For the day that’s in it, this was brought to my attention by a Scottish friend.
I’m afraid it’s Murdo Fraser again.
Good folk in Fair Caledonia were not slow to call him out.
Poorly judged quips about tanks on the streets of Glasgow possibly shows a lack of feeling for the place and her people.
Moreover, the Tories seem to be the Brit politicians most attracted to tracked military vehicles.
Back in the day, though, tanks on the streets of Glasgow was a reality.
Here is a piece of mine in An Phoblacht from looking back that gives the background to the battle of George Square in 1919.
Murdo’s party leader is a biographer of the white supremacist mass murder Winston Churchill, who was Secretary of State for War in 1919.
As part of the War Cabinet, he met and discussed sending in the military to deal with “the strike situation in Glasgow”.
This was the era that would give birth to the Billy Boys, the street gang led by the self-proclaimed fascist Billy Fullerton.
If the bold Murdo is concerned about disorder on the streets of Glasgow, then he might want to look again at what really happened there last May.
Lest we forget.
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Pretty desperate stuff from the failing “The National”, trying to create a headline our of what was very obviously a joke.
The scottish nationalists will talk about anything, other than the detail of independence!
Not long ago, it was shown that the SNP regime had introduced myths about the George Square incident into the school history curriculum as a form of propaganda. Extremely sinister behaviour from a tin pot regime.
Historian Tom Devine said criticism of the material was “amply justified”: teaching kids lies that Churchill purposely sent English troops and tanks to subdue the Scots, whilst Scots troops were “locked in their barracks”.
All lies (some good the Scots would have been in a fight anyway, if they didn’t even have the gumption to get out of their own barracks). The Armoured troops happened to be based in Bovington, (where the tank museum now is), that was the depth of the English connection.
The one thing the SNP material got right was that the presence of the army was linked to fears over a revolution; but not – as the SNP would have you believe – some Braveheart-esque Scottish rising, but rather something akin to the contemporaneous Bolshevik coup in Russia.
I don’t know enough about Red Clydeside, to say if the Governments response was an over-reaction or not (I suspect it was): but, better to be safe than sorry, given the Bolsheviks brought in a regime which ultimately proved as repugnant and brutal as their later rivals, the Nazis. Worse, even.
We could have done with some tanks in George Square, during last years ugly title ‘celebrations’.
Anyway, back to cheering on Malmo!