Talking-up Scotland

Domestic violence, predominantly against women, is one of the persisting horrors of modern Scotland. This report absolutely does not aim to diminish, to detract or to distract from a priority for change that has few if any challengers. The Scottish Government too, I feel sure, has no illusions on this:

‘The Scottish Government is committed to tackling the scourge of domestic abuse and helping victims have the confidence to come forward and report it is a hugely important part of that.’ (Justice Secretary Michael Matheson, 27/10/2015)

 ‘Violent crimes against women in England and Wales reach record high’

 This is from the Guardian on the 5^th September this year. Though the writer does not refer to Scotland at any point, she is clear that the figures refer explicitly to England and Wales. She elaborates:

‘The number of prosecutions relating to violence against women and girls in England and Wales reached a record level last year, the director of public prosecutions said, as she warned of the increasing use of social media to threaten and control.’

The figures for Scotland were released only today, 25^th October 2016. Note that the Scottish figures relate to reports rather than to prosecutions. I’m not sure how much this matters but I’m going to assume that trends in reporting and in prosecuting are both indicators of underlying trends in criminal behaviour rather than indicators of significant differences in policing. Here are the key points, reported in the Herald:

‘The number of domestic abuse incidents recorded by police has fallen in the past year, figures show.’

‘Official statistics show a 3% drop in the figures for Scotland, from 59,882 in 2014-15 to 58,104, the lowest number recorded since 2010-11. The majority of incidents (79%) had a female victim and a male accused, down from 87% in 2006-07. Over the same period the proportion of incidents with a male victim and a female accused has increased from 11% to 18%.’

So, the total number of reported abuse incidents has fallen by 3% yet the number of reported female-on-male cases has increased by 7%. Therefore, reported male-on-female abuse has gone down by more than 3%? I’m not a statistician. Have I got this right, readers?

Readers will be aware that all we have, in areas of crime, are reported levels. Actual levels of crime are generally thought to be considerably higher. From The United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations Criminal Justice Systems report of 2010, collating evidence from crime victim surveys: ‘it is known that depending on the type of crime, only about half of the crimes are actually reported to the police.’ This is of course not definitive evidence that the level of actual domestic crime in Scotland is only twice the level of reported domestic crime.

Readers may also be aware that this report is the latest in a long line of attempts by me to try to counter what is known commonly as the ‘Scottish Cringe’ or the notion that Scotland is inferior to other countries in so many ways that it cannot/should not aim for independence as it would not be able to look after itself properly. The idea that Scots males are even more violent toward their female partners than English males are is also part of the cringe. In 2014, Frankie Boyle joked that Scotland should become an Islamic State if only to unnerve England. Of course, he observed, we’d have to improve our treatment of women if we did. He was joking but that we get it tells you how deeply embedded the notion is.

Media reporting of Scottish affairs which constructs our reality for us is, to my mind, mostly to blame for the sustenance of the cringe. Recent attempts by me to suggest that Scotland is and has been for some time, more tolerant of refugees and is less xenophobic than many other countries, have taken me out onto thin ice and attracted a few angry comments. See:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/10/20/is-tory-rule-making-england-more-barbaric-while-snp-rule-is-making-scotland-more-civilised/

To any angered by this report, I plead that you read again my opening paragraph, give me the benefit of the doubt and point out my errors calmly.

My comparison of Scotland with England and Wales may be problematic but the fall in reporting of male-on-female and the rise in reporting of female on male abuse is not.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/05/violent-crimes-against-women-in-england-and-wales-reach-record-high

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/14821657.3__fall_in_domestic_abuse_incidents_reported_to_police/

https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Crime statistics/International_Statistics_on_Crime_and_Justice.pdf

 

 

 

 

 

Quite funny too? allegedly by: Retired Professor Johann Vintner Rumpledkiltsmann, ‘The Huffmeister’, of the University of Westwattersrand South (UWS)

Click to access a-scottish-university-partners-berlin-institute-rejected-by-wikipedia.pdf

 

 

Every now and again BBC Salford will drop BBC Scotland ‘right in it’ by reporting good news about NHS Scotland only to be followed by BBC Scotland appearing to not have heard of the story at all. BBC England has reported on the excellence of A&E in Scotland and on the integration of health and social care services, leading to less ‘bed-blocking’ in Scotland only for BBC Scotland to ignore it and go for something negative instead.

