AN EMAIL FROM NORTHERN SCOTLAND:

Blogger Dave Terron is a distinguished British soldier and I felt honoured to receive the following email from him about the Scottish/English rivalry that I noted in my Christmas-day post. And, given the Scottish passion for celebrating the new year, it feels very right to start off with a link to Scotland on New Year's Eve.

"Na diobair caraid's a charraid (Forsake not a friend in the fray).

The population of Scotland overall has some 20% English or of English extraction. Nearly one in five are English and they are the biggest 'minority' in Scotland. There are MSPs such as Mark (Muppet) Ballard of the Green (Muppets) Party who are English and most of the main government posts in the executive and Holyrood are held by English people. In fact were you to come to the Highlands you would find that the population of people in Moray is 17,6% English which does NOT include the two big RAF airbases. Why? Because many of the English come here on posting and love the quality of life so much that they stay once they finish with the RAF or other government jobs. They are fully integrated and intermarried with some very interesting results in terms of local accent I can tell you! A mix of Yorkshire Aberdeen Lancashire Cockney and Scouse I think....

The problem with the so called 'coldness' towards the English is (a) more to do with the dependency culture here in Scotland or rather in the Central Belt where 1 in 5 are on sickness benefits or welfare of some sort despite there being thousands of jobs remaining to be filled. The increase in immigration is aimed at filling those posts that the Scots will not fill...and (b) the stupidity of Scottish politicians who persist in telling the Scottish people that when things go wrong it is not the Scots parliament's fault it is Westminster. Indeed whenever there is a hint of a problem the Holyrood mob send the problem to Westminster and then claim that their hands are tied....see here for details or on my blog.

Scotland's 'native' population is falling because most of the bright young things are seeing that the Central Belt idle fat voters are being cuddled and given money to get fatter so long as they waddle down to the voting station when required to vote for a continuance in the Labour welfare state and their beer money. In the Highlands we see no investment, fewer jobs and everything is aimed at the Central Belt fat idle etc.

Were you to come to Inverness you would get a much warmer welcome than in downtown Falkirk if you were English. Australians? We canna understand 'em and we don't have a decent Rugby team either. But our cricket team did take part in the World Cup a few years back!

In summary: Yes. Anti English feelings do exist in Scotland but tend to be from fat idle etc in central belt and self serving scum (oops I meant politicians) who are trying to divert attention away from their failures -- e.g. we had a Liberal Democrat minister in the Scottish Parliament who called the Chairman of the Confederation of British Industry an English twit to distract from his own failure to sort out Scottish industry. One grovelling apology later and that minister now looks after fish.

I served 23 years with a Scottish Highland regiment and not once did any of the Jocks slag me off for being English. Not once. But when I served with a Lowland regiment for a year (I was drafted in to sort them out as their discipline had collapsed) boy, did I get the mutterings behind the old back. It was more of a blame the English because we will not admit we are at fault for having such an inferiority complex type thing. I was glad to get home to my Highlanders!

I think anti-English chat is rare and only gets prominence because some people want to distract from the bigger picture; Scotland is becoming less Scottish as the cultural things such as the music, dress and the regiments are slowly whittled away. Its an EU plot damm their eyes!"

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SWEDEN AND THE TSUNAMI

There were a lot of Swedish tourists in the fleshpots of Thailand when the Tsunami hit so the following is an interesting email received yesterday from one of my correspondents in Sweden:

"The Swedish government has made a total a*** of itself. Within a day of the size of the problem becoming known, the travel agents here organised something like 6 extra aircraft to begin shuttling stranded tourists and the less badly hurt home to Sweden/Scandinavia. The government, in contrast, took until today to begin organising an airlift of the significant number of seriously wounded citizens who can't be transported on the regular aircraft. They also did not/have not yet asked for help from such countries as Australia (we did get the obligatory shot of an Australian airforce Hercules transport in Indonesia). So, private companies acting with no profit motive have quickly responded to a major catastrophe on the other side of the world while the government of the people sits on its hands and does nothing. Hmmm, how do these burks get voted in again? I suspect the deeper problem is that the government *can't* quickly respond to such incidents despite their claims. Sweden is busy laying off its armed forces, where I guess quickly activated medical teams and aircraft are traditionally located, so they have been caught with their pants down. As for why they didn't ask for help from Australia or the US? That is a curly one, a cynic would suggest pride in not asking the dreaded Anglo-aggressors for help. There really is no other reason I can imagine. Granted, Australia may be stretched already and the US -- well, we get no information about that -- although I know at least one naval group is in the area to help. The point I think was that the Swedes didn't even ask"

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ELSEWHERE

PID summarizes about all you can reasonably say about the tsunami. Beyond Wallacia seems to be keeping up with the Australian and Indonesian news about the aftermath.

European hatred of Microsoft: "Yesterday?s antitrust ruling against Microsoft by a European Union court sends a troubling message about the future of competition and innovation in Europe and around the world. The penalties imposed on the company threaten to chill investment in new technologies and impose billion of dollars of costs on European consumers and independent software developers. In addition to a fine of $665 million, Microsoft will be forced to separate its Windows Media Player from its operating system and disclose parts of its internal software code for server applications to other companies. While these changes in the company's software and intellectual property protections will impose huge costs on the IT industry and its customers, the alleged benefits of the ruling is far from clear."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with holiday reading for all.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here

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That power only, not principles, is what matters to Leftists is perfectly shown by the Kerry campaign. They put up a man whose policies seemed to be 99% the same as George Bush's even though the Left have previously disagreed violently with those policies. "Whatever it takes" is their rule.

Leftists are phonies. For most of them all that they want is to sound good. They don't care about doing good. That's why they do so much harm. They don't really care what the results of their policies are as long as they are seen as having good intentions.

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