The flame remains undiminished

Apr26 by weegingerdug

Back in 2014 in the immediate aftermath of the independence referendum, I published a piece about the importance of keeping the flame of hope alive. Right now, we need that flame of hope more than ever, the candle is guttering and the storm winds of despair are blowing stronger than ever. In recent weeks the Scottish Government has been buffeted by one crisis after another, and today the opportunistic wolves of the Labour and Conservative parties are circling around a First Minister they believe to be mortally wounded following his decision to pull the plug on the Bute House Agreement and the furious response of the scorned Scottish Greens which places the current administration on a knife edge in terms of its parliamentary majority. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that yesterday’s decision was a massive misjudgment on the part of Humza Yousaf, who was seeking to appear tough and decisive, but the problem with that is that it merely provokes other people to seek to appear tough and decisive too. It’s rarely wise to piss off people upon whom you depend.

But we are where we are. The next few hours and days are likely to be fraught for the political future of Humza Yousaf, just at a time when what the wider independence movement needs is a period of calm and stability in order to capitalise upon the incompetence and corrupt chaos of a massively unpopular Conservative government and to shine the spotlight on the deceit and lies of a Labour party which has moved so far to the right it now occupies the political space inhabited by the Tories before Brexit drove them mad. Instead attention is focused on the Scottish Government and Humza Yousaf’s struggle to survive politically. I cannot be the only independence supporter who is sighing in exasperation right now. This is absolutely not what we need. Yet again we see that terribly Scottish tendency to score an own goal.

That said, when we take a step back from the immediate drama and the glee of the anti- independence parties and their media allies salivating at the prospect of landing a serious blow on the Scottish Government, the wider and longer term picture is a lot more positive.

We don’t tend to look much at that bigger picture when dealing with politics in Britain. The curse of Westminster is short-termism, and it is rare to consider what happens beyond the next electoral cycle. Right now there is intense focus on the very short term, the political survival of Humza Yousaf and the Scottish Government.

Predictions in politics are a mug’s game, but for what it’s worth I feel its likely that Humza Yousaf and the Scottish Government will survive this crisis, for all the feverish speculation in an anti-independence media that he will be brought down. It is more likely than not that an arrangement will be reached with Alba MSP Ash Regan allowing the First Minister to scrape through the Conservative vote of no confidence which is likely to take place around the middle of next week.

There is even less chance of Labour’s motion of no confidence in the Scottish Government passing as at least one Green MSP, Mark Ruskell, has already signalled that he is unlikely to support it, accusing Anas Sarwar of wasting Parliament’s time by putting forward a motion that he doesn’t want to pass, saying: “It was the poor judgement of Humza in ending the Bute House Agreement that is in question, not the record of the SNP/Green [government].”

Expecting the Greens to support a vote of no confidence in the Scottish Government is asking them to vote no confidence in a government that they had been a part of since the Bute House. If other Green MSPs join with Mark Ruskell, the Labour motion will have been nothing more than an attention seeking waste of time, solely a testament to the arrogance and entitlement of Anas Sarwar for all the excited and feverish anticipation in an anti independence Scottish media which wills the Scottish Government to fail.

But irrespective of what happens in the coming days, the underlying dynamics driving support for independence remain unchanged. Amidst the hysterical media barrage that essential truth remains undiminished.

As part of securing Ash Regan’s vote, the Scottish Government is likely to have to commit to backing her bill to hold a referendum seeking to ask Westminster to devolve to Holyrood the power to hold another independence referendum. Ash Regan sees her referendum bill as a means of circumventing the decision of the UK Supreme Court that the Scottish Parliament lacks the legal competence to pass legislation for a second independence referendum.

Although the UK Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood cannot pass a bill for a second independence referendum without a Section 30 order from the Westminster government, the Alba MSP noted: “However, there is nothing to stop our Parliament proposing a referendum, which we believe would be within competence, and that is to ask the people whether they believe the powers of the Parliament should be extended to include the right to legislate for and negotiate independence.”

The bill would certainly face a legal challenge and the UK Supreme Court may take a different view to Ash Regan, but Scottish Government support would see the bill successfully pass through Holyrood, and if nothing else would recentre focus on independence and the right of the people of Scotland to decide their own future. Far from bringing down Humza Yousaf and the Scottish Government, the Tory and Labour no confidence motions may blow up in their faces and bring independence back into the forefront of the Scottish political agenda rather than neutering it.

All crises pass eventually and the SNP will get through the crises and challenges it currently faces. When it does it will be making a pitch to a Scotland which grows more and more receptive to the idea of independence with every passing year. Support for independence is distinct from support for the SNP and remains undiminished no matter what slings and arrows are thrown at the party. Winning a nation’s independence is a project far greater than the short term attention span of the political media can accommodate. In the wise words of the Scots saying ‘Keep a calm souch’ and retain that sense of perspective that the anti-independence media has long since abandoned. We will have the last laugh, and the flame remains undiminished.

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Obviously recent developments concerning Peter Murrell will attract a lot of interest and people will want to express their views. However I must remind people that Scotland has very strict laws about contempt of court and you must exercise extreme caution in what you post. Ideally it is best to say nothing. I must also warn you that you are personally responsible for any comments you make.

The Scottish press, a catastrophist’s wet dream

Apr25 by weegingerdug

It has become commonplace in the media in Scotland for every initiative from the Scottish Government to be greeted with dire and apocalyptic warnings of catastrophe. When the Scottish Government raised income tax on higher earners the Scottish Tories, and some Labour figures immediately wailed that there would be queues of traffic on the M74 as Range Rovers piled high with Agas flee to a lower tax regime in Tory run England, trying to escape the horrific prospect of little Findlay being deprived of a winter break on the pistes in the Swiss Alps. Will no one think of the upper middle classes? They’re the real victims here.

Predictions of ruin and disaster are very much the stock in trade of the anti-independence media in Scotland because to them the very biggest disaster of all would be the calamity of Scotland actually managing to achieve something positive by itself. That would be evidence that Scotland is not in fact a hopeless basket case utterly dependent upon the good graces of that well known charitable institution run by kindly and benevolent candidates for sainthood, the British Government, and heaven forfend might even be able to make a decent fist of things as an independent nation.

