Never mind the fifty other countries - can Campbell even name ONE other country which is witnessing a crime against humanity as grave as the one Netanyahu is inflicting on the people of Gaza?

A few days ago, I posted my detailed response to Stuart "Stew" Campbell's blogpost 'Anatomy of a Lunatic', in which he had set out the latest radical revision of his ever-changing set of reasons for insisting that everyone must vote against the SNP on the list ballot next year.  (I'm the person he's referring to as a "lunatic", by the way, in case anyone is worrying he's been overdoing the tough love for Andy Ellis again.)  The main point I made was that it was quite simply incredible that anyone could keep a straight face at Stew's sudden decision to self-identify as an 'opponent of tactical voting on the list' while he continued to make all of the stock arguments in favour of tactical voting on the list and demanding that people must do it - in fact he said they would be "idiots" if they didn't.  It's rather akin to saying "I just think some ethnic groups are inferior, and I like dressing up in paramilitary uniforms and giving Roman-style salutes to our great leader, so what part of 'I am not a fascist' do you not understand?"

Stew has now posted his own reply of sorts - it's pretty threadbare, but it looks like this is all there's going to be...

Oh my lord. It took him NINETEEN DAYS in the end, he wrote THREE THOUSAND words about it, and yet still didn't even come close to *understanding* a single thing in my post, let alone address all his demented lies that it detailed. https://t.co/4ffbWja9qm pic.twitter.com/7L2ru5Znhc

— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) July 12, 2025

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Stew's heart just doesn't seem to be in it anymore.  He's barely even trying.  What you see above is the rough equivalent of Rowan Atkinson in The Curse of Fatal Death answering every inconvenient question with "I'll explain later".  Presumably we're supposed to infer that if we were all as intelligent as Stew, we'd understand why it's perfectly possible to rabidly push the case for tactical voting on the list while somehow being a resolute opponent of tactical voting on the list.  But as we're too stupid to understand, that's on us and not on him.  Explanations would be futile.  He exists on a higher plane of understanding and that's all there is to it.

Well, I don't know about you but I'm convinced.  Perhaps he could direct his great wisdom towards answering a question on another topic, though.  He angrily told us a few weeks ago that no-one should have the arrogance to pollute his Sacred Gaze with images of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip, because such an act is to invite him to care about the genocide more than he does about Sandie Peggie and NHS Fife, which would be an offence against nature given that what Netanyahu is doing is entirely routine and humdrum, and no worse than what is going on in "fifty other countries" right now.  For the uninitiated, there are fewer than 200 UN member states, so Stew was basically claiming that horrors on a par with Gaza are going in about one-quarter of the world's countries.

I took him to task about that claim at the time, because even leaving aside the issue of genocide, I could only find a handful of current conflicts with a death toll comparable to Gaza's, and with only a handful of countries involved in those conflicts - certainly nothing even close to 50.  But since then, the situation in Gaza has worsened further, and Israel has inched closer to implementing its own "Final Solution to the Palestinian Problem", which is a kind of hybrid between the Nazis' Final Solution and their earlier aborted scheme to deport Europe's entire Jewish population to Madagascar.  It seems that the population of Gaza will be herded into a concentration camp - dubbed a "humanitarian city" in suitably Orwellian terms, which is something Stew should be highly sensitive to given his repeated professions of admiration for Nighteen Eighty-Four.  Anyone who stays on the ouside will be assumed to be Hamas and will be slaughtered, while those on the inside will not be allowed to leave unless they accept expulsion to a foreign country.  The ethnic cleansing of Gaza will then be complete, and the territory will be ready for annexation and usage as Lebensraum for Israeli settlers.

Never mind the fifty other countries, Stew - can you name even one other country in which a crime against humanity of this gravity is occurring?  Because frankly I can't. 

Viva España! YouGov poll shows massive Spanish support for an independent Scotland rejoining the EU - exploding the hoary old myth of a Spanish veto

The estimable Mr Wheecher on the previous thread drew my attention to the latest Eurotrack poll from YouGov, which was mainly about attitudes in both Britain and the continent towards the idea of the UK rejoining the European Union, but also has a question tacked on about attitudes to Scotland rejoining the EU as an independent country.

If Scotland voted for independence from the rest of the UK and asked to join the European Union, would you support or oppose allowing it to do so?

Respondents in France:

Support: 63%

Oppose: 13%

Respondents in Germany:

Support: 68%

Oppose: 10%

Respondents in Denmark:

Support: 75%

Oppose: 6%

Respondents in Spain:

Support: 65%

Oppose: 13%

Respondents in Italy:

Support: 64%

Oppose: 11%

Is this just an unremarkable result, because EU countries tend to take an attitude of "the more the merrier" to the accession of new member states?  Well, not necessarily - there would be plenty of opposition to Turkey joining, and I suspect there might also be some ambivalence to a few specific eastern European countries, such as perhaps Albania or Georgia.  One of the many eccentric hobby-horses of Alba's expelled Expeller-in-Chief Chris McEleny is that the EU should bar its doors to eastern European countries like Georgia and start admitting North African countries instead.  (In which case why is it called the European Union, Chris?!)

What leaps out the most, of course, is that the result in Spain is bang in line with all of the other countries, which doesn't lend much support to the age-old unionist scare story that Spain would veto an independent Scotland's EU membership to prevent Catalonia and the Basque Country from getting any ideas.  OK, it's the Spanish government rather than the Spanish people that would be making the decision, but the idea of a veto never made much sense anyway - even the former right-wing Spanish government pointed out that if Scotland ever got to the point of applying for EU membership, that would mean the UK had recognised its independence, and thus the situation wouldn't be comparable to Catalonia because the Spanish constitution forbids the recognition of a Catalan state.  The latter bit is democratically indefensible, but it does mean Scotland is highly unlikely to ever suffer because of Spain's domestic politics.  Remember that Spain did not veto the EU accession of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which were all part of the Soviet Union until 1991.  It did not veto the accession of Croatia and Slovenia, which were both part of Yugoslavia until 1991.  And it did not veto the accession of the Czech Republic (now called Czechia) and Slovakia, which were both part of Czechoslovakia until 1992.

Incidentally, in the British sample (which of course is roughly 85% comprised of residents of England), there is a plurality in favour of allowing Scotland to rejoin the EU if it wishes, but it's much lower than in the continental countries -

Respondents in Great Britain:

Support: 46%

Oppose: 32%

Presumably this lower support reflects a deep-seated resentment against Scotland in certain quarters of the English public - ie. 'why should those whinging wretches be given anything?', etc, etc.  Curious, isn't it, that unionists tell us that our most natural partner for a political union is the country that arguably dislikes us the most.

The poll's main questions give the lie to any notion that there is a realistic path to the UK as a whole rejoining the EU.  On the face of it, there is overwhelming support among the British public for EU membership, but the follow-up question about whether Britain should be allowed to resume its former opt-outs shows an even bigger majority in favour of the opt-outs - which I suspect will be interpreted in European capitals as meaning that any resurgence in pro-Europeanism in England is only skin-deep, and that if the UK ever rejoined, the campaign to leave again would start on day one.  There's hardly going to be much enthusiasm on the continent for putting Europe through that kind of torture all over again.

Among the five continental countries polled by YouGov, only Denmark is in favour of allowing Britain to rejoin on the basis of its previous opt-outs - which makes perfect sense, because Denmark has its own bespoke opt-outs, negotiated after the 1992 Maastricht referendum.

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