"do you think Gaughan would support a bigot?"

He once told me that if the English want their independence, they should be allowed to have it.

Folk artistes do tend to be romantic fools at the best of times. Hence protest and hard luck stories forming many songs. Mine tend to be about shagging or the lack of shagging, take your pick.

A Scottish government will be a government. An independent government would also be a government but without the free prescriptions and tuition fees as they will be the first luxury to go.

Poor people do have an equal chance. Your chances are based on your intelligence and wit every bit as much as your background. I went from the bailiffs asking me to choose between the pram and pushchair for my baby after the strike in 1985 to selling up my business interests for a few million as my 40th birthday treat, having picked up a gong on the way. Later became a government advisor and visiting professor at a medical school over two universities. My sons, sons of a miner if you want to be romantic about it went to a school with an awful reputation and poor attainment. By their own endeavour, one is a director of a large company with all the trimmings and the other has a PhD and is presently in California designing the next generation of microprocessors.

Yes. I do think poor people have an equal chance. You just have to see further than the mist over the loch and treat people as you find them, not how you distrust or fear them.

End of sermon.