Scotland: We Have Rockets Too
Craig Dalzell
Imagine the pitch. You’ve been instructed by Angus Robertson’s office to cut together a bunch of stock footage for a video showcasing Scotland and [don’t look at the fascism] the USA. Quite artistically, the images are juxtaposed to show the common interests between our two [ignore the ethnic cleansing] nations. For the scene to illustrate the line “we share beautiful places”, what images do you think would show Scotland and the US at their best [Hail King Musk and Viceroy Trump]?
The Scottish Government chose these two.
The image of America is of a severely depleted reservoir (I think it’s Lake Mead, on the Colorado river, upstream from Hoover Dam). I was last at Hoover Dam in person in 1999 and even then that white band of deposited salt that marks the dropping water level was evident and a concern. As you can see from Google Maps Street View (see the option to go back in time), the problem has only gotten worse since. What was once the icon of the New Deal has become the epitome of hydrological mismanagement as farms and cities more or less plunder the waterway to the point that one of North America’s mightiest rivers now scarcely reaches the sea (to the detriment of the Mexican farmers who used to rely on it.
And on the Scotland side (thanks to Andy Wightman for identifying it as Loch Leven, see his comment for details)? What do you see there? A lush and pleasant coastal scene? Look closer. I see fish cages. One of Scotland’s three iconic exports (alongside oil and whisky) is salmon but as The Ferret has pointed out multiple times, the way we farm salmon in Scotland is often appalling both in terms of animal welfare and the pollution dumped into our coastal seas, with companies deliberately coming here to do what they’re not allowed to do in their own countries and to export the profits of their extraction back there. How about on land? That’s a nice forest isn’t it? Well, much of it is sitka spruce plantation. An invasive non-native plant grown in dense monoculture again purely for profit and again, often for foreign profit (see Andy Wightman’s recent blog about the French Government putting their Scottish plantations on the market). And in the background? The glorious Highland hills? They look a bit bare – not even a sitka plantation on them and a far cry from the “mosaic of life” that they once were and should be returned to. In fact, if you look really closely, there are signs of muirburn – the deliberate incineration of the hillsides so that very, very rich people can more easily shoot birds for fun.
Is this really the image of Scotland’s “beautiful places” that Angus Robertson wants the world to see? We’re just like America, you see? Our land is similar. Our sports with not-round balls are almost identical. We have rockets too! Their Saturn V rocket is just like our space program! (look – I’m proud of Scotland’s contributions to the space sector. We’ve written policy papers about how the Scottish Government can improve our standing there too but there’s a bit of a difference in scale there between a lunar mission and a ranging rocket that didn’t get as high as a passenger jet, never mind out of the atmosphere) We even have a financial sector where you can come and take all of our money!
In fact, does he even want the world to see this? What budget has the Scottish Government put behind broadcasting this advert across the US? Will it appear during the Superbowl this year? Between prime time news segments? Maybe sandwiched between funny-if-they-weren’t-horrifying pharmaceutical adverts on a late night shopping channel? Maybe they’ll be on constant loop on a TV in the basement of the British embassy? Will we ever get to see an impact assessment on how many tourists and how much investment came to Scotland from the US after seeing those ads?
I don’t think we will. I don’t think the US public is even the target audience. I think it’s us. I think this is the Scottish Government trying to run a PsychOps campaign to bed the idea into our heads that we can be good and loyal Atlanticists both pre- and post-independence. Loyal allies of the American regime as it uses us for its own purposes. Robertson’s faction within the SNP are the ones that brought the party into the smothering embrace of NATO and are the ones furiously trying to extricate the party from its promise to ban nukes from Scotland. I believe that this advertising campaign is aimed at that. The timing – right after Mr “Art of the Deal” came back into office – cannot be a coincidence (even if his commitment to ethnic cleansing was underestimated by the Scottish Government before hitting the “launch” button on the ad) other than as a small attempt to try to avoid Mr “Tariffs are the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and his trade war? I think this is an attempt to sanitise Trumps actions as Scottish Ministers cuddle up closer and beg for a few more scraps or at the very least another ticket to Tartan Week. Maybe the question isn’t what the Scottish Government is trying to sell with this ad (unless the answer is “us”) but what do they want to buy from him instead. It’s certainly a far cry from what Scotland should be doing with our international outlook (see Robin’s article here for that).
Scotland’s space programme isn’t the only place where we can find total rockets if they think this is the best that Scotland can aspire to.
If you care about our land, please go and contribute to Revive’s Big Land Question where you can tell us how you’d like to see Scotland’s land actually reformed. Hopefully, you’ll agree with us that Scotland shouldn’t be a playground for billionaires with guns, golf clubs and grabby little hands. Maybe one day, we’ll run an advert showing how the people of Scotland have become custodians of an actually lush and verdant land not just now but for many generations to come.
Postscript:- At 0800 this morning, Robertson published this new video, perhaps suddenly realising that there was another country on the continent of North America that it might be a little more politically palatable to cosy up to.