Galloway's 'Daily Record' column

[faceless]

30 July 2007
WHERE BLOOD ISN'T THICKER THAN WATER

SPEAKER Michael Martin, soon enough to be the Lord Martin of Springburn, has been a friend of mine since he was a panel-beater in Glasgow. Our 30-year relationship came to an abrupt end when, led by the nose by an over-educated bewigged clerk, Mr Speaker chucked me out of the Commons just one hour into my three-hour speech defending myself against the decision of the "Double Standards committee" to suspend me from Parliament for 18 days.

According to one report, Mr Martin interrupted me no less than 17 times before he finally "named" me (an ironic device as everybody already knew my name but not the names of many of the baying hyenas who cheered him). He'd promised me that I would have the full protection of his great office in making my speech after an English down market tabloid had called for him to forbid me "attacking" my "own country" during the debate. But that was just a ruse. In fact, every single one of those interruptions was to protect my accusers from me.

Wretchedly he kept saying that he had to "go by the rules (he'd) been given". Just as well Mr Speaker Lenthall, the Speaker who went to his death at the hands of the King's men which provoked the outbreak of the English civil war rather than hand over members of parliament to their persecutors, hadn't followed that principle. But the saddest thing of all is that I had supported Michael Martin, defended him in print and on the airwaves, against the very supercilious, condescending, upper-class prats whose bidding he was doing in throwing me out of the House.

Sir George Young (Bart), the Tory grandee who chairs the "Double Standards committee", has spent years scheming to take the Speaker's job and, I predict, will get it. The Oxford-educated clerks, who spent the whole of my speech passing Martin notes and leaning backwards telling him what to do, are the very toffs who've looked down their noses at him since he got the ancient and venerable job, not usually occupied by people like him, or me.

Young was allowed, without interruption, to describe me (after I'd been kicked out) as "a bully". Funny. Where I come from it's usually the overgrown guy who turns up with a gang and beats up somebody whose already been incapacitated who's called the bully. But then me and the Speaker come from a different place from the English baronet. I wouldn't have been suspended at all if I'd bent over and taken my punishment like a public school fag at the hands of his betters.

I would have thought Michael Martin would have sympathised with me on that. It seems blood isn't thicker than water after all.

GAZE UPON THE GRIZZLY

ALEX SALMOND is a big man nowadays - not only because he's proving to be a smart First Minister, but also because he looks like he ate all the Tynecastle pies. Gaze upon the grizzly visage of your fellow Hearts fan, Lord Foulkes, Alex, and wonder why it's not a good idea to get on the low-carb diet right away. I respect Salmond. In fact, he's been a better friend to me than most of my erstwhile Labour colleagues. But I can't follow him down the road to separation and partition he outlines in his White Paper on an independence referendum. Let's stick together, as Bryan Ferry might put it. In fact, why don't I launch a campaign right now by that very name. Surely some blood is thicker than water?

PROUD KIWIS LOSING OUT TO OIL-HUNGRY FOREIGNERS

Three days down under after the topsy-turvy week I've had were just what the doctor ordered. Twenty three hours in the air via Hong Kong, 17 media interviews and two big rallies attended by thousands whose standing ovations told me that whoever has brought British politics into disrepute, it surely isn't me.

Writing this from Balmoral Heights, not far from Braemar Drive in Auckland, New Zealand, the wistful whiff of nostalgia for the old empire can affect even me. Some of my school-friends were among the many Scots who took advantage of the £10-assisted package schemes in the early sixties and emigrated here. One of them, my best friend Mark Strachan, I remember still and spend the weekend wishing he'd pop up in one of my audiences. I met many Scots, like the fire-officer concerned about the standing-room only crowd in my Auckland Grammar School rally, who'd been here since the year I was born but sounded like he just left Cowdenbeath yesterday.

but New Zealand today is more concerned with affairs in Tonga and Fiji than Tomintoul or Fife. This is a Pacific country, and in more ways than one. New Zealand, unlike her rought neighbour, Australia, refused to join the coalition of the killing in invading and occupying Iraq. She doesn't allow foreigh nuclear weapons in her anti-nuclear waters and she has a Labour government more recognisably Labour than the country whose Union Jack still flutters from public buildings illuminated by the Southern Star. And it warms the cockles of my heart that practically every Bolshie shop-steward (union officials) in the country has the a name like Anderson, MacPherson or McIntyre.

The locals are revolting over a proposed privatisationbuy-out of Auckland airport by oil-rich sheiks from Dubai and, much as I like the Arabs, I'd say New Zealanders are more than capable of running the airport themselves. they're prospecting for oil and gas off the coast of the South Island, excited by early indications of an El Dorado below. I had to point out to them Donald Rumsfeld's immortal words, "It's not our fault that God put America's oil under other people's countries". If they strike it rich it's American boarders rather than Dubai prospectors they will have to be watching for.

MONSTER THAT WE CREATED

More people speak Punjabi than have the Gaelic and so for that, amongst other reasons, we should be afraid, very afraid, of the disintegrating political situation in Pakistan. General Musharraf and his military junta will shortly be overthrown and whose finger then will be on the trigger of Pakistan's nuclear weapons?

The democratically-elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharaf, whom Musharraf overthrew, and his predecessor Benazir Bhutto will soon return to confront the generals. But before they get there, the Islamist fundamentalists, bred by 30 years of misguided western policy-makers who obviously didn't read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the end, may have already got their hands on the tiller. The Talibanisation of Pakistan is a real and frightening prospect and if it happens we'll only have ourselves to blame. We backed these people in Afghanistan and Pakistan on the immoral principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend - in this case the enemy was Russia. But sometimes your enemy's enemy is worse than your enemy.

And the whole point about monsters is that, once created, the move out of control. That's why they're monsters.
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This was only half as much in the online version - the rest I've typed in from the paper... bloody hell! haha

[faceless]

6 August 2007
GO FOR IT, GORDON.. BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

THE air is thick with thoughts of a snap election, maybe in the autumn, perhaps next spring. I declare an interest. I told my constituents in Bethnal Green and Bow before they elected me that I'd only be doing it once. And I'm not a Bill Clinton "another pre-erection promise broken" type of politician. But I have decided to stand again, somewhere else. Speculation is rife that I'm off to play an away match at Ewood Park, taking on the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. I can't rule it out. I have lots of friends, Lancashire lads and lasses, who are pressing me hard to run against one of the most rancid examples of New Labour treachery. All I'll say for now is I'll be standing, against a New Labour minister, one of the warmongers who have let all Labour people down. Mind you, that's still an awfully large field.

Maybe Gordon Brown ought to think about an early poll. Before Alex Salmond gets much further down the track leaving Labour's Scottish midgets in his wake. Before foot and mouth disease blights the land again. Before more of our young men and women are sacrificed on the alter of the special relationship with his golf-kart chauffeur GWB (at least the dour Scot had the sense not to strut Camp David looking like a gay tripper in ball-crunchingly tight cords and a bomber jacket - there's been enough bombs thanks very much). And above all, before the economic chickens start coming home to roost.