However like most of the overwrought warnings of calamity and catastrophe, utter ruination is not in fact what has come to pass. Quite the reverse, a study carried out by HMRC on behalf of the Scottish Government found that there has been a steady increase in net migration of taxpayers in the five years since Scottish Income Tax was introduced in 2017-18. In 2021-22, the last year for which data is available, £200 million in extra taxable income has been brought into Scotland, contrary to the predictions of better off people fleeing from Scotland, more higher and top rate taxpayers have been moving to Scotland than leaving.

Provisional findings from the study were shared with Scottish ministers ahead of setting the 2024-25 Scottish Budget, which saw the creation of a new advanced rate of 45% income tax for those earning between £75,000 and £125,140.

Who’d have thought it? A country which prioritises better public services and a higher quality of life for its citizens over stripping the public sector to the bone is actually an attractive place in which to live. You can be quite certain that this welcome news will not receive a fraction of the attention in the Scottish media which it gave to the hysterical doom mongering of the Scottish Government’s political opponents. I did not see any mention of it on BBC Scotland’s news broadcasts on Wednesday. I cannot say for absolute certain that the BBC Scotland TV news did not cover the story, but if they did it was given no prominence and was squeezed into a few seconds between the catastrophe of the day and the fitba. As always in the Scottish media, good news for a pro independence Scottish Government gets buried, bad news gets screamed from the murder tent for weeks on end.

Scottish Finance Secretary Shona Robison welcomed the findings of the study and said: “We know people base the decision on where to live on a range of factors, and by coming to Scotland they have access to a range of services and benefits not available elsewhere in the UK, including free tuition and prescriptions. Scotland has the most generous childcare package for three and four year olds, and council tax is lower here than in England. This social contract with the people of Scotland is funded in part by our progressive income tax system.”

The doom mongering catastrophists will be out in force today after the First Minister decided to walk away from the Bute House Agreement, the cooperation deal between the SNP and the Scottish Greens. There has been considerable speculation in recent days about the future of the agreement, which ensured that the Scottish Government could govern as a majority. There had been unhappiness about the continuation of the deal from sections on both sides, with a number of SNP figures speaking out against it in public, and a larger number having reservations about it in private, although without making any public statement as they knew precisely what the Scottish media would do with it if they had done.

These members argue that the deal with the Greens ties the Scottish Government to controversial and often electorally unpopular policies, and that the benefit derived from a formal parliamentary agreement with the Greens is completely overshadowed by the costs in terms of a continuing barrage of negative publicity.

There was also unhappiness with the agreement amongst the Greens, with party members forcing an EGM which would give the rank and file the opportunity to vote upon whether they wanted the agreement to continue. This vote was due to take place in the coming weeks and had the members who forced it succeeded, the Greens would have been obliged to walk away from the Scottish Government.

Rather than deal with the weeks of fevered speculation which would undoubtedly have ensued, with the accompanying focus on whether the SNP would appease those in the Greens who forced the vote and continuing attention on controversial policies, Humza Yousaf decided to pull the plug. The immediate cause of this was the negative publicity generated by the refusal of the Greens to accept the findings of the Cass review into NHS care for transgender youth, but other factors are equally important, not the least of which was last week’s decision by the Scottish Government that the 2030 target for a 75% reduction in carbon emissions was not achievable. The British Government’s target for 2030 is a much more modest 45% reduction and there have been complaints, typically little reported in the Scottish media that Westminster, which retains tight control over energy policy, has done little to facilitate Scotland reaching its much more ambitious goal.

There will of course be considerable glee in the anti independence media about this recent development, but in reality there remains a substantial pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government is very far from collapse. The SNP is only two votes short of an absolute majority and only needs to get one or two votes from Ash Regan or one of the Greens on a case by case basis in order to get its agenda passed. The SNP has very successfully governed as a minority in the past, and it can do so again. Yet again the warnings of impending apocalypse are grossly overstated in a Scottish media which has abandoned all sense of perspective in its desperation to undermine support for independence.

As always with the Scottish media, its dire warnings of catastrophe will not come to pass, and when that predicted unmitigated disaster does not in fact transpire, there will be a broken down ferry to bewail.

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Obviously recent developments will attract a lot of interest and people will want to express their views. However I must remind people that Scotland has very strict laws about contempt of court and you must exercise extreme caution in what you post. Ideally it is best to say nothing. I must also warn you that you are personally responsible for any comments you make.

Wee Ginger Crowdfunder 2024

Apr22 by weegingerdug

It’s that time of the year with the blog that always makes me apprehensive, the annual crowd funder. I am launching it a bit early this year as there is a lot of chatter about an early general election and I don’t want it to fall into the official election campaign period. Although I have a part time writing gig with The National, this blog is my first job, writing it is what got me established, and it is now in its tenth year, the very first post was on 14 October 2013 and it got 35 views in the first couple of days after publication and I was thrilled. It was about Alastair Carmichael. Remember him? He was a thing then, the Scotland Secretary in David Cameron’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition government.

Now the blog has become a fixture in the Scottish political independence landscape, it has about 8500 email subscribers – more than some established newspapers – and has readers in Holyrood and the Scottish Government, and I am loathed by BBC Scotland (So that’s a result.). I no longer keep a close eye on the site statistics, frankly I am not that anal, the fact that each post attracts well over 100 comments on average and I know that the vast majority of readers never comment, together with the occasional private message from influential people, tells me all I need to know.

If everyone who subscribed to this blog paid 25p per month I wouldn’t have to do an annual funder but of course it doesn’t work like that. This blog will alway be free for everyone to read – both those who love it and those who hate it. It will never go behind a paywall or charge a subscription fee.

The last few weeks have been a torrid time for the independence movement and to say that the coming weeks and months are likely to be challenging is something of an understatement. So it is all the more important that someone tries to keep the flame of independence alive, highlights the hypocrisy and deceit of the “we’re not nationalists we’re British” parties with their flag fetish, and articulates the case for independence without getting drawn into attacking pro independence parties for supposedly ‘doing independence wrong’. We have an entire Scottish media ecosystem devoted to attacking the SNP and the Greens, that is their job not mine. My job is to draw attention to uncomfortable truths that the Scottish media prefers to ignore, like the many and varied lies of the Labour party in Scotland or positive developments in the case for independence.

