Quantifying BBC bias

Anyone who follows the Scottish independence debate will be aware that the BBC’s reputation for fairness and impartiality comes with an important caveat: Except for viewers in Scotland. During the independence referendum campaign in 2014 the BBC was shameless in its shilling for Britain. The examples are legion. The Corporation gave huge publicity to a suspiciously well funded anti-independence astroturfing organisation Vote No Borders’ – more accurately titled ‘Vote Nob Orders’ – which the BBC assured us was a genuine grassroots organisation and whose launch was awarded a gushing ten minutes long puff piece on the main BBC news. Meanwhile genuine grassroots initiatives from pro-independence supporters passed entirely unreported.

My oft cited example of BBC bias is the publicity given to claims that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to join NATO if the Scottish Government insisted on the removal of the British nuclear warheads and missiles from the Clyde. Yet not once in the many minutes of coverage that the BBC gave to this story did the BBC see fit to mention that another country had done exactly what Scotland was being told was impossible, got rid of a NATO member’s nukes and submarines from its territory then gone on to join NATO, Spain did just that in the late 1970s and early 1980s after concluding a treaty with Washington to remove US nukes and submarines from the American base at Rota near Cádiz, and then joined NATO shortly thereafter. You might have thought that this was germane information to a story about claims that it would be impossible for Scotland to get rid of the nukes on the Clyde and then join NATO, but not apparently if you are a news editor at BBC Scotland.

There are many more examples, from Nick Robinson shamelessly asserting that Alex Salmond had failed to answer a question about currency that he had in fact answered in full, to the repeated failure to give equal coverage to positive stories for independence as was given to press releases from pals and cronies of the Conservatives warning of doom and catastrophe if Scotland voted yes. Gordon Brown’s infamous Vow was given star billing and presented to the public uncritically as a cast iron commitment to ‘Devo Max,’ a term usually understood to mean the Scottish Parliament would control everything except defence and foreign affairs.

It’s not just independence supporters who accused the BBC of bias during the independence referendum campaign. Veteran journalist Paul Mason, formerly the economics editor at BBC2’s flagship news and current affairs programme Newsnight said of the BBC’s reporting of the referendum campaign: “Not since Iraq have I seen BBC News working at propaganda strength like this. So glad I’m out of there.”

I could go on at considerable length and indeed have done in previous blogs, but this is not just history that is almost a decade old here, the BBC has continued in a similar vein ever since. The BBC is not what it purports to be, a neutral and unbiased observer and reporter on Scotland’s constitutional debate, an organisation which is funded by the public, the BBC is an active and enthusiastic participant in Scottish constitutional politics, one of the most important actors on the anti-independence side.

Naturally the BBC continues to brush off all accusations of bias, it has become an expert in gaslighting the Scottish public it purports to serve. It’s not the BBC that is at fault, it’s our perception of the blindingly obvious.

We might all know that the BBC is biased, but what is important is to quantify and prove that bias, particularly to those who are as yet unconvinced about Scottish independence and who are willing to accept the BBC’s denials of bias at face value. That is where the work of Dr John Robertson is so valuable. John was formerly the media politics professor at the University of the West of Scotland who authored an academic study which showed how Scottish news broadcasts on the BBC leaned more favourably towards the No campaign on Scottish independence. For his trouble the BBC reported him to senior staff at the university and he says that colleagues of his were even warned to stay away from him.

I am quite certain that I too am blacklisted by the BBC, a previous editor of The National once told me that he was regularly asked by the BBC for the contact details of pro independence writers who could comment as guests on the BBC. He told them that I did most of the public speaking at roadshow events for The National and that I lived in Glasgow within a short distance of BBC Scotland’s studios, but I was never contacted by the BBC. Broadcaster and campaigner Lesley Riddoch once told me that a few years ago she was invited by the BBC to comment on the Catalan independence debate, she told them that I used to live in the country and speak the language so I was far better placed to provide commentary than she was, but again I was never contacted by the BBC. But I regularly call out the BBC for its lack of impartiality when it comes to Scottish independence, so it’s obvious why my name is mud at Pacific Quay.

I am convinced that BBC Scotland preferentially platforms anti independence voices and marginalises and sidelines those who have the temerity to criticise its evident bias against Scottish independence. The BBC continues with its industrial strength bias. Now John Robertson has carried out a new study comparing the framing of political stories by BBC Scotland with similar stories covered by BBC Cymru Wales. Unsurprisingly, he again discovered evidence of systematic bias in BBC Scotland’s reporting.

We are now at the point with BBC Scotland where it would have been truly gob smacking if Dr Robertson had not found evidence of systematic bias in BBC Scotland’s news coverage favouring those opposed to independence. He said he decided to embark on a comparison between Scotland and Wales after noticing that “just about every BBC Scotland news story” whether it was about policing, nursing, or education, ended with a statement from the Scottish Government, and frequently platformed opposition politicians who were given the opportunity to attack the Scottish Government.

He then embarked upon a month long survey of news reporting on BBC Wales Cymru and found that it did not make the same connection of news stories to the Welsh Government. In Wales the BBC speaks to the health board, the chief of police, or the organisation directly responsible. His study produced figures showing that of 52 negative stories on BBC Scotland over the study period, 24 made mention of the government. In Wales, there were 47 negative stories about the country but the government was mentioned only 13 times. Additionally the opposition parties were platformed four times on the BBC Scotland morning news during the study period, but not once on BBC Cymru Wales.

Dr Robertson told The National: “It’s a politicising of public services in Scotland that is not happening in Wales. Nowhere else in Europe would people think if there’s something wrong in a hospital you go straight to the government.”

He added: “This is a very objective piece of evidence. A lot of research into media bias is very subjective, based on interpretation and so on. But objectively, BBC Wales did it by a ratio of 1:2 with BBC Scotland.”

The big difference of course is that Wales has a Labour government which is committed to keeping Wales a part of the UK. While there has certainly been a surge of interest in independence in Wales in recent years, support for independence remains very much in the minority in the country, and the anti independence parties and their supporters in the media do not fear any imminent threat from the Welsh independence movement or Plaid Cymru, the major pro-independence party in the country.