This morning, Tuesday 25^th October 2016 at 08:12 we heard the above quote followed by an extended and quite assertive interview with an unconvincing and wriggling NHS England representative. Only 15 minutes later BBC Scotland led with:

‘The Scottish Police Federation (trades union) has criticised Police Scotland for waiting 12 hours before releasing details of the attempted murder of two officers.’

I’m no police procedural expert despite watching a few TV versions so with the union naturally wanting the chase to begin as quickly as possible and their HQ wanting to establish the facts first and get on with the job, perhaps with good reason, before dealing with the media, I was left thinking this was not much of a story.

Then we had reports on the missing airman, Brexit affecting research and airport expansion at Heathrow.

So, once more, we have the elderly and the sick in Scotland getting their early morning dose of anxiety-inducing news. A frightened population is easier to manage and more likely to vote for the status quo. It doesn’t require a conspiracy just a well-established pattern of editorial decision-making and  ‘working toward the editor’ by reporters, born out of years of conditioning, in Unionist institutions such as school and university, as a junior reporter and, of course, from years of watching a Unionist news agenda on TV, from childhood. Add to that, of course, living with parents and grandparents who are themselves victims of an even more Unionist social conditioning, dramatically intensified by war propaganda, and you wonder how any support for independence survived.

Why does BBC Salford do this? Don’t they know it will spoil BBC Scotland’s efforts? Well, of course, they don’t know. They are utterly focused on things in England and if they even thought about it they don’t really give a stuff about anything in Scotland including BBC Scotland. The BBC England agenda comes first and last and saving the Union is down the list some way. BBC England’s primary agenda is based on saving themselves from the nasty Tories. What they really want is a return to a kind of Blairite Britain where their funding is safe and where they can spend time pleasantly with like-minded ‘centrist’, ‘moderate’ people. By this they mean people who pretend to want a meritocracy and who do want to reduce poverty and inequality a bit. They want to be able to tell themselves they are more caring than those rabid, right-wing, Europhobic, nasty, Tories but still, of course, want big pay differentials, perks, holiday-homes in France, a property portfolio derived from expenses, and so on.

So, BBC England’s agenda is to attack the right-wing of the Conservative party whenever they can. Though fearful at all times, this means that they will report on failures in NHS England which reflect well on NHS Scotland. The BBC elite are mostly Europhiles thus Brexit has seriously reduced their ability or desire, for that matter, to criticise the SNP when Sturgeon is coming across as the kind of ‘moderate’, ‘sensible’ politician they wish England had.

All of this puts BBC Scotland on the back foot with their reports following on from negative reports on NHS England and positive ones on, especially, Nicola Sturgeon. Their agenda to undermine the Scottish Government and to protect its Tory opposition is more than ever seriously undermined. Even those without a BA Propaganda Studies must now be aware of the confusion and contradiction at the heart of their reporting.

And, that’s why I’m against the idea of a Scottish six. We need BBC England on our side!

Running Total:

Running total 21/9/16 to 25/10/16*             Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            20

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         9

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for Conservative Party (CP)                              0

Missed bad news opportunities for CP                             143 (estimate)

Good news for CP                                                                   3

* Monday to Friday only

 

 

Images: nationalvanguard.org/, reveal.co.uk, theguardian.com

 ‘Just four years ago, Britain proudly projected the image of an open, tolerant, confident nation onto the international stage. We luxuriated in the glow of an Olympic opening ceremony that drew together the best of British: from Shakespeare to EastEnders the Queen to James Bond; the NHS to the internet.’