I intend to continue to blog and be a small but irritating thorn in the flesh of the anti-independence parties and to post new pieces as often as my health and disability permit. I order to do that I need your support. This blog represents a substantial chunk of my annual income (which is fully declared for tax, British nationalist trolls) and I depend on it to pay my bills and keep food on the table. Any amount that you can contribute is hugely appreciated. I am hoping to raise £5000 which together with the money I earn from The National and my disability benefit is still less than the annual minimum wage, but enough to keep me going.

Many thanks for all your support, whether that’s in the form of a donation or just dropping me a kind word when I’ve been feeling down and struggling to adapt to post-stroke reality and life as a physically disabled person.wtw

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The turbulent river

Apr21 by weegingerdug

The big story in Scottish politics today is the one that cannot really be commented on due to Scotland’s strict laws about contempt of court and not saying anything in public which might prejudice the outcome of criminal proceedings. Last week former SNP Chief Executive Peter Murrell, the husband of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, was charged with embezzlement following Police Scotland’s three year long investigation into SNP finances. No details have been released about the details of the alleged offence. The matter has now gone to the Crown Office who will decide whether the evidence warrants the case going to trial.

We cannot comment on the specifics of the matter but this development, and I strongly urge those commenting here to avoid any mention of this on-going legal case, however this development means that the SNP now faces the nightmare of going into a Westminster general election which was already expected to be difficult with the potential spectre of the criminal trial of a former senior party figure looming over its head. Hopefully this is the final chapter in the long running Operation Branchform saga, although Police Scotland has insisted that the investigation is on-going. While there are undoubtedly rocky days ahead in the short to medium term, we can begin to see the distant light of Scottish independence politics in the post Branchform, and post Salmond and Sturgeon era.

Achieving a nation’s independence is never easy, and Scotland’s pro-independence parties and the wider independence movement have perhaps been naive about the scale of the challenges that we face. The British state and its supporters were never going to make this simple and in the years after 2014 we made the mistake of assuming that they would play by the long established rules of democracy. However the British nationalists and their allies have shown no hesitation in ripping up those rules and replacing them with new ones more to their liking. The independence movement must acknowledge that it is not facing a principled and honest opponent.

Until 2021 there was a long established understanding that it is for the people of Scotland to choose the system of government that best suits their needs and that they could do so by electing a Scottish Government to Holyrood which reflects that. Yet in 2021 the people of Scotland had the temerity to elect a government committed to holding another independence referendum, and so the Conservatives, aided and abetted by Labour and the Lib Dems – parties which lost that year’s Scottish elections – decided to ignore a result which was not to their liking and sought to gaslight Scotland into believing that the people had not really voted for what they had in fact voted for by the well established rules of democratic elections in the UK. Shamefully, the great majority of the media in Scotland actively colluded in this deceit.

Nevertheless significant progress has been made, the idea of independence has now been normalised in mainstream Scottish politics, in itself a remarkable achievement given that it had previously been successfully kicked to the margins by the powerful forces of the British nationalist parties, the deeply ingrained Scottish cultural cringe, and a Scottish media which is overwhelmingly dominated by the traditional Unionism which has now been replaced by a nakedly aggressive Anglo-British nationalism.

It is only within the past couple of years that it has begun to dawn that we are facing British nationalist opponents who will not hesitate to stoop to nakedly anti-democratic means in order to thwart the legitimate drive for Scottish independence, shifting the goalposts in order to ensure that a democratic vote on independence is forever outwith our grasp. We now know that voting for a Scottish Parliament which has a clear and unequivocal mandate for a Scottish independence referendum is no longer deemed sufficient for a referendum by a Westminster which continues to insist that Scotland is a member of a voluntary union even as it refuses to specify any democratic route to another vote on independence which is not subject to a veto by a British Prime Minister.

We are currently in a stalemate, which suits the Labour and Conservative parties just fine, the independence parties and the wider movement have yet to work out how to break that stalemate in a way that ensures that a clear and unarguable majority of Scots are on board with it. With support for independence in a huge majority amongst younger age groups, that is not a situation that will last indefinitely. The log-jam will eventually break, and it will do so because of the demographics of independence support are gradually changing Scotland into a nation in which independence will become the settled will of the people.

The new era of Scottish independence politics which is gradually developing will be an era dominated and shaped by a younger generation of politicians, responding to the needs and concerns of a younger generation of Scottish voters who take the idea of Scottish self-government for granted and who are far less influenced by older and out dated notions of the supposed global importance of Britain and more able to see through the self-serving deceit of Westminster.

The cause of independence will be buffeted by storms, it will face crises and difficult times like those it is currently experiencing, but we are travelling on a river which leads inexorably and inevitably to one destination, the wide blue open sea of independence. Right now that river is turbulent and dangerous. The truth is that things will probably get worse before they start to get better, but get better they most assuredly will.

The cause of independence is not a creature of the SNP, recent polling has proven that support for independence remains unaffected by the travails of the party, but the anti-independence parties will seize upon any electoral reverses suffered by the SNP and will use them to claim that it is all over for the dream of Scottish independence. They will redouble their attacks on the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

The SNP will get through this crisis. The party will regroup and reorganise, and it will do so on a foundation of support for independence which remains strong and undiminished and which grows more solid with every passing year. The cause of independence is bigger than any individual, and it’s not going anywhere. We will get through this, and we will be vindicated in the end. History is on our side.

This blog will continue to make ths case for independence and to highlight the hypocrisy and lies of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the corrrupt and rabid Conservatives and the morally and intellectually bankrupt Labour party. It will continue to offer what I hope is a calm and reasonable voice, articulating the humanity and compassion which drives this movement.

Later this week I will launch the blog’s annual crowdfunder. I hope you value my work enough to support it. I have continued to blog despite health challenges which have reduced my output, and I will continue to articulate the case for independence and to hold high a beacon of hope in the dark and stormy days that may lie ahead. On the other side of those days a new and better Scotland is taking shape.

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When is a convention not a convention? When it’s a Sewel Convention

Apr18 by weegingerdug

The fundamental plank of the devolution settlement is the Sewel Convention, which states that the Westminster government will not interfere with the powers of the Scottish Parliament or intrude upon devolved competencies without the consent of Holyrood. This convention is vital if devolution is to work in a British constitutional system which fetishises the absolute sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament and whose unwritten constitution provides for no clear separation of powers and places no restrictions on the power of the leader of the party which enjoys a majority in the House of Commons.