In Scotland by contrast, politics are dominated by the independence question, support for independence often exceeds 50% in opinion polling, and so the anti-independence parties and their supporters in the media are very much concerned to keep a lid on support for independence with an urgency which is lacking in Wales. Hence the relentless attacks on the SNP and the Scottish Government while far bigger scandals involving the Conservative party and the British Government pass with relatively little comment in the Scottish media while voices like mine and John Robertson’s are sidelined and ignored. There is a link to John Robertson’s blog “Talking Up Scotland” in the links section of this blog. He’s well worth a read – as not seen on the BBC.

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I am currently running the blog’s annual fund raiser and would appreciate your support.  This blog has a regular readership in the tens of thousands and has 8500 email subscribers. If all those people donated just £1 per month I would not need to run an annual crowd funder, but of course that’s not how things work. I am committed to keeping this blog advert free and free to read for all. I am hoping to raise £5000 which together with the money I receive from writing for the National will pay me enough to live on and pay my bills. It’s considerably less than the living wage, but enough to keep me going. Many thanks for your support.

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Wee Ginger Crowd Funder 2023

It’s that time of the year again. Every June I run an annual crowdfunder to keep this blog going. I’ll be honest, earlier this year I was very close to throwing in the towel. I was very down and dispirited in part because far too many people in the Scottish independence movement appear more interested in attacking other people who support Scottish independence for “not doing independence properly” than making the case for independence and defending the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament from the unceasing attacks on them by the Conservatives, who have now espoused full throated English nationalism, openly despise Scottish democracy and are worryingly getting closer and closer to authoritarianism. However more importantly I was dealing with the realisation that it has now been two and a half years since I suffered a devastating stroke and I am not going to improve any more. I’ve been left with significant disabilities and these are going to be life long.

But I can still do this blog and I feel it is more important than ever that I keep going with it, even though we can now no longer be certain about when Scotland will have another chance to vote for independence. The media frenzy which accompanied the police investigation into the SNP finances highlighted just what we are up against even as that same media all but ignored Conservative financial scandals involving far far larger sums of money. Someone needs to keep articulating support for the SNP and the Greens, the only two pro-independence parties with a proven track record in getting their candidates elected, and in making a positive case for Scottish independence that can reach beyond the bubble of committed independence supporters.

The SNP is an imperfect vehicle but it is currently the only pro independence political party with mass support and the ability to win elections. A reverse in fortunes for the SNP will be used by Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media to forge a narrative claiming that Scotland no longer wants independence, so it is imperative that we do not give the anti-independence media and parties the chance to do so.

Given everything that has happened in the wider independence movement over the past two years or so, it is all the more important that someone continues to focus on making the case for independence and attacking the parties of British nationalism. I sometimes feel that this blog is ploughing a lonely furrow. We already have an overwhelmingly anti-independence media which delights in attacking the Scottish Government and the SNP. That’s their job, not mine.

It is crucial that we continue to highlight the hypocrisies and failures of British nationalism, the Conservative Government and the Westminster system, this is all the more important given the Conservatives’ alarming attacks on democratic oversight. The UK is gravely in danger of descending into a British nationalist authoritarianism, from which Scotland must escape. With your help, I will be continuing to make the case for independence and warning of the dangers posed by the Conservatives and a Labour party which under Starmer chases along in the Tories’ wake.

This blog has a regular readership in the tens of thousands and has 8500 email subscribers. If all those people donated just £1 per month I would not need to run an annual crowd funder, but of course that’s not how things work. am hoping to raise £5000 which together with the money I receive from writing for the National will pay me enough to live on and pay my bills. It’s considerably less than the living wage, but enough to keep me going. Many thanks for your support.

You can donate to the crowdfunder here
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Sunak’s trying to hide from accountability

The Official Inquiry into the government’s handling of the covid pandemic will probably go the same way as other official inquiries into the British government’s handling of other important isues. It will be characterised by arse-covering, blame shifting, deflection, pathetic excuses, the scapegoating of minor players, and then nothing much of any significance will change, the only lessons that the British Government ever learns are that no matter what happens it is never the fault of those in charge. In any event the inquiry will drag on for years and by the time it publishes its invariably underwhelming conclusions the lead players will already have placed themselves beyond any semblance of democratic accountability and their cronies will have rewarded them for their services to failure and self promotion with a nice cosy seat in the House of Lords.

However public inquiries do have the potential to cause political embarrassment while they are going on and when the politician who is the object of that embarrassment is already weak and beleaguered that can prove very damaging to the ego fuelled self promotion which is what passes for a British ministerial career these days.

Currently Rishi Sunak is going through extraordinary contortions in order to prevent retired senior judge Baroness Hallett, chair of the Covid Inquiry, from accessing all the information that she requires to conduct a thorough inquiry. What the Government’s position boils down to is that it will decide what information is or is not relevant to the Inquiry. This is the Government, let us not forget, whose actions and behaviour are the topic of the inquiry. It’s a bit like a murder suspect telling the police that it’s up to the suspect, not the police, to decide what evidence is relevant to the police investigation. Despite the usual Tory nodding donkeys being trotted out around the television studios on Sunday to assure the public that the decision to take legal action to prevent the inquiry from having access to unredacted WhatsApp messages between ministers and officials while the official response to the pandemic was being framed is entirely legitimate and above board, there is no precedent for a government seeking to thwart a request for evidence from an official inquiry that the government itself set up.

It is widely expected, even by senior Tories, that the government will lose its attempt to prevent the information being handed over. The inquiry was given a very broad remit by the same government that is now saying: “Oh but when we said we’d be totally transparent we didn’t mean THAT transparent.”

The Government can only be taking this step because it fears that the information being sought by the inquiry is political dynamite. That can be the only explanation for taking legal action which most observers believe has little chance of succeeding, and which is causing political embarrassment by the mere act of initiating it. Sunak clearly feels that the small chance of blocking the inquiry from seeing the information and weathering the criticism that the legal action provokes is far better for him than allowing the information to come out.

Boris Johnson is heaping the embarrassment upon Sunak by voluntarily handing over his own WhatsApp messages to the inquiry, Johnson will most likely receive huge criticism from the inquiry for his chaotic and shambolic handling of the pandemic, but politically Johnson has little left to lose. He’s out of office and has more immediate problems in the shape of the Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament, the verdict of which has the potential to end his political career and finally put an end to his diminishing hopes of a triumphant return to Downing Street.

