The long awaited exposé of Hollywood sleaze-mongers, corrupt industry agencies, and adventures of a Scottish writer will be published in hardback at £20.A Kindle version is also on the cards.
Readers of this weekend magazine might like to know how many people the site reaches and from where they visit. Since 2020, readership is diverse and consistent. A recent check states:
“Figures for the sister news site peak at just over three million viewers in a strong month, falling back to just under two million in quiet months. A great many visitors are from international countries. A quick listing includes the USA, Canada, China, Australia, Japan, Turkey, Uganda, all European countries, Norway, England, Wales and Ireland.
“The separate long-form essay-analysis weekend site [this site] gets far fewer visitors, usually 45-55,000 views and visitors per article per month, many of which are ex-patriots living abroad keeping abreast of news and current affairs of their homeland, people with time to read well researched articles and academic papers. Content in is a mixture of the editor’s own opinions, observations, satire, and essays, though he occasionally republishes excerpts or relevant articles by others, with appropriate attribution.
“Content of the News site is as its states, news emanating from Holyrood, Scotland’s Parliament, national newspapers, often categorised as ‘colonial’, independence matters featuring strongly, local and national issues too from the Islands down to the Borders, plus matters affecting Scotland that issue from Westminster. It is usually presented with a a deal of satire, especially when it arrives from Scotland’s auld enemy, England.
“Reviewers of Grouse Beater’s 5-star books frequently note how his work educates while entertaining, combining research-backed arguments with personal insight accumulated over a lifetime in the arts and activism. These collections reward readers interested in thoughtful, independence-focused Scottish commentary with literary quality.”
“It is noted: “The polemic and topics chosen are those of a secular humanist…”
NOTES
The editor’s next publication is a 300-page account of years spent in Hollywood, entitled ‘Hollywood Daze’. published shortly at £20.
Looking aged and crumpled, the Grousist, filling in for the last minute cancellation of No 10’s latest white hot miracle messiah Andy Bunghim. (Jist kiddin.) I allowed myself humiliated and verbally pummelled in interview by Norrie Hunter, easily wilting under a barrage of smart to the jugular questions, all the while remaining stuck by the searing humidity to his Bond ejector office seat bought in a car boot salefor £10.(That’s what it said on the price label.)
What wisdom, bribes, sweeties passed between them? That’s for readers to decide.
Topics ranged from ‘what good is a democratic system of governance?’, to the fitba Wurruld Cup, through Swinney’s safe pair of soiled hands, knees und booms-a daisy, to Tail-End Joanna Cherry’s rush to be seen and heard, and on to the threat of data bases dumped on Scottish soil, a Trojan Horse, in colossal size, cost to the nation and information stored. The outcome of this group think of two was outrage, laughter and bonhomie. Enjoy. It may be Grousey’s Swan song, the poor sucker.
The podcast lasts for one damn fine hour’s entertainment.No animals nor feelings were hurt in the making of this epic, but some politician’s egos were well and truly bruised.
Jon Stewart dives into Trump’s talent for breaking what ain’t broke, from throwing one of his cronies $1.7 million in taxpayer money to clean the D.C reflecting pool (which morphed from “American Flag Blue” to Mountain Dew green), to launching an aggressive war on Iran with the goal of re-obliterating their nuclear program but instead settling on a gentle parenting-style deal that lets Iran keep their nukes, along with a few hundred billion dollars, a wheeze to make the Mad Sun King look good for the incoming mid-term elections.The extract is 20 minutes long.
Here is our customary selection of remarks from the show’s Comments page, and our editorial:
“For Sale $250: American Flag Blue paint chunk. This is your chance to own a part of history! Celebrate our 250th anniversary with this piece of latex paint. Freshly retrieved from the green waters of Lincoln Memorial Reflective Pool in Washington DC. Valued at $14 million tax payer dollars.” Mark At
“Both you and/or your writers were killing it tonight. Thanks for making me laugh so hard. Several times! Scared the cat.” Chad Gibson
“Iranian here. Yes, we do circumcise boys in Iran. In general, circumcision is practiced throughout the Muslim world, and most Muslim men—whether Shia or Sunni—are circumcised.” Minimoosh
“I struggle to understand how America has sunk to such a horrible place – rise up decent Americans and get rid of this unbelievable corruption for the sake of the whole world.” Anonymous
“Wait, you mean giving a $13m no-bid contract to a Trump donor who has never done any government work was a bad idea? Who would’ve thought?!” Ferinex
The paint on Washington’s newly renovated Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool – at the Mad Sun King’s instruction – peeled away from the bottom and into the algae-tinted water, less than 10 days after Trump announced the job’s completion. The historic pool was drained and refinished in a $14.7 million (€12.8 million) no-bid contract this year as part of Trump’s sweeping plans to remake the US’s capital city, which includes tearing down the east wing of the White House to make space for a new ballroom and building an arch near Arlington National Cemetery, which honours the country’s war dead and other prominent Americans. Trump announced on June 6th that work on the pool had finished. By Tuesday, workers had started pouring hydrogen peroxide into the pool to combat an algae bloom that had turned it green, instead of the expected “American flag blue”. Oh dear. The National Park Service, that operates the National Mall, where the pool is located, have kept schtume since. Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the Virginia-based company that carried out the renovations, also refuse to comment.