Devolution can only work if the governing party in Westminster agrees to abide by the self-denying ordinances of the Sewel Convention. Without it, devolution is a dead letter. The importance of the Sewel Convention to the operation of the devolution settlement is such that during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign the Better Together parties pledged to elevate the status of the Sewel provisions from a ‘convention’ reliant upon the willingness of the Westminster government to abide by it to statute and to enshrine it in law, giving Scotland a legal guarantee that the devolution settlement was sacrosanct and it would be placed beyond the ability of any Westminster government to meddle with it or undermine it.

This promise was one of the most important made by the Better Together Campaign, allowing them to assert to Scots that after a No vote, the future of devolution would be assured and legally protected, as such it was instrumental in swinging a No vote in the independence referendum.

As we all know now, there are lies, damned lies, and Westminster promises to Scotland. The provisions of the Sewel Convention were indeed written into the revised Scotland Act passed in the wake of the referendum, but within a couple of years the Conservative government of Theresa May sought and obtained a ruling from the UK Supreme Court stating that the relevant provision of the Scotland Act had no force in law as it went against the very English constitutional doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament, a Westminster government can be urged to respect the Sewel Convention but it cannot be legally compelled to do so and it will suffer no legal consequences if it chooses to ignore it.

Since then, the Conservative government in Westminster, which has always been hostile to the devolution settlement has breached the Sewel Convention on not one or two occasions, but on eleven.

Speaking to Westminster’s Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, Permanent Secretary John-Paul Marks, the head of the civil service in Scotland, told MPs that the UK Government has repeatedly broken the Sewel Convention.

Marks said that while there were instances of Scotland’s two governments working well together, this came amid a “disrupted and quite regularly contested environment.

He said the Internal Market Act – which effectively gives the UK Government a veto over some Scottish laws – had created a “different operating environment to devolution compared to what went before”.

He explained: “You see that evidence in the Sewel convention and legislative consent. So up to 2018, the Sewel convention – whereby the UK Government would not legislate without consent from devolved governments in devolved areas – was always observed and there were no circumstances where that consent was not granted, where the UK Government would legislate without consent. But since 2018 there has been 11 occasions where that convention has not been followed. And so to an extent that reflects the changing nature of the political contexts post-Brexit.”

The Conservatives are using something that a majority of Scots do not support, Brexit, to undermine and hollow out something that a majority of Scots do support, a Scottish Parliament that is able to exercise its powers without Westminster interference.

The Rubicon has been crossed, not only does the Westminster government now feel that it can trash the Sewel Convention with impunity, the Scotland Secretary has also used the powers of the hitherto unused Section 35 order giving Westminster’s Scottish viceroy the power to unilaterally veto legislation passed by Holyrood that relates to a devolved matter.

The devolution settlement now stands naked and unprotected, with no defence against a power hungry British Government determined to brook no opposition from Scotland. This dire situation will only worsen if Scots allow the Labour party to win the largest number of seats in Scotland at the Westminster general election expected later this year. That will only embolden the British nationalist parties who will crow that the ‘threat’ from Scottish independence is over.

Just this week Gordon Brown broontervened to day that the ‘threat’ of Scottish independence had not gone away, and that the so called union was on borrowed time. The trashing of the Sewel Convention is a good reason why that is the case. If the British parties cannot be trust to honour the promises they make to Scotland then obviously Scots are going to look for an alternative. What exactly is the point of continuing to allow ourselves to be governed by parties which make fine promises when they want our votes but traduce their promises the second the ballots are counted. There is no point.

The fact is that a ‘convention’ that has been breached eleven times in the course of six years is no longer a convention, it is breaching it that has become the convention. This is the new normal in the devolution settlement, what was once unthinkable has become the established political reality. The Tories have given a future Labour government carte blanche to continue with the pattern of contempt for the principles of the devolution settlement that they have set in place.

You’d be a fool to imagine that a government led by Keir Starmer would behave any differently. The one constant in Starmer’s political career is his thirst for power and his willingness to lie and deceive in order to get it then having done so he ruthlessly neutralises any potential threat from those who opposed him or who might stand in his way. This is not a man who will tolerate a strong and powerful Scottish Parliament which might stand up against him.

Labour has already been giving some alarming signals about what it has in store for the Scottish Parliament should, as seems likely, Starmer becomes Prime Minister after the Westminster general election expected later this year. Anas Sarwar has been talking about what, in typically Labour Newspeak style, he is wont to call ‘real devolution’.

This will consist of stripping powers from Holyrood and giving them instead to local authorities which are both more likely to be controlled by a Labour administration and far less able to withstand an overweening Prime Minister. What Sarwar means by ‘real devolution is giving power to the Labour party. This will be done despite the fact that control of local government in Scotland is devolved and irrespective of what Holyrood might say. If Scotland is foolish enough to allow the Labour party to take power in Holyrood, a Labour controlled Scottish Parliament will willingly collude in its own neutering, but even without that, the convention that the Sewel Convention can be ignored is already well established.

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Labour’s Scottish branch office: the most dishonest party in Scottish politics

Apr16 by weegingerdug

Anas Sarwar, the branch manager of the Labour party’s Scottish accounting unit, gave a speech over the weekend which was breathtakingly hypocritical and mendacious even by the standards of a party for whom breathtaking mendacious hypocrisy is very much its USP.

Speaking ahead of the STUC congress which is being held in Dundee this week, Sarwar promised that under a future Labour government the UK would see the greatest ever transfer of power and wealth to working people that has ever occurred in the UK. That smells a bit like a Vow, doesn’t it, and we all know how seriously the Labour party takes ensuring that it delivers on its vows.

Under Labour’s New Deal for Working People, which has been championed by deputy leader Angela Rayner and which was worked out with trade unions , the party has pledged to end zero hours contracts, repeal anti-strike laws, expand sick pay and employment rights and end fire and rehire. It all sounds too good to be true, and that’s because it is. Like so many of Labour’s fine sounding pledges before it, this New Deal for Working People will never see the light of day in any recognisable form.

With Sir Keir Starmer all but certain to be the next Prime Minister, there has been some pushback from businesses on the plans, leading to fears they could be watered down. Keir Starmer never ever U turns on his promises in order to placate corporate interests and the right wing, so we have absolutely nothing to worry about on that score just as we need not worry our little heads that Anas Sarwar might yet again be pontificating far above his pay grade on topics that he has no influence on.

What will happen is that this New Deal for Working People will be kicked to committees, the most progessive thing about it will be how it will be progressively watered down, its key planks stripped out, and absolutely nothing which might provoke the ire of the right wing press will remain intact. During its progress through Parliament it will be further diluted, exemptions will be introduced at the behest of Starmer’s corporate donors and what eventually reaches the statute book will be an unrecognisable travesty of what Sarwar has just anounced. Then he’ll hide from the press and not take any responsibility for his party’s deceit.

Sarwar voted against the SNP’s plan for a progressive tax policy, ensuring that the wealthy pay more. So much for his ‘commitment’ to redistribution. Sarwar also took a pop at the Scottish Government over the high levels of zero hours contracts in Scotland, but he and his party have refused to countenance the devolution of employment law. It takes a very special kind of brass neck to criticise the Scottish Government for a situation which you yourself are refusing to allow the Scottish Government the powers to address.

We all know what is really going to happen. Sarwar can ‘pledge’ all he likes, but he has no power to make any of it happen. We have very clearly seen that Labour MPs elected in Scotland pay no heed to the dictates of the branch manager, Michael Shanks is a case in point, most recently the Labour MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West was defending his party’s refusal to consider a halt to arms exports to Israel, despite Sarwar’s calls for one.

Shanks resigned from the Labour party in 2019 over Brexit, denouncing Labour on social media as “a party that has a bankrupt approach to our membership of the EU and is complacent about the impact it will have on the poorest people across the UK.” How times change. It’s amazing what being offered a junior shadowministerial position will do for a man’s convictions. Now Shanks is an enthusiastic supporter of Starmer’s morally bankrupt support for the hardline Brexit bequeathed to us by the Tories.

Earlier this month Sarwar said: “A failure to properly access humanitarian aid into Gaza, the targeting of infrastructure like hospitals and schools, innocent civilians losing their lives on such a huge scale in Gaza, and the death of aid workers killed because of IDF [Israeli Defence Force] attacks.These are clear breaches, in my view, of international law and therefore we should not be selling arms to Israel.”

However appearing on the BBC on Sunday, Shanks refused to back Sarwar’s position and instead insisted it was “right” that the UK Labour Party has declined to call for an end to Israeli weapons exports without seeing the UK Government’s legal advice on the matter. Shanks also misleadingly claimed that Sarwar and UK leader Keir Starmer shared a position on the issue although they patently do not. Lying comes so easily to the Labour party.

In the same interview Shanks also refused to back anything other than a one-size-fits-all approach to UK immigration – despite experts saying the challenges from such a policy were more acute in Scotland and Scotland has particular challenges that could be addressed by devolving aspects of immigration policy to Holyrood.

Asked: “Why not devolve it to Holyrood? Scotland’s got this unique crisis, this absolutely specific need for more people that’s unpopular in key electoral areas south of the Border. One-size-fits-all isn’t working at the moment. Why not just give it to Holyrood?”

Shanks responded: “Because we’re part of a United Kingdom and immigration is a reserved issue, and when you think about where the UK border is, it’s right that that’s a one-system approach.”

What an asinine non answer. Unpacked, that ‘answer’ boils down to ‘just because’. It’s the response given by a man who thinks he’s speaking to morons. There are other non-independent self-governing territories which do have control over aspects of immigration policy. This is the case in Quebec in Canada and the autonomous Portuguese territories of Madeira and the Azores. There is no reason that it cannot be the case for Scotland too, other than the fact that Michael Shanks doesn’t want it to. The geographical location of the UK border is meaningless, all the more so because the vast majority of people entering Scotland directly from outwith the UK enter via airports where border controls are physically located on Scottish territory.

The truth is that the Labour party of Keir Starmer has no interest in offering a radical political alternative or a meanigful redisribution of wealth and power, no matter what Anas Sarwar might ‘pledge’ while he is seeking Scottish votes for Starmer’s right wing British nationalist project. Labour’s Scottish branch office is the most dishonest party in Scottish politics, but that is only to be expected, its very name ‘Scottish Labour’ is a lie. It lies about being distinct in organisation, leadership and policies from The Keir Starmer right wing British nationalist flag shagging project of which it is a wholly owned and controlled accounting unit. You cannot trust a party which is dishonest about its very identity.

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Vote Tory vote flag shagger, Vote Labour vote flag shagger

Apr9 by weegingerdug

Voters in most of the UK have a very clear choice at the next Westminster general election, they can vote for the British flag shagging party, or they can vote for the British flag shagging party. Keir Starmer constantly boasts about how he has changed the Labour party, it is not an idle boast, he has indeed changed the Labour party, he has changed it into what the Tories used to be before the narrow victory for leave in 2016’s EU referendum drove them over the edge into the insanity of further and further right wing anti-foreigner English nationalist populism.

The Tories are now full on deranged. It’s a party which is all consumed by its internal power struggles and which has lost all sight of political reality. Many Tory MPs are now so far down the G Beebies rabbit hole that they genuinely believe that all they need to do in order to restore their party’s fortunes is to stick a few asylum seekers on a one way flight to Rwanda, preferably after a fight with the European Court of Human Rights, or to have yet another leadership change and replace the hopeless and unpopular Rishi Sunak with some other leader who will quickly reveal themselves to be equally as hopeless and unpopular.

It’s easy, and let’s be honest, highly enjoyable, to take pleasure in the misfortunes of a deeply nasty and unpleasant Conservative party, but it is dangerous to pretend that the threat from right wing English nationalist authoritarian populism will be gone once the Tories receive their well deserved drubbing at the polls.

British politics are uniquely and dangerously susceptible to being taken over by the forces of right wing populism. In no small measure this is due to the characteristics of British nationalism, a nationalism which has at its core the unshakeable belief that it is better than the nationalism of lesser nations by virtue of not being nationalist at all. British nationalism is functionally indistinguishable from English nationalism but the structure of the UK, comprised as it is by three entire nations and a part of a fourth enables the dominant English nationalist driving force of British politics to cloak itself in a false internationalism which disguises the true nature of Anglo-British nationalist populism.

