When your Chicken Tikka Masala tastes a bit municipal swimming pool, you'll know it's the taste of #Brexit freedom.

Remembering Alasdair Gray as I’ll always remember him on what would have been his 91st birthday - surrounded by his own art and pissing himself laughing.

Born in Riddrie on this day in December 1934, Alasdair Gray became one of Scotland’s most visionary writers and artists, his words and images continue to shape our civic life. We honour his enduring legacy & are proud to continue to champion his legacy and creative spirit ❤️

Boxing Day is so named to commemorate the day Noddy Holder gets put away into cryogenic storage again for another eleven months.

In Scotland, Christmas Day only became a public holiday in 1958 and Boxing Day in 1974. blog.historicenvironment.scot/2016/12/time...

The UK Conservative Party’s official Christmas card, 1938. blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archivesandm...

France just jailed its former president for illegally funding his 2007 presidential campaign. news.sky.com/story/too-la...

"Jewber" was right there...

As Professor Dorling of Oxford University put it when it was introduced “[The Scottish Child Payment] basically means that no child in Scotland should go cold or hungry by this Christmas. It’s a remarkable story and the second remarkable story is how it hasn’t been reported.” #MediaTumbleweed

A research project from the Universities of York, Glasgow and the LSE has found “statistically significant reductions in both child material deprivation and food insecurity relative to England, after the introduction of the Scottish Child Payment.” www.lse.ac.uk/news/depriva...

A vote for Reform is a vote to be ruled by the same old corrupt, incompetent arseholes you voted out in disgust last time.

Labour: abolishing the House of Lords since 1910. www.gov.uk/government/n...

I still stand by this, with the proviso that "whatever remains of the Conservative Party" will already have joined Reform.

There are two categories of Reform supporter: millionaires and fuckwits. Check your bank balance to discover the one to which you belong. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Malcolm Offord of "Vote No Borders" infamy was also a vocal advocate of Leave during the #Brexit referendum. Parachuted into the HoL by Johnson on the unquestionably democratic pretext of making extremely generous donations to the Tory Party. Snakes gonna snake. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"...on top of 91 prisoners freed by mistake between April and October in England & Wales." Imagine the Scottish Prison Service mistakenly released 103 prisoners. Imagine the newspaper front pages. Imagine Reporting Scotland. Imagine Newsnight. Imagine Scotland Today. Imagine Call Kaye.

Happy #StAndrewsDay, troops.

This will drive all the right people bananas. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If a person is working full-time and has to be on Universal Credit, then the "benefits scrounger" is their employer.

Perhaps they could also have their teeth checked for any gold fillings. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

It was during the 1984-85 miners' strike that I first began to regard the BBC as an arm of the state. I've seen little to change my opinion since.

Reminder that Tim Davie, who's just resigned as BBC Director-General, stood in an election for the Tories in Hammersmith, was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party and in 2020 spent his first day in the job visiting BBC Scotland in Glasgow.

A proposal to require property developers to include at least one “swift brick” in every new home to save swifts, house martins, sparrows, and starlings - all of which are in rapid decline - at a mere cost of £35 per building has been rejected by UK Labour. naturalworldfund.com/labour-block...

“We do not want an independent Scotland because we dislike the English, but because we want separation from that Union of financial, military and monarchic establishments calling itself Great Britain.” —Alasdair Gray, “Independence: An Argument for Home Rule”, 2014.

If you believe in human rights but you don't believe they apply to everyone, then what you actually believe in is privilege. bsky.app/profile/urc....

Bloody foreigners, coming over here, saving our lives. www.lbc.co.uk/article/trai...

Take a look at this graph. It should be a rocket up our collective arses. It's time we took independence a lot more seriously than we are doing. Per capita, Scotland is as rich as Europe but leaks more wealth than sub-Saharan Africa. www.thenational.scot/politics/255...

When you hear, "new information has emerged in recent times..." from a former royal press officer you know it actually means, "what the royals have known in full for years and which was so damaging they paid £12m to suppress it, is now coming into the public domain."

Wee factoid: the name “Mountbatten” was adopted on 14 July 1917, three days before the British royal family changed its name to “Windsor”, by members of the Battenberg family residing in the UK, due to rising anti-German sentiment during World War I. The name is a direct Anglicisation.

Since Scotland voted No, energy costs have increased by about £3,000.

BMA Scotland welcomes £531m deal with Scottish Government - the largest investment in core GP services in Scotland to date - as a ‘significant step in the right direction’ to stabilise and rebuild general practice. I'm sure Reporting Scotland will be all over this. www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi...

A wee nugget here regarding Dounreay which may have slipped under the radar: "The full decontamination of the site is expected to take *more than 300 years*" 12 generations. I wonder if they'll have "allowed" us another independence referendum by then. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

One of the most blatant lies I can remember from BBC Scotland (and that's saying something.) Basically a copy/paste of a Scottish Tory press release. The actual figure involved was £23,000 over 3 years. The BBC has added wages that would be paid whether the staff involved were in Turkey or not.

Royal protection officers routinely give codenames to those they’re looking after. The late Queen was known as ‘Purple One’, for example, while Prince Philip was referred to as ‘The Greek’. Prince Andrew's codename was ‘The Cunt’. www.express.co.uk/news/royal/2...

I seem to remember that the Yanks made a huge fuss about this when the Brits did it in 1814.

Only a couple of decades ago, similar lines were spewed out by representatives of the National Front and British National Party for which they were, rightly, castigated from all sides. Now it's become normalised. How far the UK has fallen. bsky.app/profile/theg...

Films: We need to hack a keycard, obtained by seducing one of the guards. We then need to drop in from the skylight after jumping from a plane, and dodge all of the lasers and traps, carefully switching the jewels for fakes that weigh the same to avoid tripping the alarm. Real life:

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Well, it's been more than three years now. I guess that debate on the future of the monarchy we were told would have to wait until the queen died isn't happening.

Fixed that for you, @AP

The Nonce and Future King.

Oh, the grand old Duke of York, He had 12 million quid. He gave it to someone he’d never met, For something he never did.

The Royal Family has - for two decades, at every stage of these shabby, squalid, dishonourable proceedings - protected, covered up, and ultimately paid for Andrew Windsor's behaviour. His disgrace is their disgrace. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv...

Apparently they were promised an away ticket allocation for the match in Birmingham 5,000 years ago. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

“They’re arrogant. They think they can get away with it and they think they have an entitlement, and they carry on regardless. They sail on.” Andrew is not the biggest problem. The monarch, his family and allies and the system are. archive.is/mctTa

Do you *really* want this gurning neo-fascist as your Prime Minister, Scotland? Time to go. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...

"The latent genius of the great engineers and thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment still exists in our community today. To be found and to flourish, all it really needs is belief." An upbeat, encouraging article from Professor Mark Logan OBE FRSE. www.heraldscotland.com/business_hq/...

The UK Labour Government will allow the Welsh Labour Government to decide where the Welsh share of the so-called 'Shared Prosperity Fund' is spent. In contrast, the Scottish Government is bypassed. Spend in Scotland is dictated by Westminster. Union of equals, my arse. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"Britain’s departure from the EU in the time of Trump, and Britain’s consequent unqualified dependence on the United States in an era when the US is heading straight down the road to institutional racism and neo-fascism, is an unmitigated clusterfuck bar none." - John le Carré

Abdicate? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...