That’s how the Observer editorial opened on Sunday 23^rd October 2016.  It’s instantly worrying that they thought these were the ‘Best of British.’

The Olympics was a hugely expensive vanity project which sucked the resources from community sports activities and which actually resulted in a decline in general activity levels. The Observer/Guardian editor must have seen this in July 2015:

‘Sport England, the quango that invests £325m of exchequer and lottery funding in grassroots sport per year, last month published participation figures among adults that were damned as very disappointing by the new sports minister, Tracey Crouch. Her Labour opposite number, Clive Efford, called them disastrous. The figures showed that the number of people playing sport at least once a week had declined by 222,000 in six months. Meanwhile, the percentage of those on the lowest incomes participating in sport has hit the lowest level since records began in 2005-06.’

Shakespeare, a damn fine writer I agree but was he not quite mean and narrow-minded himself? He left his wife his ‘second-best bed’ and was:

‘a ruthless businessman [who] did all he could to avoid taxes, maximize profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable.’

His work is full of cruelty, deceit, dishonesty, violence. Look at Mr and Mrs Macbeth, Shylock and Hamlet. You and Nigel Farage can take him to the pub. I’ll take Rabbie Burns any day.

Eastenders! Eastenders? What could be more mean and narrow-minded than the lives and tongues of that nasty crew?

‘You slehgs! You slehgs!’

The Queen! The Queen? The Guardian editor thinks having a monarch is not just a good thing but a very good thing? So, we have a monarch in receipt of millions in tax payer contributions at the same time as the bedroom tax and food banks and this is good in some way?

Finally, James Bond is another ‘Best of British?’ I saw and enjoyed the first two films. I was 13 years-old at the time. I’ve grown up a wee bit since then. This is a hired killer and sexual predator. I know there is worse to see on TV but we’re not saying they’re ‘Best of British’ are we?

Best of British or Best of English?

The Observer editorial uses the words ‘Britain’ and ‘England’, ‘British’ and ‘English’ interchangeably as if they are the same thing so that evidence from a survey of England is left as evidence for the headline statement. This is not new for Scottish readers.

For decades, I’ve been angered by this tendency and it is particularly annoying in this context where all the evidence is that Scotland unlike England is becoming less mean and narrow-minded. I’ve written recently on this. You only have to look at the lack of a hate-crime spike in Scotland after Brexit as compelling evidence. You’ll get more evidence in:

‘Is Tory-rule making England more barbaric while SNP-rule is making Scotland more civilised?’ at:

 https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/10/20/is-tory-rule-making-england-more-barbaric-while-snp-rule-is-making-scotland-more-civilised/

Mind you, looking on the bright side as we Scots can do, there are times when I’m glad that the tendency use ‘English’ for ‘British’ pays off. I first noticed it listening to angry chanting against British foreign policy by a crowd in Tehran. I then noticed it in protests in other crowds in the Islamic world: ‘almawt lilalanjlyzia!’ I’m assured it means ‘Death to the English!’ Of course, then the Black Watch regiment drove their armoured vehicles into Iraq flying the Lion Rampant. Get that down! 

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/22/theresa-may-defence-of-british-liberal-values

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/jul/05/olympic-legacy-failure-london-2012-message-millstone

https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2013/04/13/shakespeare-skinflint/R8ol9mMXWBAYX5i4oJflzN/story.html

 

 

Image: investinwallonia.be

‘If we can’t make it with Canada, I don’t think we can make it with the UK’ (EU Commissioner Cecilia Malmström)

There are 97 NUTS regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) in the EU. One of them, Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium, has refused to sign the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) with Canada. CETA is a free-trade deal like TTIP which many fear will lead to further privatisation of public services including the NHS and consequently damage the pay and conditions of workers. So, my first reaction is ‘Well done Wallonia!’ However, the Canadian Trade Minister and free-trade lover, Christia Freeland (yes), walked out in tears we hear, wondering how those Walloons could be so mean to her ‘kind and patient’ Canada.