Right now Johnson is more interested in settling scores with Sunak, and Johnson almost certainly knows just how damaging the contents of those WhatsApp messages could be to his former Chancellor. As Chancellor Sunak was directly responsible for the “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, encouraging people to dine out at restaurants even though there was a significant risk of spreading the coronavirus The scheme was blamed for a sharp rise in covid infections. The scheme was panned by Professor John Edmunds of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who was a member of the Sage committee of advisers to ministers as “spectacularly stupid.”

The scheme allowed diners to claim a 50% discount on meals when it was launched in August 2020, before the widespread roll out of effective vaccines. It cost the public purse £850 million and one study found that it was responsible for an 8 to 17% rise in covid infections.

During the pandemic the Conservatives repeatedly insisted that its response to the spread of the virus was “led by the scientific evidence.” That was a lie, and those WhatsApp messages will prove it in embarrassing and damning detail. Professor Edmunds insists that Sunak’s pet project was never discussed with the scientists who were supposedly advising the government.Speaking to the Observer newspaper Professor Edmunds said: “If we had [been consulted], I would have been clear what I thought about it. As far as I am concerned, it was a spectacularly stupid idea and an obscene way to spend public money.”

Edmunds dismissed the Government’s repeated claim that it “followed the science” when setting policy to tackle the pandemic as “nonsense.”

The president of the British Medical Association, Prof Martin McKee, also criticised the “dysfunctional” way in which the Treasury under Sunak overlooked scientific advice throughout the pandemic. It wasn’t just the scientists that Sunak did not consult with. According to reports he did not consult with his cabinet colleagues either. The biographer and Conservative historian Anthony Seldon claims in his book ‘Johnson at 10: The Inside Story’ that the then Health Secretary Matt Hancock only found out about Sunak’s pet scheme when he read about it in a press release.

This is why Sunak is so afraid of letting the covid inquiry see all the evidence. He has always claimed that he was the grown up in the room and upon entering Downing Street vowed to restore integrity, professionalism and accountability to government. These WhatsApp messages will show that he was just as cavalier and reckless as Johnson and had an equal disregard for the consequences of his decisions on the public, even if that meant people might die. All Sunak cared about was getting himself in the spotlight and furthering his rampant ambition.

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I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

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Brown promised a federal UK, we got a feral UK

On Thursday evening Gordie Broon delivered another of his tedious Broonterventions in front of an invited audience of Labour party hacks, about the only people left who can muster a show of enthusiasm for the Gordosaur’s meaningless pronouncements. We get these Broonterventions every couple of months, each of which is billed as an important new potential development in Scotland’s position within the UK but which invariably turn out to consist of anodyne proposals for tweaking tax powers or the timing of traffic lights, to be put before some grandiose commission at some unspecified point in the future, and none of which have any chance of ever seeing the light of day.

The “Making Britain work for Scotland event” featured Brown, Anas Sarwar, the Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford, and assorted other Labour worthies. Only two of the eight speakers billed to appear actually live in Scotland, the sole qualification of one of them to pontificate on Scotland’s constitutional future, the actor Arabella Weir, is that she appears in a popular Scottish sit com. And indeed Scotland’s place in the UK does indeed seem like a bit of a farce. It’s very telling that the Labour party comes to Scotland to talk at Scottish people, or at least an invited audience of Labour party hacks, instead of talking with Scotland, Scotland’s place in the UK is to do as it is told, and if any Scots outwith Labour’s cosy little circle jerk were permitted to speak at this ‘rally’, they might have pointed out that Britain can only be made to work for Scotland in the same way that a bicycle can be made to work for a fish.

Gordie wasn’t very interested in any of these fantasy reforms that he tells us are vital when he was actually in a position to do something about what passes for the British constitution. Neither was he very interested in the months after the 2014 independence referendum when having helped to secure the No vote he so craved with his infamous Vow, he buggered off into a sullen silence instead of doing what he had promised, which was to personally ensure that the leaders of the British political parties fulfilled the commitments to Scotland which he’d got them sign up to on faux parchment paper on the front page of the Daily Record.

That was when Gordie promised Scotland that within two years of a No vote the United Kingdom would undergo sweeping constitutional reform which would transform it into the closest thing possible to a fully federal state. To be fair to him he was almost right, nine years on from the Vow, the United Kingdom has been transformed into the closest thing possible to a fully feral state. None of Broon’s Vows have been kept. Instead of federalism we got Brexit, which Scotland voted heavily against, although that hasn’t stopped the Conservatives from using it as an excuse to embark upon a new round of centralisation and introduce a slew of measures designed to by pass, undermine and weaken the devolution settlement. Moreover they have done so without even pretending to seek a democratic mandate from the people of Scotland to do so.

But having seen all of his promises so comprehensively trashed, and having done absolutely nothing to defend the Scottish Parliament, Brown still has the audacity to pace up and down a stage, acting as though he has the key to Scotland’s constitutional future in the apparent belief that he still retains some credibility with anyone outwith the Labour party. Even BBC Scotland is just going through the motions these days when Gordie delivers one of his banal Broonterventions.

Ahead of the British nationalist event that doesn’t think it’s nationalist at all because it’s British and it’s Labour, Jamie Hepburn, the Scottish Government Independence minister, called on Brown to apologise for all the broken promises that he has previously made about Scotland’s place within the British state. Like that’s going to happen, telling Gordie Broon to apologise for his broken promises to Scotland is like telling a starving dog to explain quantum mechanics, even if it could grasp the concept, it’s not going to be interested.

Apparently Broon thinks Britain can work for Scotland by a future Labour government implementing the underwhelming proposals contained in Broon’s much hyped Constitutional Review, which was not so much a damp squib as a burst crisp packet at the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench. But we already know what is in store for us if Keir Starmer does succeed in forming a majority government after the next General Election. We will get the same hard and uncompromising Brexit that the Tories inflicted upon us, no reform of the painfully unfair first past the post voting system that Labour is as much wedded to as the Tories are, and some commission which will look at proposals to reform the House of Lords which will report back in a few years with some minor plans to tweak the existing system ever so slightly which will then be gutted by MPs in Commons committees before ultimately passing into law a provision to do nothing that changes anything important.