Building societies report a 30per cent increase in house repossessions, British personal indebtedness EXCLUDING mortgages is nearing £1.3trillion, the stock market is trembling and house prices about to tumble - and that's before we look overseas. In Germany, the head of the financial regulator has warned of a banking crisis, the worst since 1931. Er, that was the crisis which ushered in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. In the US, regulators warn of more than two million homes in danger of repossession - and much of their indebtedness has been sold on to private equity companies, including many of the players in the City. The Chinese and Japanese economies are heavily dependent on a US recovery, which looks more and more unlikely.

In short, next year could see Britain head into the recession we have missed for more than a decade. If it comes, it will be blamed on the Prime Minister, who of course for so long was the Chancellor. To hell with Presbyterian caution Gordon. Go for it quickly before its too late and "we're all dooooomed" becomes the bewailing soundtrack of 2008.

PATTIE LOVE ODE A DEBT TO ARABS

PATTIE BOYD had the good fortune to capture the hearts of two of the greatest musical geniuses ever produced by this country. The former model left George Harrison - who wrote for her the exquisite "Something in the way she moves" - for Eric Clapton, who penned the incomparable Layla with her in mind.

Not a lot of people know the original Layla was an Arab. Leila amd Quais were the original Romeo and Juliet in an Arabian love triangle wjere overwhelming love foundered on the rocks of others. Shakespeare took his story from theirs as did Eric Clapton. Arab women can get you on your knees right enough...

GOLF WASN'T IN MY FOREWORD PLAN

WHEN I was in Portugal on holiday last week, a former radio colleague called inviting me to a celebrity golf competition. Embarrassingly I had to tell him that although I was brought up scarcely 20 miles from both Carnoustie and St Andrews, I've never held a golf club in my hand - ever. My reasoning was sound - I was a footballer. And when I was no longer able to do that, then I could turn to more, well, Darby and Joan pastimes - like golf.

It's now almost a decade since Craig Brown picked me up front for the Scottish Parliamentary XI on the grounds that I'd "scored for Scotland all over the world". And I still haven't ventured to the first tee. The reason is that, at least in the beginning, I'm sure I would be swiping fresh air, hurling the golf stick like a javelin shouting "Fore" more than was seemly and holding up the tut-tutting bankers queuing behind me. In short, I'm now TOO EMBARRASSED to learn. I should have made preparations for my middle age.

I could've been a contender...

RONNIE BIGGS

HASN'T Ronnie Biggs done enough porridge? 79-years-old, he's still in jail for a crime committed when I was a young boy. What conceivable purpose is served by locking up a near octogenarian who can't walk and who merely had a bit-part in a robbery, small beer by contemporary standards. It's true the train driver later died of a heart attack, but Biggs never laid a hand on him. It was a collective manslaughter to be sure, but many a murderer, even multiple murderer, has been in and out of jail while Biggs remains incarcerated. Is it because Biggs led the Yard a merry dance for so long that he's being punished in this cruel and unusual way? Free Ronnie Biggs I say. There have been worse robbers and killers released under licence from our own parliament in recent years.

IT'S TIME TO TACKLE THE BIGOTS

I SEE the dregs of Scottish bigotry were out in full force in Inverness at the weekend. Those who are ready to wade "up to their knees in fenian blood" at the drop of a flute - despite David Murray's heroic efforts, which deserve a Nobel nomination - were baiting Catholics in a town where scarcely any remain.

There are only two people in polite company who don't apparently regard this scourge as unacceptable - Donald Findlay, QC, who is up to his knees in a million pounds a year of legal aid (partly provided by Catholic taxpayers), and Gordon Smith, who, unhelpfully in the circumstances, is the head of the Scottish Football Association. Ex-Ranger Smith has still not dealt with the revelation - by Jim Traynor in the Record - that he believes these songs may not be sectarian. He promised to take action to assuage the doubts of Scotland's Catholic minority.

I suggested an SFA role for the under-used and highly talented Celtic supporters' champion Brian Dempsey, but he has not done so.

SPREAD THE WORD

On my talkSPORT radio show at the weekend - by the way, I'm standing in for Jon Gaunt all this week on the morning show - I declared a crooners' weekend in honour of Tony Bennett's 81st birthday. Little did I know what i was letting myself in for.

A listener, Don. from Aberdeen, claimed crooning was a device by which those who could not sing could sort of talk their way through a sing, like he said, Bruce Forsyth. Cue thunderous abuse from fans of Bennett, Andy Williams, Sinatra - whom I saw at Ibrox in 1990, one of the first Catholics ever allowed to play there - Matt Monro, Dean Martin and the amazing underestimated Bing Crosby, the singer of the most successful record of all time, White Christmas.

I rediscovered Bing in the Anchor butter ad on TV singing Don't Fence Me In. I bought the butter - and an armful of old Bing Crosby records. Try it, you'll thank me for it. I mean the Bing, not the butter.

[faceless]

13 August 2007

BROWN SHOULD USE BOUNCE TO TROUNCE TORIES

BROWN has bounced 10 points clear in yesterday's opinion polls.In political terms that's a kangaroo leap which may prove irresistible. The cautious PM would be a fool to look this gift horse in the mouth. He has the reason - the wish for his own mandate. He has the assets - the principal of which is that he is not Tony Blair, currently living the life of the Addams family at Cliff Richard's summer holiday palace in Barbados.

Brown's handling of the terror emergency, the floods in the south and the foot and mouth outbreak have all been exactly what WE who knew him expected, but those who feared him must have admired. He now has the chance to win a landslide victory, shatter the Tories and it all must be very tempting. The midge in this glorious ointment is Scotland. It is entirely possible, given the equally flying start of Alex Salmond, that Gordon's friends in the north could falter while he is pulling up trees in the south, and thus the West Lothian constitutional conundrum would be not buried, but thrown into sharper relief.

On the other hand, it's far from certain that time will either weaken Salmond's great leap forward or see New Labour's bonsai Holyrood leaders grow taller. It's all the sort of political Rubik's cube a PM gets paid for working out. And, as we all know, Gordon has a brain as big as Hampden Park. Me, I'm raring to go.

I declared before the last election, in which I became the first MP to win a Commons seat in England from the left of Labour for 60 years, that I wouldn't be standing again. I've changed my mind. I intend to fight the seat next door to my own - Poplar and Limehouse - currently held by a no-mark Scottish Junior Minister, Jim Fitzpatrick (I think). So, two Scot MPs will slug it out in London's East End, where Labour was born. I will be standing in the tradition of Keir Hardie (who became the first-ever Labour MP, in that very area, in 1894) and my opponent, who will parade in the tradition of Ramsay MacDonald, the traitor to everything Labour stood for.