Scotland lost income and investment when England confirmed its colonial power yet again, and told Scotland it had no right to be consulted over Brexit. The result was the Scottish government had to find funds to fill in the gap left by lost EU grants to farmers. it took a mountain of costs to set up a system of local payments. To look at our own country, Scotland, the collapse in the pound drove up the cost of importing goods, triggering an inflation shock that damaged the public finances and inflicted financial pain on households across Scotland, and into Holyrood’s budgets.The EU – not England – is Scotland’s biggest trade area, now all but lost unless we can find a way of getting something back in a trade deal when we are independent.England committed the Brexit cim just before the UK got hit by Covid.Scotland has not recovered, and England remains a basket case of squabbling political partiesall pointing in different directions simultaneously.
And then we had to watch the devil-may-care Dirk Diggler, Boris promise £350 million extra for England’s NHS which never quite materialised. And we lived with his risible no bendy bananas for Britain, yet another load of garbage made up for his Spectator column.And yet, and yet, there are still ordinary Scots who cannot accept Scotland is a colonised country, much wealthier than other small nation of six millions souls, kicked incessantly economically by England’s interests. In the main, Brexit is a nightmare of bureaucracy for small businesses both sides of the Border.
“The assessment of the broad long-run is … we’re poorer than we otherwise would have been.”Charlie Bean, deputy governor, Bank of England
Irish journalist and political archivist, Fintan O’Toole, wonders about the damage caused by Brexit and how it has soured relations with Northern Ireland and with England.From Ireland’s side of the Irish Sea they feel the Irish made the best of a bad job. The Irish also saw the damage a reckless and reactionary British government could create overnight.O’Toole feels the repercussions are gaining strength and it worries him a lot.
THE AFTERSHOCKS OF BREXIT
by Fintan O’Toole
For Brexit’s true believers, Ireland will always be the spoke in the wheel that set everything off course, the green tarnish that took the shine off the golden age. Without the vengeful and malicious obstructionism of the Irish, all the promises of freedom and prosperity would have been fulfilled.
To understand how nonsensical this is, it is necessary to go back five years before the referendum of 2016. Back, that is, to the sense of an ending. In May 2011, Queen Elizabeth made a four-day state visit to Ireland. This should not have been remarkable – the heads of state of neighbouring countries visit each other all the time. But no reigning British monarch had set foot in what is now the Republic for almost exactly a century.
The weight of too much history pressed on these formalities – too much condescension, too much resentment, too many raw nerves. But the queen’s visit, when it finally came, was an exquisitely choreographed exercise in statecraft. It was obvious that the British state had thought very deeply about how it would make clear that Ireland and the UK now related to each other as equals.
For many of us in Ireland, this felt like an exorcism. The ghosts of a colonial past were banished and with them went the demons of Anglophobia. The ordinary experiences of adjacent islands whose people’s lives are deeply entwined through family and friendship, through culture and commerce, could now be the political realities too.
This moment didn’t come from nowhere. Two big things had made it possible. One was the extremely close cooperation between the two states in the Northern Ireland peace process. Dublin and London had understood that the Troubles could be ended only if they worked together as inseparable partners. They had to learn to speak with one voice.
The other was the European Union. Its peculiar nature is that it gives small nations most of the same rights as big ones. Over nearly half a century, Irish and British officials discovered how to work together to advance their countries’ mutual interests. They were not merely sitting at the same tables – they were often arguing for the same things.
The shock of Brexit for most Irish people wasn’t so much the event itself. We know too much about the distorting logic of certain kinds of nationalism on our own island to feel superior to anyone else who is in the throes of such passions. We also know that deciding to leave a larger union (which is what most of Ireland did a century ago, after all) is not a simple calculation of economic losses and gains – emotional satisfaction and collective pride matter, too.
The shock came, rather, from the sheer recklessness of the Brexiters. It was obvious in the referendum debates: any time Northern Ireland came up (which was rarely enough) they simply changed the subject. The Irish question wasn’t even a question. It was at best an afterthought, to be settled after the fabulous UK-EU trade deal (“the easiest in human history”, according to Liam Fox) had been wrapped up.
David Davis’s assertion that there was “no downside to Brexit at all, and considerable upsides” was, from an Irish perspective, terrifying – not because he was lying but because he actually believed it to be true. Such confidence was possible only if it was rooted in blithe ignorance.
