Saturday's SNP demo: A Scottish homage to Catalonia or a tartan Clochemerle?

Last weekend almost a hundred thousand folk took to the streets of Scotland to celebrate Team GB. It was a demonstration of affection and pride in our athletes who contributed so much to the success of Team GB at London 2012.

Nobody organised buses for them and there were no political parties urging their supporters to attend, nor twitter or facebook campaigns to whip up support: just normal Scots demonstrating their appreciation for the athletes of Team GB.

So, you would imagine that with all their resources and their boasts about the slickness and efficiency of their digital campaigning the SNP will be able to match these numbers at their demonstration in Edinburgh this weekend.

In fact, if the SNP are to breathe life into their moribund Yes campaign then it's critical that they do exactly that. However, as Saturday approaches the organisers are beginning to realise that the numbers at their celebration of separation - dubbed GirnStock by nat-watchers - are going to fall well short of those who came out to support Team GB.

However, it is not just the lack of numbers which is giving the nats a headache; it is the pressure of ensuring that those who do turn up manage to subdue their more outre prejudices and whackjob conspiracy theories and behave themselves - 'Scottish Not British' banners and anti-English chants will sink them and the SNP highheidyins know it.

Already, the SNP have demanded that a small group of tartan trots with a taste for flag-burning and armed insurrection stay at home. However, for every excommunicated wild-eyed trot there are scores of SNP members who will quite cheerfully describe the union flag as a butcher's apron and declare their hatred of all things British: shamefully, that goes for plenty of SNP MSPs too.

And that should be a worry for them.

The SNP should be very concerned that their planned family-friendly day of fun and tartan celebrities on Saturday could very quickly degenerate into a demonstration of all that is bad with nationalism: bitterness, bigotry and blind prejudice.

So far the SNP have successfully gagged their lunatic fringe - but for how much longer can the nats rely on the silence of their bams?

Don Salmondo and his soft shoe shuffle

Proof that there's a shit-storm heading towards the NHS in Scotland came today when Nicola Sturgeon - wee Salmond's golden girl -  was moved out of Health to take control of the SNP's stalled and discredited campaign for separation. And in a move right out of The Godfather Wee Salmond's one time rival, Alex Neil, was handed the health brief. "Keep your friends close but your enemies closer" whispered Don Salmondo.

Make no mistake, having this job can seriously damage your political health. Poor wee Alex Neil, one of the more entertaining pantomime dames at Holyrood really should have noticed the smoke billowing out of the health brief and as for that ominous ticking sound...now it's only a matter of time before we hear that Alex Neil is sleeping with the fishes. 

And moving quickly along from political whack jobs to out and out whackjobs; what about poor wee Johnny Swinney on Newsnicht last night?

 Reduced to stuttering bluster and lying through his teeth when asked to explain why, if independence was the solution to all Scotland's woes, didn't he want the referendum to be held sooner. 

This is the man who the nats want to have responsibility for a separate Scotland's finances: somebody who  looks like a constipated rabbit caught in the headlights when asked a question he can't answer and and who blurts out lies when he gets flustered. 

Good choice, Bravehearts!

The Olympics and the Nouveaux Brits of the SNP.

It's not the fact that they've spent the last few years whining, girning and greeting about it which makes the SNP's new found enthusiasm for the London Olympics so nauseating.

It's not the fact that they and their supporters have never missed the opportunity to shriek their outrage at every imagined slight on the road to the Olympics or trumpet every petty grievance which makes their new found support for it stick in the craw.

It's not the fact that they've taken almost half a million pounds from our schools and hospitals to pay for what amounts to a gang hut when they could have had accommodation for free which disgusts.

It's not even the way that they've tried to deny their antipathy to Britain. They've gone from Brit-hating butcher's apron burners to born again Nouveaux Brits without as much as an acknowledgement of this embarrassing volte face.

It's the fact that they thought nobody would notice.

It's the way they think that our heads zip up the back.

It is the total and utter contempt in which they hold the people of Scotland to arrogantly peddle this nonsense and imagine they'll get away with it.