What will be signally absent from anything that the Labour party proposes is any binding mechanism to entrench the powers of the Scottish Parliament and to ensure that it is protected from the future government of a Conservative party which is already alarmingly English nationalist, extreme right wing, and which grows ever more authoritarian with every passing electoral cycle while Labour chases after it waving a British flag.

Britain cannot be made to work for Scotland because Britain’s system of government is fundamentally broken. Westminster doesn’t work for Britain never mind Scotland. Starmer and the Labour party are far to in thrall to the possibility that this system offers of absolute power to the party that wins a Westminster majority to want to change it. You’d be as well asking a junkie to give up drugs as they eye a packet of heroin that’s being dangled in front of them. This Broontervention will be exactly like all the others, a pointless and self indulgent waste of time from a power junkie eying his next fix.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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The BBC: Not even pretending to be unbiased about independence

There’s no point in beating about the bush, for a long time it’s been obvious that BBC Scotland’s commitment to neutrality and even handedness has an unwritten rider saying *except when it comes to Scottish independence, but now the Corporation is just taking the piss. It is well known that young Scots are more inclined to support independence than those of older generations, this is a pattern which has been deeply entrenched in just about every opinion poll since the independence referendum of 2014. Amongst the youngest age cohort, those under the age of 24, majority support for independence is overwhelming, people in Scotland under the age of 24 support independence by a factor of two to one.

At least young Scots support independence by a factor of two to one, except when they are young Scots who feature in a BBC online article entitled: “Scottish independence: Is it still a priority for young Scots?” The online article was a trailer for a report due to be broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight Programme on Tuesday evening.

It does not auger well for the broadcast report. It appears that BBC young Scots not only oppose independence by a factor of two to one, but the two opponents of independence featured alongside a single supporter of the SNP are also former candidates for the Labour and Conservative parties, a fact which the BBC did not see fit to disclose. The piece glosses over the consistent and long established pattern in different opinion polls from different polling companies which find that by a very large majority young Scots favour independence and indeed the only age cohort in which there is a majority opposed to Scottish independence is the very oldest.

Nowhere in the article was there any acknowledgement of that reality, far less any attempt to examine why it is that younger people in Scotland apparently reject a British political identity and see Scotland’s future as an independent state. Neither was there any awareness that Britishness as a political construct is far weaker in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK and what role this weakening sense of Britishness might have to play in leading a large majority of young Scots to see Scotland’s future as an independent nation.

It could be argued that it is this weaker appeal of Britishness in Scotland which leads Scots as a whole, and young Scots in particular, to be less enthusiastic about big royal events than people elsewhere in the UK, or that it might be responsible for Scottish opposition to Brexit. It is plausible to argue that for Scots in general and young Scots in particular, a European identity and a European future are far more attractive and appealing than a British identity or a British future. This has been thrown into even sharper relief since the Brexit vote, now British and European futures are seen as standing in opposition to one another. The Better Together claim during the 2014 referendum campaign that by voting No Scotland could have the best of both worlds has been unmasked as a cruel joke.

All the piece has to say about the long established demographic pattern of large pro-independence majorities amongst younger age cohorts is :”Polls suggest Scots aged under 24 are more likely to back independence than the average person.” Then it quickly goes on to speak with one SNP supporter, one Labour supporter, and a Tory. The BBC certainly does not want to suggest that Scots under 24 are more likely to back independence ” than the average person,” an odd phrasing which suggests that if you do back independence you are somehow no longer an average or ordinary person.

This is not reporting in an unbiased way on an important story, it is not an honest and transparent attempt to inform the public in the rest of the UK about a very real and well established demographic fact in Scotland, a fact which is a demographic time bomb for the United Kingdom in its current form. What the BBC published is a clear and deliberate attempt to shape an anti-independence narrative.

Instead of a serious attempt to look at what the factors might be that are leading a large majority of young Scots to support independence, we got the usual BBC idea of ‘balance’ which is to stick on one person from the SNP and one each from the other large parties. In this case that turned the two to one support for independence amongst people under 24 on its head and gave us young people who two to one oppose independence. As noted above the BBC did not think it important to disclose that the Labour and Tory supporters had both been candidates for those parties. You might think that their own personal political ambitions would have a bearing on their views on Scottish independence, but not if you’re the BBC. In the BBC universe these two party candidates are more representative of the ‘average person.’ So that’s you telt, independence supporting youth.

However there was another and more insidious form of BBC bias on display here, the piece framed the independence debate through a party political lens. This is a framing which favours the anti-independence case as it portrays independence as being entirely about the SNP and so encourages people who may be sympathetic to the idea of independence but who are not necessarily SNP supporters to associate the concept of Scottish independence with a political party that they do not favour. This framing also avoids looking at more deep seated structural issues within the British state as being factors which have a role to play in creating a desire for independence. It means that the Westminster parties and the Westminster system do not need to look at themselves and their own failings, the wish for Scottish independence can then be conveniently blamed on ‘nationalism’ and the ‘grievance mongering’ of the SNP.

The BBC isn’t even pretending to cover Scottish independence in an even handed way any more. As SNP president Mike Russell said: “The BBC is now not even trying to hide its institutional bias against independence. This is not just lazy and shoddy programme making, it is an attempt to skew the debate. Those responsible shouldn’t be working in broadcasting.”

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

The clean fuel of independence

The reasons why Scottish independence is so badly needed for the success, sanity, and security of this country keep piling up. Just in the past few days more reasons have been added to the ever growing pile, not that most people in Scotland would know that because we are saddled with a parochial and provincial British nationalist media which is determined to ensure that Scotland remains parochial and provincial.

Scotland is an energy powerhouse, this country has the potential to produce vast amounts of energy, both from traditional fossil fuels and from clean renewable sources, either one of these can provide many times more energy than Scotland requires for its own domestic and industrial consumption, creating a huge surplus for export which could be sold to other countries and provide enormous national income which could be used to guarantee lower energy bills for Scottish consumers. That’s the theory, what happens in practice is very different. Energy policy is reserved to the Westminster government which imposes a system that gives Scotland the worst possible outcome. As a part of the UK Scotland is in the ridiculous position of being a country which produces more energy than its citizens could possibly need from resources that are the common property of all , yet its people suffer from record levels of fuel poverty and high fuel bills that many households struggle to pay.

