Authentic Mediaeval Warfare.. With Sidewinder Missiles.
Last week we reported on the problems facing Bannockburn’s 700th anniversary celebrations. Their reenactment event held up as a centerpiece event in the 2014 homecoming year was dealt a blow when they discovered that nearby Stirling was to host Armed Forces Day on the Saturday of the same weekend. This free event attracts around 40,000 visitors and is a major draw for tourists.
The National Trust for Scotland who run Bannockburn and Unique Events who are organizing the Bannockburn Live event are behind the scenes furious but are publicly putting on a brave face. The logistics of having two massive events happening next door to each other are extremely difficult; notwithstanding the problem of traffic and making sure people can get to the events there is the fact that a historical reenactment of a battle that took place in the middle ages is going to be upstaged by fighter jets and the Red Arrows display team screaming overhead.
Last time out I alluded to the fact that this seemed a bit too much a coincidence; there was a very strong suggestion that Stirling council knew exactly what they were up to and deliberately kept quiet.
Evidence now coming to light not only backs this up but also quite shockingly suggests a sequence of events that led to the cancellation of the 2014 clan gathering.
Lets look at a timeline of events: over 18 months ago the MOD invited applications from cities to host Armed Forces Day 2014, At that time Stirling were just announcing the 2014 gathering, then things went quiet. In October Stirling canned the gathering event claiming ‘budgetary concerns’ as the reason. Two months later the MOD received Stirling’s application to host Armed Forces Day. This application was not thrown together overnight so you can be sure they were working on this at EXACTLY the same time they were throwing the plans for a clan gathering in the trash can, knowing full well they could never manage to organize both.
Just today I have learned that a senior figure in Event Scotland warned Stirling Council not to go for Armed Forces Day as it would clash with Bannockburn. What we now know is that not only did they ignore this advice but they then kept plans under wraps, did not reveal them to the NTS who were running Bannockburn (even when asked directly at planning meetings about potential event clashes) and did not inform the Scottish Government or any other official bodies. This is nothing short of a gleeful and willful attempt to undermine the Homecoming 2014 schedule of events.
Not only that but they passed the responsibility of hosting the clans over to Bannockburn while they were secretly planning to upstage this event.
Just be aware of this, what Stirling Council have done is take what could have been a ‘take two’ of one of the largest and most impressive clan gatherings that has ever happened and thrown it away in favour of scoring political points in the lead up to next year’s referendum. They have mocked the clans, the National Trust, The Government and thanks to dragging Armed Forces Day into a political mire have mocked thousands of brave men and women who put their lives on the line daily by turning what is THEIR day into nothing more than a political rally.
This is not acceptable to any of the above.
What makes this so galling is that they think they have ‘played a blinder’ catching the Scottish government off guard, since any attempt to criticize the hosting of Armed Forces Day can be twisted to be a criticism of the military.
We started this blog way back in October last year. Back then it was going to be a resource for the tens of thousands of visitors who were expected to pile into Scotland to attend what would have been an incredible gathering event and then travel off into the Scottish regions to trace their roots and go to soak up everything else this great country has to offer.
Thanks though to the tortious interference of a town council being controlled by parties in the UK government we don’t have that, we do not have the chance to welcome so much of the world as we would like to and we will not have the benefit of the dollars and euros that these people will spend here. We will have some visitors but not in the numbers we expected and everyone will suffer as a result.
Come to Scotland in 2014, you will love the peace and quiet!