Better Together, better campaign, better message, just plain better...

Better Together launched yesterday with the dignity, determination and a decency that you would expect from an organisation headed by Alistair Darling.

Where the SNP had a disgruntled ex-MSP and a wild-eyed trot, the Better Together campaign had representatives from across Scotland's political spectrum.  

Where the SNP had a few foreign-based luvvies telling us how much they loved Scotland, the better campaign had real Scots who actually live here telling us why they believed it was better for Scotland to remain within the UK.

Where the SNP campaign was brash, hectoring and bombastic the better campaign was understated, pragmatic and honest.

There was a handful of SNP activists milling around outside the launch of the Better Together campaign yesterday. They had a few flags and had attached some scraps of old cardboard on which they'd scrawled slogans to a fence.

All in all it was a pretty unimpressive and uninspiring 
demonstration from a campaign which has already stalled and is now mutating into an ill-tempered, negative blame-fest.

Three crows and you're out....

With less than a week to go before the launch of the multi-party, broad-based campaign against separation it appears that the SNP have pretty much thrown in the towel.

We've already seen them give up any pretence of having an independent currency, monarchy, monetary policy, fiscal policy, defence policy, energy policy and foreign policy.

The SNP front organisation, 'Oh, yes please', has stalled with the Greens jumping ship and Margo giving it a wide berth leaving the narrow campaign with just the swivel-eyed loons of the SNP and the wild-eyed trots, splitters, entryists, opportunists and deluded dreamers of  the Peoples Front of Alba (Foxist-Leninist) supporting it.

If that wasn't bad enough, in the last week we've seen the SNP go from a would be latter-day William Wallace to a two-faced Caledonian Peter denying everything in which they once believed:

Independence? Don't mention that word warns a SNP psycho-babble expert.

Nationalist? Don't call me that, bleats the SNP campaign director.

"British?" Shriek those who used to sneer at the  'butcher's apron', "You'll still be British and you'll still live in the UK".


So many denials, it's enough to break your braveheart.

And this is BEFORE the Yes UK campaign even launches...

It's not so much the sound of a cock crowing which follows the SNP these days, it's the cluck cluck clucking  of a chicken...

Blinkin' 'Eck! Not such a sterling effort after all...

It started off with Nicola Sturgeon repeating the ludicrous assertion that a separate Scotland would be able to nominate a representative to sit on the Bank of England's MPC and continued today at FMQs with wee Salmond claiming that a separate Scotland would have the same kind of relationship with the Bank of England as the UK.

Are these people really this ignorant?

The Bank of England have already made their position absolutely clear: It is not for the Bank Of England to decide on the conditions of allowing a separate Scotland to use sterling - it will be up to the UK Parliament.

Apparently Lord Coe is still waiting for an apology from SNP campaign chief, Angus Robertson MP,  for smearing him on twitter and the separatist campaign's wabsite is already discredited with its multiple false members and signatories on top of their fraudulent claims that every person who follows them on twitter are supporters.

The  campaign to break up Britain, which started with a whimper, has ground to a halt in a quagmire of misinformation, myth and dodgy, discredited websites...

Wee Salmond's campaign is turning into the longest car crash in British political history...

Four foreigners and a trot...

Holy Moly fatman, your historic launch of your historic campaign wasn't exactly the historically most important historical event in our history.

It was more a bunch of foreign-based actors telling us that Scotland's biggest problem was ....foreign-based folk meddling in our affairs.

The SNP had an American citizen flown in from New York to lecture us on how to vote in an election that he, as a US-based American citizen, has no right to vote in.

There were also a few minor policitcal figures muttering about how things were in their day and a swivel-eyed trot who promised us that separation will deliver a Socialist Republic of Scotland.

The two Tams didn't show up - one wasn't invited and the other couldn't be trusted not to behave like a tartan Prince Philip... however, a fax purporting to come from Shir Sean was read out by a luvvie who loved Scotland so much that he moved away.

Then a couple of guys sang a sentimental song about Scotland.

You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh in their stupid faces...