The cat crap trap

The biggest problem with the Tories isn’t that they’re evil and selfish, although they are most certainly evil and selfish. You only have to look at George Osborne basking in the adulation of the Tory conference to see that. But that’s not the biggest problem with the Tories. The biggest problem with the Tories is that they’re evil, selfish, and transparently manipulative like a cat which has crapped in your shoes and expects you to blame your significant other for it. They’re evil and manipulative and just don’t care, because they know there’s not a great deal we’re able to do about it. And cats are considerably cuter than George Osborne. No one has ever felt the urge to chuck George under the chin, just the urge to chuck him over a cliff.

Sadly – thank you No voters – Scotland is powerless before the evil selfish Tories. Our powerlessness before the Tory onslaught is not solely down to the fact that we’re only a few months after a General Election in which they won a majority in England, it’s also because the Tories also know that in Scotland they have no meaningful support and so can do what they like without suffering any meaningful electoral consequences. David Cameron isn’t going to lose any sleep over the fate of the Tory party in Scotland, because the Tory party in Scotland already makes a shuffling zombie look like a nifty mover. And zombies probably smell more fragrant too.

However this doesn’t stop the party’s Westminster Head Office from giving the corpse of the Scottish Tories the occasional electric shock, in the hope that they can jolt some life into the rotting body. They know however that there’s no real prospect of this ever happening, so instead their interventions in Scotland are designed more to trip up the other parties. This isn’t difficult to achieve with the Labour party in Scotland, it must be said, as tripping up a party which is staggering about blindly is about as simple as David Mundell.

The latest Tory cunning plan involves the party’s favourite fetish – taxation. Despite having historically the same enthusiasm for devolution as a dental patient has for root canal treatment without an anaesthetic, all of a sudden the Tories are falling over themselves to make like the tooth fairy, promising shiny new tax powers in return for a few molars. However the new tax powers which the Tories are hurriedly bringing forward for the Scottish Parliament are new powers in the exact same way that cat crap in your shoes gives you extra height which opens up undreamt of new vistas.

What the Tories are hoping is that they can put pressure on the Scottish Government on income tax, the most visible and noticeable of all the taxes, the tax that directly affects ordinary working people. It is of course income tax that the Tories are proposing to give Holyrood limited powers over, not any of the other taxes which together raise 80% of a government’s revenues. Income tax is the most taxy of the taxes, it’s the one that directly has an impact in the pocket of working people in a way that other taxes do not. Income tax is the tax that the voters notice, and that’s why the Tories and Labour are prepared to devolve some control of it.

Combined with the package of tax responsibilities are equally limited powers over social security – powers which can only be exercised with the permission of David Mundell. These powers will give the Scottish government the ability to make up the difference to low paid workers whose tax credits have been slashed by the Westminster Tories. But the Scottish government will only be able to do so if it slashes public services or it increases the most taxy tax. It’s going to be the ordinary working people of Scotland who will pay twice for the cost of Tory economic slash and burning – and the cunning cat crap plan is to force the Scottish government to take responsibility for the Tories slashing tax credits for low paid workers with families.

Oh look, purrs Fluffy Mundell like the cat that’s crapped in your shoes, the Scottish Government has the power to raise income tax in order to compensate low paid Scottish workers for the cuts to their tax credits imposed by George Osborne. The political heat for the cuts to the income of low paid workers in then transferred from the people who impose the cuts, to a parliament which is not actually responsible for them. The Tories hope that the focus will be on the people with the bandages and plasters, and not on the basterts with the chainsaw who’ve just cut the support off from beneath the poor and the vulnerable. In this they will no doubt be assisted by a Scottish media that’s more interested in screaming SNPbaaaad than in holding Westminster to account.

The thing about traps is that they’re supposed to be well camouflaged, hidden deep in the woods and covered with branches where they can be cunningly sprung on their unsuspecting victims. This Tory trap is lit up in sparkly lights and sits under a neon sign that flashes TORY TAX TRAP in dayglo red white and blue while Fluffy Mundell poses on top of it wearing a Union Jack thong and a come hither smile. It won’t work, and not only because Fluffy is to honey traps and sexual allure as his boss is to porcine welfare. It won’t work because it rests upon the voters of Scotland not remembering that we have a Tory government which is engaged in slashing and burning the incomes of the poorest paid while it enriches the better off. It won’t work because it depends on the Scottish government not realising it’s a trap. And it won’t work because it depends on the people of Scotland having heads that button up the back.

Once again it’s Scotland that loses out as Westminster uses devolution as a means to play party political games. The Tories are hoping that their cunning taxy tax wheeze will mean Ruth Davidson can call a taxi for Kezia Dugdale and overtake Labour as the second party in Scottish politics. Ruth’s going to go into the next Holyrood election calling for tax cuts, while Labour’s going to demand that there’s a tax rise for the tiny number of people with high incomes. As they jostle for the runner up prize, it’s the chances of Scotland remaining in their precious Union that will get squeezed.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. There is a limited number of books in stock, so get your order in today!

Unionist sheep bleat SNPbaaaad

The shine has come off the SNP, say people who’ve spent the past decade throwing mud and crap at the party in the hope that some of it might stick. The main result of this exercise has been to leave crap all over the hands of the mud throwers, and an SNP which sails on unperturbed by the ripples created by Scotland’s media pond life. Mud slinging is a dubious political tactic, consisting at base of the unconvincing and base selling point that we should vote for a unionist party because a pro-independence party is as sleazy as a unionist party.