There are conflicting claims about whether Scottish households pay more for energy than is paid elsewhere in the UK. In June, last year, during the worst of the cost of living crisis, the average fuel bill in Scotland was £1651 per year compared to £1554 for people in England and £1525 in Wales. British nationalist froth group These Islands denies that Scots pay more for energy than households in England, which we can file under – well they would say that wouldn’t they. But the point is not the relative amount paid by households in Scotland compared with those in England, the point is that the UK burdens Scotland with a broken energy system which delivers huge profits for the energy companies while thousands of Scottish households struggle with fuel poverty – defined as more than 10% of household income being spent on energy after housing costs (rent or mortgage costs) are deducted.

Figures provided by fuel poverty campaigners Energy Action Scotland show that 40% of people living in the Western Isles live in fuel poverty compared to just 13% in East Renfrewshire. The Scottish average was 24% of all households. Almost a quarter of households in Scotland live in fuel poverty thanks to UK Government mismanagement of energy policy. In a country as blessed with such abundant energy resources as Scotland, zero percent of households should live in fuel poverty.

Yet in 2021 the UK National Grid spent £806 million pounds in fees, so called ‘curtailment costs’ paid to wind farms, 82% of which was paid to wind farm operators in Scotland because the National Grid has not been upgraded sufficiently to handle the renewable power that Scotland can generate. The costs of the shutdowns added over £500 million to energy bills across the UK. In addition there is the enormous loss of energy that could have been harnessed productively.

Vast amounts of energy which Scotland could produce are not being produced because the British Government has not invested enough in the National Grid in order to cope with the electricity that Scotland can produce from clean renewable sources. The shortfall must be made up with the polluting fossil fuel gas, much of which the UK imports from abroad. Energy which is produced in Scotland and fed into the UK National Grid incurs transmission fees as Scotland is far from the main centres of energy consumption in Southern England. The upshot is a financial penalty on Scottish energy producers.

Yet it doesn’t have to be like this, there are developing and existing technologies which could allow excess Scottish electricity production to be stored until it is needed, such as increased hydro capacity, green hydrogen production, or batteries or fuel cells.

A quick chemistry lesson is in order here. Hydrogen is a highly combustible gas. The airships of the interwar period were filled with hydrogen because a given volume of unpressurised hydrogen is considerably lighter than the equivalent volume of unpressurised air. However hydrogen is also highly reactive. A spark caused the hydrogen filled floatation bags in the Zeppelin the Hindenburg to explode with such catastrophic effect when it voyaged to New York in 1937. A similar disaster had befallen the British airship the R101 in 1930. Modern airships use helium, which is also lighter than air but unlike hydrogen is inert.

Burning methane, the combustible gas which is the primary component of the natural gas we use for cooking and heating, creates large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the major contributor to the greenhouse gases which are responsible for anthropogenic climate change. However burning hydrogen does not create carbon dioxide, the product of burning hydrogen is water vapour. A water molecule is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, so the world contains a supply of hydrogen which is limitless in practical terms in the form of the immense quantity of water in the world’s oceans.

Burning hydrogen causes the hydrogen atoms to react with oxygen and we end up with water again. It is also possible to produce hydrogen by separating hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules using electrolysis. However liberating the hydrogen from water molecules requires a huge amount of energy, and that’s where the excess energy from Scotland’s windfarms comes in. This clean energy could be used to produce hydrogen from water, the hydrogen could then be stored until it was required. The entire process is carbon neutral.

The exciting potential of this clean hydrogen is that it could theoretically be used in existing gas distribution networks to replace the methane gas we use for cooking and heating. Of course investment would be required to upgrade existing networks and appliances for hydrogen, as well as major investment in facilities to produce and store the hydrogen. This investment has not been forthcoming from a British Government which maintains an energy policy whose aim is to protect the profits of the fossil fuel giants.

British energy policy penalises Scottish energy producers and deprives the Scottish energy sector of vital investment which could permit Scotland to produce abundant amounts of green energy which would remain on tap even when the wind wasn’t blowing or the sun wasn’t shining. But that won’t happen until Scotland is in charge of its own energy policy, which can only occur with independence. Until then Scotland will continue to pay through the nose for energy.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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A tale of two opinion polls

Wednesday was a day of two polls, one of them was loudly touted by the anti-independence Herald and Scotsman newspapers, which these days are becoming almost unreadable in their strident and ceaseless attacks on the SNP even as they ignore far worse stories about the Conservative party. That poll was of course the YouGov poll which suggested that Labour could make very serious inroads into the SNP in the Central Belt at the next UK General Election. Both papers chose to make this poll headline news and retained the story as their lead throughout the day.

There’s no getting around the fact that the poll makes uncomfortable reading for the SNP leadership, it forecasts that the party would suffer losses even worse than those it endured during the 2017 General Election when the SNP lost 24 of its seats, many of which went to a resurgent Conservative party. During that election some very senior SNP figures lost their Westminster seats, including former First Minister Alex Salmond and the party’s then Westminster group leader Angus Robertson. The SNP remained the largest party in Scotland in terms of votes cast and seats won, but it was a hollow victory which was completely overshadowed by the losses which the party had incurred.

Several polls from a number of polling companies have recently shown that support for the SNP has declined. This is hardly surprising given the unceasing and furious wall to wall coverage that the Scottish media has given to the police investigation into SNP finances. Now I am most certainly not saying that this is not a story which the Scottish media should cover, of course it needs to tackle it, but there is a striking discrepancy between the relentless barrage of coverage given to the SNP finances story and the way in which the Scottish media has quickly glossed over the multiple scandals affecting the Conservative party even though unlike the SNP story these often involve taxpayers’ money in sums which are many multiples of the amount which is involved in the SNP finances story. To date there have been no suggestions that the SNP money being investigated by the police has been diverted into personal pockets, this is not the case with some of the many scandals assailing the Conservatives, which often do include allegations that taxpayers’ money has been diverted into private accounts, in one case allegedly being used to purchase a luxury yacht.

