New Year's Resolutions

The Invention of Scotland - George IV in a kilt by Wilkie

Happy New Year!

This blog's New Year's resolutions include: keeping on top of its finances, campaigning for standards and to support open debate.
The need for financial responsibility speaks for itself. 'Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.' (Dickens, David Copperfield 1849).
 What does this blog mean by 'standards'? It means being willing and able to make distinctions, to challenge and examine. If you wish to communicate, poor layout, choice of unreadable typeface and illiterate style is an insult to your readers.  Orwellian 'newspeak' and political correctness carry real dangers to a free society.
As for open debate: this blog enjoys the hospitality of a charity which has non-political aims but that doesn't mean it can't have opinions. For instance: this blog thinks that one strong argument against independence for Scotland is that our DNA is no different from that of other natives of these islands. Putting it another way: if you give a scientist 10 samples of British DNA he or she would not be able to tell if the person was 'Scots' 'Welsh' or 'English'. And don't lets get started on the extraordinary aberration of teaching Irish Gaelic to north Britons, whose linguistic heritage is Welsh.  Recommended reading for those who wish to take an informed part in the debate: 'The Invention of Scotland' by Hugh Trevor-Roper and 'The Quest for Merlin' by Nikolai Tolstoy.