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The Jeggit Podcast
Christmas is Dead
Season 2021, Ep. 2
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Every single night, in the days and weeks before Christmas, the evening news featured someone or other representing the hospitality sector or retail; hoteliers, pub owners, restaurateurs, shop owners – people linked by class and marriage to the decisionmakers in government – telling of the woes endured by business through lockdown, as though their suffering bore the slightest relation to the suffering endured by the thousands in this country who have perished from this sickness and the suffering of their families – most of whom couldn’t even attend their loved one’s death beds or funerals. The dial on the media manipulation was turned up to full volume to ensure we could ‘save Christmas’ by easing the restrictions, opening the bars and cafes and restaurants and what have you, and getting the cash registers on the high street ringing like the bells on Father Christmas’ sleigh in time for a good ol’ fashioned family Christmas.
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5. Conversation with Alex Salmond
31:58||Season 2021, Ep. 5We are greatly privileged to have Alex Salmond on the Jeggit podcast, the leader of the Alba Party, former leader of the Scottish National Party, and former First Minister of Scotland. What is Alba about, what can it achieve, and what is the plan for Scottish independence? In this conversation I was eager to get to the root of the man; to find out what motivates him and why he has come back to frontline politics. It was a most enjoyable natter.
4. A Working Class State of Mind
42:46||Season 2021, Ep. 4Colin Burnett is a young Edinburgh short story writer who is passionate about writing in the Scots language. As he explains, Scots is the native language of the Scottish working-class people and has suffered the double oppression of being suppressed by so-called British culture and by the dominant class within Scotland. His debut title, A Working Class State of Mind, is now available for pre-order from Leamington Books and will soon be on sale in all good bookshops.
3. Ross Weir for the ISP
46:58||Season 2021, Ep. 3Exactly three years ago Ross Weir and I met in the bar of the Stag Hotel in Lochgilphead in Argyll. He had come to hear Peter Bell and I speak, and now he's here to talk about his campaign to be elected to the Scottish parliament in the upcoming Holyrood elections. He has left the SNP and is now standing for the ISP. He says he left the SNP 'to get independence.'
1. New Year 2021
09:05||Season 2021, Ep. 1Back in 2014 Scotland bought the lie that its parliament would be made permanent. That was always a lie – no Westminster parliament can bind a future Westminster parliament. That’s what Crown sovereignty means. It was such an obvious lie. But Scotland bought it, and we are now going to see just what Britain meant by 'permanent:' the permanent obliteration of Holyrood and Scottish democracy. Faced with isolation from Europe and economic ruin, Britain is not about to let Scotland – literally its oil tank – swan off into the sunset. Stop being so dim! England robbed Scotland to fund Scotland's deindustrialisation, using our oil to build the economic powerhouse that is the City of London, and now it is poised to rob whatever we have left to fund its economic isolationism. This is as plain to see as the nose on your face, but it seems that only the Scots can’t see it. Maybe we just don’t want to see it.
14. It is Christmas
06:56||Season 2020, Ep. 14Isn’t this the message of Christmas; the transformation of the human story by the birth of a child – a weak and defenceless baby in the arms of a frightened mother and father? This pandemic and Christmas have this in common; they are a revelation – they uncover the little lies we tell ourselves, the falsehoods that help us feel empowered and in control. But no, we are not in control, not really. Like the Christ-child we depend on the love and care of others – because, like him, we are truly human. Our divinity, our transformation, begins only when we embrace this solidarity, the togetherness heaven shared with us that night in the City of David so long ago.
13. Scottish Texan Against Trump
53:49||Season 2020, Ep. 13Speaking with Karen Wallace, a Scot who has upped sticks and moved to the great state of Texas, about life in Trump's America. This is not the America she moved to twenty years ago, she tells me. So much has changed! I wanted to get her on the podcast to tell us what it feels like to be on the ground as Texas and the United States struggle with the horrible forces Trump's administration has unleashed. Truly, this was a fascinating discussion and I hope you enjoy it every bit as much as I did. Thank you, Karen!
12. Independence as Freedom
10:25||Season 2020, Ep. 12Scotland has been subjected to the worldview of colonialism; a process in which we have been culturally dominated, in a racialised class system to be subservient to the will of England to the end that we have become complicit in our own oppression and in the extraction of our own resources to the benefit of the English state. This too is colonialism, and this is what we have experienced in Scotland. No colonised society is a free society, by definition. And thus to be free we must seek to end the colonial exploitation of our country.This is independence as freedom.
11. COVID-19 and the Conspiracy Theories
40:07||Season 2020, Ep. 11This afternoon I was speaking with Dr Peter Ashby, a bio-medical researcher based in Dundee, Scotland, about how the various conspiracy theories growing up around COVID-19 are getting in the way of medical and governmental efforts to tackle the disease. He says that people want to believe fantastical things because it gives them comfort. Thinking that someone or some people are somehow behind this catastrophe stops them from facing the real terror that sometimes nature is chaotic and beyond our control.