[ad_1]
We’ve been off for a little break in the country, and as far as we can tell we’ve missed absolutely nothing in the moribund world of Scottish politics. We did, however, arrive back just in time for something mildly interesting, or at least revealing.
It’s the latest episode of a new podcast by veteran Scottish political journalist and broadcaster Bernard Ponsonby and jobbing opinion columnist Alex Massie, inventively titled The Ponsonby And Massie Podcast.
The first 35 minutes or so weren’t very noteworthy, other than the curious omission – when predicting the makeup of the next Scottish Government – of the idea of a Labour-SNP coalition, which to this site remains by far the most practical and logical outcome of the 2026 Holyrood election.
But then things got a little feisty.
We highly recommend watching the whole 11-minute segment we’ve extracted above, because if nothing else it showcases two prominent members of the Scottish political media – both capable of thoughtful insight – at their best and worst respectively.
Freed from the constraints of truncated and superficial TV soundbites, Ponsonby is magisterially impressive – meticulous, serious, persistent and fair – while Massie’s decision to bring a flippant, triumphalist, and frankly imperialist sneer to the debate seems a bad misjudgement by comparison.
Massie repeatedly says out loud what only the most rabid Yoons of social media are normally prepared to utter – that Scotland is a prisoner nation with no fundamental right of self-determination without the permission of the rest of the UK:
“It can never be permissible for one part of a state to have a unilateral right to hold a referendum on secession without the approval of the national parliament […] The dismemberment of the United Kingdom is clearly – and the law agrees with me here, happily – a reserved matter.”
But what Massie dismisses, with the arrogant chortle of a feudal landowner refusing his serfs a living wage, is what Article 1 of the UN Charter clearly and unambiguously states is not only permissible, but in fact one of the founding principles of modern civilisation as we know it.
Scots are a people, and are plainly not in possession of “self-determination” if their preferred constitutional arrangements depend upon the permission of another people (or peoples).
In most countries of the world, if one party to a marriage wants a divorce, a divorce happens, whether the other party wishes it to or not – and indeed even if they consider it a “dismemberment” of the marriage – and the likes of Alex Massie tend quite rightly to regard the few states which do not hold to that rule as examples of deeply un-British barbarism, and simply not cricket.
But we won’t walk you through every line, because we’ve put the whole video up there for you to see for yourself. Both of the men in it, in free and unmoderated conversation, have given us a glimpse of their real characters (and indeed their true self-perceived nationalities), and that glimpse not only reflects very considerably better on one than the other, but tells us a lot about the state of Scotland’s political media in general, and the inferiority of its current generation to its preceding one.
[ad_2]
Source link
