Labour still hasn’t found what it’s voting for

Nov30 by weegingerdug

Wee Dougie Alexander, the political patron saint of holy wullies, has got himself a new job after being booted out by the voters of Paisley at the last election. The Guardian described Wee Dougie’s debacle as a shock defeat for the Labour party, but the only people shocked by it were Wee Dougie and the Westminions. The rest of us didn’t think it was shocking, we thought it was comedy karmic come-uppance.

After spending a few months avoiding a work assessment interview with the jobbie centre, Dougie has now been appointed as a poverty sermoniser for the only man on the planet with a bigger ego than your average former Labour shadow foreign secretary. Bono of U2 is paying Dougie a very large amount of money in order to allow Bono to believe that he’s a serious spokesperson on world poverty, and not just an ego with sunglasses and a back catalogue from the 1980s and 90s, which is the last time that U2 were relevant. Coincidentally the 1990s is also the last time that the Labour party were relevant, so you can see where the mutual attraction lies.

Dougie likes giving sermons, and Bono likes preaching, so it’s a match made in marketing heaven. Now Bono has another member of his entourage to take on the two planes he needs when he jets into a developing nation to hug an elderly person with a lip plug. One plane is required for Bono and his hangers on, the other is for the sunglasses and the hat. Although to be fair, Bono has listened to the critics who have pointed out the hypocrisy of jetting in on a private plane in search of a photo opportunity about poverty, and from now on the sunglasses and the hat will be flying economy.

Bono is the only person in the music business that even Chris Martin of Coldplay can feel superior to. He has a famously big ego. It is said in Ireland that the only difference between God and Bono is that God doesn’t wander around Dublin imagining he’s Bono. Although that’s a bit cruel, as Bono doesn’t wander around Dublin imagining he’s God, he’s got a luxury car with a private driver.

You’d also think that he might actually manage to find what he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for if he took off those pissing sunglasses. But at least he did finally explain why it is that he always wears sunglasses and a hat, even indoors. It’s because he’s a tit. Bono’s only redeeming feature is that he isn’t a middle aged man who calls himself The Edge. A middle aged wealthy man is as Edgy as a platinum credit card and a reservation in a posh restaurant. As edgy in fact as a former Labour foreign secretary with a penchant for writing pseudo-intellectual articles in the Scotsman about Scottish philosophers in which he manages to spell all the philosophers’ names wrongly.

It’s quite an appropriate appointment really. U2 are infamous for their tax arrangements, and Dougie was infamous for arranging tax laws so that very rich groups like U2 could avoid paying much tax. Then the two of them can get together and bewail the poverty and deprivation that’s caused because very rich people don’t pay their fair share of tax. They both made poverty history, for themselves. Bono can sing a wee song about it and get tons in royalty payments from Apple, and Dougie can jet off to a conference in a lovely hotel in an exotic location, and everyone is happy except the auld guy with the lip plug.

Now we can look forward to a range of Labour inspired songs from U2, like I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Voting For, How To Undismantle an Atomic Bomb, or Stuck in a Manifesto Commitment You Can’t Get Out Of. And if you’re exceptionally unlucky, the next time you buy an iPod, Apple will very kindly preload it with Dougie’s speeches to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland.

It’s a bit of a come down, from being the man hailed as the next foreign secretary to becoming the man hailed as a groupie. Wee Dougie is the world’s most implausible rock chick. Sadly for the planet he’s got little option except helping to give Bono a donor boner after Dougie’s proposal to start a tribute act to the Carpenters failed to get off the ground when his sister told him that he’d have more success Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft than in getting her to work with him again.

It’s not entirely clear what expertise Wee Dougie has in reducing world poverty. You might think that if he’d been marginally more successful in reducing poverty in Paisley then he might have kept his job as an MP. But Dougie was more concerned with striding the world stage with very short legs and masterminding a disaster of a campaign for the Labour party. Completely screwing up what had been perceived as an excellent chance for the Labour party to get back into government might not seem to you or me to be a passport to a six figure salary, but clearly Bono thinks differently.

Likewise the BBC seem to believe that John McTernan is a political expert, which is true because he did after all mastermind the campaign that delivered the Labour party in Scotland its greatest defeat ever. That’s got to count for some sort of political expertise, even if only in reverse. And Jim Murphy, who is capable of starting a fight in an empty building and then nursing a grudge about it for decades, has been appointed as a peace envoy in the Caucasus.

The one sure fire way to end poverty is to have an unsuccessful career as a Unionist politician. At least you’ll never have to worry about your own personal poverty. Westminster politics is a career where the consequences of failure are indistinguishable from the consequences of success, and that is why our political system is in such a sorry state. Even when politicians are held to account at the ballot box, they just land some cushy post somewhere courtesy of the contacts they made during their time in office, or they get appointed to the House of Lords and continue to wield their baleful influence on our public life.

We might never be able to escape Bono’s ego, but there’s an escape route from Westminster, and it’s getting more attractive with every passing day. Labour might still haven’t found what it’s voting for, but the rest of us have. And it’s not Labour.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE Barking Up the Right Tree has now been published and is an anthology of my articles for The National newspaper. You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

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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. Get your order in today – an ideal Christmas present!