One of ninety-seven regions refuses and the deal is off? You can’t help but agree with Cecilia above that this does not bode well for deals with the UK.

Until I read that, I’d been a bit unsure about whether or not we should go for Indyref2 soon or later. I’m sure now. If we want to inherit the UK seat we need to move quickly. We don’t want to see a situation where the Whisky becomes too expensive and thus less attractive than the Cognac or the Schnapps. I know it doesn’t seem at all likely to us connoisseurs of fine drinking but the Germans and the French might not agree. I mean, do either of them even have a word for connoisseur? Equally, we don’t want our whelks losing out in a race for profits with their escargots even if it did take some time for them to disagree with us.

Needless to say the Walloons are getting a bit of stick in the corporate media. The usually soft and gentile Guardian yesterday (21.10.16) asked:

‘Will the fierce Walloons become new bêtes noire for EU leaders?’

Well I hope so, though I am now worried if they plan to undercut our sales of Aberdeen Angus with boeuf from their own bêtes noire.

Indyref2 now before it’s too late and they give that chair at the top table to Amazon or Google!

Footnote: Walloons, Welsh, Wallace, is there a connection? Well yes there is. The Walloons didn’t come up with that daft-sounding name themselves. Why would they? When German tribes (Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths, Vandals…) invaded the fallen Roman Empire around 400 AD, they found it already occupied by people strange or foreign to them so they conquered them, as you do, called them Walhaz and over time some of those same people came to know themselves as Welsh or Walloons or Vlachs (Romania) and so on. Thus we get the surnames of strange folk in Scotland like Welsh or Wallace. On the Eastern boundary of the Germans in Poland, we even find Lech Walesa. Here’s the techy bit:

‘*Walhaz (ᚹᚨᛚᚺᚨᛉ) is a reconstructed Proto-Germanic word, meaning “foreigner”, “stranger”, “Roman”, “Romance-speaker”, or “Celtic-speaker”. The term was used by the ancient Germanic peoples to describe inhabitants of the former Western Roman Empire, who were largely romanised and spoke Latin or Celtic languages. The adjectival form is attested in Old Norsevalskr, meaning “French”, Old High German walhisk, meaning “Romance”, Modern Germanwelsch, used in Switzerland and South Tyrol for Romance-speakers, Dutch Waals “Walloon”,Old English welisċ, wælisċ, wilisċ, meaning “Romano-British“, and Modern English Welsh.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walhaz

 

 

 

 

 

I’m accusing them. Here’s today’s story at 06:26am on 21^st October 2016:

‘A report has warned budget cuts, Brexit and growing patient demand are all leading to a ‘perfect storm‘ for nursing staff in Scotland. The Royal College of Nursing is calling for the Scottish Government to avert a staffing crisis they say rising demand and insufficient staff are putting patient care at risk’

 If you want to have maximum negative effect on elderly and infirm voters, this is the time to do it. I’ve explained in an earlier post the theory behind this:

‘The Power of Nightmares: Waking up to early morning bad news on BBC Scotland and fearing the unknown’ at:

https://thoughtcontrolscotland.com/2016/09/22/the-power-of-nightmares-waking-up-to-early-morning-bad-news-on-bbc-scotland-and-fearing-the-unknown/

I’ve suggested and been jumped on for doing so, that constant scare stories of overwork and understaffing might actually cause some elderly and sick people to hold back from contacting their GP or going to A&E. Yes, I’m saying constant media scares may be endangering lives.

This report from BBC Scotland is part of a much longer slimy trail. See:

‘Stand up for NHS Scotland, bucking the UK trend despite media attacks’

http://newsnet.scot/archive/stand-nhs-scotland-bucking-uk-trend-despite-media-attacks/

As for the Royal College of Nursing, a trades union like the RMT or Unison, remember, can we trust them? No. See:

‘Why won’t Royal College of Nursing release full results of a members’ survey?’

http://newsnet.scot/archive/wont-royal-college-nursing-release-full-results-members-survey/

There is currently a perfect storm in NHS England. There isn’t any such thing in Scotland nor is there any sign the Scottish Government will allow one to happen. This is scaremongering, a non-story based on unreliable evidence from a trades union operating only in the interests of its members and reported by BBC Scotland as part of its desperate Unionist agenda.