It’s a tactic which is doomed to fail. Every time Kezia Dugdale gets up at Furst Meenister’s Questions to hurl some more dirt at the SNP, all she does is to remind us just how dirty the Labour party is now and has always been. There’s not a lot of mileage in accusations of impropriety directed at the SNP out of the mouth of the leader of a party which only a short while ago saw five of its MPs receive jail terms. Then there’s the goings on in Glesca Cooncil under Purcell, the sink of North Lanarkshire and sectariangate, the pauchles of Falkirk selections, and a litany of scandal and sleaze which long since ceased to be a series of isolated incidents and became an intricate macramé of mafiosos.

Labour in Scotland is not a political party tainted by sleaze, it’s sleaze with the occasional spots of politics. Scandal and sleaze is what defines them. Not that that stops Labour from trying to claim the moral high ground, when in fact all they’re doing is clambering on top a pile of corpses, most of which have been stabbed in the back by a former SLab MP. The result of this well known history of rankness is that when Kezia and her pals scream SNPbad, all the Scottish electorate hears is “See that SNP, they’re just as bad as we are.” It’s not a message that’s going to get any of their former support to return, but even though it’s a tactic that has been as successful as business selling pan scourers as toilet paper, Labour keeps scraping. They don’t know what else to do.

We’re told that it’s always important not to confuse the messenger with the message, and in the general run of things this is true. But in Labour’s case the SNPbad message is being delivered by a party which has a proven track record in badness. It’s like getting a warning about the dangers of organised religion from a Young Earth Creationist, or the Mongol Hordes railing against caravans on the A9. The message has no credibility when the messenger is guilty of far worse.

Another of Labour’s attacks died a death over the weekend when the director of T in the Park revealed his company had received financial support from the previous Labour Lib Dem coalition in Holyrood. For weeks now Labour and the Lib Dems along with the Tories have been trying to make out that the festival’s receipt of a grant from the Scottish Government was an atrocity on a par with the Massacre of Glencoe. Although that was carried out by Unionists and so was really just a bit of a misunderstanding and not in any way typical of Westminster’s historic attitude to Scotland, oh no.

Meanwhile, faced with a Tory government that’s demonising immigrants and dismantling the NHS, Labour chooses to attack the Tories by asking why Jeremy Hunt’s Chinese wife came to live in England. So much for the much heralded new politics. Corbynism has given Labour in Scotland the same sort of bounce that was last seen on a spacehopper which had lost an argument with Jim Murphy’s broken Irn Bru bottle. The SNP’s commanding lead in the opinion polls remains bright and shiny. It should be clear to even the most obtuse party leader by now that all the SNPbadness in the world isn’t going to do the Unionist parties any good, but it’s all they’ve got.

The only way in which the Unionist parties could start to make a serious dent in the SNP’s support is a way that’s closed to them. They’d have to start making a real commitment to the kind of devolution that they promised during the referendum campaign, and not the kind of devolution they’re currently trying to pretend is what they meant all along.

Oh but when we said home rule we didn’t actually mean, you know, home rule. We meant limited extra responsibilities over limited forms of taxation. And road signs. And no, don’t even think about getting your hands on the TV remote control. Now eat your cereal and go to your bedroom where the TV is set to the BBC and don’t dare imagine you can change the channel. What we really meant by the closest thing to federalism possible is whatever is going to advantage our parties, not what the people of Scotland want. This is still the game that the Unionist parties are playing, and it’s still the game that the electors of Scotland see right through.

If Labour wants to eat into the SNP’s support, it can only do so by attracting SNP voters back. That’s never going to happen if all that Labour has to offer is repeating ad nauseum that the SNP is as bad as Labour is. But then Labour’s real problem is that it’s so discredited that it could offer incontrovertible proof that it could give every person in Scotland winning lottery tickets, the ability to walk on water, the powder to turn base metals into gold, and most importantly of all, some actual real jam – but people would still not believe it.

All the SNP has to do is to be mildly competent and it’s still miles ahead of the competition. People are still going to vote for them no matter how much Unionist party sheep go SNPbaaad because they want to punish Labour and the Lib Dems and their proven record of incompetence, because they have no faith in the Westminster system, and because they want another independence referendum – and whatever your opinion of the SNP another independence referendum offers the people of Scotland the opportunity to wrest power for ourselves. Nothing Labour can offer is able to match that, no matter how many sheep bleat SNPbaaaad.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. There is a limited number of books in stock, so get your order in today!

Gordie peddles the pedalo of delusion

Gordie Broon’s been intervening again. This time he’s intervening in a doomed attempt to save his credibility, if not the carpets that he paces up and down on. Unfortunately for the clunking fistula, the Gordie Broon credibility ship sailed to the mythical land of media adulation quite a long time ago, struck the iceberg of self-deception, and is now rusting on the bottom of the ocean of self-regard, heavily encrusted by the barnacles of bluster. Not even all the balloons on the Labour benches in Holyrood could refloat it now. Gordie’s no longer sailing the ship of state, he’s peddling the pedalo of delusion.

