000 and half a million via his companies. The killer line though is: “I hope that other people in the same position as myself are also willing to contribute whatever they can.” I’m sure that Labour voters all over Scotland with their 50,000 acre estates and castle hotels, deer herds and distilleries will even now be calling their broker to sell some blue chip shares  in the morning and release some readies. “Maybe convert it into dollars at the preferential rate, Rupert. Now excuse me, I’ve a Food Bank to open with Johann.”

There’s is inevitably a stockbroker in there (with £200,000) as befits this squalid self-interested cartel of Brit-nats, and he’s a major Tory donor (over £1m, joining Ian Taylor as another one of Labour’s new social democratic friends). Apparently this individual ignored warnings about the activities of Nick Leeson while at Barings Bank where Leeson lost over £800m. Better Together should feel really comfortable in such typically Unionist company.

One of the big donors is Alan Savage of a recruitment company, adding £150,000 to his previous £100,000. (Is he getting nervous?) He already has plans to move his business out of the country if there’s a Yes vote. Now there’s the kind of patriotism that made Britain what it is today.  “If I don’t get my way, I’m leaving.” To be honest, Alan, while I feel for you employees, you’re exactly the kind of corporate cut-throat  we don’t want in our new country. Anybody so devoid of patriotism and care for his own people that he would ditch it to save a few quid, I don’t regard as a proper Scotsman let alone an individual with personal dignity. I think there will be new Scottish companies and others from elsewhere who will have the foresight and the business balls to back Scotland. You have given me yet another reason for voting Yes. I do truly hope you have wasted your money. (What does Labour make of the fact that all the big donors are Tory donors? Comfortable, Johann? What about the unions…happy with your new pals, comrades?)

Then there is the “private intelligence company” owner, a former solider who may or may not be involved in spying. Could you get a more pantomime bunch of self-serving nincompoops with more money than sense? Only if you were remaking the Wild Geese with cartoon business types and land owners bankrolling a dodgy enterprise in a foreign country with rich mineral assets led by ex military types without scruples. Oh, hang on…that really is it. This is a plot to land an expeditionary force and take over control of Scottish assets with an elite squad of cigar-chomping marines bursting into Holyrood and spraying them with lead.

Well, maybe not. But if you’d told me two years ago that our constitutional debate would involved Labour getting into bed with this motley crew of millionaires and military cowboys, I wouldn’t have believed it. Whoever wins next year, the battle honours of Scottish Labour, once the proud vanguard of the working Scot, will be hung for ever with the names of these carpetbaggers and charlatans to whom the working class are mere commodities.

PS Blair McDougall is going into psychosis mode believing his own propaganda. “Alex Salmond has shown he is willing to spend hundreds and thousands of pounds of taxpayers money on propaganda for his campaign”, he says. Who’s paying for the 30 reports of the British Government and parliamentary reports of every single Committee at Westminster and the Secretary of State’s department, I wonder?