I was thinking a bit today about the protests against the World Cup taking place in Qatar. Of course there's one very obvious reason why it shouldn't be taking place there: the bid was only won due to corruption on an epic scale. But if it wasn't for that, the issues would be quite complex and finely-balanced. If we completely bar countries with poor human rights records from hosting major sporting events, then countries covering perhaps one half or more of the global population would be automatically excluded, which would arguably make a mockery of the whole concept of "international sport". Some people would perhaps say that any awarding of an event should be conditional on changes in local laws, but in many cases the offending laws are very similar to ones that were in place in western countries as recently as a few decades ago. Arguably it's a form of colonialism to expect developing countries to conform to our standards of right now and to say that even our standards of five minutes ago won't be good enough.
And that thought process suddenly reminded me of something. Before I was banned from Stormfront Lite, I recall Tory posters repeatedly trying to brand Scotland a backwards, socially conservative country on the basis of the fact that male homosexual acts remained illegal here until 1980, more than a decade after the lifting of the ban in England and Wales in 1967. There's just one little snag with that narrative: 1980 was nineteen years before the introduction of devolution, which meant that all of Scotland's laws - without exception - were decided solely by the English-dominated UK Parliament. Exactly the same parliamentarians who decided male homosexual acts should be decriminalised in England and Wales opted to keep them illegal here. Of course, once you point that out there's then the inevitable innuendo about how Westminster was powerless to act against the face of unsophisticated Scottish public opinion. Hmmm. Have you ever actually noticed Westminster paying the slightest heed to Scotland-specific public opinion, as opposed to Britain-wide public opinion?
And who held the power of initiative to legislate on Scotland-specific matters prior to devolution? Why, that would be the Secretary of State for Scotland, who was not elected by the people of Scotland, but was instead handpicked by the British Prime Minister from the ranks of his own party, even if Scotland had voted for a different party. No matter which way you cut it, British fingerprints are all over this supposedly "Scottish" point of historical shame. Nor is this an isolated example of Scotland getting the blame for things that Westminster have done to Scotland - probably the most brazen one is the "Scottish deficit" we keep hearing so much about, which the Scottish Government has literally zero responsibility for due to a legal requirement to balance the books. If it can even be reasonably described as a Scottish deficit at all, it's merely a nominally-assigned Scottish portion of a British deficit run up by British governments.
What other examples can we think of?
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