Gordie would be the very last person to admit that his hastily cobbled together Vow was always as screwed as Peppa at a Tory party conference, but in his traditional haste to ensure that someone else takes the blame for his own failures, he has made a sideways admission that the only delivering his Vow has done has been to deliver Scotland into the pocket of the pig fanciers.

Despite serial claims from Labour politicians that the Vow has been fulfilled, Gordie now feels the need to point out that it hasn’t been fulfilled at all. This of course, is certainly not his fault. It never is. Nothing can dent the regard which Gordie has for himself, a regard matched only by his mythical status as a great statesman in Scottish media circles. The thing about a mythical status that has escaped Gordie’s notice is that it has no bearing in reality, somewhat like his Vow.

But Gordie is not to blame for the failure of a Vow whose success he swore blind he would personally ensure and take responsibility for. Oh no, it’s all the fault of those nasty Tories, the ones that Gordie worked his wee socks off to deliver Scotland to with his threats that you wouldn’t get your kidney transplant if Scotland voted Yes. Leaving Scotland prostrate and powerless before a majority Tory government elected by a mere 10% of the population, plugged in to a dialysis machine whose off switch is controlled by the Tories, that’s the kind of democracy that Labour told us we’d be better together with. Now we’ve got what Gordie wanted, only he’s unhappy to discover that he’s getting shafted along with the rest of us.

It was only by staying in the Union that the NHS was going to be safe, Labour said, as the NHS in England plunges into the worst financial crisis that it has ever seen, a crisis which is likely to have a knock on effect in Scotland. It was only by staying in the Union that Scotland would be able to guarantee social security and state pensions, said Labour. Pooling and sharing, repeated Gordie ad nauseum. There’s no pooling and sharing now, only social security pulling apart and shredding. It might be the Tories who are doing this damage, but Labour is to blame for delivering Scotland into their hands. That’s not a responsibility that Labour gets to escape from.

But the former prime minister who makes the invisible man seem like a bit of an exhibitionist wants us to know that it’s not his fault for believing that Tories would actually keep their promises when there was nothing to force them to do so and they have a history of duplicitous and underhand behaviour matched only by Gordie and his erstwhile chum Tony Blair themselves. Gordie’s blameless. In his own mind, if nowhere else.

Although Gordie has as much power to influence the Scotland Bill as a bacon sandwich has of resisting the advances of Davie Cameron. In his delusional state he still thinks he’s making policy. He paced up and down, wearing out the carpet, telling the press and his pre-vetting audience that he and Ian Murray propose giving the Scottish Parliament the clear and unambiguous power to top up what it pleases him to call, in the language of the Tory right, welfare payments. He is going to make it clear that the UK Parliament can’t have a veto over this. He’s going to achieve it by intervening in speeches to pre-vetted audiences, because that’s really going to make Davie Cameron sit up and take notice.

Gordie has no power at all. He’d have as much success if he attempted to achieve constitutional change through the medium of interpretive dance. This would at least have the advantage of being kinder on the carpet. All these dance steps he now thinks are so vital to ensure the future of the Union – maybe he could have performed them when he was actually in power, when he was Prime Minister. But when Gordie was Prime Minister he was far more interested in trying to prevent Scotland from having a referendum on independence in the first place and making sure we were the Cinderella who didn’t get an invite to the ball. That’s why Wendy Alexander got stabbed in the back.

What Gordie is complaining about now is that the Tories are using the non-progression of devolution for their own political ends. It’s unfair that the Tories should do that, it’s only Labour which has the right to use Scotland as a political football. After Labour used the consultations of the Smith Commission to water down the proposals as much as possible because all Labour was interested in was party advantage and not what was good for Scotland, they’re now complaining that the Tories are doing the exact same thing.

What Gordie meant by a modern form of Home Rule was a devolution settlement that suited the Labour party. As always, the desires of the Scottish population come a poor second to the desires of Westminster political parties. But never mind, yelling SNPbad! will substitute for having Scotland’s interests at heart. The Vow won’t deliver, because the Vow was always a lie. It was deliberately vague and deliberately unspecified so that it could be sold to the Scottish people as a modern form of home rule, as devo max, as the nearest thing to federalism possible, but still allow the Unionist parties to treat Scotland with the contempt that they have always done. Gordie’s not upset that the Vow has not been fulfilled, he’s upset that he’s been found out and his pedalo is peddled in ever decreasing circles.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. Books will be back in stock on Thursday, so get your order in today!

The bright light whooshing over Greater Britain’s head

The world ended yesterday, according to some mad churchlet of Christian fundamentalists. And in equally accurate predictions, according to the equally mad breathless fanboys of the right wing press, after today’s speech to the Tory party conference Davie Cameron is the new voice of the left. In other news, Hannibal Lector is the new voice of veganism, Ian Paisley is the Vatican spokesman on ecumenicalism, and the BNP are the new UN Commissioners for Refugees. Although that last one isn’t too far from the truth because in part due to the support of our Tory government, Saudi Arabia is now chairing the UN human rights council. If you think Cameron is centre ground, you need a new GPS because the one you’ve got has led you up shit creek. That’s where much of the UK media is currently marooned, having confused a Telegraph editorial for a paddle.