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that blatant double standards are at play. However those who are determined to stop Scottish independence at all costs have managed to inflict some damage. If the SNP suffers significant losses at the next UK General Election the media narrative will be that Scotland does not want independence. That will be the established story even if the SNP remains the largest party in terms of votes cast and seats won and if the other pro-independence parties do manage to boost their vote share into double figures.

The fact that the second poll was completely ignored by the Herald and the Scotsman, at least I couldn’t find it anywhere on their websites, merely demonstrates that once respected publications are no longer serious newspapers, but have descended into being uncritical cheerleaders for British nationalism. This was of course the poll from Ipsos which was also published on Wednesday and which showed that support for independence is at 53%, and which although it has registered a drop in support for the SNP, still places the party well ahead of Labour in voting intention in Scotland. This poll was only given significant publicity by The pro-independence the National, which had also published news of the YouGov poll.

The Herald has joined the unreadable Scotsman in no longer seeming to care what sort of British state Scotland remains a part of, no matter how chaotic, corrupt or authoritarian the ruling party at Westminster may become, all that matters is that independence is staved off. This is what we are up against as independence supporters and campaigners, there is no level playing field in a Scottish media which will magnify anything which is damaging to the SNP and to support for independence and will ignore or trivialise anything which might boost support for independence.

However there is more than a glimmer of hope. It is famously said that a week is a long time in politics and the next UK General Election is not expected to be held for around eighteen months. That gives the SNP time to develop effective lines which will stem the loss of votes to Labour in working class and Yes supporting areas of Central Scotland. A clue to what that might be comes from that Ipsos poll that was effectively ignored by the anti-independence press. Just as a number of recent polls from different polling companies have agreed in showing a drop in support for the SNP recently, the polls have also concurred in showing that support for independence has not suffered in popularity along with the SNP. It’s almost as though voters in Scotland understand that a vote for independence is not the same as a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity, for all that the anti-independence media in Scotland is desperate for them to believe that it is.

Under Keir Starmer the Labour party has moved quite far to the right, it is now a supporter of Brexit and of many of the authoritarian and anti-democratic policies of the Tories. Like the Tories Starmer’s Labour pays lip service to the notion of the United Kingdom as a voluntary union of nations even as Starmer refuses to set out what the democratic path to another independence referendum might be. Labour is as hostile to Scottish democracy as the Tories are, and promise to introduce right wing policies which pander to the English nationalism of the so called Red Wall seats which are key to a Labour victory at the next election. Starmer’s Labour is no friend of Scotland.

The SNP can stem the loss of support in yes supporting and anti Brexit Scottish constituencies by ensuring that independence is front and foremost in its campaign for the next UK General Election. That means a de facto referendum, with the threshold for victory being winning a majority of Scottish seats and the largest share of the votes cast, the normal threshold for winning a democratic election. Only the SNP promises the people of Scotland a say in their own future. All Labour offers is a brief respite from this hideous Government, a Scotland which continues to be marginalised and ignored, and Tory policies delivered more apologetically.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Charting a way forward

The SNP has announced a new date for the special independence convention which was originally scheduled to be held on March 19 but was postponed due to the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. The event was intended to give SNP members the opportunity to decide how to proceed with achieving a vote on independence in the face of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the Scottish Parliament does not have the legal authority to hold an independence referendum without the consent of Westminster and the refusal of the Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dem parties to accept that the current Scottish Parliament has a mandate for an independence referendum despite the fact that the issue of another independence referendum dominated the last Holyrood elections and the parties opposing another referendum lost by a significant margin.

It has now become evident that the Westminster parties will only accept the outcome of democratic events in Scotland if they produce a result which is acceptable to them. We also see this in the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in which Scotland’s resounding vote against leaving the EU has been discounted by both the Labour and Conservative parties. Had the outcome of the 2014 independence referendum produced a 55% victory for the Yes campaign, it seems clear with the hindsight of everything that has happened in British politics since then that the Westminster parties would have found some means, however dubious, of refusing to accept the result. They don’t call it perfidious Albion for nothing.

The SNP’s special independence conference will now be held in Dundee on 24 June at Caird Hall in Dundee. The previous conference had been due to debate whether the party should contest the next UK General Election as a de facto independence referendum, whether to use the next Holyrood election for this de facto referendum, or to adopt some other strategy for breaking the log jam of the refusal of the Conservative and Labour parties to recognise the Scottish Parliament’s democratic mandate for another independence referendum.

In an article in the National on Sunday, First Minister Humza Yousaf said that he would make an announcement shortly on a summer of independence campaign activity to take a positive message to every corner of the country. During his campaign for the party leadership he promised to set up regional assemblies across Scotland “to bring together and harness the energy of our members to discuss how we cross the line and win independence.” Work on organising these has been underway and an announcement can be expected soon.

Of course the usual suspects are unhappy, claiming that the Dundee event is only being organised in order to give the First Minister an ‘excuse’ for not addressing the AUOB march and rally being held in Stirling the same day, or that it is a ‘betrayal’ because the event is being billed as being “solely focused” on how to hold a legally-binding referendum, which some are taking to mean ‘how to extract a Section 30’ order from a Westminster that keeps saying no. Naturally supporters of other parties are going to attack the SNP, they have their own party agendas to promote.

However it means no such thing. SNP deputy leader Keith Brown, who made the comment about the event being solely focused how to hold a legally binding referendum, went on to add: “We have won election after election and have a cast iron mandate for a fresh independence referendum – but the Westminster system is refusing to respect Scotland’s democratic wishes. As the only mass membership political party in Scotland we are calling on our members – the lifeblood of our party and movement – to help us secure that key vote that our country needs.” He made no mention of going cap in hand begging for a Section 30 order, indeed his comments make it clear that he does not expect any such order to be forthcoming.

The Scottish Government’s independence minister Jamie Hepburn defended the decision to hold a special convention just for SNP party members and answering a question about the involvement of the wider independence movement said: “Of course, yes, the independence cause doesn’t belong to the SNP. It belongs to the wider independence movement. The SNP is part of the wider independence movement, and of course in advance of a General Election it is entirely right that we consider what our particular platform will be.”