The agenda for the morning also had Patrick Harvie’s ‘Warning to the SNP’. Ironically he seemed to be warning the SNP to stick with the very progressive policies BBC Scotland rarely trumpets as successes.

Running Total:

Running total 21/9/16 to 21/10/16*                    Number of reports

Bad news for SG/SNP                                                            20

Good news for SG/SNP                                                         9

Bad news for Labour                                                              1

Good news for Labour                                                           5

Bad news for Conservative Party (CP)                              0

Missed bad news opportunities for CP                             143 (estimate)

Good news for CP                                                                   3

* Monday to Friday only

 

 

 

http://informscotland.com/

 

Strong legs, apart or on a tank for a tougher, less soft, Britain?

Images: mirror.co.uk, dailyrecord.co.uk

Look at those images above and these headlines below:

 

• ‘Violent crime in England and Wales is up 24%, police figures show’ (Guardian, 20.10.16)
• ‘In Scotland, crimes of violence rose by 5.3%’ (BBC, 20.6.16)
• ‘Hate crimes surge by 42% in England and Wales since Brexit result’ (Independent, 8.7.16)
• ‘Police: No spike in hate crime in Scotland since Brexit vote’ (The National 1.7.16)
• ‘Theresa May must wake up to the crisis facing the NHS’ (Guardian, 19.10.16)
• ‘Stand up for NHS Scotland, bucking the UK trend despite media attacks’ (Newsnet.scot, 23.6.16)
• ‘Scottish Government ‘most trusted’ government in Europe’ (STV, 20.3.16)
• ‘Bedroom Tax: Hated Tory tax is banished from Scotland after vote lasting less than 10 seconds’ (Daily Record 6.2.14)
• ‘Scotland is best place to live in UK, study reveals’ (Herald, 11.10.16)
• ‘Scotland tops league for gay rights’ (Guardian, 10.5.16)

I could have found more bad news about things in England and good news about things in Scotland. I’d have been hard pushed to do it the other way round.

After six years of Tory-rule over the UK and nine years of SNP rule in Scotland, the two countries are clearly drifting apart. Aggressive, xenophobic and heartless, the Tories have seriously damaged the quality of life for many in England, especially the poor, the disabled and the sick. Despite limited autonomy, the SNP government in Scotland has tried to protect these same groups. Of course there will be other factors helping to explain some of these differences but you can be sure that  if they fell in the opposite direction, our media would be quick to blame the SNP. Though clearly committed to a more equal society the SNP is seriously constrained in its actions to achieve one but it has done what it can. More equal societies tend to be better places across a range of factors as Pickett and Wilkinson have shown:

 ‘The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better was published in 2009. Written by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the book highlights the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”. It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.’

https://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/resources/the-spirit-level

Look back at those images above. Spreading your legs out to look manly and sitting on a battle tank – what do they tell us? They’re not just called the ‘nasty party’, they are nasty.

 

Images: vulture.com,alchetron.com, bbc.co.uk

‘Who’s our greatest national hero? Nobby Stiles anyone?’

Watching the strangely flat-for-a-poet delivery of Simon Armitage in his ‘The Making of King Arthur’ (2010) for BBC 4, I was reminded of things more recent in the making of Great Britain, Brexit. Should that be Exit? We all know this is really about England and its burning resentment of the ways in which the EU restricts or at least seems to restrict its freedom. That we Scots should want a bit of freedom is of course narrow-minded.