Only those who knew nothing of Ireland (or of the great success of British-Irish cooperation over many decades) could believe that turning the meandering, uncontrollable Irish border into one of the EU’s main external frontiers had no downside. Only those who had no sense of the human price that had been paid to get to a point where the people of Northern Ireland believed that they would be left in peace to decide their own destiny could think it was fine to drag them out of the EU against their will.
The Irish state thus had little choice but to enter damage limitation mode. Strikingly, the Irish government and diplomatic service prepared for Brexit far more thoroughly than their British counterparts did. They got in ahead of the referendum to convince all the other EU members that avoiding the reimposition of a hard border must be a precondition for any exit agreement.
Hence, of course, the tortuous (and tedious) crisis over the backstop and the eventual concession that Northern Ireland would remain, in effect, in the customs union and the single market and that the border would be in the Irish Sea.
This was a dreadful outcome for unionism – and in the tribal mentality of the zero-sum game that had to mean that Irish nationalism won. There is, it must be admitted, a limited sense in which Ireland did win. For the first time ever, it was (because of the solidarity of all the EU member states) in a stronger position than Britain in a crucial tussle.
But in truth nobody won anything. Damage limitation is not victory. Ireland managed to make the best of a bad job. Yet very few people on the island were unaware of what had been lost – the trust that had been built over decades, the deep sense of common purpose, above all that feeling in 2011 that a lot of bad history was now properly acknowledged and therefore capable of being transcended.
In fairness to Keir Starmer (not a phrase much used in Britain now) the departing prime minister’s government has done a great deal to rebuild trust. The dominant feeling about Brexit in Ireland is, I think, not anger but sadness. There is no pleasure in being proved right about the economic stasis and political instability it created. If Britain wants to move back into a closer relationship with the EU, Ireland will be there to help in every possible way.
But there is the fear in Ireland that one of the delayed consequences of Brexit could be Nigel Farage in Downing Street. It feels from our side of the Irish Sea like the aftershocks of Brexit – and of its comprehensive failure – may be not diminishing but strengthening.
Having seen what a reactionary British government can do to the delicate fabric of our relationships, we cannot be complacent about that prospect.
NOTES
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times and the author of ‘Heroic Failure: Brexit and the politics of pain‘.
Non-native Sitka spruce, managed by London-based company. Photo:Murdo MacLeod
A LUCRATIVE BUSINESS
On the English-Scottish border a small species of butterfly, the northern brown argus, has fended off one of the biggest investors in the UK. Todrig, with its heath moorlands and hundreds of species of flora and fauna, represents an investment that could save Britain’s wealthiest families millions of pounds in inheritance tax.But first the ground needs to be cleared, and sown with commercial tree saplings – a plan that has been defeated, for now, by the tiny butterfly.
“No one wants this,” says Camilla Fowler, who chairs the local Lilliesleaf, Ashkirk and Midlem community council. “This kind of forestry scars the landscape and replaces it with monocultural, dark trees that harms our biodiversity.”
Todrig – about 580 hectares (1,433 acres) – is the site of just one of many battles unfolding along the border, as big investors move in on vast expanses of land that can be stripped back and replanted for the mass production of timber. The “vulnerable” status of the northern brown argus has halted plans for a forest plantation in Todrig, after a legal challenge forced the local environmental regulator to carry out more checks. But Gresham House, the £11bn City of London investor that bought the land for £12m in 2022 – six times its price just three years before – is still aiming to turn the land into a tree farm. Now, as demand for these tax-break trees grows, campaigners are warning that investors are in danger of putting further strain on natural grassland and forests across the UK.
“There is an enormous difference between Sitka spruce trees and native woodland, and other types of habitats such as meadows and calcareous grassland in terms of the wildlife they support,” says David Lintott, a barrister who has led the legal campaign against the forestry plan at Todrig via his company Restore Nature.
But land is increasingly being targeted for commercial forests. Only an hour away from Todrig at Stobo Hope, the ground has already been cleared, ploughed and sown with rows of tree saplings by a “forestry carbon sequestration fund”, managed by the London-based company True North Real Asset Partners. The investment company argues that Sitka spruce is more effective at capturing carbon compared with native trees – and that they can grow and cut down between two and three “cycles” of Sitka spruce in a single cycle of native woodland.
It is a lucrative business for investors. Industry calculations suggest the value of woodland has roughly doubled over the past decade, exceeding gains from some other physical assets such as commercial property – and helped by increasing numbers of wealthy families who have turned to the sector for a break from inheritance tax. The UK has one of the highest rates of inheritance tax in the world, at 40% above certain thresholds. Most married couples can pass down £1m tax free to their children, including a £250,000 allowance for their main residence.