There is more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. As I pointed out above, I have no confidence at all in assurances from the Westminster parties that they will respect the outcome of any Scottish vote which does not give a result to their liking. Under what passes for a British constitution there can be no such thing as a legally binding referendum, and as such Keith Brown’s choice of phrasing was unfortunate. The 2014 referendum was not legally binding, the Conservative Government of the day merely made a political promise to respect the result. We have all seen what happens to Tory promises to respect Scotland. David Cameron’s government could not legally compel any future Westminster government to abide by his promise. This runs directly against the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Westminster which is so fetishised by British nationalists. Indeed during an interview on Good Morning Scotland on Monday Keith Brown made clear that what the party was seeking was a lawful vote on independence.

In the UK there can only be lawful votes and campaigns in which all parties participate, and by doing so implicitly recognise their democratic legitimacy. What the SNP needs to bring about is a vote on Scottish independence in which the anti-independence parties participate and which the British Government cannot rule as being unlawful. It would certainly do so if Holyrood attempted to pass a bill to bring about another referendum. However the British state cannot rule that it is unlawful for the SNP and other pro independence parties to fight the next UK General Election or the next Holyrood election as de facto referendums, neither can it rule it unlawful for the SNP to make the transfer to Holyrood of the power to hold another referendum a condition of SNP MPs propping up a minority government at Westminster. Speaking on Sunday Jamie Hepburn insisted that using the next General election as a de facto referendum was still an option under consideration.

We are now making progress toward the SNP having a clear strategy for obtaining a lawful vote on Scottish independence, and despite the usual chorus of criticism that is to be welcomed.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

National Conservatism, self-pity, idiocy and English fascism

The Brextremist hard right culture wing of the Tory party, which these days is most of it, has been holding a conference in London to air its delusional and self-pitying views. The so-called ‘National Conservatism’ conference is giving the Tories full throttle to blame all the ills of modern Britain on migrants, the EU, the poor, trade unions, and a supposedly all powerful globalist liberal elite which however was not powerful enough to stop Brexit from happening. The event was organised by the right wing Edmund Burke Foundation, one of those right wing think tanks with an opaque funding structure. The conference show cased the reality-phobic right wing authoritarian, xenophobic and minority bashing politics which are in store for the UK unless the Conservatives are utterly thrashed at the next General Election, an eventuality which is looking less and less likely as that election draws closer.

The National Conservatism conference represents the Trumpification of British politics, it is nakedly and shamelessly nationalist and British exceptionalist and triumphalist even as it denies that it is nationalist. The event platforms an authoritarian populist form of Conservatism which is all but indistinguishable from fascism. Delegates to the conference discussed the Tories’ favourite culture war tropes, a form of political masturbation which could not be further removed from the issues which will really determine the outcome of the next election. It’s the Daily Mail comments section in the flesh.

When I first heard about this conference, I imagined it was going to be held in some vast hall, like the QE2 Centre in Westminster. Instead, it’s being held somewhere as tiny as some of the minds on display. The modern Tory party is presenting us with Suella Braverman as one of its great thinkers. It’s the political equivalent of praising a toddler as a genius because it managed to get most of the poo in the potty.

It seems the Tories have given up on winning the next General Election outright and are contenting themselves with depriving Starmer of a majority. The Conservatives have learned nothing since they were given a message at the English local elections. What they appear to have taken from that defeat, which saw them lose more than one thousand councillors, is the same lesson that Liz Truss took from her disastrous and thankfully short chaotic term as Prime Minister. It’s the people who are wrong, the Tories need to double down on the extremism and go even further.

The populist extreme right of the Tory party has run Britain into the ground with Johnson and Truss, and a disaster of a Brexit which even Nigel Farage has had to concede has failed. So the Tories sticks Sunak into power in order to take the blame for their inevitable defeat at the next General Election, thus permitting the hard right-wing to take full control of the party again in the wake of the General Election. But even if defeated at the election their ideas will live on through Starmer’s Labour party.

This conference would be laughable were it not so dangerous, a direct threat to democracy railing against liberal values before our eyes. We had the ludicrous spectacle of Tory MP Marian Cates railing against the UK’s low birthrate, which make inward migration necessary. According to Cates the reason the birthrate is falling is ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘excessive education’ and not the late stage capitalism which she so strongly defends even as it makes a small number of people obscenely rich and condemns the majority to a cost of living crisis unaffordable housing, soaring childcare costs, and the collapse of public services. But no, it’s really all the fault of university academics pointing out the evils of British imperialism and Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. It would be a joke were this woman not a legislator with the power to shape public policy.

One speaker was right wing historian David Starkey, who insisted that left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery. I have no idea what that means although it’s obviously both asinine and offensive. Starkey went on to claim that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust. And this was coming from one of the supposedly more intellectually distinguished contributors.

Right wing author Douglas Murray averred that people were not ‘allowed’ to be proud of being British, in his own words He could “see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century”. The Holocaust, and a war of aggression that killed 70 million people are “mucking up.” In his book” The Strange Death of Europe”, Murray pandered to the tropes of the extreme right wing white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, arguing that Europe “is committing suicide” by allowing non-European immigration into its borders and losing its “faith in its beliefs.”

Another speaker at the conference was the academic Matthew Goodwin who asserted that during the past 50 years the people of Britain have been victims of a revolution imposed on them by the left. It’s clearly escaped Goodwin’s attention that over the past 50 years the UK has only had 13 years of Labour government, and that was the government of Tony Blair, whose wholesale adoption of previously Conservative policies was described by Margaret Thatcher as her greatest achievement, a cruel trick now being emulated by Keir Starmer.

Goodwin is one of those right wing poster boys who constantly rails against cancel culture even as he has no apparent shortage of high profile platforms from which to air his grievances. This is the guy who wrote a book entitled ‘Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics’ a book whose contention that ‘liberal elites’ are responsible for all that ails Britain has been enthusiastically taken up by the right of the modern Tory Party. Despite its title, nowhere in its 240 pages is there a single mention of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The dominance of the right in the British media and the dark money which floods into right wing British nationalist and pro-Brexit politics are likewise given short shrift by Goodwin. For Goodwin, as for the right of the Tory party for whom he is the modern guru, England and Britain are synonymous terms, British nationalism is identical to English nationalism and its distinguishing feature is its refusal to admit that it’s nationalist at all. One reviewer of Goodwin’s book noted that Goodwin had become “part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.”