The purpose of Davie boy’s pleadings was to use his speech to try and entice some of the Blairite factions of the Labour party over to the Even-Darker Side. We got to witness the leader of the party which has been the main historic agency of discrimination use the struggles of the discriminated to make political capital. He railed against sexism, he complained about people with foreign sounding names not getting called back for job interviews, he moaned at the unfairness of racism and homophobia. But he didn’t say what he was going to do about any of it. Discrimination will magically vanish in Greater Britain just because Davie and his oh so modern Tories think it’s a bad thing. They don’t propose taking any steps to end it, because that’s the sort of thing that the Daily Telegraph doesn’t like, as it damages the life opportunities of middle class heterosexual white men. We’ll have none of that sort of thing in the Tories’ Greater Britain. It’s not clear what Dave meant by Greater Britain, although it’s a phrase he repeated a dozen times during his speech. Possibly it means more Union fleg bedecked pastry programmes on the BBC, because we don’t have many of those as it is.

Of course Davie’s newfound fairness was all just fluffy window dressing from a man who wants to withdraw from the European Treaty on Human Rights, a distraction technique to mask his dog whistle attacks which appeal to the right. Compassionate conservatism is like part time virginity. The real way in which the Tories intend to screw us all was revealed just the day before by Theresa May.

It wasn’t all pretendy cuddly. Davie attacked Jeremy Corbyn like he was attacking a pork pie. He accused the Labour leader of hating this great country which Davie loves like a bacon sandwich, in an entirely non-nationalist way of course. If it had been a Scottish politician who supports independence who had accused Labour of a Scotland-hating terrorist sympathising ideology, the newspapers would descend in a feeding frenzy that would make the Michelle Thomson piranha attack look like breadcrumbs in a goldfish bowl, but Davie can do it with impunity because British nationalism isn’t nationalism at all. British nationalism remains invisible, even when it wraps itself in a Union fleg and marches across the stage of the Tory party conference. The great thing about British nationalism is that it allows British people to be better than the foreigners and Scottish people who suffer from nationalism.

Maybe one day the UK press will realise that what pisses people in Scotland off isn’t that the SNP is criticised, it’s the media’s double standards. But that’s as likely to happen as David Cameron and the Tories actually doing something to combat discrimination instead of just using it to score cheap political points.

Davie got his loudest applause for a lie. He claimed that Jeremy Corbyn had described the death of Osama Bin Laden as a tragedy, and used the claim to launch into an attack on the Labour leader which the delegates loved. Naturally the BBC news didn’t examine the claim, which was as truthful as Davie’s intention to take real action to end all the discrimination he complained about in the same speech. What Jeremy Corbyn really said was that not bringing Bin Laden to trial was a tragedy. The tragedy he referred to was a tragedy for us not a tragedy for a mass murderer. But nuance is lost in hysterical headlines and in a BBC whose coverage of the speech consisted of little more than gushing guff. But then the speech was likewise gushing guff, so for once the BBC was accurate.

He’s going to ensure there are affordable houses for people who earn enough not to need social housing. If you earn £77 thousand a year then you’ll be able to afford one of the Tories’ new starter homes. But then if you earn £77 thousand a year, approximately the same as a backbench MP, then the only reason you should need help from the state with your housing is if the housing market has been irredeemably buggered by successive governments which have used an ever inflating housing bubble as a replacement for economic growth.

Davie’s rhetoric crashed into reality exactly like the asteroid promised by the Bible text interpreters. It’s a fantasy, but the world has indeed ended. We no longer live in a world where our political masters make any sense, or where they have to make any sense, because much of the UK media doesn’t report on them criticially. When the leader of the most right wing Tory party in history is described as making a bid for the centre ground, you know that Greater British politics have lost any anchor in the real lives of people in Scotland, where just 10% of us voted for this farce. Scotland isn’t a democracy, that’s the reality, and we are forced to pay attention to the prancing of what by any right ought to be marginal figures, because we live – for now – in this dysfunctional Union.

See that bright light in the sky? That’s reality whooshing over the heads of the establishment in Greater Britain. One day it’s going to come crashing down on top of them. Every day that passes brings us a day sooner to that inevitability.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. Books will be back in stock on Thursday, so get your order in today!

Going to work on an egg

The Tory party conference is taking place in Manchester, behind steel barriers and protected by snipers in case someone throws an egg. A young fogey delegate goaded the crowd with a photo of Margaret Thatcher, but what’s to be condemned is that someone rose to the goading by throwing an egg, and not that an over-privileged young man with all the empathetic skills of a sea slug goaded them in the first place. It is apparently expected and perfectly acceptable that middle class youth with gilded spoons up their arses should not empathise with people who have not enjoyed the same privileges in life. It’s unreasonable to condemn the fact that compassion has become a dirty word. This is the UK that we’re better together with.

According to Jeremy Hunt, whose name is rhyming slang, the removal of tax credits from the lowest paid workers will make people in the UK work harder like the Chinese or the Americans. In other words, on starvation wages in sweatshops with no holiday entitlement and without the protection of strong trades unions. The Tories are trying to rebrand themselves as the party of labour, which is a bit like Attila the Hun’s hordes which wrought destruction across a continent and sent off a chain reaction of refugee migrations rebranding themselves as a removal company.

