I have had an association with Glasgow since I was a kid. I first went there in the mid-1980s after a family break on the Ayrshire coast. I went again during the summer of 1990 on a school trip which I, as a Sixth Former, had been invited to join as a mentor for First Year pupils. It was in my late teens that I decided to follow in my paternal grandfather’s footsteps and become a follower of Rangers FC. By the time I had returned to Yorkshire in the early 1990s, I had become a season ticket holder and I remained so for several years. Eventually, when I realised the only people who really profit from football devotion are the players themselves, I called it a day. However, I still take an interest in the goings-on at Ibrox, with a wardrobe of no less than three Rangers jerseys from various historical periods.
Glasgow in the 1990s was a great city. Its contemporary renaissance had begun back in 1983 when, in response to nationwide notoriety about the state of the place and its gang culture, the council had started a campaign called ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’. It was accompanied by the image of a big smiling ‘Mr Men’-type character. The sterling efforts to rebrand and clean up the city didn’t go unnoticed. In 1990 (the same year as my aforementioned school trip), Glasgow won the coveted title of ‘European Capital of Culture’ – the first British city to win the award.
Back then, of course, Scotland wasn’t convulsed by the toxin of separatism. For the most part, insults hurled at the English were in the context of football friendlies or in the heat of a Five Nations (as it was back then) rugby tournament. But then the SNP took power. They not only took power at Holyrood, where they have been as unmovable as a rhino being shepherded by an ant, they also gained control of Glasgow City Council. Doubling down on the city’s status as one of ‘sanctuary’, Scottish separatism has helped to make its largest city the go-to place in the United Kingdom for every illegal waif and stray that can be bothered to make the 500-mile trip from Dover. Consequently, Glasgow now has the highest number of ‘asylum seekers’ per head of population anywhere in the United Kingdom. More recently, it was reported that one (https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2141106/uk-city-children-do-not-speak-english). This demographic transformation has taken place at a speed probably unparalleled anywhere else in the Kingdom – London included – in such a short space of time. Of the 71,000 school pupils in the city, almost 29% now have English as a SECOND language!
As you would expect, Glasgow is now suffering every social problem that comes with rapid and culturally incompatible demographic change. There are the usual pressures on educational resources, health infrastructure, council provision and the like. On a darker note, there’s also the increasing danger posed to females (https://news.sky.com/story/syrian-man-who-fled-uk-after-raping-15-year-old-girl-near-hampden-park-is-jailed-13366784) and children in public places (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c14gdz53xj5o.amp – though the BBC uses its usual editorial sleight of hand to cover up the fact that, in this instance, the perpetrator was a black guy with poor English language ability). The asylum crisis in Glasgow in entirely self-inflicted. Thanks to legislation passed at Holyrood back in 2012 by a Glasgow MSP called Nicola Sturgeon (remember her?), ‘asylum seekers’ are not housed on the basis of priority need (families with children, etc.) as elsewhere in the UK, but on the basis of an ‘equal right’ for its own sake. In plain English (beyond the wit of nearly a third of the city’s schoolkids), it means the armies of single men who make up a huge proportion of this invasion now head to Glasgow if they cannot secure accommodation in England.
This brings me to the most sickening part of all. Those who’ve known me or my opinions for many years will know Unionism is the absolute bedrock of my political convictions. The territorial integrity of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales within ONE country is my lodestar. Thus, I was active during the referendum campaign of 2014 to prevent the SNP ripping the UK apart and I can honestly tell you that, notwithstanding the heavily sanitised presentation of that campaign by many in the British media, it was a an exercise when the some of the most appalling Anglophobia I’ve ever witnessed came rushing to the fore. What I cannot fathom, and never will fathom, is what motivates a Scottish (and the accusation can be equally levelled at their counterparts in Northern Ireland and Wales) separatist to so hate the people of the largest constituent part of the UK – people they share a common heritage and familial ties with – to the point where they’d shatter the United Kingdom, but simultaneously become tumescent with excitement at seeing their own towns and cities slowly taken over by folk culturally, religiously and behaviourally antonymous to themselves? The only conclusion I can make is that these people will be used as electoral tools of empowerment the next time the SNP or Sinn Fein attempt to bludgeon the United Kingdom into a product of broken parts – especially if or when Reform UK becomes the next government at Westminster. You can already see how their respective bases will be energised through another round of Farage Derangement Syndrome, and how the consequential Damien Thorn of England-hatred will be reborn at the end of it (https://www.thenational.scot/comments/25673615/).
What British patriots and Unionists need to reinforce every chance they get is the inescapable truth that the ‘civic nationalisms’ of Scotland or Northern Ireland are not really nationalisms at all. They’re proto-globalisms, with a side salad of Sassenach ‘othering’. Would I, as a Unionist, accept another Scottish ‘independence’ push in the knowledge that non-UK citizens could well be the deciding factor in its victory? No bloody way! It was bad enough when Alex Salmond and Co. tried to piss all over the sacrifice of men in uniform, who’d given their lives by the million in the defence of the Union flag and the country it represents when they tried to end it 11 years ago! I’ll be damned if I’m going to stay silent if I thought the very integrity of the country I love was threatened by the ballot box ‘Xs’ of Tekle from Eritrea, Jamal from Sudan, or Sohrab from Afghanistan on a second attempt.
