Gerald Warner

Thursday

28 Nov 2013
Gerald Warner

David Cameron is betraying Scotland’s Unionists

With trademark grandiosity, Alex Salmond unveiled his white paper on independence this week as if he had retrieved it from the top of Mount Sinai. ‘This is the most comprehensive blueprint for an independent country ever published,’ proclaimed the First Minister. It was yet another reminder of an inexorable law of politics: the larger the document, the weaker the content. The American declaration of independence managed to fit on a page. The SNP’s plan for a separate Scotland is so bald that it needs to conceal its nothingness with 650 pages of flannel. You can look in vain in its pages for any sign of any policy that will make Scotland a better place. There will be more welfare, universal childcare, milk and honey.

David Cameron is betraying Scotland’s Unionists

Thursday

7 Mar 2013
Gerald Warner

If Cambridge’s debating girls can’t stand the heat, they should stay out of Glasgow kitchens

Glasgow University Union is in the headlines again. The story at first sight appears typical of the petty campus rows to which undergraduates attach passionate importance but which bore the rest of the world. On closer consideration, it encompasses issues of free speech and political control that are of genuine concern. At the recently held final round of the Glasgow University Union (GUU) Ancients debating competition, involving the older-established British universities, two female speakers complained of being heckled and booed during their speeches and of being subjected to sexist abuse. One girl was from Cambridge, the other from Edinburgh University. As a reprisal, Cambridge has announced it will not send debaters to compete in GUU in future.

If Cambridge’s debating girls can’t stand the heat, they should stay out of Glasgow kitchens

Saturday

10 Dec 2011
Gerald Warner

Politics: Whitehall’s own Scottish nationalist

The notion of Scotland being reoriented as a ‘Scandinavian’ country, at the expense of links with England, the Commonwealth and Europe, is odd enough; but stranger still is the revelation this week that the plan — part of a massive ‘Prospectus for Independence’ — is being put together by a branch of the UK civil service. These servants of the Crown have been tasked by Alex Salmond with selling separatism to the electorate, in advance of an independence referendum. For Scots it was a shock, but not a surprise. This is only the latest demonstration of how what ought to be part of the British government machine has been made an instrument of separatist propaganda.This subversive scenario was never supposed to happen.

Saturday

23 Apr 2011
Gerald Warner

‘We’re all doomed!’

Scotland is staring into a £4.5 billion black hole‘Their form of rule is democratic for the most part, and they are very fond of plundering…’ That description of the Scots by Cassius Dio, the Roman historian, in the early 3rd century testifies to the consistency of the Scottish character over 1,800 years. Today the Scots are so democratic they have saddled themselves with three tiers of government, while their enduring taste for plunder has progressed from the crudity of border reiving to the sophistication of the Barnett Formula. Scotland has successfully reversed the fiscal arrangements that would have been familiar to Cassius Dio in the days when outlying nations paid taxes to Rome: contemporary Caledonia is a dependency that exacts tribute from Westminster.

‘We’re all doomed!’

Wednesday

11 Jun 2008
Gerald Warner

Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms

Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry‘Do you have the new novel by Alexandre Dumas?’ Who ever imagined going into the local branch of Waterstone’s and asking that question, in the 21st century? Yet the unexpected — the impossible — has happened and an authentically new historical novel by the legendary author of The Three Musketeers has recently been published for the first time in Britain. Its classically Dumas title in French, Le chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, has been changed for an Anglophone readership to The Last Cavalier.An account of how the Master’s last novel was rediscovered by Claude Schopp, the leading Dumas scholar in France, is given by him in an appendix to The Last Cavalier which describes how the complete book was painstakingly reconstructed.

Wednesday

9 Apr 2008
Gerald Warner

Shame on Scottish Tories for their Vichy sell-out

Gerald Warner says that Scotland’s Conservatives, far from standing their ground on devolution, have jumped with relish on the gravy train of the Holyrood parliamentThe Scottish Play has degenerated into a farce and the indigenous Tories have lost the plot. When the constitutional future of the United Kingdom moved centre-stage in late 2007, Unionists were heartened by the deftness of touch David Cameron brought to this issue. It contrasted with the directionless drift of his supposed allies in the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party, which is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Scottish separatist tendency.The Scottish Tories have gone native. In the run-up to the devolution referendum on 11 September 1997, they proclaimed vociferously that the creation of a devolved parliament would end civilisation as we had known it.

Saturday

17 May 2003
Gerald Warner

Luxury Goods SpecialMonocles

I have been toying with the idea of founding a Cyclops Club, drawing its membership from the dwindling band of individualists who persist in defying the zeitgeist of Cool Britannia by wearing a single eyeglass, commonly known as a monocle. We are a species threatened with extinction and we probably qualify for victimhood, as an oppressed minority.The impending crisis first became apparent last summer when an incident in Bromley provoked national headlines. Brian Dowling, a retired scriptwriter who had worn a monocle for 30 years, went to the Bromley branch of opticians Dollond & Aitchison to renew his prescription, only to be told, 'We don't do them any more.' The ensuing publicity caused Dollond & Aitchison to issue a hasty reassurance that they would continue to sell monocles at their main London store in Wigmore Street.

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