GYPSY ROSE

There’s a lovely bit of Tory double-standards kicking about this week. First up…

You’ve got to love Evil Michael Howard (as we like to call him) who’s got a penchant for the press moment.

Howard’s “seven-point plan clamping down on illegal gypsy camps” is nice an simple. But the plan says nothing about how to address the problem of a lack of sites in the first place. That little problem couldn’t date back to 1994 when the Conservatives abolished the obligation on local authorities to provide travellers' sites could it? Wait a minute, who was Home Secretary back in those days? Hee hee, yeah, you guessed it was our old friend Evil Michael Howard?

Secondly what a load of BROCK COCK. Earlier this week, we profiled the strange right-wing world of the Sunday Times, and the barking bard Allan Brown. It might well become regular feature. Now Jason Allardyce gives full exposure to the ramblings of another Tory failure Norman Lamont who reckons that devolution has
fostered extreme nationalism and anti-English hatred and turned Scotland into a “strange land”. No doubt about the strangeness Normski but the rest of it is a crock isn’t it?

As the Times has it: “The former Conservative chancellor, who was born in the Shetland Islands, claims there has been a marked rise in anti-English racism since 1999. He believes this has resulted in a backlash south of the border that threatens the future of the union.

Lamont’s intervention follows claims made by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC Newnight presenter who claimed that the people of England are being forced to live under “a Scottish Raj”.

Shetlander Lamont laments: “What strikes me is that this sort of feeling in Ireland, where I go a bit, has diminished whereas in Scotland it seems, if anything, to have increased,” he said. “I am not a great enthusiast for devolution, to put it mildly, but I thought that maybe with devolution this would diminish. I don’t think it has."

How sad.

Lamont says he visits Scotland once or twice a year and claims to notice a deterioration every time. “I am Scottish, I feel Scottish and I think of myself as Scottish but every time I come to Scotland I think this place is becoming stranger.” Read the full article here.

Poor old Brocky! We say people like Lamont and Michael should be welcomed with open arms…