Only a few decades ago, media commentators would have felt quite free to substitute the word ‘England’ for the word ‘Britain’ thinking them largely interchangeable.  As recently as the 1960s, I was taught Higher History with no Scottish content whatsoever by young Glasgow University graduates who had not had the opportunity to study Scottish history there. Indeed, they had been able to supplement the study of post-1707 British imperial history with courses on earlier English history. Scotland had no history of its own worth of study at that level. If your primary school head teacher chose to do so, you might get a bit of Wallace, Bruce and Mary Queen of Scots, taught as fairy tales.

Step back and look more critically and what you see there is an education system with its origins in an attempt to justify England’s dominant position in the British Isles and to write out or to appropriate the traces of an earlier identity, loosely termed ‘Celtic’, which survives only in the Arts, on the fringes of the UK, in Scotland, Ireland and Wales.

I say above ‘loosely Celtic’ because I know that the term ‘Keltoi’ used by the Greeks to describe the Iron Age tribes of Northern Europe was never used by those tribes themselves. Also, unlike the people of the post-Roman historical period such as the Germans, the French or the English, there is no evidence that they had any sense of their tribal neighbours as part of a shared wider culture. They did, of course, have other strong indicators of connections in language, art and customs.

So, there was something loosely Celtic about much of Britain before the Roman and Germanic (Angles, Saxons…) invasions. The latter tribes who were to come to dominate much of the main island began a process of writing their conquered predecessors out of the story and writing themselves into the story so as to confirm their right to ownership. One consequence of this was the tendency for schoolchildren in England and Scotland to jump from the study of Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Roman and post-Roman periods, neatly missing out around 1 000 years in which the people of the British Isles mostly spoke languages closely linked to those of much of Europe at the time and which were demonstrably part of a wider family of languages referred to as ‘Celtic’. The word ‘Britain’ itself: ‘originates with a group of P-Celtic speakers, resident on Great Britain, who were referred to, and perhaps referred to themselves, by the earliest known form of the term “British”.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_(place_name)

The aristocratic warrior elites of early England and their tribal story-tellers began then a long process of writing out the Celts and, when it suited, appropriating their iconic figures. You can see this latter process in the mutation of Celtic warrior queen Boudicca into Britannia and, most of all, in the transformation of Arthur, from Romano-Celtic leader in wars against the proto-English invasions and into the ancestor of English kings keen to justify their right to rule Britain.

This process is just what Simon Armitage was helping to maintain with another wee brick (See the photo above, good eh?) in his TV programme ‘The Making of King Arthur’ made first in 2010 but repeated last night , 19^th October 2016. Here’s what he did.

First he asked:

‘Who’s our greatest national hero? Nobby Stiles anyone?’

He then goes on to name King Arthur as his choice. For younger readers, Nobby Stiles was an England footballer in 1966 and all that. Isn’t that revealing? Armitage unthinkingly (?) characterises a Romano-Celtic warrior who fought against the early English invaders as his choice for ‘our’ hero.

Then we get:

‘It’s said he will one day return in ‘our’ hour of need’. Surely Brexit is ‘the hour’? In the background we see an old film clip where Arthur is proclaimed ‘King of England’ but it’s not qualified in any way.

Armitage reveals that he knows all about cultural appropriation by telling us that the Norman invaders of 1066 ‘didn’t just have to conquer the country, they had to conquer the culture.’ By this he meant the way Norman writers would attempt to give William ‘the Bastard’ or ‘Conqueror’, an Arthurian lineage to justify his place on the throne. The bastard indeed, stealing our (English) Arthurian lineage which we only recently stole from the Welsh (Celts).

That ‘our’ means ‘English’ is reinforced as Armitage then talks of ‘How a new generation of ‘English’ writers would reclaim him as ‘our’ quintessential hero.’

