Some Thoughts On The Nature Of Self Doubt

I suffer from the Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome.

One of its symptoms is obsessiveness.

I have recently had cause to briefly re-read many of the articles I had previously contributed to 'The Washington Dispatch', an exercise which made me realise how little genuine insight many of them offered into their topics.

Too many of them, particularly the very early ones, were so full of naked, obsessive aggression that a reasonable reader might wonder whether their author was in need of therapy.

The same obsessiveness spilled over into 'The G-Gnome Rides Out'; and it is a monument to the graciousness of those I obsessively criticised on that site, criticism which often blurred the line between free speech and slander, that some do not now shun me completely. I cannot apologise enough to them.

And one has to wonder about the stability of any 35 year old man who willingly assumes the public persona of a garden gnome.

By the same token, one can't help but wonder whether what appears to be the exclusive focus of my writing about immigration and globalisation on this weblog is a manifestation of the same obsessiveness.

Whether or not this is the result of my condition, I cannot bring myself to write about anything else. Perhaps it's a consequence of having gorged oneself on political commentary, but I now approach the task of watching and listening to Tony Blair with the same level of enthusiasm with which one might approach the mauled carcass of a dead zebra. The man disgusts me.

The same disgust is felt for David Cameron and the rest of the British political establishment. None of them have anything to say to people like me, the provincial lower middle classes, any more; they are no longer interested in us, our concerns or indeed, in the era of tradable skills and IT-enabled wage arbitrage, our very survival.

They all seem such horrible people.

Perhaps the obsessiveness arises due to a conscious decision made early in life to reject one's own stagnant and bankrupt local ethnic culture; it is almost socially acceptable, if not expected, for those of Irish Catholic extraction in the West of Scotland to decry 'Britishness', and feel attachment to another country in which no family members have made their homes for generations, if not centuries; a country whose eyes are now definitely fixed on other, golden places.

Similarly, although the earth of Scotland is and always will be my home, it is fatuous to pine for the independence of a country whose leaders sold it 299 years ago. If Scotland, our silly but beloved wee nation, is to have any future at all, it is as part of the greater British whole; and the skirted fool McConnell might care to ponder that if he and the other knaves, rogues and poltroons persist in the foolishness in which they indulge themselves at the bottom of Edinburgh High Street, they might one day actually live in an independent nation of five million, a few miles away from one of fifty million; one whose residents really couldn't care less about us.

And what would become of us then?

To profess oneself a Unionist in the Scotland of 2006 is to commit a social solecism almost on a par with admitting a tendency towards necrophilia; but without the Union the United Kingdom is nothing. It is to us what the Constitution is to the United States, that without which our nation cannot exist.

Too few of us are ready to admit that the United Kingdom is fighting a cultural war for its very survival. Devolution is not federalism; and it would be one of the blackest days in history if that entity which has survived so much, done so much and given so much to the world were to wither and die under the assaults of Rosie Kane.

The years 1979 to 1997 smashed the Union's fragile economic balance. Instead of moving to restore it, Blair ripped the bandage off the wound by promising limited devolution; an exercise which might have added to the gaiety of the nation but which in its short life has proved a disaster, a cause for shame instead of celebration.

But it is in the issue of immigration that one sees what one loves, one's home and culture, being altered and bent like plasticine with neither consultation nor consent; the taking of a hammer to an object already under stress.

The right to decide who lives amongst them is one of the most profound rights of any nation of citizens.

Blair came to power in 1997 wanting to increase immigration. No other conclusion supports the facts. Whether he was motivated by ideology, a flawed understanding of economics, a desire to ingratiate himself with the business class or my own personal belief, that he profoundly hates everything about the United Kingdom and its people and will do everything in his power to change both it and them, he did not tell us that was his plan.

That has been his greatest betrayal in a shabby career which has left history's highway strewn with roadkill in its wake.

But if perhaps an obsessive nature can be harnessed even to merely trying to chart the ghastly consequences of Blair's hidden agenda, then the hours spent banging away at a keyboard in a tenement on the South Side of Glasgow might not perhaps have been wasted.

And perhaps this is the cry of a fractured and unfulfilled ego, but one could not suffer the thought of being considered as lacking commitment; nor of one's work being without some merit.