A Northern Brown Argus butterfly (Aricia artaxerxes). Photo: Oliver Smart
But a range of other reliefs has meant that for much of the past decade, wealthy families have often paid the tax at a much lower rate. Rachel Reeves took an axe to some of these reliefs at her maiden budget, introducing a £2.5m limit on business and agricultural property relief. But one lucrative area escaped the chancellor’s attention: woodland. Commercial forests – where trees are planted and felled as soon as possible for timber – can qualify for business property relief after just two years of ownership. Investors in woodland also do not pay income or corporation tax on the value of growing timber, and no capital gains tax is due when trees are felled.
The special allowances mean wealthy families can save millions of pounds in inheritance tax if they park their money in woodland. If, for example, a couple owned £100m worth in woodland and it qualified for business property relief, their estate would inherit £5m tax-free, and the remaining £95m would be taxed at half the normal rate. The tax break is not widely known – which means that every time the rules change, even if they get stricter, it helps to spark new waves of interest from investors, says Baskerville. “We see spikes when it hits the news cycle.”
“Anyone seriously thinking about estate planning should consider woodland as part of the mix,” says Anton Baskerville, of Woodlands.co.uk, a provider in the sector. “Buying land that is commercially managed is one of the key options available.”
Super-rich backers
Dr Josh Doble, the director of policy and advocacy at the campaign group Community Land Scotland, says increasing demand for woodland is coming from buyers seeking a way to reduce their tax burden. The super-rich have long dabbled in woodland. The private equity tycoon Guy Hands and his wife, the hotelier Julia Hands, have been investors in the sector. In 2019, the Times reported that Julia had spent £67m on almost 30,000 acres in Scotland, and her husband owned 14,000 acres in Perthshire.
Last summer they sold Griffin Forestry Estate for £145m to Gresham House, valued at more than £26,000 a hectare, one of the highest valuations on record for a woodland. The couple are based in Guernsey. Guy Hands declined to comment. The billionaire Danish retail magnate Anders Povlsen is the biggest private landowner in Scotland. His company, Wildland, had land worth £337m as of 31 July 2025, according to accounts filed at Companies House. However, unlike other ventures in the sector by the super-rich, it is a loss-making rewilding project – restoring native woodland and species on their estates – which makes it unlikely that the Povlsen family could use it towards IHT reliefs.
But it is Gresham House, which specialises in “natural capital”, that has become one of the most prolific private sector buyers of land in the sector – with many wealthy families buying stakes in woodland ownership via its funds.
“It’s shocking how quickly Gresham House has acquired so much land,” says Doble. “In the space of 14 years it has acquired about 73,000 hectares. That is just in Scotland – in our view that works directly against what the Scottish government has been trying to do for the last 25 years in reforming land ownership.
“With institutional landowners, you do not get the same level of accountability and collaboration. You don’t get transparency or benefit sharing when you’re dealing with a huge asset manager. “It is a case of how do you know how to hold them account if you disagree with the planting that is happening? You’re dealing with big estates, so often there is housing involved, local people work and live there. But there is not a conversation.”
Funds managed by Gresham House collectively control thousands of hectares of land. Campaigners say that makes the company one of the largest private landowners in Scotland, although Gresham House denied this claim, arguing that the land is ultimately owned by its investors. Backers of Gresham’s forestry funds include the trusts of wealthy families and prominent business people. Investors in its Forestry Partnership – which has net assets of £162m – included the late banker Lord Rothschild, Jeremy Darroch and Nicholas Ferguson, formerly of Sky, the Marquess of Linlithgow, and the family of the late hotel magnate Reo Stakis, according to filings at Companies House.
Tax break trees
Despite the rise in woodland values, locals at Todrig say the huge numbers attached to their local landscape does not match their reality. “No farmer would buy Todrig for £12m because it is simply not worth that much,” says Fowler.
Valuations are hard to pin down in illiquid sectors, where infrequent deals create uncertainty around prices – and Gresham House itself admits that its forestry funds, which are classed as “unregulated collective investment schemes” (UCIS), can be “difficult to establish an accurate value” for. Apithanny Bourne, a researcher at the Butterfly Conservation charity, said the inflated values often made locals feel they had little choice but to sell.
“The land is also selling for such high values because of the grants available to forestry – there are farmers who would rather keep it and have an interest in regenerative agriculture, but they can’t afford to keep the land if it is selling four to five times what it was worth,” she said.
There are multiple government grants that help support prices across the sector, she notes, including the woodland creation planning grant, the England woodland creation offer and woodland carbon credits.
“The commercial forests are also just so large and often have no native trees involved,” Bourne says. “So not only are trees being planted on rare habitats, they are built in huge blocks, which means that wildlife can’t actually travel through them. “Once these trees are planted, the grassland is gone. And it takes hundreds of years for it to get so species-rich – it all just feels very shortsighted.”