It goes on like this. Watch it yourself if you dare. Why hasn’t the wizard Merlin returned to turn Simple Simon into a toad?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tg2q2

 

 

Image: bbc.co.uk

I’ve just finished watching the much-anticipated three-hour-long documentary, Hypernormalisation’, by Adam Curtis, on iPlayer. This is only the latest in a long series of disturbing, controversial and thought-provoking pieces by Curtis, which includes ‘The Power of Nightmares’, ‘The Trap’ and ‘Bitter Lake’. I count myself as a fan of his work. I found it fascinating. His stories are of course ‘big history’ with sweeping themes, much generalisation and sometimes over-simplified links but that is only to be expected if he is to make us think about big ideas and big trends beyond our local and recent experiences. We do need to do that. The reservations we might have of Curtis are no greater than, probably less than, those we needed to have of Edward Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ and they are not enough to reject him unless you want to hide away entirely from confronting the awful abuses of power that happen on the world stage but which inevitably change your local realities. Here’s what Wikipedia says about Curtis, for background:

‘Curtis says that his favourite theme is “power and how it works in society”, and his works explore areas of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history. Curtis describes his work as journalism that happens to be expounded via the medium of film.’ 

Note that Curtis makes no claim to be other than a journalist. He’s not claiming to have done any more than to have provoked us into thinking about what is happening in our lives. I think this means that some of his critics who accuse him of being a conspiracy theorist are missing the point. Other critics have identified repetitive, predictable even clichéd patterns in his work but it’s quite easy to do this kind of thing with any important creative figure. Marx, Freud and Darwin can all be parodied but it doesn’t mean that their ideas are unimportant. Bob Dylan has just received the Nobel Prize for Literature yet his lyrics are a gift to any half-witted parodist. It’s so much easier to be smart in this way than it is to say something important in the first place.

What is Hypernormalisation saying about the World? Well, it’s a very gloomy dystopian view which suggests very little hope for us to be able to live meaningful lives any more. Here’s my take. From the mid-1970s, these developments produced a world in which people have nothing to believe in other than material consumption and self-absorption:

1. Powerful corporate and right-wing interests (Reagan, Thatcher) combined to undermine and to destroy the post-war consensus on managing capitalism in the interests of the majority.
2. US foreign policy under Henry Kissinger conspired to divide and to weaken the Arab world ostensibly to maintain stability but, by betraying Syria and Assad Snr especially, in effect released uncontrollable Islamist forces and the ‘weapon of the weak’ – suicide bombing.
3. The take-over of politics by the banks and the corporations and their blind belief in the ability of market forces to control society made voting seem pointless.
4. The acceptance by politicians of a new role as mere managers of the electorate in a market-dominated society further weakened the idea of democracy.
5. The failure of the ‘Facebook rebellions’ in the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements because, unlike Marxist rebels in the past, they had no idea of the kind of society they wanted to create once they had temporary control of the streets
6. The massive growth of militant Islamism rushing in to fill the void of ideas created by the defeat of the Facebook rebellions and the return of old military and corporate power gave millions a reason to live and some, of course, a reason to die
7. The Brexit and Trump rebellions in the England and the US emerged as examples of hopelessly inarticulate, politically incoherent and damaging, but understandable, responses to the failure of traditional politics, in larger countries

 So, what hope is there for Scotland in this? Paradoxically, our size, our geography and our current lack of power may help. Look at Iceland. They’ve jailed corrupt bankers, restored their economy and, best of all, given their lives a new sense of purpose in self-determination. Feeling you can control your life is in itself a reason to live. Their small population, strong sense of identity, resilient social justice and fairness values and their physical isolation have been crucial in this. Look at Catalonia and the Basque country. Look also at the relative contentment of the populations of smaller nation states like Denmark, Norway and New Zealand.

Scotland can do likewise. The Yes Movement and its accompanying train of sub-movements, against Trident, fracking and TTIP, for land reform and for greater equality, built on a strong yet inclusive sense of civic national identity can help us to create a new society based on meaningful relationships. As with Iceland, self-determination and the subsequent feeling of being in control can be reason enough to live. Only our dying Unionist groups and corrupt media stand in the way.

Sources:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04b183c/adam-curtis-hypernormalisation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis