Scotland

I half-agree with James's (dangerously!) quasi-Whiggish view on the teaching of British history but would put it slightly differently: pupils in England should learn how Britain became a United Kingdom. (So should Scottish pupils. And Welsh ones too.) Simon Schama's Guardian piece contains a good deal of sense but the most important passage, I think, certainly as regards the teaching of history is this: My own anecdotal evidence suggests that right across the secondary school system our children are being short-changed of the patrimony of their story, which is to say the lineaments of the whole story, for there can be no true history that refuses to span the arc, no coherence without chronology.

By which I mean why isn't he cooped up inside Ed Miliband's office, working as a strategy-comms chap? Maybe he wouldn't want the gig but it's a good thing for us (in both a blogging and an anti-Labour sense) that he's still a free man. Take this latest bout of good sense, for instance: Our nation has significant challenges – from deficit reduction to welfare policy to job growth. As an opposition we must have opinions on all of these, but lack the power to act on them. That is an exposed, vulnerable position. We already know how the Tories want to define us.  They want to spend the next four years painting us as wasteful in the public services, over-generous with welfare at the price of higher taxes for working families.

Since it's Pope Day, let's consider this tediously-hardy perennial too. Commenting on this post, Fifer asks: Since you've given this some thought, then, perhaps you can answer me this - why, exactly, are my taxes being used to fund an education system divided in Scotland on sectarian lines when, out of a population of 5 million, only 65,000 can be bothered turning up to see the head of their faith preach? Even Celtic can manage that turnout a few times a year. If we really are in the dire financial straits we're told we are, perhaps it really is time to "think of the children" and educate them all as best we possibly can for the money available, rather than perpetuating massive structural inefficiencies as a sop to an increasingly irrelevant religion.

The annual memorial service at Flodden. Photo courtesy of Grant Kinghorn. Today marked the 497th anniversary of the battle of Flodden, perhaps the gravest military disaster in Scottish history and a fiasco that's still keenly recalled in these parts where Flodden is a bigger deal than Bannockburn. The story goes that some 50 men from Selkirk rallied to King James's colours but that only one, a man named Thomas Fletcher*, returned alive. Commemorating that loss remains at the heart of the town's Common Riding ceremonies each June. Outside the Borders, however, I suspect Flodden is most familiar as the inspiration for the most beautiful of all laments, The Flowers of the Forest (known here simply as The Lilting).

  I don't know. I really don't. It can't go on. But it will. It bloody will. There are times when watching Scotland play international football produces the sensation that one's actually trapped inside a Beckett play. It might seem a tragicomedy to you but it's no fun in here. A game of two halves, as a friend puts it, in which bugger all that's good happens. Twice. We can all recite the horrors. The 7-0 hammering against Uruguay in 1950 1954*. The 9-3 unpleasantness against England. Peru. Iran. Costa Rica. The two draws against the mighty Faroe Islands. But all bar the last were at the Big Show and even the grim fiascos against the puffin-munchers were away from home (like Alan Rough, we are clutching at thin air here).

The answer may not be what you think. It seems that South Lanarkshire council have embarked upon the most idiotic defamation action of the year. Over to Jonathan Mitchell QC to explain: South Lanarkshire Council has long had a certain reputation for Brezhnevism. Recently it seems to have excelled itself by bringing proceedings for defamation in Lanark Sheriff Court against the membership of a local community council for an article on its website which linked to another article on a different organisation’s website entitled “South Lanarkshire Council and Scottish Coal Hand-in-Hand at Community LIE-aison Meeting”.

George - now Lord - Foulkes is taking his leave of Holyrood and returning to the comfort of the red benches in the House of Lords. It's fair to say that Foulkes's ability to wind up nationalists has not endeared him to SNP supporters. Still,  Lallands Peat Worrier is quite right that the national bard would, were he still drawing breath, have felt the need to mark this heavyweight departure with some stirring lines in the old Scots demotic. Happily LPW was on hand to take dictation. It begins: To a Foulkes   So ye're gaun at last, ye Lairdly ferlie? Your impudence protect you sairly! 'Tis time again for struttin' rarely In whitrat cape ~ Geordie, ha' no fears o' dinin' sparely In sic a place!