Lord Dunderheid

In the past few weeks we have seen, due to the murder of George Floyd by US police officers, the creation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This has resulted in demonstrations in many countries around the world and the destruction of statues celebrating many historical figures who gained their wealth in the slave trade. I have no problem with this protest movement as I fully support it’s general aims - although I do feel that the destruction of statues is not beneficial or helpful in achieving those aims.. There are those, however, who do object to the BLM protests and they have come up with their own slogan - All Lives Matter. I can’t object to this slogan, either but those making it are either deliberately missing the point or doing so without realising that they are doing so. As some in the BLM movement have pointed out, “Yes, all lives matter but that cannot come about until black lives matter”. People of colour (and all non-whites) must be a subset of ‘all’ and if black li...

It is with some disquiet (understatement) that I find myself agreeing with the words of both Donald Trump and ex Tory health minister Jeremy Hunt. Trump recently attacked the WHO for it’s poor, early response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I feel he has some justification in doing so. I feel, however, that he should not have done so when he did as we are at a point where the whole world needs to pull together to defeat this virus. He also said he was going to stop the US funding of the WHO because of it’s response. This, for the same reason, was also a mistake. In addition to that, he was not seeking to change things anyway - he was simply trying to deflect criticism away from his own, also very poor, response to the pandemic. My agreement with Hunt is based on his recent attack on the scientific, medical advice provided to the UK government via SAGE (the group of medical experts set up for this purpose). It is becoming clearer and clearer that this advice was seriously flawed and that th...

I am not one to wish death, or even harm, on anyone (exceptions, if I’d been alive at the time, being Stalin, Hitler and Franco etc., with, later, the likes of Pol Pot) but I am starting to reconsider this view in relation to Donald Trump. This man is not just a moron, he is, in my view, a dangerous moron and a cretin. While now seemingly supporting much of the US lockdown measure he’s, at the same time, encouraging the mass protests against this. Then he seems to suggest that injecting disinfectant (or swallowing some), or getting bathed in UV light, will kill the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, in minutes. The lack of the man’s intelligence and basic scientific knowledge is staggering - and potentially lethal. Having eventually realised the enormity of his error (in this) he then tries to say he was being sarcastic: he simply cannot admit to any mistakes he might have made, by action or by words. I fail to see the sarcasm - flippancy at best. But even if he was being flippant (un...

It’s been a breath of fresh air, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to see the political parties put aside their differences to work together in dealing with the situation. This was going fine until (no surprise) a Tory, Jackson Carlaw, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, decided to break the pact. Mr Carlaw decided to try and make political gain out of the situation by suggesting that Scottish independence was now exposed as a non-starter as it was the financial strength of the UK that was helping Scotland fight the virus and the deaths it was causing. I hope the SNP do not reply to this until the virus has been defeated. At the same time, I am not the SNP so I’ll take this opportunity to debunk Carlaw’s claims. An independent Scottish government would have had it’s own resources and reserves to fight this battle and not need financial support from the UK treasury. Indeed, without having to pay for the support of nuclear weapons, an independent Scottish government might well have had mor...

Last week we had the (almost) hysterical spectacle of Michael Gove, in the House of Commons, calling the SNP the Scottish Nationalist Party - when it is actually called the Scottish NATIONAL Party. Several SNP MPs immediately corrected him by calling out "national, national".  Instead of retracting his error, Gove went on attack and insisted they were nationalists - in what was clearly intended to be an insult. Does Gove not recognise the irony (or maybe the hypocrisy) of his words? I suspect he was fully aware but that this was just another example of a politician twisting facts to suit a personal and political point.  As a leading light of the pro Brexit movement, Gove was a major figure in what was the UK nationalist movement (or, more accurately, the English and Welsh nationalist movement). To accuse the SNP of being nationalists, in such a derogatory way, is pretty rich given that his nationalism is far deeper than the SNP's! To be clear, this...

With Brexit day almost upon us I feel I should explain why I voted to leave - and why I now regret doing so. The first thing to say is that I did not vote to leave to escape the free movement of people, as required by the single market. I was not being racist in my outlook. I was happy that the UK, or Scotland if independent, paid for access to the single market and continued to work within the rules of free movement. I assumed we’d be joining EFTA or coming to a similar agreement with the EU as the other EFTA countries have done. I should have realised, given the attitudes being expressed south of the border, that the UK, on the whole, was going to aim for as complete a break from the EU as possible. This included getting out of both the single market and the customs union. I was happy to escape the customs union as I very much dislike the CAP and the CFP but I was also happy to pay for access to the single market and retain the free movement of people. But the main reason I voted to ...