YOU’LL forgive us if we devote this section of today’s Yes DIY hub to our very own Paul Kavanagh who is already a person respected, and indeed loved, by a great many people in the Yes movement for his Wee Ginger Dug blog and his columns here in The National.

There are also his indefatigable efforts for Yes groups across the country, his superb public speaking – this from a man who was too shy to speak in public just a few years ago – and his new National Dugcasts in which he and editor Callum Baird shoot the political breeze in a double act developed on the National Roadshows.

Now Paul has published a collection of his best National columns from 2016 to date, and obviously we highly recommend Barking Up the Right Tree.

The blurb by the publisher – in this case Vagabond Books – is accurate: “Here is political satire in the best tradition,” it states. “No punches are pulled, and strangely the humour is both brutal and subtle.”

He starts with a salute to the departing prime minister: “Goodbye Davie, you were the worst ever” but he, like the rest of us, will soon see how the “worst ever” can still get worse.

“Brexit has been a gift to him. He tracks the posturing of our politicians from “Our tea exports will take over the world, never have so many owed so much to a brew”

to “The Empire is dead and ... the harsh realities of Brexit will expose that. The emperors of Brexit

have no clothes”.

One of his best polemics is included: “It is being widely reported in the British media that there are now only three possible scenarios for the UK. Theresa May’s deal, no deal, or no Brexit. That might be the case for the UK, but it’s not the case for Scotland. Scotland has an additional possibility: independence. If we are in for an early General Election, the SNP needs to make sure that the electorate of Scotland understands that for Scotland, independence is the only realistic and meaningful path out of the disaster of Brexit inflicted upon the UK by a reactionary British nationalism blinded by nostalgia and longing for an empire that’s long gone.”

He’s still kebabbing them as shown by his blog this week: “Let’s be honest here, of all the many things that Michael Gove has done which make him loathsome, doing a few lines of cocaine in the 1990s isn’t one of them.

“I lived in Easterhouse during the 1980s. I had friends who were criminalised because of cannabis-related offences. They did a lot of drugs but were never so out their trees that they voted Tory.”

You can order the book

directly from the publisher,

which means postage is free. You can order here: www.vagabondvoices.co.uk/rants/barking-up-the-right-tree-2019