This makes it easy for far right authoritarian forces to become influential in British politics while hiding their true nature as populist nationalists. This is precisely what has been the trajectory of British politics over the past few years, a process which has accelerated rapidly since the narrow victory of the leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum. Since then, both the Labour and Conservative parties have shifted sharply to the right.

British politics are now more unstable and faster moving than they have been in living memory, the current drooling rage-fest that is the Tory party, trundling along 20 points behind in the polls and facing a likely electoral collapse was riding high just five years ago and won a landslide victory in 2019. With the volatile state of British politics it could easily do so again at the general election after the next one, a task which will be facilitated by a new Labour government which is likely to become unpopular very rapidly as the promise of ‘change’ upon which it was elected turns out to be as threadbare as the promises which Starmer made to secure the leadership of the Labour party and then trashed as soon as he got his feet under the desk.

Out of power the Tories are likely to pivot even further to the right, fully embracing an intolerant authoritarian right wing Anglo-British nationalism. Over the weekend, the Sunday Telegraph reported that an internal poll of the Conservative party found that almost half of all Tory councillors think the current government is “too left-wing”. Meanwhile the Conservative Post website, funded by the billionaire Conservative donor Peter Cruddas, who was controversially given a peerage by Boris Johnson in 2020, has published a hit list of so called ‘liberal centrists’ whom it wants to see deselected as Tory candidates for not being sufficiently right wing and Thatcherite. The website has asked its readers to contact the local Conservative associations of the named MPs to urge their deselection as candidates and their replacement by candidates on the right of the party.

Those named include Victoria Atkins, the Health Secretary, and Alicia Kearns and Caroline Nokes, who chair select committees, as well as Laura Trott, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Tobias Ellwood, the former defence select committee chairman, Alan Mak, the business minister, Bim Afolami, and MPs, Roger Gale, Simon Hoare and Alberto Costa.

Following what increasingly looks like an inevitable general election defeat the Tory right will be in the ascendant and Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch will both fancy their chances of seizing the leadership while Boris Johnson will be eyeing his chances of making a come back. The Tory party will complete its conversion into an anti-immigration authoritarian right wing populist party in the mould of Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary of the woefully misnamed Truth and Justice Party in Poland.

The rightward shift of the Conservatives has a similar effect on the Labour party, which itself triangulates to the right as it attempts to prevent support from haemorrhaging on its right and to forestall criticism from an increasingly right wing media. This is already happening. Just this weekend shadow foreign secretary David Lammy published a piece in The Sun defending the use of the Union flag on Labour campaign flyers Lammy said anyone complaining about the Union flag on Labour material had it “wrong”.

Lammy defended the use of the flag by appealing to that other favourite trope of right wing British nationalists, WW2. He wrote: It was the flag that went to battle against Hitler’s racism. I’ve always felt abandoning it to racists was a betrayal of its anti-fascist heritage.”

Further proof of the Torification of the Labour party comes from shadow health secretary Wes Streeting, who in an article in The Sun over the weekend – The Sun is seemingly the go-to publication for Starmer’s Labour party, has written that as Health Secretary in a future Labour government he would force NHS England to use services from the private health sector. During his campaign for the leadership of the Labour party, Starmer insisted that he would not talk to The Sun. Chalk that up as yet another of his many lies.

Using language which would not be out of place on GB News, Streeting claimed that people complaining about increased use of private services in the NHS were “middle-class lefties” – and tried to draw a dividing line between them and “working families”. Apparently in the eyes of the modern Labour party you cannot be left wing and part of a “working family”. Who knew?

Meanwhile Josh Simons, the director of the very influential Labour thinktank Labour Together, published a piece in the Telegraph chock full of the same right wing tropes so beloved by the Tory right in which he claimed that the government “have not made the average working family better off, just increased our population”. Adding that “migrants should contribute to the pot before they take from it”, and “homes should be built for British citizens before those who live here temporarily”. This is the same guy who recently suggested that asylum seekers should be sent to a “remote” Scottish island, prompting Labour’s Scottish branch office to claim disingenuously that the director of a Labour think tank that was influential in Starmer’s victory in the Labour leadership campaign in 2020 and which remains highly influential with the Labour leadership is a “fringe” figure.

British politics is on a dangerously right wing and intolerant trajectory, the flag shagging is the least of our worries.

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A Tory solution to a Tory-made problem

Apr3 by weegingerdug

You know that the performative cruelty and downright nastiness of this government has really gone over the top when it’s too cruel and nasty even for Conservative MPs. The Criminal Justice Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, seeks to replace the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Although the bill supposedly repeals the English legal provisions that make begging and rough sleeping criminal offences, it gives the police a whole slew of new powers to use against homeless people which effectively amount to the criminalisation of rough sleeping by the back door.

These new measures would allow police to move on rough sleepers deemed to be causing a “nuisance” and if they do not comply, the police could issue a fine or arrest them. However concerns have been raised that the definition of nuisance is far too broad, as the bill stands, nuisance could be defined as being smelly or talking loudly. This could give police the power to criminalise a homeless person simply for the ‘crime’ of being homeless and not having access to a shower or clean clothing, or simply for existing in a public space and being aesthetically displeasing to people who have had their empathy surgically removed, such as GB News commentators.

It’s a very Tory solution to a problem created by Tory policies. Over the course of the past decade the Conservatives have decimated the social housing stock, and have made affordable housing an impossible dream for millions. Meanwhile they have presided over a ballooning in the private rental sector, while many private landlords are responsible and ensure that their properties are well maintained, others are not and cram as many tenants as they can into substandard properties in order to extract as much profit as they possibly can. The cost of buying a home has soared.

An analysis by the Halifax building society has revealed that the average price of a home in the UK has risen by an incredible 207 percent over the last 20 years. UK house prices have more than trebled since the start of the 21st century. According to the Halifax, the average price of a UK home at the end of 1999 was £91,199. By November 2019, the average price of a home had risen to £279,997. By December 2023 it had risen further to £285,000.