Camilla Fowler at Todrig.Photo: Murdo MacLeod
It’s all about tax avoidance
A spokesperson for Gresham House says most investors in its funds were institutional and therefore do not consider inheritance tax benefits. They added that it respected the court’s judgment on Todrig and that it would “continue to work constructively with Scottish Forestry to support a lawful and robust re-determination”. They add: “Todrig has been designed as a high-quality woodland project delivering long-term environmental and economic benefits. Extensive ecology surveys of the landscape and existing biodiversity have informed the design, with sensitive areas identified removed to create a multi-species mosaic.
“The scheme will also deliver wider benefits, including carbon sequestration, local employment, sustainable timber production, reduced reliance on imported commodities, and improved access to land that may previously have felt inaccessible.”
They add that it had undertaken a formal public consultation and invited feedback from interested bodies including SEPA, NatureScot and RSPB Scotland. The current design includes a commitment to retain about 40% of the site as open ground, which it said was to primarily support biodiversity and habitat creation.
“Once operational, all planting, felling and management plans will be made publicly available, and we will continue to look for opportunities to deliver wider community benefits through improved public access, educational opportunities, and support for local initiatives. This dialogue is essential in shaping a final design that delivers lasting environmental and community value.”
NOTES
Information by Lauren Almeida, business report, published in The Guardian
Gunn at London’s Old Baillie after charges were dropped. Photo: David Sillitoe
This short article is an example of how authority can be challenged and what it will do if forced in open court to tell the truth.It is a salutary tale of how politicians and unsupervised secret surveillance services feel they can behave, specifically, the British Government. As illicit deeds become known they destroy trust in governance and in the word of our elected representatives.
In January 2003, Katharine Gun was a Mandarin translator at GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency. She showed up to work one morning, opened her email, and found a memo that would destroy her career, threaten her marriage, and land her in court facing two years in prison.
The email was from Frank Koza, chief of staff at the NSA’s regional targets division, asking GCHQ to help spy on the private communications of six UN Security Council nations whose votes would determine whether the world approved an invasion of Iraq.
The goal was to gather intelligence that would give US policymakers leverage over smaller nations. Angola. Cameroon. Chile. Guinea. Pakistan. Bulgaria. Countries with no dog in this fight, being bugged so Washington and London could fix the result.
Gun printed the email, slipped it into her handbag, and eventually passed it to a journalist.
In March 2003 the memo was published by The Observer newspaper, creating a media firestorm and raising serious questions about the legality of the Iraq War. Then they came for her.
She was charged under Section 1 of the Official Secrets Act in November 2003. She refused to plead guilty. Her legal team decided the best defence was to prove that the war itself was illegal, and demanded the government hand over its own legal advice to Tony Blair. Aye, that Tony Blair, a man who has made him self rich advising Arab states, some of which connived in the falsehood that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I wonder how much of his moral journey was taught by his education at Fettes College in Edinburgh.
And here is the part that tells you everything you need to know about how power actually works. The case came to court on 25 February 2004. Within half an hour it was dropped. The prosecution offered no evidence.
In May 2019 The Guardian reported the case was dropped because the prosecution realised that evidence would emerge showing that even British government lawyers believed the invasion of Iraq was unlawful. Blair knew that, but got into bed with Dublya just the same.
Why did the case collapse? The government could not prosecute the whistle-blower without putting the war on trial. So they quietly walked out of court and hoped everyone would forget. Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, called Gun’s action the most important and courageous leak he had ever seen. Three UK inquiries into the Iraq War never once examined her case.
The Observer published the dirty tricks memo as a front-page splash just over two weeks before the invasion. Gun owned up to the leak a few days later to save her GCHQ colleagues from a witch-hunt. She was arrested and charged with breach of the Official Secrets Act.
Thinking back to her motivation, Gunn says, “Accountability is key. And that if the perpetrators in these situations get away scot-free, that has a knock-on effect. That whole period undermined the judicial process, it undermined the parliamentary process, and it undermined the media and press and the intelligence service.” We are all of us living, she believes, with the consequences of that. The simple fact is, she says: “Truth always matters at the end of the day.”
It was in a police cell that she uttered those two sentences that now seem to define the person she was and is. Gun was asked by Special Branch officers why she had chosen to act as she had. “You work for the British government,” her interrogator said, with a sneer.
“No,” Gun replied, steadily. “I work for the British people. I do not gather intelligence so the government can lie to the British people.”
Scotland (and Wales) is governed By London’s elite. You have to ask yourself why we endure the lies and the ignominy of this nation’s progress held back by those oppressors for generations. You ‘Yes’ yet?