In the UK, as we have seen with Trump in the USA, the Law and Justice party in Poland and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, there has been a creeping right wing populist authoritarianism, which prioritises ‘culture war’ issues and claims that an out of touch global liberal elite does not care about the working class even as it cracks down on the ability of trades unions to organise, introduces tax policies which favour the wealthy and has little to say about low wages, the casualisation of the workforce or the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the real elite whom the right protect and defend.

It’s a right wing which increasingly trades in conspiracy theories and which rejects any attempt to hold it to account, dismissing elections which it loses as ‘rigged’ or introducing measures to suppress the participation in elections of demographic groups which oppose it.

This is the future of British politics. This is what English fascism looks like in the 21st century, deeply xenophobic, reactionary, and hostile to any distinctly Scottish political expression. Labour cannot protect Scotland from this as its response to English nationalist right wing populism is to co-opt its garb, its language and its policies. All Scotland can do is escape. If Scots want their country to be more than a neglected region of an authoritarian, right wing and intolerant Greater England, independence is the only option left.

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button.

Starmer’s transforming Labour into the Tories’ Mini-Me

In a speech to the Progressive Britain conference in central London last week Labour leader Keir Starmer insisted that he didn’t care if people think that his party’s priorities sound conservative. We’ve noticed that Keir, we’ve noticed. In an attack on the the Tory government of Sunak, he claimed it “can no longer claim to be conservative.” That’s a mantle that Starmer is determined to adopt. Under Starmer the Labour party has become a vehicle for the imposition of conservative policies.

Starmer is a Labour leader for whom Tony Blair’s neo-liberal New Labour is dangerously left wing. In the speech, Starmer said that in order to secure victory at the next General Election the Labour Party would have to “change our entire culture” and compared his efforts to reform the party to former prime minister Tony Blair’s symbolic rewriting of Clause Four, but “on steroids.” In this speech Starmer signalled that under him the Labour party will move even further to the right than it did under Blair and Brown, with the clear implication that he intends to shape Labour into a party which appeals to English nationalist Brexit voters in the midlands and north of England, the so-called red wall seats which fell to the Conservatives and were instrumental in delivering Boris Johnson his landslide Tory victory in the December 2019 General Election. The only reason that Starmer is able to pose as a social democrat is because the Conservatives are in the grip of people like the right wing authoritarian English nationalists of the European Research Group who are but a hairsbreadth away from outright fascism. However viewed objectively, Starmer’s Labour party occupies much the same political space as the Conservatives did under John Major. It was to get rid of those Tories that Scotland gave Labour a landslide in 1997, now Starmer wants us to let those so called one nation Tories back in, rebadged and rebranded as the Labour party.

Starmer knows that his route to power depends upon winning those seats back for Labour. Despite his cant about achieving a Labour recovery in Scotland, he knows that he needs to win in England in order to have any chance of winning the next General Election. He can win without Scotland, he can’t win without England. The electoral arithmetic is very simple.

How Scotland votes can only make a difference when the outcome in England is finely balanced, there are just not enough Scottish constituencies to affect the final result when England votes decisively one way or the other. Scotland has only 59 Westminster MPs, a number which will be even lower following the planned review of constituencies which will see Scotland with only 57 Westminster constituencies. These new boundaries may be in place prior to the next General Election, which is not scheduled until late in 2024. England on the other hand will have ten more MPs than it currently does, with 543 MPs. Since Scotland does not return many Conservative MPs, and there is no sign that the Conservatives are benefitting electorally in Scotland from the current difficulties of the SNP, how Scotland votes will have very little impact upon the total amount of Conservative MPs at Westminster.

So despite what Starmer and the Labour party might tell voters in Scotland, Scotland and Scottish interests are not a priority for Starmer and his party. His assertion that voters in Scotland need to vote Labour in order to ‘get the Tories out’ is factually incorrect. Indeed, voting Labour simply means voting for an alternative vehicle for the delivery of conservative policies. Starmer has given us a Labour party shorn of any decency and idealism which it once may have had and which promises nothing more than to apply Tory policy, only more competently and with a sad face. Starmer is the true heir to Blair, a man who fakes sincerity as a means to tell a more convincing lie.

What we have now is a Labour party which is committed to Brexit, which promises to be every bit as vile as the Tories to migrants and asylum seekers, a party which refuses to repeal the authoritarian legislation introduced under Boris Johnson and his successors, and which, crucially as far as Scotland is concerned, refuses to recognise the right of the people of Scotland to choose another independence referendum by voting for a Scottish Parliament which is committed to delivering one. Labour pays lip service to the notion that the United Kingdom is a voluntary union of nations, but effectively denies that it’s an idea which has any meaningful political content. Starmer has consistently refused to spell out what the democratic route to another Scottish independence referendum might be. He’s not going to say what it is, even as he insists that it exists, because he is determined to prevent another independence referendum from ever taking place. He will only consent to one when his path to Downing Street depends upon it, but that’s the last thing that he’d ever admit to.

Nothing Starmer says can be taken at face value. He will say whatever it takes in order to win over those crucial votes in pro-Brexit English constituencies, and his stated refusal to do any deal with the SNP must be viewed in that light.

As I pointed out on this blog a few days ago, Starmer will be haunted by the memory of the Conservative attack adverts which did such damage to Ed Miliband in the 2015 when the Tories produced adverts showing Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket. The Tories had not expected to win an absolute majority in that election, but in the event they did, with the catastrophic consequence for the rest of us of them having the votes in the Commons to force through the EU referendum which was held the following year. Starmer will be determined to avoid giving the Tories the opportunity to mount a similar attack on him which might deprive him of the victory he craves.

Colin Talbot, emeritus professor of government at Manchester University, said he would “never say never” when it came to whether Starmer would go back on his promise to refuse to deal with the SNP. Certainly Starmer will continue to vehemently refuse to do any sort of deal with the SNP prior to the election, but he will insist that there will be no deal with the SNP right up until the moment that he needs one. The price of that deal will be to transfer to the Scottish Parliament the power to hold a lawful independence referendum. Only then will Scotland have a chance to escape the danse macabre of the Tories and Labour in lockstep

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My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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