House price inflation has greatly exceeded wage rises. In 1999 the average annual salary in the UK was £17,800 a year, just under 20% of the average cost of a home. By 2023 the average annual salary of £34,963 was just 12% of the average cost of a home. The possibility of home ownership has become an impossible dream for millions, particularly young people who now often enter the labour market saddled with tens of thousands of pounds in student debt – something which was far less of an issue in 1999. Additionally they face the problem of the near impossibility of finding stable well paid work, having to rely on poorly paid jobs in the gig economy. If that was not enough the almost total dearth of social housing means that they have to pay out a far larger share of their income in rental costs, further eating into their already constrained ability to save for a deposit on a home of their own.

But one of the greatest drivers of homelessness is the changes made by the Tories to a social security system which is now neither social nor secure. The benefits system no longer prevents people from falling into destitution, it makes people destitute as deliberate policy, because we have a government which believes that the poor must be castigated in order to make them productive, but the wealthy must be cossetted and rewarded. The benefits system is punitive by default, even without the capricious misuse of sanctions, claimants are all too often left having to choose between putting food on the table or paying the rent. For families with more than two children it’s even worse, the two child benefit cap which Keir Starmer will not abolish is a powerful engine for the creation of child poverty.

Back in the 1980s it was rare to see a rough sleeper on our streets, now it is tragically commonplace, and it is not even unusual to see a person with disabilities begging on the streets. That is a shameful indictment of government policy in what we keep getting told is one of the most developed and wealthiest economies in the world. Such a surge in homelessness is not due to a concomitant rise in fecklessness amongst the poor, it is a direct consequence of the policy decisions of successive governments.

But according to former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, rough sleeping is a ‘lifestyle choice’ moreover a ‘lifestyle choice’ practiced by ‘people with foreign accents. Braverman, the darling of the Tory right who makes no secret of her leadership ambitions doesn’t even bother dog-whistling to British nationalist racists who ‘want their country back’, she bellows it with a megaphone.

According to Braverman and the Tory right the real victims of a housing and homelessness crisis which is a direct product of Conservative policies are not the people who are forced to freeze in the driving rain, huddled in a doorway while the luckier pass by on their way to hot showers and warm and dry beds. No, the real victims are the likes of Suella Braverman, the empathy dead whose noses and ears are offended by the plight of those who suffer the brunt of the callous disdain of a government that is supposed to protect the vulnerable, but which has failed in its duty for many years.

The new bill heaps punishment upon those who have lost out due to government maladministration is too much, even for a significant number of Tory MPs who have signalled their intention to rebel unless some of the more egregious provisions of this bill are struck out. These Tories, who pose as the ‘reasonable and moderate’ wing of the Tories, say that they only want police action against begging, not rough sleeping. So that’s OK then, reduce people to penury, deprive them of any income, and then criminalise them when they ask for help. Don’t expect anything more compassionate from Keir Starmer either. He too is a practitioner of Tory solutions to Tory problems.

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Starmer’s devolution deceit

Mar29 by weegingerdug

As he launched his party’s election campaign for the local and mayoral elections due in England on 2 May, a little over a month away, Keir Starmer promised that if he becomes Prime Minister after the Westminster general election expected to be held later this year his government will introduce “full fat devolution”. That’s a phrase with unfortunate connotations for a Scottish audience who recall Gordon Brown’s vow during the Scottish independence referendum campaign that the UK would introduce ‘full fat federalism’ within three years of a No vote.

As anyone who has been paying even the most cursory attention will know, the only full fat thing we got from Westminster after the no vote was in the bag was full fat contempt. We got some very trivial tinkering with the powers of the Scottish Parliament, we got English Votes for English Laws, we got the shameless lie that the powers of Holyrood would be legally protected from Westminster meddling. Then we got the Brexit that Scotland didn’t vote for and a Westminster government that used it as an excuse to mount a further attack on the powers of the Scottish Parliament.

The only full fat thing on offer from Keir Starmer is full fat deceit. This a man whose campaign for the leadership of the Labour party was the most deceitful and mendacious election campaign in British politics this century, and that’s saying something given the lies told by the leave campaign in the 2016 EU referendum and the full on hysterically lying propaganda of the original Project Fear during the 2014 referendum.

Those who organised Starmer’s leadership campaign now openly admit that he had no intention of keeping any of the promises he made when he was trying to court the support of the Labour party membership. This is a man who will say and do whatever it takes to get himself into power, he feels not the slightest remorse about lying through his teeth in order to win the power he craves. He did it during the Labour party leadership campaign in the wake of the party’s defeat in the 2019 general election, and he’s doing it again now.

Absolutely nothing that Starmer and his acolytes say now can be trusted, for all that he talks about ‘change’ and about pushing out ‘real power’ to the English regions this is a power hungry individual who craves the near absolute power that the corrupt and dysfunctional Westminster system offers to the leader of the party which wins a majority of seats in the House of Commons and who despite his promises of ‘change’ will do nothing at all to change a system that gives him exactly what he wants.

Starmer promised a “new Take Back Control Act” which he said would set a “presumption towards devolution, and new powers for mayors over transport, skills, energy, and planning, so they can rejuvenate our high streets and generate growth for every town and city – a full-fat approach to devolution,” in England.

Nothing that Starmer will do will enable any other elected body to challenge his supremacy. The promises he’s making to the English regions now are very much in the same mould as the promises Gordon Brown made to Scotland ten years ago. They are insincere and unprincipled and made purely with the goal of securing votes. Once those votes are in the bag Starmer will feel no reason to be bound by them. How many times does the man need to deceive us for people to see what he really stands for. He stands for himself, he stands for his own power, when he says he stands for change what he really means is changing Rishi Sunak for Keir Starmer. That is the totality of the change that Starmer represents.

Once Starmer gets into Number 10 that full fat devolution for the English regions will be run through focus groups and Starmer’s right wing advisors, it will be heavily diluted and watered down in Commons committees. Eventually what will reach the statute book will be the palest shadow, an unrecognisable travesty of what Starmer is promising now, and it will be nothing at all that is remotely capable of challenging the near absolute power that Starmer craves for himself. He is not spending all this time and energy in the single minded and deceitful pursuit of power for the sake of power simply to give it away once he gets it. If you believe he’s going to do that, Gordon Brown has a vow to sell you.

British colonialists expropriated land and resources from colonised peoples in the British Empire with beads, blankets and mirrors. All that Scotland gets from Starmer is a vague hint that there may be a promise of some beads, blankets, and mirrors at some unspecified date in the future.