It will be a short swordfight, but I intend to run him through and rewrite the political textbooks with a sixth general election win across two countries, four constituencies and two political parties. 'He now has the chance to win a landslide victory, shatter the Tories and it must be very tempting'

ELVIS IS STILL THE ONLY KING FOR ME

THURSDAY sees the 30th anniversary of the death of The King, Elvis Aaron Presley. As the day is also my birthday, I spend each year wallowing in Elvis nostalgia. On my Mother Of All Talk Shows on TalkSport and Scotland's Talk 107, I've just held an Elvis weekend. I staggered home with well over a thousand texts and emails (which people have to pay to send), and the switchboard was full with callers keen to talk about the man, his music and how he is irreplaceable.

In the early 1950s, poor whites in America's Deep South rarely crossed the tracks which separated them from blacks. Elvis did, absorbing the blues and gospel music which was the deep sigh of the oppressed victims of Jim Crow segregation, as wicked as any apartheid, and it showed. The early Elvis sang and moved like the only black white man in his world. Sure, he made a pastiche out of his greatness in the Vegas years. But on Sam Phillips' Sun record label in the beginning, and in his 1968 comeback special, you can hear how Elvis got his crown.

MAN THE PUMPS

ALEX SALMOND marked the 100 days since the Holyrood elections with a series of interviews. I saw him on Sky News running rings around a bemused palooka, who was forced to say "You are good at this, Mr Salmond, aren't you?" The confident First Minister was like a basking shark.

A young woman asked me: "What difference would it make, Scottish independence?" The fact that I found it hard to give an answer is, for me, a reason not to go for it. The problem is that the corollary is also true. If it will make little difference, many may conclude, why not? When the White Paper on an independence referendum appears, I will argue the case for the union. But yesterday I had that sinking feeling that our ship was taking in water and that I don't trust most of my ship-mates to man the pump.

SPEAKER SCORNED

THE revelation that Speaker Michael Martin has employed one of the world's most expensive libel lawyers at the taxpayer's expense to handle Press enquiries about his performance has sparked a revolt that may bring his bumbling tenure to a premature end. Further revelations that a Commons committee, chaired by him, wasted millions trying to stop the costs of MPs' expenses being made public have deepened his gloom.

Not only did Martin wreck my big Commons occasion on Iraq, interrupting me 17 times to protect the "honour" of my persecutors, last week I discovered how vindictive is the Speaker scorned. When he "named" me, he suspended me for five days in addition to the 18 days, which start on October 8, for my main offence. Telling the truth about Iraq in a house of liars. After the five days was up, I was turned away from my Commons office then told I would not be paid between July 23 and the end of November, when my main suspension ends, and was not allowed in the building during summer recess.

By the grace of God, and my media earnings, I don't need my Parliamentary wages, and now that I can't smoke there, I don't care about exclusion either. But a five-day ban turned into 80 days and an 18-day suspension now stretches to 105 days. All thanks to a Glasgow man I used to call my friend.

GO FOR IT, GORDON.. BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE

THE air is thick with thoughts of a snap election, maybe in the autumn, perhaps next spring. I declare an interest. I told my constituents in Bethnal Green and Bow before they elected me that I'd only be doing it once. And I'm not a Bill Clinton "another pre-erection promise broken" type of politician. But I have decided to stand again, somewhere else.

Speculation is rife that I'm off to play an away match at Ewood Park, taking on the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. I can't rule it out. I have lots of friends, Lancashire lads and lasses, who are pressing me hard to run against one of the most rancid examples of New Labour treachery. All I'll say for now is I'll be standing, against a New Labour minister, one of the warmongers who have let all Labour people down. Mind you, that's still an awfully large field.

Maybe Gordon Brown ought to think about an early poll. Before Alex Salmond gets much further down the track leaving Labour's Scottish midgets in his wake. Before foot and mouth disease blights the land again. Before more of our young men and women are sacrificed on the alter of the special relationship with his golf-kart chauffeur GWB (at least the dour Scot had the sense not to strut Camp David looking like a gay tripper in ball-crunchingly tight cords and a bomber jacket - there's been enough bombs thanks very much). And above all, before the economic chickens start coming home to roost.

Building societies report a 30per cent increase in house repossessions, British personal indebtedness EXCLUDING mortgages is nearing £1.3trillion, the stock market is trembling and house prices about to tumble - and that's before we look overseas. In Germany, the head of the financial regulator has warned of a banking crisis, the worst since 1931. Er, that was the crisis which ushered in the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler.

In the US, regulators warn of more than two million homes in danger of repossession - and much of their indebtedness has been sold on to private equity companies, including many of the players in the City. The Chinese and Japanese economies are heavily dependent on a US recovery, which looks more and more unlikely. In short, next year could see Britain head into the recession we have missed for more than a decade.

If it comes, it will be blamed on the Prime Minister, who of course for so long was the Chancellor. To hell with Presbyterian caution Gordon. Go for it quickly before its too late and "we're all dooooomed" becomes the bewailing soundtrack of 2008.

[faceless]

20th of August 2007

PLUM POSTING? JACK'S JOBS IS ROTTEN FRUIT

THE benighted African state of Malawi you would have thought already had enough on its plate. Certainly the appointment of spring-heeled Jack McConnell as our man in Blantyre won't butter many parsnips in a country swept by hunger, AIDS, unemployment, mass poverty and ill health. It is an insult to the poor Africans, as much as it is to our diplomatic service, the way an expensively superannuated failed apparatchik has been dropped on them without ascintilla of ambassadorial bearing training or skill.

My only consolation - call it Schadenfreude - is that Jacko will be bored out of his tiny mind wishing he was back in our own Blantyre or even Cumbernauld - anywhere but Malawi. I was the last British politician to see the late tyrant. Dr Hastings Banda that is, not McConnell. He was the former elder of the Church of Scotland (until the church very belatedly threw him out) who ruled Malawi by the rod. He was much favoured by the West for what he was not - a Communist - at a time when the colonies like Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Zambia were booting out the Empire and spouting red flags or, in the case of Kenneth Kaunda, red 'kerchiefs.

They didn't care about the dirty little secrets Banda was keeping under his ubiquitous black Homburg hat. That he was a thief, a torturer and a murderer. By the time I met him he was absolutely gaga. "How is the Prime Minister, Mr Wilson?" he asked me despite the fact Harold had left office nearly 20 years before. I didn't have the heart to tell the old boy Mr Wilson was in fact, er, dead. By that time Banda, and Malawi, were being run from behind the lace curtains by the brother of Banda's "official hostess", in fact his wee burd on the side. It could have been an Ealing comedy if it hadn't been so tragic.

Like Helen Liddell and Paul Boateng, McConnell is being given a diplomatic posting to ease him off the premises. The difference is Australia and South Africa are plum postings, Malawi rotten fruit indeed. It is a small dark corner where a very small man in a too-short black kilt with the wrong shirt and wrong socks has been made to go and stand to eat up his curds and whey. 'He'll be bored out his mind wishing he was back in our Blantyre or Cumbernauld'

CHANNEL 4'S FRIDAY NIGHT

I FIRST met Amy Winehouse when we appeared together on Channel 4's Friday Night Project. I guessed she didn't like me as she didn't exchange a single non-showbiz word with me even though we had to cavort on an adjacent double bed. It was only later I realised she had scarcely known she was there. Finally, she has gone into the rehab she has always no, no, no-ed after a drugs overdose. I thought her double-barrelled toff husband was unlikely to keep her off the booze. Even in rehab, he enticed her out for a few wee drinks. Her father is reportedly at his wit's end. Be a daddy's girl, Amy, and make sure the double-barrels aren't filling up with your life's blood.