George Osborne promised an unprecedented extension of powers to local authorities in England, claiming he’d give them control of business rates. But they’ll only be allowed to lower rates. If they want to raise business rates they’re going to have to ensure that the measure is supported by a majority of local businesses. The Tories have now actually given businesses a veto over representative democracy. Companies can overrule voters in this Britain that Scotland remains a part of. Yet this descent of the UK into a corporatocracy went unremarked because something far far worse happened. Someone threw an egg. Someone spat. Someone said a swerry wurd. The very horror. And they weren’t important or rich people either. It’s outrageous.

The lies and deception from the mouths of Tories who wouldn’t recognise morality if it splattered them with yolk is considered acceptable discourse, it’s not acceptable to throw an egg. In fact, egg throwing is so bad that it causes the political classes and the media to entirely overlook the reasons which brought the egg thrower to the point where they threw an egg.

Egg throwing is the curse of our times, and signals the imminent end of civilisation as we know it, because it’s wrong for people to get upset when the government forces them into penury while further enriching its wealthy friends. Meanwhile the right wing media gets angry at the response of the poor and the disabled to their living conditions, but not at the conditions that the disabled and the poor have to endure. But then these are the same people who claimed that the introduction of a 5p charge for a plastic shopping bag would create chaos. We are quite literally ruled by people which couldn’t punch their way out of a plastic bag. The same folk who tell us that Scotland, which managed to introduce a 5p charge on plastic bags without creating a cataclysm, needs them to look after us. Scotland introduced a 5p charge on plastic bags and is still in the rugby world cup.

But it’s the egg throwing. Egg throwing is worse than what’s happening in Syria. It’s worse than the US airforce bombing a hospital in Afghanistan. And it’s certainly worse than Job Centre staff being given quotas for the number of claimants they have to sanction each month. How dreadful that someone threw an egg, that someone else called out an insulting and hurtful name, and how much more worthy of condemnation that is than making someone live on the edge of starvation and stripping them of dignity and hope. This is the topsy turvy morality of Great Britishness. The worst possible crime is saying a rude word to a selfish pig sticker.

The recurring theme is that ordinary people have no right to protest. We’re all egg throwers because one person threw an egg. We’re all misogynists because one person called someone a whore. We’re all violent thugs because someone spat. Yet no one was killed, no one was injured, no one was driven to despair – it’s Tory policies that are doing that. If you call a Tory a rude name it becomes a justification for police snipers on a rooftop. Sticks and stones may break bones, but names will bring out snipers.

Bad names fade in the wind, but poverty passes down the generations. Children grow up learning there is nothing to hope for but a minimum wage and a lifetime of debt, and that’s just fine and dandy with the young fogeys in the ill fitting suits and with the braying laughs who think being poor is a reason to mock and belittle. Broken eggs on shirts come out in the wash, but the stain of deprivation marks lives for life. All these things are acceptable in modern go-ahead striving Britain of hardworking families and political cliches.

However calling out a rude word is beyond the steel pale that surrounds the Tory delegates who enjoy absolute power on the back of 24% of the popular vote. Imagine shouting out Tory scum eh. What a dreadful state of affairs, allowing the Tories of all people to claim victimhood status. Although in their case it’s not so much victimhood as victimgood, because it means that they can claim the moral high ground for their wanton cruelty, selfishness, materialism, and their substitution of money for morality.

England is doing a very good impression of a country which is divided and at odds with itself. Roads are closed by police barricades, armed officers perch on buildings aiming at the public. Still, at least we know now that it’s not supporters of Scottish independence who are uniquely prone to insults, slurs and egg throwing, and now the Scottish media will start praising the calm and rational manner in which Scotland’s constitutional debate is conducted. Won’t they? Or will they be too busy going to work on an egg.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. Please note that the books are currently out of stock but a new batch has been ordered from the printer and is expected on Friday.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ‘KL’ and Angus MacInnes Someone identifying themselves only as KL made a bank transfer to my account so they could buy copies of my new books. Unfortunately the only information linked to the payment are the initials KL and I have no means of linking the payment to a mailing address. Could KL please email me and identify themselves so I can get their books sent out. I’ve also received a payment from Angus MacInnes, but he’s not given me his postal address. Could you please get in touch with your mailing address Angus.

The problem child

We need to talk about our problem child. The media in Scotland is suffering from a strange form of mass psychosis. It’s like the witch hysteria of the 17th century, only it involves screaming about the SNP. The same publications which denounce Jeremy Corbyn for being so left wing that even Lenin would consider him to be a dangerous extremist are in paroxysms of huffiness that the SNP isn’t left wing enough. Oooh, get them, say the papers about SNP MPs, they don’t all wear sackcloth and whip themselves in sympathy with the struggles of Palestine while donating all their money to refugee charities. This being one of the few instances in which most of the papers use the word refugee, more typically they use phrases like illegal immigrants with HIV coming over here to steal your places in bus queues so they can go and rape a pensioner’s pug.

We are, if you’ve not already noticed, in one of the Scottish media’s regular fits of SNPbadness. This time it centres on the business activities of the MP for Edinburgh West. Imagine an Edinburgh MP having more than one property eh. Alistair Darling would never have done anything like that. Only he did. And he got the taxpayer to pay for them. The media wasn’t so interested in that, I seem to recall. But I digress.

I’ve been reading the screeds of reports about the Michelle Thomson affair and am still struggling to comprehend exactly what it is that she’s supposed to have done wrong. I’m not trying to defend whatever it is that she’s done, if for no other reason than like most of the country I’m still in the dark about what it is that she’s supposed to have done. She’s not actually the subject of any police investigations herself. It appears that what the entire sorry saga boils down to is that she buys properties cheaply and then sells them on for a profit. This may be morally reprehensible if you’re a fully paid up member of a socialist party dedicated to bringing about the downfall of global capitalism, but it isn’t a crime. It’s a BBC 1 daytime TV show.

In any case Michelle Thomson is not a member of a socialist party dedicated to bringing about the downfall of global capitalism. She’s a former high heid yin in Business for Scotland, there’s a wee clue in the name there to the fact that she’s not exactly an advocate of anarchism. Now she’s an MP for a social democratic party whose claims to left wingery rest upon the fact that for a number of years it has been somewhat further to the left than the Transgeordie Labour party. But then being further to the left than a party which proudly produces anti-immigration mugs is not exactly the same as signing up to the entirety of Das Kapital and vowing to set up a Soviet in Saughton.

Certain figures in the media feel aggrieved that punters and the public, and folk like me, criticise them. You’re against a free press, they cry. That would be a free press which is a fully owned subsidiary of global corporations, controlled by companies based in tax havens. In fact media critics are the champions of a free press. We’re the ones who demand a media which is representative of the breadth of views in this country. It’s not unreasonable to expect that in a country where approximately half the population supports independence that approximately half of our media outlets should support the same view too. But that’s not what we’ve got. It’s not unreasonable that in a country where only 16% of the population support the views and aims of the Conservative party that the views of the Conservative party should be reflected and supported by only a similarly small percentage of our media outlets. But that’s not what we’ve got.

Our media hates the independence movement in general and the SNP in particular. I’m not trying to argue that the SNP should be beyond criticism, far from it. I’m arguing that the unremitting negativity of our media towards the SNP is counterproductive. It makes people switch off. That’s dangerous in a democracy. You cannot have a properly functioning democracy when the media does not broadcast and publish the range of views found in the population it claims to serve. Instead what you get is a public which grows increasingly resentful of what it perceives as manipulation, and a growing anger towards the purveyors of news that’s not our news. Meanwhile the media screeches that it’s under attack by people opposed to press freedom. But the simple truth is this, when public trust in the media breaks down, that’s the fault of the media not the public. The breakdown in trust is reflected in plummeting sales figures for national newspapers, and the growing clamour to reform the state of broadcasting.

Yet even the most modest proposals to redress the balance receive a hysterical response. When Newsnet Scotland was first launched it was alternately ignored or vilified by the mainstream media. The entirely reasonable and sensible proposals that Scotland should have its own national broadcaster – just like every other self-governing country or territory in Europe – is denounced as SNPTV. The notion that there should be a national TV channel broadcasting in Scots, a language spoken by 1.5 million people, doesn’t even get airtime in a media and political class which is inhabited by linguistic illiterates who refuse to accept the fact that Scots is even a language.

Nothing changes. The media stays stuck in its SNPbad comfort zone, and irrespective of the justification of the story, another little bit of public faith in the Scottish media dies. We’ve heard it all before, too often, too stridently, and few are listening any more. What we need to see is a similar zeal in pursuit of the other political parties, a similar eagerness to promote the views of the independence movement as there is to promote the Union. Until that happens Scottish faith in the media will continue to evaporate away. But there’s as much chance of the Scottish media being representative of Scottish opinion as there is of the newspapers attacking the Tories using public funds to promote Unionism with the same vigour that they attack Michelle Thomson. Eventually people get sick of the problem child, and they disown it.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ‘KL’ and Angus MacInnes Someone identifying themselves only as KL made a bank transfer to my account so they could buy copies of my new books. Unfortunately the only information linked to the payment are the initials KL and I have no means of linking the payment to a mailing address. Could KL please email me and identify themselves so I can get their books sent out. I’ve also received a payment from Angus MacInnes, but he’s not given me his postal address. Could you please get in touch with your mailing address Angus.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer. Please note that books are currently out of stock. I expect to get a new delivery from the printer at the end of this week.

News from the place to the north of the North

Jezza came to Scotland this week, and vowed to restore his moribund party’s fortunes with some dour activities. Labour’s going to counter the joyful positivity of Scotland’s Yes campaign by being miserable, although Johann Lamont already tried that and it didn’t do her much good. Cheery and Johann are two concepts which are usually only found in the same sentence if there’s also a negative in there too, like that one. It’s not clear what Jezza meant by the phrase dour activities, perhaps he thought it sounded couthy and Scottish, but it has been Labour’s propensity for dour activities like wasp chewing and having Gaunie No Dae That Jist Gaunie No as its catch phrase that got it into its current mess in the first place. Perhaps Jezza thinks that the party can be revived with a pep talk from the Rev IM Jolly. People will really flock back home to Labour if they think it’s just like a meeting of the Wee Frees on a wet Wednesday in Wester Ross. Labour, sucking the joy out of politics since forever while hoping no one notices that Jezza’s New Politics are looking suspiciously like the old politics. He’s only been leader a couple of weeks and he’s already demonstrated that his political motor is a bit of a VW diesel.

