With All Due Respect

Can someone please explain to me what is so "respected" about Sir George Matthewson, and why? What do you have to do to be held in contempt?

Still, he might be some sort of sleeper agent, in there to create a situation whereby another twenty per cent of HBOS has to be nationalised, to match the sixty per cent of RBS.

Tellingly enough, the only politician whom the BBC could find to defend this bid was the semi-detached SNP hardliner, Alex Neil MSP, not someone who would ordinarily be granted national or international coverage by Radio Four, not least because his view on something like this, at least, would ordinarily be articulated by Alex Salmond. But not today.

Glenrothes was a dreadful night for the SNP, which basically means for Salmond, who was already in trouble after the banking crisis had illustrated his (and his party's only real purpose's) having been overtaken by the march of history. Salmond seems to have gone to ground. Jim Sillars is all over the place, arguing that the decision to park independence in some future referendum is the cause of the woe, and that the Nationalists should instead bang on about nothing else. "Then people would vote for us", as Tony Benn used to say, and as those posting Far Right comments on the Tory blogs say today. And now, Alex Neil is presented, even on Radio Four, as the bespoke voice of Nationalism on the great issues of the day.

Lord Salmond KT is finished. And with him the SNP, a very recent phenomenon as a major force, and really only a product of the aberrant 1980s drift of Labour and the Tories to their own respective, essentially entryist, extremes. As great tracts of the Scottish economy have to be run by a largely Scottish central government, so Scotland is returning to the normative political culture of Great Britain, a culture of which she was an integral and entirely normal part until not even a full generation ago.

Which can only do good to ordinary people there. With the middle-class, right-wing Nationalist nomenklatura discredited (or just ignored) beyond the SNP, and supplanted within it by the unelectable monomaniacs, there might be the end of the cry of "Scotland is different! Scotland is special" from those who always wish to increase yet further their wealth and power as the people best able to present themselves as embodying the soul of one part or another of the United Kingdom, past or present.

In this case, Scotland. But it applies all round: the public schools, Oxbridge, the English Bar, and the upper echelons of the Church of England; the Scottish Bar and academocracy, which latter includes the upper echelons of the Church of Scotland; the entirely bilingual Welsh-speaking elite; Ian Paisley or Martin Maguiness; and indeed the entirely bilingual Irish-speaking elite within the professions in the Irish Republic (and increasingly within Northern Ireland as well).

The class oppression inherent in the definition of the ecclesiastical, legal and educational systems as the untouchable essence of Scottishness, though with no corresponding suggestion about their English equivalents, is startling evident from the lack of any right to trial by jury in Scots Law, although that would be perfectly simple to remedy by statute. As would be any lack of a right of appeal to the Supreme Court, if there must be such a thing, once its justices were appointed for fixed terms and subject to parliamentary approval. Among many, many other things.

Well, not any more.

Or, at least, not necessarily.

Gordon, riding high as you now are on both sides of the Border, it's over to you.