I’VE an earth-shattering announcement to make. I don’t have a smartphone!
I’m used to getting ridiculed by family, friends and, even worse, the dreaded rolling of eyes from the grandbairns for being such a prehistoric Luddite. Firstly though, there is the practicality of these damned things. Whenever my partner has passed her smartphone to me to flick through photos of family and dugs etc, my extremely clumsy fingers, which can’t cope with this touch screen thing, usually manage to disable the damned contraption, which is immediately thrust back to my partner to sort out!
I’m not a complete Luddite though. My laptop is my saviour, with the satisfying whack I give those keys on the keyboard. No messing here. As long as you batter a particular key, no matter how hard it’s done in temper, it can’t go wrong, unlike these smartphones!
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So where am I going with this? Even on my sacred laptop I don’t do social media at all. “X” has become, so I’ve been told, a total cesspit of extreme right-wing racism, Islamophobia, xenophobia and just hate generally, with absolutely no guardrails whatsoever, thanks to a certain abomination cawed Elon Musk!
A spat between him, the world’s richest person, and our very own Humza Yousaf has been building for years. Following the murder of George Floyd in the US, the Scottish Parliament held a debate on showing solidarity with anti-racism demonstrations. Humza, justice secretary at the time, took the opportunity to say: “At 99% of the meetings I go to, I’m the only non-white person in the room.” He read out a list of senior positions including the lord advocate, solicitor general and Police Scotland’s chief constable and after each, added, “white”.
Humza said the same was true for every high court judge, every deputy chief constable, every assistant chief constable and every prison governor in Scotland. He also highlighted senior positions in the health sector and trade union movement. He stated: “That is a collective failure that includes every single one of us. I hope we are sitting uncomfortably, because those should be uncomfortable truths for us all.” Unfortunately, an edited version of Humza’s speech was widely shared by right-wing accounts on social media.
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By October 2023 this had reached the attention of that awful Musk guy. Ye cannae make this up but he called Humza “a blatant racist”! Last month, during the riots in the UK, Musk called Humza a racist “scumbag”, claiming he “loathes” white people. Clearly Musk is an intelligent guy, so grotesquely misrepresenting Humza’s comments, which were about racial injustice and a lack of people of colour in positions of power, was just beyond the pale – and racist! No wonder Humza called Musk “a dangerous race baiter” and “one of the most dangerous men on the planet”. I 100% agree!
I really applaud Humza for standing up to one of the most powerful folk in the world in this way, even though, given the recent racially motivated riots, it could be detrimental to Humza and his family. It is an extremely sad state of affairs that a former First Minister of Scotland now feels he might have to not just leave Scotland but also the West for the safety of his own family! That is a total effing disgrace!
In my view the evils of social media are now increasingly outweighing the good. For once in my life I’m quite happy to be the auld fogey, fuddy-duddy Luddite in the room that reads newspapers and occasionally has a go at that cheapo “pay as you go” phone bought at the local supermarket! Bliss!
Ivor Telfer
Dalgety Bay
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