What would your wrestling name be? @angiemacdo15

“Heartbreak Kid”, “Big Sexy”,

“Best in the World”…sadly, all these fitting sobriquets have already been taken.

I’ll confess that becoming a professional wrestler is one of my few unaccomplished dreams. Let’s face it, I’ve got the body, I’ve got the charisma. I couldn’t pick a better time to make the transition from political guru to warrior of the squared circle. The independent wrestling scene is on fire across the whole of the United Kingdom.

Interestingly, nowhere in the UK has spearheaded this revival more than Scotland. Glasgow’s own Insane Championship Wrestling is on course to hit the SSE Hydro in Glasgow on November 20th.

“But what has this got to do with Scottish politics!?” I hear you cry. Well, I say it has everything to do with Scottish politics. ICW has created jobs. It has generated money. It has generated community spirit. In this instance, professional wrestling has done exactly what politicians have failed to do and made a real difference in the lives of working people. ICW represents the sort of self-determined, madcap creativity that I hope would define an independent Scotland. As far as I’m concerned, government is fake but professional wrestling is very much real.

I knew people were stupid enough to elect Trump

Did you ever think we’d be in a situation where President Trump could become a reality? – William, Albany

Truth be told, I always had a terrible feeling that Trump was going to win. When you’ve been around politics as long as I have, you learn never to under estimate human stupidity. Nevertheless, predicating the result didn’t make it any less horrific to watch unfold. In fact, the depressing reality of a Trump presidency is almost beyond comprehension. It’s an event so awful, I’m surprised that the Statue of Liberty isn’t currently swimming back to France.

Of course, many of us sensed that Trump’s chances of victory were greatly increased the second Hillary was put forward as the Democrat nominee. Clinton, from the very beginning, was completely the wrong candidate, and people couldn’t pretend that this wasn’t the case. The argument that she was “the lesser of two evils”, though accurate, was hardly the strongest basis for voters to back her on election day. The left couldn’t look past Hillary’s flaws, whilst the right were gleefully willing to embrace Trump’s. This had been obvious for some time prior to the election, and it left the rest of the planet with little to do besides close their eyes and cross their fingers. Bluntly, America took an IQ test on Tuesday and the result came back negative. It’s frankly stunning that the United States can swing from picking Barack Obama to Donald Trump in just four years. This nation of fools has gone from electing arguably the most progressive president in history to granting a bigoted fascist access to nuclear launch codes. It’s exactly why aliens never make contact with the human race. Our capacity for self-destructive idiocy has no limits. Frankly, I’m starting to think that building a wall around America might not be such a bad idea after all.

Trump’s campaign was punctuated by attacks on immigrants, minorities, women and the poor. The man seems intent on irrationally uniting a nation through division. Trump may have won the election, but I don’t think there are any winners in the USA at the moment. It seems clear that 2016 will be remembered as the year in which the far-right rose to power again. We can’t let them get comfortable. Nobody looks back at the people that gave Hitler a thumbs up when he rose to power with any goodwill. Let’s not make the same mistake here. Scotland must always oppose Donald Trump

Pets deserve better cuttings to c**p on

My mum gives us old copies of The Daily Mail for lining the guinea pig cage. Do you think this is risky? – Heather, @haitchtav

I DON’T want to alarm you, Heather, but this is incredibly careless behaviour on the part of your mammy.

By exposing your guinea pig to old copies of The Daily Mail, you risk indoctrinating your furry wee pet with horrendous right-wing propaganda and ultimately inspiring hate in it. It’s not unusual for humans to let their pets defecate on old newspapers – but have we considered what might happen if they read them, too?

In recent weeks, The Daily Mail has shown itself to be a hotbed for hatred, division and jingoistic patriotism. Worryingly, human beings seem drawn to these traits, and continue to purchase the newspaper. While it hasn’t been proven conclusively that animals can be affected by right-wing rags, the simplistic language seen in the Daily Mail is likely to be attractive to dim-witted rodents.

Similarly, the lowest-common-denominator gibberish touted by said paper is sure to appeal to creatures not accustomed to thinking much. This is largely true of human readers of The Daily Mail, so it seems to follow that guinea pigs will try to mimic them.

I’d imagine that you wouldn’t like to be recognised as the individual responsible for radicalising guinea pigs. My advice is that you stick to paper with inspirational messages handwritten on it, or old issues of Private Eye, Classic Rock and The National. This way, your pet will grow up to be hip, educated and not bigoted.