While Jezza was being miserable in Edinburgh, possibly on account of the fact that he’d just discovered he’ll have had his tea, the Herald newspaper revealed that Labour’s MPs have been instructed to stop mentioning Scotland entirely. Scotland now takes its place on the rapidly lengthening list of things that Labour doesn’t want to mention, like Trident renewal, student fees, Gordie Broon’s Vow, where Mike Arsonist Watson keeps his matches, and Alistair Darling’s expenses claims. Labour has decided that Scotland is so upsetting that it’s better just not to mention us at all. It’s the North British way, which isn’t nationalist at all.

Despite the fact that Labour swear blind that the northern accounting unit which they call Scottish Labour really is a properly autonomous political party, it’s not actually the autonomous party of anywhere, at least not anywhere that Labour wants to admit is a real country. The Labour hierarchy in a place that isn’t England claims that mentioning Scotland plays into the Nationalists’ agenda, because using the name Scotland is acknowledging the fact that Scotland is actually a country and that makes people wonder why Scotland can’t govern itself. It’s promoting separatism to acknowledge the fact that Scotland and England are separate countries.

In fact, what really makes people wonder why Scotland can’t govern itself is the fact that British Unionist parties like Labour keep coming out with such hauf-airsed policies. It’s possibly the first time in recorded history that a political party has attempted to use sheer stupidity to patronise the electorate. Labour wants to change the language and erase over 1000 years of Scottish existence, and is arrogant and stupid enough to believe that its Westminster MPs are influential enough to achieve that goal by simply not mentioning the name Scotland. Deep down in what passes for the party’s soul, there lurks the belief that if you say Scotland three times while turning widdershins, Alicsammin will appear and cast an evil spell on you.

In keeping with the party’s aim of fostering solidarity within the UK, Scottish Labour will now be known as Transgeordie Labour. As a result of the new policy of linguistic engineering, which isn’t a Scottish policy because there is no Scotland to have Scottish policies for, Ian Murray’s job title has been changed to the Shadow Secretary of State for Greater Red Morningside and the party’s justice spokesperson has taken to referring to the Met Polis HQ as That Place To The North Of The North Yard, whereas the BBC will now call it the place where you are – although to be honest that’s what they’ve called us for years now – and Reporting Scotland will have its name changed to Reporting Labour.

The attempt to claim to be the most patriotically Scottish party hasn’t lasted long. Labour are still reeling from the drubbing they got at the polls after Jim Scottish Irn Bru Murphy for Scotland tried to tout the Scottish Labour Scottish Party for Scotland We’re Really Dead Scottish Honest Party. Sadly the voters decided that they were just dead and not honest at all. As a result we now have a rare example of modern politicians adopting the oldest funeral ritual in the world, not speaking the name of the recently deceased. It’s a form of magic, don’t say the name and you will be immune to the evil spirit of Nicola Sturgeon stealing all your expenses claims.

A refusal to mention the name of the recently deceased or things which upset you is a taboo which is widespread amongst traditional cultures, although it’s unlikely to succeed because the rest of us are not going to forget that Scotland is a country just because some Labour MP for the Midlands refuses to utter its name. Whereas traditional peoples adopt the practice as a means of demonstrating respect, Labour is doing it to demonstrate its disrespect. The party would have considerably more success in reviving its fortunes in Scotland if it adopted some other traditional funeral practices from ages long past, like staking out Tony Blair to be pecked at by ravens, or walling Gordie Broon up in a cave – although given the fact that he never appears in public it’s perfectly possible that they’ve already done that.

So Labour wants to restore its fortunes in that place to the north of the North by being miserable and refusing to acknowledge that Scotland exists. This is going to endear Yes voters to the party and make us all flock back home to Labour. Of course, as the famous saying has it, we didn’t leave Labour, Labour left us, and now we’ve got possession of the house we’ve bolted the doors and locked the windaes so that the basterts cannae sneak back in. But it doesn’t look like we need to worry, as it seems that Labour has lost our address.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ‘KL’ Someone identifying themselves only as KL made a bank transfer to my account so they could buy copies of my new books. Unfortunately the only information linked to the payment are the initials KL and I have no means of linking the payment to a mailing address. Could KL please email me and identify themselves so I can get their books sent out. Many thanks.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer.

Great British Weapons of Mass Destruction

So that went well. Jezza came to Scotland for a day to let us know how much he cares about us, and then went back dahn sarf. Although it’s not so much that he cares about Scotland, a country he scarcely understands, as he cares about rescuing the Labour party in Scotland from the deep pit that they are still digging for themselves. Give the Labour party in Scotland a helping hand, and they’ll only use it to excavate deeper.

“Left winger Jeremy Corbyn” as he’s described by a BBC which never utters the phrase “lunatic right wing extremist Iain Duncan Smith”, says that his priority is to win back votes in Scotland. It’s a bit late for winning back votes, Labour’s Scottish ship hasn’t just sailed, it’s struck an iceberg and is currently on the bottom of the ocean where it’s been crushed into insignificance by the weight of public disdain for all the crap that it was laden with, and its time-serving crew of careerists. Good luck with getting that ship underway again. The Labour party in Scotland is proof that crap doesn’t float after all.

And there were all those newspapers wanting to question the Labour leader on his statement the other day that he’d refuse to press the nuclear button. The revelation that their new leader was prepared to renew Trident, but unprepared to use it, made assorted Labour politicians do impressions of enraged baboons throwing monkey poo. So pretty much business as usual then.