NOTES
Katharine Gun is a former British intelligence linguist who leaked a top-secret National Security Agency (NSA) memo in 2003, exposing an illegal US-UK surveillance operation aimed at blackmailing United Nations diplomats to support the invasion of Iraq. Her courageous act of conscience inspired the 2019 film Official Secrets. Katharine Gun lives a quiet life in Turkey, where she resides with her husband, Yaşar, and their family.
The second half of this extract is about the basketball win by the New York Knicks – a news story in which readers in Scotland might not be interested.However, Stewart talks of how Fox News uses New York’s city-wide Knicks celebrations as an excuse to smear Mayor Mamdani, and he dives into what Republicans stand to gain by pitting the Knicks’ NBA championship against Trump’s UFC fight at the White House.The first half has satirical commentary of how Trump signed a deal with Iran that lands him back at square one.The video extract is 23 minutes long.
Here is our customary selection of posts from the show’s Comments page, and our editorial:
“Spending the entire monologue talking about the Knicks win instead of Trump’s many many loses is exactly the Monday I needed.” Levi Bennett
“Cried watching this! I was lucky enough to visit NYC and stay in Times Square last weekend and it was beautiful! The streets were full of joy, love, and celebration!!!” Dany Fam
“Lived my whole life in rural north Georgia. I’ve barely left the south. But my 10 year old daughter wanted to go to NYC, so we went last Spring. I absolutely love NYC now! It’s a truly amazing place with the friendliest and most amazing people America has to offer.” Many Worlds
“As someone who’s not from NY and so doesn’t care about basketball, seeing all these people come together in celebration is pretty heartwarming.” Less Than Three
“You know, I actually feel like crying. It has been SO long since I have seen such an expression of undivided joy in America, I sort of forgot it was actually still possible.” Michaela Fiorilla
Without doubt, the US-Iran ‘deal’ is a win for Iran. They outfoxed the Great Deal Maker. Moreover, Iran has the Straits of Hormuz to do with as it pleases. The US already had a deal with Iran, brokered by former President Obama, a deal which amounts to much the same as the new one, the same set of conditions, bar the Straits of Hormuz. The Mad Sun King tore that agreement up to allow Israel to bomb Iran. But the tables were turned, and with US mid-term elections looming, Trump was forced to make a new deal fast to save his popularity and voter base. Losing anything can isolate Trump to the extent impeaching him for war crimes is made easier. And he knows it. Khamenei said Trump had “out of desperation, used all kinds of leverage” to bring the deal about. The US-Iran deal centres around 14 core points, including the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, a requirement that Iran should never have a nuclear weapon, [they never had one in the first place] and a commitment to a $300bn (£227bn) fund for the “reconstruction and economic development” of the country. The deal caused Trump (if reports are true)’ to shout down the line to Israel’s Netanyahu to stop bombing Lebanon, a break in relations from that genocidal state to be welcomed. More please.
Scotland fans outside the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park.Photo: Andrew Milligan
Scotland’s football fans have been playing it ultra-cool in Boston, to the delight of Bostonians, some claiming the fans have rejuvenated the city. Whether its playing the bagpipes, street theatre or visiting famous sites, the news is good.Reporter Paul MacInnes, and snapper Andrew Milligan have been following them around recording their high spirits, swallowing spirits and spiritedness.
On Thursday afternoon, local broadcasters in Boston went live to an event hosted by the city’s mayor, Michelle Wu. It was a significant moment, with Wu confirming a deal that would commemorate a new chapter for the city. Representatives of the other party were also present, and they were easy to spot. Particularly the one guy in a kilt and a T-shirt reading: “I’m not perfect, but I am Scottish, and that’s kind of the same thing.”
The agreement signed will see Boston and Glasgow become twin cites. Officially, according to Wu, the arrangement will “create new opportunities for meaningful cooperation and mutual growth”. But who was she kidding. A more telling line was the one that reflected “longstanding ties between Scotland and the United States” and, of course, “the goodwill generated during the Fifa World Cup 2026”. In other words, Boston’s love affair with the Tartan Army is now official.
Just 10 days since they first began arriving in New England, Scotland fans have managed to bring yet another nation under their thrall. Carrying a letter of support from FC Cologne, the last place to fall for the Scots two years ago, they have charmed, amused and fascinated the locals in Boston and beyond. Following the antics of the Scottish fans, their discovery of tailgating or their dancing at the baseball, appears to have become an American pastime, with clips ubiquitous on everyone’s social media feeds.
Scotland fans outside the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park. Photo: Andrew Milligan
In the week since their nervous and necessary victory over Haiti at Boston Stadium, some fans have returned home from New England. Many more have arrived to replace them, however, and most of them have been met at the Logan airport arrivals hall by TV cameras.
A topic of particular fascination for the media has been the Tartan Army’s ability to drink, especially after slightly breathless reports of the Sam Adams taproom at the heart of downtown being “drunk dry” by fans. It turned out supplies never ran out, but extra did have to be ordered after the bar sold 3,000 pints of its Boston lager over the course of 48 hours.
