Quote of the day 18th March 2017


"The clear lesson of the EU referendum is that while policy matters, economic evidence is not enough.
 
To win a referendum, economics must be matched by emotion, and statistics must be matched by sentiment.

This is doubly important in a post-trust environment – of facts and “alternative facts”. The nationalists’ cry this time will be less “devo max” and more “grievo max”: seeking to entrench a sense of “us and them”, to amplify difference and to use the Brexit vote to conflate the people of England with the politics of the Tories and Ukip.

My sense of Britishness is no more defined by Nigel Farage and Ukip than my sense of Scottishness is defined by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.

I am proud to be Scottish and proud to be British – and to share what we have with our neighbours on these islands.

My Scotland embraces the idea of solidarity and the inspiration of John Smith – and stretches from Gregory’s Girl to the work of J K Rowling.

My Britain is the country of the BBC and the NHS – and stretches from Robert Burns’s “A Man’s a Man” to William Blake’s “Jerusalem”.

There are millions of Scots who still refuse to make the divisive choice between being Scottish and being British, who still believe in solidarity, in sharing and in interdependence."


(Douglas Alexander, extract from a New Statesman article called "Why sentiment, not statistics, will sway the next Scottish referendum"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nick Herbert on his visit to flood hit areas of Cumbria

Please note that the post below was published more than ten year ago on 21st November 2009 Nick Herbert MP, shadow cabinet member for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, was in Cumbria this morning to see the areas affected by the flooding. He writes on Conservative Home about his visit. Here is an extract. I’ve been in Cumbria today to see the areas affected by the floods. I arrived early in Keswick where I met officials from the Environment Agency. Although the river levels had fallen considerably and homes were no longer flooded, the damage to homes had been done. And the water which had got into houses wasn’t just from the river – it was foul water which had risen from the drains. I talked to fire crews who were pumping flood water back into the river, and discovered that they were from Tyne & Wear and Lancashire. They had been called in at an hours’ notice and had been working on the scene ever since, staying at a local hotel. You cannot fail to be impressed by the
Read more

Quotes of the day 19th August 2020

Image
"Wise men profit more from fools than fools from wise men; for the wise men shun the mistakes of fools, but fools do not imitate the successes of the wise."  ( Cato the Elder , who lived 234 BC - 149 BC, quoted in "Lives" by Plutarch.) There is a similar saying by Germany's Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck: Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put the same saying in a more humorous form: "Wise men profit by the mistakes of others, while fools will not learn even from their own blunders." See also this thread on the "Quote Investigator" website . Let us all be wise and learn from the events of the last few days.
Read more

Quote of the day 24th July 2020

I was moved to put the passage below forward as a quote today when I saw a horrible post on twitter from someone writing that it was "excellent" that someone who took a different view from her about Brexit had died. I won't write which way round it was so that all the Remain supporters can assume the post was from a Brexit fanatic welcoming the death of a remainer and all the Leavers can assume it was a Remainiac welcoming one less Brexiteer. There's been plenty of nasty stuff on both sides but if you catch anyone of your own viewpoint  posting something like that who might listen to you, please do call them out on it - and point out that they're giving everyone on your side of the argument a bad name. Anyway, here's the quote from John Donne.
Read more