THE TIME HAS COME TO PUT THE SEPARATISTS TO THE SWORD

IF we don't watch out, we'll end up down the Swanee that is separation - making England a foreign country. The White Paper released by slippery Alex Salmond is a masterpiece of understatement, and as open and consensual a document as Labour's response has been arrogant and sectional.

The Nats are behaving as the NATIONAL party, and Labour as colonial administrators taken aback at an uprising amongst formerly compliant tribesmen. If you took Wendy Alexander and stood her on Jack McConnell's shooders, Salmond would still be head and shoulders above his opponents.

With Annabel Goldie drilling like Lady Bracknell at a pink gin soiree up the Khyber Pass as the sun goes below the yard arm, and the Liberal Democrat leader looking and sounding like a tailor's dummy, Scotland is in great danger of sleepwalking into a major blunder from which there would be no return. For the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with Michael "Poll Tax" Forsyth the other night. Denying the Scots a referendum on their future is exactly what Salmond hopes his opposition will do.

Self-determination is an instinct beating in the hearts of all dignified people. To be denied it by "foreign" parties - which is how the SNP will portray it - will only make the likelihood of partition grow. To say we can't have a referendum because it will be "too expensive" when they are all sitting in a near billion-pound upturned boat, and when McConnell has made off with a £30,000-a-year pension and an ambassadorship for leading his party to defeat, and when money is no object for schemes like a "web-based think tank", is beyond risible.

Let's get it on. Let's have the big conversation and mobilise all who want to keep this small country together. Let's put the separatists to the sword through debate about Scotland's future. New Labour can run, but Salmond will not let them hide.

IT'S WEIRD IN WENDY HOUSE

SCOTTISH Labour leader in waiting Wendy Alexander was crucial to my victory over the late Roy Jenkins in Glasgow Hillhead more than 20 years ago. Though still a student, she took charge of my election HQ, proving a brilliant organiser and motivator, and even found time to baby sit my five-year-old daughter. I appointed her my first parliamentary researcher. She's clever and a decent soul. But she can be otherworldly to the point that she is life, Jim, but not as we know it.

Long after mobile phones were proliferating across the land, I saw her lovingly handling one belonging to the brother of one of her own MSPs. "That's amazing," said the would-be First Minister. "But where do you put the money in?" And who could forget her excruciating speech in the White Blether club when she compared John Swinney to the "giant hungry caterpillar" she'd just been reading about to her children.

But the main problem is that her coronation means there will be no debate in New Labour about how they came to fall so low in public esteem. Where humility and selfcriticism is needed, hubris continues to rule the roost in Scottish Labour, who still act as if the country belongs to them and Salmond's first ministership is a temporary usurpation. And that if the Scottish people don't watch out, the party will abolish them and elect a new one.

[faceless]

27 August 2007
TOO YOUNG VICTIMS OF OUR NEW VIETNAM

NINETEEN. In 1965, that was the average age of the American servicemen already dying in their hundreds in the Vietnam War which would last another nine, blood-soaked years. Last week, the latest in a long line of US Air Force friendly-fire massacres of British soldiers happened in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.

Three Tommys were killed by an American bomb. Two critically injured. At the weekend, the Ministry of Defence released their names and their ages. Privates Aaron McClure, Robert Foster and John Thrumble were serving with the 1st Battalion, The Royal Anglian Regiment when they died. They were 19, 19 and 21-yearsold respectively. Who says we haven't blundered into another Vietnam?

Dr John Reid, two million rounds ago when he was Defence Secretary, said he hoped the men he was sending into Helmand would return "without firing a shot". As epitaphs go, I'm content to let that one hang round his neck. His hapless Mr Magoo successor, Des Browne, appears like a bespectacled rabbit caught in headlamps. The part-time Defence and Scottish Secretary responsible for the Iranian hostages fiasco, said there was a "small margin of error" involved in the friendly-fire carnage.

That is not a bad epitaph too. But how come there's never any friendly fire incidents involving us on them? Is it because their armies contain a larger than normal collection of Columbine-type crazies and LA South Central thugs? But it was ever thus. My late grandfather, who was in Monty's Eighth Army in World War Two, told me the Americans bombed them from El Alamein to Monte Casino. "When we sent in our bombers, the Germans ducked," he said. "When the Germans sent in theirs, we ducked. When the US sent in theirs, we all ducked."

Plus ca change mais plus c'est la meme chose - as George W. Bush would not be able to say. How come there's never any friendly-fire incidents involving us on them? Is it because their armies contain a larger collection of crazies and thugs?

THE EFFECTS OF SLAVERY ARE STILL BEING FELT

BY the time you read this, I'll be in Bridgetown, Barbados; carried not by Coconut Airways, but Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic. I am invited by the Prime Minister - of Barbados that is, not ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is sunning himself by Cliff Richard's pool just by the coast. Mind you, that's an improvement on his last freebie holiday, when he romped with bisexual Isle of Man Druid High Priestess aka Mrs Robin Gibb, the wife of the buck-toothed Bee Gee. I'm at a conference on slavery as part of the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade - though not of slavery itself, which continued in the US until 1865.

Barbados, like all the West Indies, was one of the grimmest killing fields. 40 million people in total were seized from their lands in Africa, chained and tossed into the holds of death tubs and trans-shipped through Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow to a life of hell. British companies grew fat on their misery. Great buildings were constructed with their blood as mortar and their bones as bricks.

They were owned as a farmer owns a cow, their women sexual fodder, their children but a new generation of beasts of burden. Some white people seem to have a problem acknowledging this. One of my regular Talksport correspondents asked 'if Africa deserves reparation, why not the descendants of the Highland Clearances?' But the people of the Highlands, who were driven off their land, went to the new world, to a better life, not to bondage. Their children are prosperous today in Canada and the US, while the grandchildren of the enslaved tobacco pickers and cotton pickers still fester in the ghettos of North America.

DESPITE DAVID MURRAY'S BEST EFFORTS

The SFA have let the country down by their failure to act decisively against the sectarian bigots who continue to infest sections of Glasgow Rangers supporters' base. Despite David Murray's best efforts, the bigoted chanting and singing disfigures us all. If they were singing about blacks, they would all have been under arrest. I receive a steady stream of hate mail, death threats, allegations of dabbling with rent boys - from the same kind of people. Recently, at Glasgow Airport, I was up close and personal enough to smell their foul breath. They are the Scottish equivalent of the hooded lynch mobs of the Mississippi, who used to dangle the grandchildren of their former slaves like strange fruit. I've cautioned SFA boss Gordon Smith about this before. He started his new job with something to prove. He's a long way from proving it yet.