Other bars were equally shocked or delighted. The Irish hostelry Hennessey’s proclaimed sales that were three times those of St Patrick’s Day. The Dubliner, next door to the Fifa fanfest in the city and a key Tartan Army destination, said it had had the busiest week in its history and while it hadn’t run out of beer, its distributor had.
So concerning was the situation to so many that Tennent’s felt the need to put out a statement reassuring their clientele. “We’ve been planning for this since December and made sure we had plenty of Tennent’s in the US,” said Hazel Alexander, a senior brand manager, from the UK. “So we’re confident that supplies will continue to meet the demand.”
Scotland fans at Cheers in Boston. Photo: Nick Potts
The welcome extended to Scottish fans has been warm across the board, according to Adam Robb from Aberdeenshire. “The locals are just incredible, they’re so happy to see us,” he said. “Surprised to see us, I think, in these kinds of numbers, but the reception has been unbelievable.”
By way of evidence, Robb cites the fact he had been bought breakfast by Boston police that morning after he lost his passport on a hiking jaunt between matches. “I reported it as missing and I was at the police station,” he said. “The cops bought me an egg and cheese muffin while I was waiting, which was amazing.”
With no ticket for the match against Morocco, Robb was keeping a keen eye on resale sites, but prices were rising. “I think we’re up to about £700,” he said. “It was down to £350 before the Haiti game, but I think all these videos are going about and people getting the FOMO. They’re like: ‘Oh, we’re going to have to get part of that.’ I think a lot of them will be Americans.”
Robb intended to count down the time to the game by checking out some of Boston’s culture and staying off the booze “for a few hours”. Others will be doing similar. Or perhaps they will continue the new tradition of sticking traffic cones on Boston statuary (apparently a tribute to a longstanding practice on Glasgow’s Queen Street). Or maybe they’ll visiting the off-licence which has become a must-see destination for Scottish tourists, not for its contents, but its name.
Thousands have already made a pilgrimage to Jobi Liquors, which means a very different thing in Scotland to the US. “They’re all coming in and saying ‘shit’,” Jobi’s owner, Jim, said in another viral video. “Boston is loving all the Scottish people. Screw the British, the Scottish are coming!”
Nursing a nasty eye operation covered by a transparent pirate patch and within hours of the operation sitting inside a cinema to watch a widescreen two-and-half hour sci-fi movie is not a wise thing to do. But duty calls. Leaving a review of this summer’s main blockbuster until later is liable to annoy the hell out of impatient film fans. So, I begin with a thumbs up with reservations for Disclosure Day if anyone feels disinclined to read further and wants a plain ‘yes’ or ‘no’ whether to see the film or not.
The Mad Sun King certainly did the movie a mahoosive favour by releasing a trove of America’s UFO files – excuse me, UAP files – in May. Considering Trump has contradictory opinions on California’s biggest export after armaments, films, the timing was probably a coincidence. The suspicious might think Trump heard full disclosure of the Epstein files was looming and his administration found yet another way of distracting the masses. Readers will wonder why there has been a muted response to the motherload of gunge dumped on the media and internet. That’s because it’s all old, fast decaying material. We’ve seen hovering craft that vanish in a second filmed outside moving aircraft, only to be told its a trick of curved aircraft windows and the light. It’s all mythology.
As for alien sightings and landings, how odd that they tend only to visit the USA? What is wrong with Auchtertoogle, or the top of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh? A landing in the Castle’s esplanade would soon scare the living daylights out of tourists in Scotchland! Why do aliens land in remote areas bereft of humans if indeed they have come to Planet Earth to study us? The can’t all be pathologically shy. Maybe because we excel at tribal genocide, aliens decided to stay well clear of humankind.
The obsessive see alien existence in every stone with a pictograph on it or where a knife was sharpened. This soon becomes boring, yet shows how swiftly people accept a crummy new religion as Thee Word. Ron L. Hubbard (caught in bed with seven women – it might have been as many as nine, but my libido has long since shrunk in old age) knew of the messiah phenomenon and invented Scientology. John Travolta (a scientologist) made Hubbard’s book into a film, judged execrable. The collective affect is to feel people in the West are searching the skies for the Second Coming, a new visitation of the Messiah who will cure our ills, homo-sapiens being generally useless at doing the right thing for themselves.
What was the film like, viewed in Edinburgh’s Ocean Terminal cinema complex? Well, yet another far too long, padded out with pseudo scientific what ifs and buts and maybe and irrational fears, long sequences of discourse, gobbledygook and ramblings that fall heavily on our toes. Just under two hours might have delivered a tighter, more succinct thriller, because in reality, that’s what the film is, a chase and hunt action thriller whenever it lets itself go and moves away from the mountains of dialogue, and not a haunting sci-fi extravaganza in the memorable likeness of Close Encounters.
