EdinburghEye Alternative

Ice cream, you scream, we all scream

This was first posted on Facebook on 11th April 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Any flaws in formatting are due to WordPress now requiring all bloggers to use their dreadful “Block” editor, which they call Gutenberg to indicate that they have taken us back 650 years in functionality. While Boris Johnson claims blandly to have been invited to Prince Philip’s private family funeral but…

Vote Of Nasty Conservatives

This was first posted on Facebook on 23rd March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. A few things that occur to me after listening to the no-confidence vote debate in the Scottish Parliament this afternoon. (Video at link: it took less than an hour.) Continue reading

Immigrants get the job done: the Hamilton Report

This was first posted on Facebook on 22nd March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. (James Hamilton is not an immigrant, but I regret to say I couldn’t resist the quote.) The question for the independent investigator, QC James Hamilton, who was Director of Public Prosecutions for the Republic of Ireland (1999-2011) and in 2010, President of the International Association of Prosecutors, and…

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill

This was first posted on Facebook on 16th March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. I listened to the Second Reading debate on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill on Monday evening and tonight, and I noted that four points were consistently being made by the obedient Tory MPs: Gypsy, Roma, and Irish Travellers are bad and dirty and we need legislation to take action against their…

Census 2021: a legal, hateful, victory

This was first posted on Facebook on 9th March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Scotland decided to put off the Census til next year, because of coronavirus: the England & Wales Office of National Statistics decided to go ahead (as did the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency). ONS decided this year to encourage people to do the census online by preference – and to do a soft…

This was first posted on Facebook on 6th March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. “…well, imagine a person standing on a block of ice, planning and planning and planning. Planning ways to get about on the ice, ways to decorate it, ways to divide it up, ways to cope with all the possible knowns and givens of a block of ice. That would be a busy person, provident and industrious and…

Nicola Sturgeon: Eight Hours

This was first posted on Facebook on  3rd March 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Nicola Sturgeon has spent all day today at the Scottish Parliament in the large committee room, giving her evidence to the committee investigating the harassment process. The committee meeting began at 9am. They stopped for a mid-morning break, a lunchtime break that lasted less than an hour, and a…

This was first posted on Facebook on 27th February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. The Scottish Parliament has been in existence since 1999: Nicola Sturgeon is the present First Minister, and there are five previous First Ministers, four living, as Donald Dewar died within the first 12 months. The other four are Henry McLeish (now 72), Labour: Jim Wallace (now 66), LibDem – who was…

This was first posted on Facebook on 15th January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Richard Leonard, the leader of Scottish Labour, resigned today: his deputy, Jackie Baillie, will take over to lead Scottish Labour to inevitable defeat in the May 2021 Holyrood elections. To recap, for those not familar in detail with recent Scottish history: we had an independence referendum in November…

The Alex Salmond of Despair

This was first posted on Facebook on 24th February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. TW: sexual harassment at work. Let me see if I can very briefly bring light to this. In some ways, it seems entirely unimportant – the last-ditch struggle of an ambitious man who sees his political legacy disappearing – and in other ways, it could affect Scottish politics for years to come. Continue…

A Portpatrick-Larne Tunnel, Hurrah

This was first posted on Facebook on 13th February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. On a Saturday where 43 Republican Senators decided that it didn’t matter how much Donald Trump was obviously guilty of inciting armed insurrectionists to storm the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power for which the US used to be famous, it may seem inappropriately banal to talk about Boris…

The neo-Troubles and media manipulation

This was first posted on Facebook on 3rd February 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. The most complicating factor in figuring out what might happen in Northern Ireland over the next few weeks or months, is that Boris Johnson is a chronic liar, and yet neither mainstream media nor his ministers nor his MPs seem able to say so. We can note what Boris Johnson says. But we know, from past…

Article 16: EU vaccine panic

This was first posted on Facebook on 29th January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. The 2021 news is going to be about vaccine supply. All governments want as many of their people as possible to get vaccinated, as fast as reasonably possible. The UK got vaccine approval pushed through early, before we lost the emergency provisions available to us through the EU: the EU countries were able…

Looking at independence through Brexit

This was first posted on Facebook on 25th January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Twenty-five days ago Brexit happened, and a few days ago I listened to a Byline news video of a fisherman talking about his vote for Leave, his support for Leave, and his subsequent disllusionment – How he had been lied to about the grand possibilities of Brexit – How if he could turn back time, he would…

Who’s not happy Trump is gone?

This was first posted on Facebook on 21st January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. In conversation with a friend on the phone the other night, I noted that even though 70 million Americans voted for Trump, this doesn’t mean he has 70 million supporters. (It’s still a dreadful number, but, even so.) Donald Trump left the White House just after dawn yesterday for a big military send-off as…

Brexit has no benefits

This was first posted on Facebook on 20th January 2021, with support from my Ko-Fi network. Brexit has no benefits. Two days ago, a fleet of lorries, employed in the pre-Brexit days to transport live shellfish from Scotland to buyers in the EU, travelled to London to protest the effects of Brexit on the fishing industry. Brexiters had told the fishing industry that leaving the EU would mean an…

This was first posted on Facebook on 31st December 2020, with support from my Ko-Fi network. At 11pm tonight, the UK leaves the transition period in which we enjoyed the benefits of still being part of the EU: we have Brexit. The consequences of this kind of deliberate economic self-harm are impossible to fully predict, since no one has ever done this before, and in this post, I don’t intend to…