200 more reasons to vote YES

Scottish-Referendum

Eclectic is scarcely adequate to describe the motley crew of celebrities, who were undoubtedly recruited by some bright, young Downing St sage and asked to tell the people of Scotland of their undying affection for the place and its people. A principal organiser was historian and TV presenter, Dan Snow; he will certainly love the land since his father-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, owns a sizeable chunk of it.  If there is a common link in this disparate group, it is the unlikelihood of bumping into any one of them at a food bank near you.

Among the signatories, urging Scots to vote NO, was General Sir Mike Jackson, former Chief of the  General Staff ,  the highest position in the British Army.The most controversial point of his tenure as CGS was the restructuring of the batallion system and amalgamation of many of them into larger ones, leading to the loss of historic regiment names, particularly in Scotland. There was fury throughout the country at this crude, clinical dismantling which ignored historical nuances and strong family ties to ancient regiments.

This is not his first association with vexatious fiction. As the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday revealed,   26 year old Captain Mike Jackson  was present as an adjutant in Derry on Bloody Sunday and was the sole author of the notorious ‘shot list’, a tissue of lies, which maligned the reputations of innocent victims for nearly 40 years. Irish journalist and authority on the events of Bloody Sunday, Eamonn McCann, believes that Saville baulked at attributing some responsibility for the massacre to Jackson because of his  later pre-eminence in the Army. It remains inexplicable to many how blame was apportioned to Jackson’s commander and to the men under him but not to the adjutant in the middle

His chuzpah recognises no bounds and his signature on this letter is but another example of it. He was interviewed on TV when Ratko Mladiç, the Serb Commander,  was captured and sent to the Hague for trial. “Mladiç had no respect for the rules of war,” explained Jackson in cut glass tones through non-ironic lips.

For fifteen hours on the 18th September, the future of this country will be in our hands, an awesome responsibility. In making a decision, we will want carefully to weigh the opinions and advice of those whom  we respect.  I suspect, quite rightly,  that the views of these celebrities will be  dismissed totally as empty and irrelevant .

It’s a matter of trust, really.

1 Comment
  1. John – brilliant dismantling of the empty vessels which the Better Together (Do they think an independent Scotland will saw itself off and float into the North Sea?) has assembled and banged loudly. As for Jackson – you couldn’t make something like that up. No, not someone – something. I hope with all my heart the Scottish people have the courage and wisdom to know that grown-up countries attend to their own affairs rather than allow the next-door neighbour do it for them. As Alex Salmond said: this is our chance – take it.

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