Apparently being unwilling to commit genocide makes you unfit to be the Prime Minister of the UK. Mass murder is a Great British tradition in the same way as Bake Off but without the cupcakes and Mel and Sue’s arch presentation. This is one show in which being carbonised wins prizes, at least for colonialists and the City of London. Despite it being a defining feature of Britishness down the centuries, Great British Genocides isn’t likely to appear on your BBC screens any time soon, and it’s not because the likely contestants are all dead now. It’s because this is the Greatest Country in the World © John McTernan, and not in a nationalist way either. It’s not Great British to admit that there has ever been any Great British Wrongdoing. You could ask some Tasmanian Aborigine people, only you can’t because the British killed them off.

Despite, or more accurately because of, all this previous unpleasantness, it seems to have passed unnoticed by the mass media that we live in a state where it’s the guy who doesn’t want to kill millions of people whose motives must be questioned and who is regarded as dangerously unstable, and not the best friend of porkies who’s quite happy to turn entire populations into crispy bacon. Although of course, even he can only do that if he get the approval of the Pentagon, the independence of the British nuclear weapons system is as mythical as the impartiality of Reporting Scotland or a numerate Labour MSP.

But Labour’s right has got what it wanted. The renewal of Trident was sneaked through the party conference without being put to a vote. It’s now party policy even though Labour members didn’t get a say on it. All those enthusiastic young people, determined to have a say in how their country is run, Labour’s old guard is equally determined that they’ll be canvass fodder who’ll do as they’re told. Welcome to the New Politics, same as the Old Politics. The Great British underhand dirty tricks of Labour’s right means that future of the Great British Bacon Frier is safe, insofar as a weapon of mass destruction can be described as “safe”. All the Labour right needs to do now is to hang on until Jezza gets kicked out of office, and then they can go back to choosing a leader who will happily sacrifice hundreds of thousands of lives in pursuit of brownie points with a far right wing American president. That’s the proper Labour way.

Meanwhile, Labour in Scotland and the tiny band of mutant Tories who have survived the toxic radioactivity poured upon their party by the Scottish electorate choose to play party political games instead of getting on with the serious issues that they say the Scottish Government isn’t getting on with, what with it being obsessed with another referendum and everything. Today’s Furst Meenister’s Questions was a disgrace.

I don’t recall any SNP leaders questioning previous Labour first ministers on the assorted misdeeds of dozens of Labour MPs, and demanding to know what they were going to do about it. Yet today Kezia 50% literate Dugdale was only interested in what Nicola Sturgeon may or may not have known about the private business interests of Michelle Thomson MP and was no longer interested in Labour’s oft-repeated claim that 50% of Scotland’s poorest children can’t read, and that 100% of Labour Holyrood leaders cannae count. She got slapped down by the Presiding Officer for wasting parliamentary time, but she ploughed on regardless in pursuit of some SNPbadness.

You’d think that she’d have been a bit more circumspect on the day that her colleague, the charisma free zone that is James Kelly MSP, was forced to apologise for breaching Holyrood’s Code of Conduct after running to the papers with a complaint he’d made to the Standards Commissionar against Alicsammin. The complaint was rejected on the grounds it was irrelevant and a waste of time, a bit like Labour’s front bench team in Holyrood.

Ruthie Davidson, who can now safely get on tanks again after the polis announced they’d not be pressing charges over she revealed voting patterns in the referendum before polls had closed, has claimed that knowledge of Michelle Thomson’s alleged activities was widespread. Although if that was true you really have to wonder why Ruth and her pals didn’t bring it up during the election campaign, because it’s not like they’re averse to slinging some mud, just like they’re slinging it now. The truth of the matter is that it’s Michelle Thomson’s solicitor who has been allegedly involved in dodgy practices, no Michelle Thomson, and the Edinburgh MP voluntarily resigned the party whip until the allegations could be properly investigated. Ruth didn’t resign the party whip even though she herself was being investigated by the polis for something she admitted live on national TV.

We’ve got playground politics pursued by people who have their priorities backwards. This is Scotland in the Union. Being in favour of weapons of mass destruction is no help to Labour or the Tories in Scotland, all they’re destroying is themselves.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR ‘KL’ Someone identifying themselves only as KL made a bank transfer to my account so they could buy copies of my new books. Unfortunately the only information linked to the payment are the initials KL and I have no means of linking the payment to a mailing address. Could KL please email me and identify themselves so I can get their books sent out. Many thanks.

Donate to the Dug This blog relies on your support and donations to keep going – I need to make a living, and have bills to pay. Clicking the donate button will allow you to make a payment directly to my Paypal account. You do not need a Paypal account yourself to make a donation. You can donate as little, or as much, as you want. Many thanks.

Order the Collected Yaps of the Wee Ginger Dug Vols 1 & 2 for only £21.90 for both volumes. A limited number of signed copies is still available, so get your order in now! P&P will be extra, approximately £3 per single volume or £4 for both sent together. If you only want to order one volume, please specify which. Single volumes are available for £10.95 per copy.

To order please send an email with WEE GINGER BOOK ORDER in the subject field to weegingerbook@yahoo.com giving your name, postal address, and email address and which volumes (1, 2 or both) you wish to order. I will contact you with details of how to make payment. Payment can be made by Paypal, or by cheque or bank transfer.