Spielberg’s imagery has been so persuasive almost every alien on the internet in grainy photograph or bad hand-drawn sketch looks exactly like those that walked out of their too big and heavy to be plausible spaceship at the end of Close Encounters. In Disclosure Day they take the form of animals. Back then, Spielberg’s vision was leading the occult culture. And now that we’ve reached “the age of disclosure,” or that overused word ‘transparency, when fools and the gullible are convinced that alien visitations are real, kept hidden by the government, perhaps what audiences want from Disclosure Day is to be led, once again, into a brave new world of revelation and belief.
This lavish, intense chase thriller with two characters at its center is good to look at, the least we expect from Spielberg and his trusted and talented cinematographer Janusz Kamiński. However, to be candid, there are moments it looks more like a high budget X Files.
The film opens with whistle-blower, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a man not unlike the real-life hero of the West’s corrupt politics, Edward Snowden. He is a cybersecurity expert. (We learn early that his girlfriend has been kidnapped.) He has managed to get hold of the complete archive of America’s footage of alien encounters, going back to the, now risible, Roswell incident of 1947. an image on par with the English doctor’s infamous faked image of the Lock Ness Monster. He thinks the moment has come for the world to know the truth.
Emily Blunt, fresh from her silent killer alien pictures, here looking for new aliens
At the same time, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a chirpy media celebrity TV-news weatherperson in Kansas City, Missouri, undergoes a remarkable change of character. A cardinal (the bird!) flies into the loft she shares with her partner, Jackson (Wyatt Russell). Overnight she can speak any language she puts her mind to. Cue jaw dropping close-ups of her and bed-mate. She moves on to reading people’s very souls. While on air on air, she starts “talking” in a series of mysterious clicks — reminiscent of some African tribes, most notably the Xhosa and Zulu. To no observer’s surprise, Danny alone can understand every click, clack and cluck. (By this point I was chuckling – a suspension of belief too far.)
Both characters are being chased down by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), Danny’s boss at the Wardex Corporation, which is a privately owned corporation listing sightings and ‘evidence’ for ages but has about allows as much transparency as a toffee apple. Scanlon is played as a sinister oppressor type, a role well suited to the suit and waistcoat characters Firth chooses to play. He has a girlfriend tucked away, Jane (Eve Hewson), who thinks that if the revelation of alien encounters were allowed to leak out, it would destroy humankind’s relationship with God. (By this point I was giggling uncontrollably.)
Spielberg asserts he keeps an open mind about other life – out there
Disclosure Day tries hard to rise above the earnest drivel that infects sci-fi films and manages to reach bullcrap on an industrial level. And there are so many red herrings we are asked to follow, it become intellectually exhausting to stay afloat and chug along with the narrative. However, once you have run up and down the cinema aisles a few times to ease the boredom, the movie suddenly moves into top gear. For just over an hour, Spielberg orchestrates Disclosure Day as a Tom and Gerry cat-and-mouse action movie. This is the section that grips visually. Screenwriter David Koepp introduces complicating factors, just as you think we have all the jigsaw pieces, and one too many switches when we are given a secret shared Danny and Margaret when she was a child. This flashback is unnecessary, an attempt to give the story cod psychology.
Spielberg, as part of the film’s publicity, has suggested that he believes in alien visitations, and that he’s an advocate for disclosure. Disclosure Day feels too pat, too literal, and too fantastical. No one has their feet on the ground. I keep being reminded of the novels and films, baloney on a candy stick.
The actors are good enough (especially the doe-eyed Blunt, who makes you feel she’s actually seeing the uncanny), but for all the film’s slow build it doesn’t take us anywhere worth visiting. The theme score by Spielberg’s go to composer John Williams is far too over-orchestrated and trombone triumphant for what should be a dark thriller. It could be off-cuts from his Indiana Jones scores.
There’s nothing new, innovative or surprising in Disclosure Day. What it does, for this reviewer, is confirm the “truth” is simply that damn all aliens feel the need to visit our warmongering, pissy wee planet that we are determined to destroy and are well on our way to succeeding. In the end, the film is another Spielbergian grand flight of pure entertainment. It never gets any deeper. Three and a half stars.
Star rating: Threeand a half
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Colman Domingo
Writer: David Koepp
Cinematographer: Janusz Kamiński
Composer: John Williams
Editor: Sarah Broshar
Adult Rating: PG13
Duration: 2 hour 25 minutes
RATING CRITERIA
5 plus: potential classic, innovative. 5: outstanding. 4: excellent. 3.5: excellent but flawed. 3: good if formulaic. 2: straight to DVD. 1: crap; why did they bother?
Grouse Beater
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