CAROLE'S ON COURSE

WELL it's the last week and my 'Big Sister', Carole, looks like she's going to make it to the end of Big Brother. She's played a blinder in the house. In fact, she's been so good that I'm expecting the former Respect candidate to mount a leadership challenge. If you're inclined to vote for me, vote for Carole to win BB.

I see they've scrapped Celebrity Big Brother this year. I reckon that, after what's happened to Germaine Greer, Lea Sawyer, Vanessa Feltz, Anthea Turner, Jade Goody and, er...me, they just can't find anyone who people would regard as a celebrity that's daft enough to go in there.

LIVERPOOL IS NEW LA

NORTH Liverpool seems to have taken LA South Central as its role model. Ten years after Dunblane and the banning of handguns, there is more ordnance on our streets than ever. The murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones has put paid to the theory, incredibly endorsed by Tony Blair, that British gun crime is "a black thing". In this case, both victim and everyone arrested is white.

Scottish journalist Audrey Gillan interviewed one of the "soldiers" - that's how they describe themselves - of the Croxteth gun gangs, aged 17. He told her that weapons, even submachine guns, were available in the city. We have a national crisis on our hands for sure. But here's the strange thing. Though Liverpool is not far away, this scourge does not appear to have spread across the border. By and large, gun crime is not a black thing, but an English thing.

[faceless]

3rd of September
MEN ARE POOR RELATION IN PARENT RIGHTS ISSUES

Back in Blighty early from Barbados, it was good to chill. This is not the best time of year in the Caribbean - you can swim through the humid air. I thought at one point I'd have to island-hop to cuba for a funeral, but Miami emigre reports of the death of Fidel Castro turned out to be exaggerated.

The Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation had agreed to host my now thrice-weekly radio talk shows, but I was a little nervous about the quality of the line. But the main reason for my premature return was banal. I was missing my baby son Zein. He's just four months old but already my pride and joy. His smile when I hold him aloft saying 'Is it a bird, is it a plane, it's....Super Zein' never fails. I don't live with him, not through my choice I quickly add, but I do see him every day, albeit in the abnormal conditions of a walk in the park in his pram. But my situation got me thinking things I never thought before.

As far as Fathers For Justice are concerned I never liked the cut of their jib. For me they were nutters climbing public buildings dressed as Batman, throwing the condoms they should have worn, a picture of fecklessness seeking rights after having dodged their responsibilities, the very opposite of Supermen.

So I never really looked at what they were saying. but the truth is that in Britain today fathers can rely on rather little justice in the circumstances which, say, I find myself. Although I am Zein's dad, my name is on the birth certificate and I am and will be thoughout his childhood his sole financial support, I have no 'right' of access. It depends on the mother, who might decide not today thank you, or, it's too cold for the park. and the mother, especially in the crucial early bonding months decides for how long you can have your child and where you can take it.

When I looked into my legal rights I was horrified. 'Don't even think about it,' said my expensive lawyer. 'Judges always find for the mother, always work on the assumption that she knows best, and rarely award split custody decisions. You will just have to hope, certainly until the child is much older, that his mother realises the damage to a child with parents asunder and acts reasonably' Phew!

Of course, in most cases of single-parenthood, the mother is the best person to have custody. But not always. In most cases of desertion it is the feckless father who has bailed out of his responsibility to his children. But not always. Mothers usually know best about children. But not always. Don't expect to see me in a Batman suit to get my share of access to 'Super-Zein'. But I am looking again at Fathers For Justice with a less jaundiced eye.

MAGNIFICENT PRINCE IS SEEING DOUBLE

I saw Prince at Parkhead many years ago singing 1999 and I remember thinking that was a long way off. But the wee man - at five foot two, the height that made Hollywood bosses provide a box for Alan Ladd's kissing scenes - is still going strong.

So successful were his nights in the Millennium Dome, they have now stretched to nearly a month and may never end now that Prince has decided to stay in Britain. He can sing like an angel, write like Shakespeare, play guitar like George Harrison, piano like Oscar Peterson, indeed Miles Davis said Prince could be the new Duke Ellington. He does blues, funk, jazz, rock, dance... and any man who can write 'Nothin Compares to You' is all heart.

Not content with having loved almost all his leading ladies, Prince is now stepping out with twins. Hope wee Prince hasn't been watching Big Brother.

DO AS YOU'RE TOLD DES

Mr Magoo, aka Des Browne, who presides over our men John Reid sent up the Kyber Pass without a paddle, has taken to writing US newspaper columns requesting 'permission to speak, Sir'. 'Don't panic' he's telling the Yanks, 'Johnny Afghan doesn't like it up 'im', 'we'd like leave to fall out of Iraq and send our boys to die in the hell of Helmand rather than holding Beau Geste-type forts in Basra,' he seems to say. 'No chance' answers George W Bush. The coalition must stay put 'for the forseeable future'.

In a remarkable interview last week, Bush warned both New Labour and the resurgent Australian Labour Party, poised to win the forthcoming elections, that whatever their 'internal domestic political considerations' their continued military presence on the doomed Iraq front was 'imperative'.

Can there ever have been anything more humiliating than being given military orders by this swivel-eyed, draft-dodging, alcoholic, cocaine-using texan-drawling imbecile? Has the country of Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee, Harold Wilson, and yes, even Margaret Thatcher, really sunk so low? Over to you Messrs Browne and Brown.

SORRY MIKE, YOUR WORDS ARE JUST TOO LATE

Michael Jackson can't dance like Prince, but he was quite a Thriller in the Billie Jean days. But I was surprised to hear that he'd denounced Donald Rumsfeld as 'nonsensical', 'intellectualyl bankrupt' and generally landing a dawn chorus on the heads of the US occupation in Iraq.

I thought he'd aged terribly after his ordeal when I saw his picture in the paper, then I realised that it was the former para officer who was Britain's chief of staff during the invasion of Iraq they were talking about. Of course, he's now kicking straw-men who were long ago dismissed as much more than 'nonsensical' by anyone with half a brain; and of course there's no hint of the need to sell his memoirs among his motives. But what a pity he didn't speak up before now, say, before it happened or even any time before nearly a million people have to leave their guts on the ground as evidence of mass slaughter for no reason and with no purpose.

Not for the first time I can say: See that Michael Jackson...he makes me sick.

-------------

I typed this in from the paper, so if there's any errors they're probably mine...

[Mandy]

Interesting that only the 1st section is online. They could have said that to read the rest you should buy the paper, or go to CT

[faceless]

10 September 2007
THIS WOULD HAVE TO BE MOTHER OF ALL INJUSTICES

NOT since Dr Crippen - long before the blizzard of 24/7 satellite media - will there have been a case like Madeleine McCann's if the now official suspicions of the Portuguese police turn out to have been well founded. They have turned it into a circus, with daily appearances at mass and the flight to the Vatican to kiss the hand of the Pope, invoking celebrities, inducing millions of people around the world to raise a fortune in a campaign fund and turning their child into one of the iconic faces of our age. So even Dante himself would find it difficult to describe any circle of the inferno fit for Kate and Gerry McCann if it all turns out to have been a lie.

I have been in and around the Ocean Club in the sleepy Algarve village of Praia da Luz for more than 20 years and it has been surreal enough watching its tiny cobbled streets bristling with television crews broadcasting around the world from a once little-known holiday idyll. And now this.

On my Talk Sport radio shows I have been critical of the McCanns from the start. Not least because I knew aspects of their story could not be true. Their supposed constant vigilance of their three toddlers while they ate in a tapas bar and the children slept in an unlocked apartment was not possible. The distance between the two points was both greater and more convoluted than they said. In any case, the children's bedroom was on the OTHER side of the apartment block and, though both doctors, neither parent possessed X-ray vision.

I said that if a single mother had left her three kids in the chalet at Butlins while she supped scampi and chips in the boozer, she would have immediately been attacked as a feral, feckless, unfit mother by the same media which was painting the grieving McCanns as the very embodiment of modern middle-class Britain.

For months I have watched that media poke ridicule at the supposed bumbling Inspector Clouseaus of the Portuguese police for their apparent leaden-footedness in the investigation. Of course no Johnny Foreigner could be as good as our own police, who brought us the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six.

Now with this new development, the same media seems coiled like a spring to turn on the McCanns as they previously did on the other "suspect" Robert Murat. Sensing they may have been made the biggest fools in history, the Press tables can be seen turning, the plates beginning to move. Of course, the most xenophobic commentators say the science which has led to the Mccanns being named as suspects is inherently suspect due to the foreign hands through which it has passed, oblivious to the fact that it came from British laboratories.

If Madeleine's blood and other DNA evidence really has been found in the boot of her parents' hire car, there are only a few possible explanations. A previous renter of the car - it was 25 days after the child went missing that the family took possession of the vehicle - transported Madeleine in its boot and she was bleeding at the time. Or Madeleine's body was transported in the boot at least 25 days after she disappeared once the McCanns took possession of the car.

In these circumstances the Portuguese police really would be clots if they did not consider the girl's parents to be suspects. Of course there could be other, some would say unlikely, possibilities. The DNA and blood evidence in the boot may not, after all, be Madeleine's and the forensic scientists may be mistaken. The blood in the boot of the McCanns' hire car may be somebody else's, in which case Goodfellas comes to the Algarve and the family are the victims of the most grotesque coincidence.

The DNA could have been planted in the boot of the McCanns' car, presumably by the police. The sort of thing which happened to Mr OJ Simpson. The McCanns have either been the victims of a cataclysmic historic injustice, almost unprecedented, or they have been complicit in a scheme so duplicitous, so evil, so foul that Shakespeare himself could not have written it.

Either way, the name McCann is now well and truly in the history books.

GENIUS DYLAN'S DELIVERY LOST IN TRANSLATION

Bob Dylan is the greatest writer since Shakespeare and I now learn he has been translated into Gaelic. Hoots Mon - what's teuchter for Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues again, or Brand New Leopardskin Pillbox Hat?

The bigger question here is... why? Very few people speak Gaelic, almost none of those cannot understand english. and Dylan's work in its original form is the poetry of the gods. So why not enjoy it in its vernacular - nasal, north country Minnesota - and pure dead brilliant?

NO VICTORY IN SIGHT FOR OUR ARMY

An 18-year old boy gives his life in Afghanistan - the latest blood sacrifice in Blair, Brown, Reid and Browne's war. Ben Ford leaves behind a 16-year old girlfriend who has just miscarried his baby. Now his 16-year old sister vows to join the army to carry on the fight. And we rail against 'boy soldiers' in darkest Africa! Now scarcely a day goes by without more British blood seeping into Eastern sands. As Bin Laden, in the latest video of hix box-set made clear, this one will run and run.

Those who started this disaster will all soon be gone to richer pastures new. Blair to £80000 a time lectures in America, Bush to his ranch, Reid to Celtic Park, Browne to the provincial Ayrshire court circuit. But according to our man in Kabul, the rest of us will be there for FORTY more years. If the Queen doesn't run out of blood sacrifices, that is...

LABOUR LOSING SILLY NAME GAME

I wonder if Wendy Alexander paid any consultants for her brand-new wheeze to re-brand her party, er, Scottish Labour. Her predecessor, spring-heeled Jack, our man in Ouagadugu, was the man who changed the party's name to Scottish New Labour. I was there at the time. Overnight the notepaper which had served us well for nearly a century was junked and the logo iconography history, and not least the beliefs we had all been fighting for, were shredded.

Naturally, absolutely no one was consulted, no organ of the party considered let alone approved the change of the party's name. It was the shape of things to come. A million broken Labour hearts later, wee Wendy decides to change it back again.

It's too little... and too late, love.

MAKING WAVES IN BLACKPOOL

On November 9 and 10, I will be appearing at the Globe Theatre on the Pleasure Beach at Blackpool in the first, of many I hope, Mother Of All Talk Shows annual convention.

Scots diva Terry Neason will be my supporting leading lady. there will also be a cabaret, all-day conference and my Mother Of All One-Man Shows on the Saturday night. It's £25, made out to Miranda Media Ltd, all-in. Let me know by email if you want to come along.

[Mandy]

Regarding Dr. Crippen :

http://www.stephen-stratford.co.uk/dr_crippen.htm

[major.tom]

[Salim201]

of course OJ was framed never trust the police or government they've lied enough times!!
all governments lie and nothing they say can ever be believed, thats a truism

LOL @ "The blood in the boot of the McCanns' hire car may be somebody else's, in which case Goodfellas comes to the Algarve"! ('')

[faceless]

17 September 2007
HANGING'S TOO GOOD FOR BROWN'S NEW PAL

YESTERDAY'S papers said Gordon Brown wanted to hang Mrs Thatcher in No.10. Ah well, I thought, at least the former editor of the Red Paper on Scotland and biographer of James Maxton, leader of the Red Clydesiders, hasn't gone entirely to seed. And then I realised he wanted to commission a portrait of the woman most Labour people regard like Norman Bates's mother in the rocking chair in Hitchcock's Psycho Motel - needing a stake finally driven through her heart.

President Mitterrand, of France, once said Maggie had the mouth of Marilyn Monroe ... and the eyes of Caligula. And not since that crazed Roman emperor appointed his horse a pro-consul of Rome has there been a commission like it. Gordon Brown is the son of the manse. Thatcher told the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland "there is no such thing as society". She even re-wrote the Bible, claiming the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan was not that he was good but that he was rich.

Brown was a Neil Kinnock acolyte when the latter responded to Thatcher: "What, no such thing as society? No such thing as honouring other people's mother and father, cherishing other people's children, no such thing as us and always, just me and now." Even I was up on my feet for that one. Brown represents aFife decimated by Thatcherism, in a Scotland once the workshop of the world rendered post-industrial by her voodoo economics. Through the fabric of the society torn apart by her, one can now glimpse what she meant in her sermon. No society, just individuals, the law of the jungle, let the Deil tak the hindmost.

The loadsamoney years coarsened our country, no, brutalised it beyond compare, and now the New Labour leader is out there a huggin' and a kissin' the witch who, while quoting St Francis of Assisi in that very street, was planning to tear us asunder.

Brown says he "admired" Thatcher, and that she was a "conviction politician". She was a conviction politician all right. But not convicted enough - for the murder of Scottish coal, Scottish steel, the Scottish motor industry, Scottish shipbuilding, for the murder of Bathgate, Invergordon, Motherwell, Kilmarnock. Gordon should hang Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street - from the rafters.

THE DAY MAGGIE SAW RED

Mind you, the Scots used to know how to deal with the milk-snatcher. One Tory bright spark thought it was a good idea to being Maggie to Hampden Park to present the Scottish Cup, at the height of the Poll-Tax riots, and before it was known that the final was to be contested by Dundee United and Celtic. The public services union, NUPE, handed out 60000 red-cards to the fans of both sides and when the odl bat took her seat, the stadium was a sea of red.

At one point, the whole stadium was singing 'Maggie Thatcher...stick your Poll Tax up your arse!" Turning to her urbane Secretary of State, Ian Lang, she asked "What's that they're singing?". "Something about giving your Poll Tax a chance, Prime Minister' he drawled.

JODIE'S AS FAKE AS THEY COME

I see Jodie Marsh is the latest telly-fraud to be uncovered. She said she was seeking a husband, and pretended to "interview" several suitors. She, er, married her own boyfriend, whom she had planned to wed all along. The whole thing was as fake as her veneers and pouting trout-lips. What did you expect guys, a cross between Caligula's horse and Maggie Thatcher?

MY MATE WARREN'S A LEGEND

The first X-rated movie I ever saw was Bonnie and Clyde, in the Astoria cinema in dundee, with a lovely leggy blonde called Lynda Justice - I've had a passion for justice all my life. Last week, 40 years later, I watched it again. Faye Dunaway was beautiful in it, but Warren Beatty took the biscuit. Was there ever a taller, more handsome, better turned-out matinee idol than him?

Last year, Sean Penn took me to see Beatty (how's THAT for name-dropping?) at his home in Beverly Hills. All I could see was the silver-screen star looking, at 70, every bit of the magnificent lover of everyone from Natalie Wood to Madonna, through (ahem) Julie Christie. by the way, there was no trace of jealousy between Sean and him, despite their "common" experience of Madonna. But all I could hear was Clyde Barrow telling ME how much our admiration was mutual, and reciting lines from MY speeches back at me.

If only Ms Justice could have seen me then. I did tell her when she dumped me, aged 14, that there would come a day when she'd regret it.

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

Gordon Brown famously lied that his all-time favourite goal was Paul Gascoigne's against Scotland. It was as risible a claim as that he woke up to Arctic Monkeys on something he called an iPod. Well James McFadden's goal against France last week will live with me for ever. The insouciance, the chutzpah of it, a slight working-class Scotsman having the confidence to touch, look up, and lash a 35-yard shot into such a net. Sacre Bleu, the balls of it.

Walter Smith and Alex McLeish have rescued Scotland from the Vogts aka the pits. both of them are friends of mine, I'm proud to say.

[faceless]

24 September 2007
Time For Gordon To Face The Electorate

PUT the kettle on for a General Election on October 25, a little over a month away, which will either make Irn Broon a champ or a chump, but for one day, the shortest term premier in British history. If Gordon isn't a moron, and he is not - he is the only man I know to study the results of town council by-elections from Perth to Penzance - he knows he will never have it so good as now.

Going to the country now while still a novelty, means asking for a mandate for his next government, waiting means asking for a verdict on the last four. Going now means riding the wave of opinion poll success, while waiting might see Brown scrape home and prey to backbench rebellion with a majority of less than he inherited - political death as Brown must win better than Blair if the "NEW, New Labour" concept is to have any credibility.

Going now while Northern Rock looks like an iceberg which can be circumnavigated, or going later when it becomes clear it was the tip of a canyon of horrors. Going now before George Bush does anything stupid in Iran, or going later, after yet another disastrous war you've either joined, supported, or just been blamed for not opposing strongly enough.

For me, having fought elections as an activist, organiser and candidate for nearly 40 years, it's a no-brainer. And it's not just the opinion polls. The aforementioned council by-elections, which probably only me and Broon have read, all point one way. Labour beating the Tories in Birmingham, Liberals losing in Nuneaton, and, most significantly a 17 per cent swing to Labour in Worcester, the proverbial "Middle Britain" where elections are said to be won and lost. So much for why he should go early. This is why he will.

If he had wanted to still our beating hearts, flushed with election fever, he would have done so on his arrival in Bournemouth for the Labour conference. Instead he encouraged it with a steely gaze. His amanuensis Yvette Cooper, a powerful minister, could scarcely keep the smile off her face when being interviewed about the subject. Clever ministers trying to dampen speculation don't do it like that.

If Brown lets this story run all week and doesn't signal a poll, he will look like chump James Callaghan, who led us on only to leave us waiting at the gate, even singing a song mocking the speculators he'd encouraged, and laughing at Margaret Thatcher (Gordon's new best friend) who, he imagined, he'd thus left "waiting at the church". Of course, in the subsequent "shotgun" wedding in 1979 - forced on the country by the SNP - it was Maggie who had the last laugh.

Of course the unthinkable prospect of electoral defeat in next month's General Election must be considered. It would give Gordon, who bit his nails for 10 years waiting for this job, just 120 days as Prime Minister. One more than the 19th century's George Canning. And he only left office because he was dead.

Darling Made Me See Red

I ONLY ask. But if the public - that's you dear reader - was forced by Alistair Darling to underwrite the entire multi-billion pound assets of the Northern Rock private bank, in what sense is it a private bank? What this imbroglio - like many a Railtrack and Channel Tunnel before it - has shown is that privatisation doesn't transfer risk, it only transfers profit. If things go badly the taxpayers pay. If things go well the share-holders and fat cat directors party like it is 1999.

Move over Darling and make way for a young man I knew back in 1977. He was bearded, tanned and handsome in an Italianate way. He was also a dangerous Red who rubbed shoulders with Ron "Afghan" Brown the Leither, an ally of Red Ken Livingstone and Red Ted Knight down in London. He would routinely denounce the likes of me as a "reformist" because I didn't support councillors like him who bankrupted their councils - and themselves - by refusing to fix a rate in protest at the cuts coming from the class traitors in the then Labour government.

When I first saw him he was pressing Trotskyite tracts on bewildered railwaymen at Waverley Station. When I last saw him he was Chancellor, without a beard or single principle to his name. He is, of course, Alistair Darling.

Change We Don't Need

BE careful what you wish for, Alex. Reports that the SNP government are to seek power over abortion for Holyrood are circulating. My anti-abortion views are well known, and it may be there would be more or less abortions in Scotland under Salmond than there are now that the law is set in Westminster, who can tell?

But it would be absurd to have a different abortion law on either side of the border, wouldn't it? What would we have, the abortion equivalent of Gretna Green, with women being trafficked to clinics in the border-lands?

Wendy Has Labour In A Spin

Wnedy Alexander's first week in office has been spoiled by a storm in an egg cup over Brian Lironi, an unknown spin-doctor whom spring-heeled Jack McConnell - our man to be in Ouagadougou - has promised an "Alastair Campbell-type spin doctor" contract to... and whom Wendy has now axed. Her back-benchers are now revolting - well most of them always were.

Any man who took a job to be like Alistair Campbell - the guy who punched for Robert Maxwell and did Tony Blair's dirty work - is probably worth letting go, with due respect to Mrs Lironi and the little Lironis.

But memo to Scottish New Labour... why don't you at least give Wendy a chance?

Tartan Army

"DEEP fry your croissants, we're gonnae deep fry your croissants" was sung by the Tartan Army under the Arc after Scotland's triumph over France at the football. The inventiveness of the football fan knows few bounds. But sometimes they run out of lyrics. Around 20 years ago Celtic had to replay a European match against Rapid Vienna after crowd trouble at Celtic Park. The game was at Old Trafford in Manchester.

The referee had upset the Celtic fans in the original match and the full bhunna of abuse was flying his way. One man in front of me was providing a master-class. A thesaurus of tribal insult was battered about his person. But finally - when no insult to the ref's parentage, sexual proclivities, sight or mental health was unsaid - the fan plumbed the depths. "Referee, ya f****** Ethiopian". Deep fry your croissants indeed.

[faceless]

Practise What You Preach, Gordon..
1st of October

NEXT Monday, the Stop the War Coalition, of which I am vice-president, will seek to march from Trafalgar Square to parliament to demand the return of all British troops from Iraq. The police have said we cannot, citing the Government's decision not to allow demos outside parliament when it is sitting.

But what would be the point of demonstrating when parliament is not sitting? And what kind of free country doesn't allow its citizens to peacefully demonstrate outside its parliament? Why, a country like Burma perhaps. That's where the Buddhist monks are being dragooned and bludgeoned and even shot for, er, demonstrating against their government.

In that case, Gordon Brown (forgetting that the death toll in Burma would constitute a quiet afternoon in Iraq) is posturing all over the world stage about tyranny. Well, if it's good enough for Rangoon, Gordon, it's good enough for us. We will march next Monday whether you like it or not. Some of us will be wearing saffron robes and shaving our heads to make the point. I advise you, as you get into your stride in the election campaign, not to misuse our hard-pressed police officers in the way the Burmese junta are using theirs.

Twisted Assault On A True Football Legend

ON my Talksport radio shows at the weekend I unmasked the twisted campaign against the memory of the late great Jock Stein. In the late Sixties and early Seventies there was a child abuse scandal within the affiliated but not official Celtic Boys Club, in which one of the organisers, convicted in 1996, was interfering sexually with some of the boys club's brightest prospects.

In the same period Jock Stein, a protestant from an Orange background, was leading Celtic to unprecedented domestic and European glory. Stein would later literally die for Scotland, collapsing in the dug-out in Cardiff (I was there and saw it happen) from the strain of trying to get Scotland to the World Cup finals. This was not the first time death, Stein and a football ground were linked. In the Ibrox disaster the Celtic manager was helping carry the dead and dying Rangers supporters from the crushing carnage.

In recent months, writing has appeared on various toilet walls claiming that "Big Jock Knew" about this nearly 40-year-old sex scandal. That was one thing, after all only the cockroaches who hang around in toilets reading those walls would likely come across it. But on Saturday in Newton Stewart the roaches came out in the unlikely surroundings of the Borders, at the game with Linlithgow Rose, and unfurled their rancid banner... for the benefit of the TV cameras.

SFA chief executive Gordon Smith was there and was alerted to this provocation, 59 minutes later, precisely, he managed to have it taken down. But not before the memory of Scotland's greatest ever football figure was besmirched, his family's honour sullied, and the deepest and darkest recesses of Scottish sectarianism exposed to the world once again.

When I told this story on my show on Saturday night, a succession of fine Rangers fans, including William, on the A1, and Karen, in Airdrie, phoned to denounce these bigots. But another William, in Belfast, called to defend the campaign, and a caller rang up to say he was disappointed the thugs who attacked me at Glasgow Airport hadn't "done it properly" and promised that "next time" they would (were you listening Strathclyde Police? If not it's on www.georgegalloway.com).

The simple truth is that this vile campaign is a cipher for all the sectarian songs these morons can no longer sing, on pain of fines for Rangers and even exclusion from tournaments. David Murray has tried to move this mountain of sectarian slag from the Rangers support, and he deserves and gets, from me at least, every commendation for doing so. Now I'm afraid, he will have to get his sickle out again. This campaign simply has to be rooted out.

A Little-Read Scottish Broadsheet

A LITTLE-READ Scottish broadsheet "serialised" a book purportedly about me yesterday. I say purportedly as it and the truth were no more than nodding strangers, ships passing in the night. The sweepings of the internet floor, a collection of every smear I've ever faced, with a larding of cod psychology "explaining" my personality by an author who has neither met nor spoken to me in his life. Not another British newspaper was interested in "serialising" this garbage - though it was offered to every one - but a Scottish one did. Wha's like us, ae?

you can read the offending article here:

It's Reid's Turn Now

"DR" JOHN REID took his place in the chairmanelect's seat at Parkhead last weekend. Chairman Reid - my former research officer - has few political redeeming features. So shoulder-to-shoulder with Blair and Bush has he been these last years, the blood on his new green jacket will never out.

He once was a friend of mine, though that didn't stop him starting my expulsion from Labour without even a friendly call on the QT. And any man who can beat the addiction of booze like he has deserves respect for courage. But he is co-responsible for massacre, for the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase and Guantanamo Bay.

Mind you, he used to get "reshuffled" with monotonous regularity in government. So perhaps he'll now embark on a round of boardrooms, chairing Hearts, Hibs (turning his coat is no problem for John, when I met him he was a hardline Communist), Airdrie and Dundee, declaring each of them in turn "unfit for purpose"?

I'll Fight Pm's Election War

GORDON may be on his way to the palace tomorrow to start the General Election process. The balloon may be up - and I don't mean David Cameron. The Prime Minister would be psychologically flawed if he missed this chance to crush the auld enemy and keep them out of power for a generation.

I will be a candidate, seeking a sixth consecutive General Election victory in my fourth constituency for my second party. But I'll still find time amid the grapeshot to keep Record readers up to date with the contest. Let battle begin!

[faceless]

finally The Daily Record has updated its site and have put most of these features in their archive.

www.dailyrecord.co.uk/comment/columnists/lifestyle-columnists/george-galloway/