Notably Starmer has said nothing at all about extending devolution in Scotland, and that is what really proves the insincerity of his promises to the English regions. Extending devolution in Scotland would entail strengthening the powers of an elected body which does have a limited ability to stand up against the overweening power of the Westminster government and the dictatorial power of a British Prime Minister. Starmer is never going to permit that, he is as authoritarian and centralising as the Tories he claims to represent a change from.

However Starmer is quite likely to tamper with the devolution settlement in Scotland and he absolutely will do so if the Labour party makes significant inroads into the SNP’s dominance of Scottish Westminster seats at the next general election. What he will do will be to strip powers from Holyrood and give them instead to Scottish local authorities. Labour will brand this as ‘real devolution’ but what Starmer will really be doing is to diminish the ability of Holyrood to challenge him while giving power to local authorities which are far too weak to pose an effective challenge to the centralising power of Westminster and which are much more likely to be controlled by a compliant and collaborating Labour authority. All that Starmer is really offering is full fat devolution deceit.

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Starmer’s most shameful U turn yet

Mar26 by weegingerdug

Another day, another Labour U turn. It has got extremely tiresome to write that sentence, and no doubt equally tiresome to read it. Keir Starmer’s right wing U turns have become drearily predictable. At this point the only question is how many more can Starmer squeeze in before the general election. Probably quite a few is the answer to that question. Starmer and his team are going through every Labour policy and promise with a fine tooth Tory comb and are carefully weeding out anything that seems even vaguely left wing or social democratish. If it’s going to annoy the Daily Mail or the Telegraph then it’s got to go. If it doesn’t meet with the approval of the right wing British nationalist flag shaggers then it’s far too dangerously subversive for Keir Starmer, who keeps telling us how he has changed the Labour party. And that would be true. He’s changed it into a slightly less insane version of the Tory party.

The reality is, if you construct your party’s policies, promises, and presentation with the sole aim of putting forward a manifesto that is palatable to the right wing press and which will be attractive to Conservative voters, then what you are offering is a Conservative manifesto. That is precisely what Starmer is offering.

The latest U turn involves Labour’s prior commitment to financial compensation for women who lost out due to the changes to the age at which women become eligible for a state pension, or Waspi women (from Women Against State Pension Injustice.) In its 2019 manifesto Labour promised to ensure that these women would receive full compensation. However following last week’s publication of a report from the Parliamentary and Health Standards Ombudsman (PHSO) which found that those women who lost out should receive financial compensation the airwaves have been filled with the screeching sound of senior Labour figures desperately pulling on the handbrake. Except for viewers in Scotland that is, where the branch office is equally desperately trying to keep out of the public eye until the entire embarrassing story goes away and Anas Sarwar can find a pensioner in a wheelchair whose long delayed hospital appointment was cancelled due to a broken down ferry.

Incidentally, is is just me who finds it odd that there’s an ombudsman who specialises in Parliamentary and Health standards as those are two areas which do not naturally seem to go together. Unless it’s because Westminster is the sickest institution in the UK, which is quite the achievement in a state which also includes the BBC, the royal family, and the privatised railways and water companies. But I digress.

Appearing on the Laura Kuenssberg Show on BBC 1 on Sunday, Labour and party chair MP Annaliese Dodds U-turned when confronted with her own party’s 2019 pledge to compensate the women. That pledge has never officially been rescinded and the Labour branch office in particular has heavily dined out on it over the past few years, hence the current media blackout from Anas Sarwar. On the same show the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt refused to commit the government to paying Waspi women the compensation they are due, saying only that the government would ‘consider’ the PHSO report, then after an interminable period of ‘consideration’ the government will say no when public attention is safely elsewhere. Tories gonna Tory, and Labour gonna Tory as well.

Dodds denied that it was Labour policy to compensate Waspi women, and would only say that Waspi women deserved ‘respect’. But not so much respect that it would involve compensating them for what the PHSO found in a preliminary report published in 2021 to be ‘maladministration’ on the part of the Department of Work and Pensions. Dodds said that Labour’s 2019 manifesto had been put to the electorate in that year’s general election which Labour had lost, so the manifesto had been rejected by the voters. It was a gobsmackingly asinine attempt by Dodds to shift the blame for Starmer’s mean spirited U turn on to the electorate.

Equally mean spirited was Sam Taylor, the prickly and thin skinned director of anti Scottish independence frothathon These Islands, who took to Twitter to say: “Principled and correct from Labour. The government should not be paying compensation to women simply because they were too feckless to look up their own state pension age.”

Imagine a) thinking that then b) typing it out, then c) publishing it for all the world to see just what a nasty and unpleasant empathy free individual you are without at any point in the process pausing to wonder if tweeting that out was going to make you look like a dick for calling hard working women “feckless” just because they didn’t expect or realise the government was going to rip them off.

Oh Sam, Sam. What a little ray of sunshine you are. You’re supposed to be trying to stop people wanting Scottish independence, not making them think: “The further away we can get from this guy the better.” The only feckless people here are the ones who were running the DWP.

The real reason that the only thing Labour wants to pay Waspi women is ‘respect’, which of course costs nothing is because the cost of compensating the women properly is thought to exceed £10 billion.

Dodds was joined by former right wing Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett who warned that a future Labour government may struggle to afford the potential of over £10bn in compensation for the millions of women hit by changes to the state pension. Actually we can just dispense with the phrase ‘right wing’ when it is followed by Home Secretary as being intolerant and right wing is an essential part of the job description.

But what Blunkett said is not entirely true, a future Labour government could afford to pay adequate compensation to women affected by the DWP’s fecklessness if it was not so in thrall to the right wing press and committed to a proper programme of progressive taxation and abandoned its commitment to abiding by Conservative party fiscal constraints. That however is the very last thing that Keir Starmer is going to do. Vote Tory, get Tory policies and contempt, vote Labour, get Tory policies and contempt too.

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

The flame remains undiminished

The Scottish press, a catastrophist’s wet dream

Wee Ginger Crowdfunder 2024

The turbulent river

When is a convention not a convention? When it’s a Sewel Convention

Labour’s Scottish branch office: the most dishonest party in Scottish politics

Vote Tory vote flag shagger, Vote Labour vote flag shagger

A Tory solution to a Tory-made problem

Starmer’s devolution deceit

Starmer’s most shameful U turn yet