Great British double standards

Nov28 by weegingerdug

There are two kinds of people in the United Kingdom. There are those who divide people into two kinds of people, and there are those who don’t. If you’re one of the former you can also divide people in the United Kingdom into two kinds, those who are allowed to level accusations of Nazi behaviour at members of the Labour party, and those who are not. It’s a bit like terrorism really. You’re only a terrorist if you have a brown skin or are of a left wing or independentist persuasion. If you’re white and have far right wing views – you know, an actual Nazi – then you’re not a terrorist, you’re just an extremist like the not-terrorist who shot up the family planning clinic in Colorado. It’s all part and parcel of the Great British Double Standards.

Great British double standards mean that if you’re a supporter of Scottish independence, you are most definitely not allowed to claim that Labour politicians are quislings, fascists, or gauleiters, because that makes you an evil cybernat and the papers will print articles for weeks demanding that Nicola Sturgeon comes round to your house to berate you personally on the doorstep while criticising your dress sense and your taste in curtains and insisting that you never vote in favour of independence ever again. This is because in the absence of a positive case for the Union, it’s only by casting Yes voters out into the utter darkness hiding behind closed poor taste curtains can the Unionist media ensure that there will be a majority for the Union the next time we have a referendum.

Remember when Unionist politicians were forever promising that the positive case for the Union would be along any minute? Ah the nostalgia. Now what passes for a positive case is Ian Murray finding new things to abstain on, Labour ganging up with the Tories to find new ways to screw over the Scottish Government, and the public presentation of Trident’s weapons of mass destruction as a job creation scheme. But I digress.

The only people who are allowed to call Labour politicians Nazis are other Unionist politicians. Then it’s perfectly OK and not bullying at all. This is because in the United Kingdom it only counts as bullying when the insult issues from the mouth of someone who doesn’t actually hold any position of power or influence, like when a granny with an internet connection in Fife tweets that a Labour politician is a quisling. Then it’s terrible bullying and abuse, and the Daily Mail will demand that Nicola Sturgeon pay a visit to Glenrothes to make a negative assessment of the state of the granny’s net curtains. The affrontment.

However if you hold an elected post, or put more accurately, an elected post or a position of responsibility for a Unionist party, people actually have to kill themselves before anyone is going to call you out for bullying or insulting behaviour. And even then it’s by no means guaranteed. The persons allegedly responsible for bullying the young Tory activist who killed himself had a boss in Grant Shapps who turned a blind eye to the multiple accusations made against them over the course of a lengthy period.

It took over two years for Grant Shapps to resign despite a mounting catalogue of shifty behaviour and multiple identities. He used the name Michael Green to flog a get rich quick scheme online, but the only person who was granted any benefit was Grant. He also went by the name Sebastian Fox, which sounds like the writer of cheap pulp novels, which is appropriate as Grant is a master of fiction. Then he invented a totally ficticious middle initial for himself, and went by the name Grant V Shapps. It’s not clear whether the V stood for vain, vacuous, vapid, vegetable, venal or vulgar. Personally my money is on venereal, which is descriptive of a sick wee knobend.

That said, it’s unfair to claim that the UK’s political establishment operates double standards as two sets of standards aren’t enough for them. Grant Shapps has at least three, one to go with each of the identities he created for himself. What we can be sure of however, is that if any one of Grant’s personalities had called Jeremy Corbyn a Nazi, he wouldn’t be called on to resign for it. This is precisely what a Labour MP did this week, and the person deemed to be in the wrong wasn’t the Labour MP, it was the guy who got called a Nazi.

John Spellar MP, formerly a minister of state under Tony Blair, claimed this week that Jeremy Corbyn was acting like a fuhrer for opposing British military action in Syria. It’s possibly the first time in the history of invective that someone has been called a fascist for not wanting to invade Poland. In the UK nowadays the dangerous people aren’t the ones who are ready to rush into carpeting far away countries with bombings and tracer bullets and drone strikes, they’re the ones who demand that all peaceful measures are exhausted before we go to war. John Spellar supported Tony Blair in his rush to bomb and blast, and that didn’t exactly end well, but it’s not John’s judgement which is questioned, it’s Jeremy’s. Great British bombs are better bombs it seems.

We’re asked to put our faith in the judgement of people who rush to make accusations of bullying and abuse, and then indulge in precisely the same behaviour themselves. We’re ask to trust the judgement of politicians who see warfare as a first option and not a last resort, and who campaign for war without any clear idea of how to create peace.

Spellar and another Blairite MP are calling on Jeremy to resign, because they don’t like the policies of the party that they belong to. You’d think that in a normal universe they should leave that party and go and find one which is more congenial to their politics, like for example the Tories. It’s not the politicians who are wrong, it’s the ordinary party members. It’s not the powerful who bully and abuse, it’s the powerless. It’s the peacemakers who are dangerous, not the warmongers. But we don’t live in a normal universe, we live with Great British double standards.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE Barking Up the Right Tree has now been published and is an anthology of my articles for The National newspaper and is being published by Vagabond Voices press, who also publish Jim Sillars. The dug is in exhalted company. None of the articles collected in this book have appeared on this blog.

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

A fatal fart bomb in a trance

Nov26 by weegingerdug

We live in a country where policy is decided on the basis of appearance and not substance. In UK politics it’s not the Christmas present that’s important it’s the shininess of the wrapping on the big boxes under the tree. Only they contain nothing but air that’s been warmed up by a passage through the bowels of a spin doctor. The Christmas spirit is nowhere to be seen, lost in the fog of farts.

This week we’ve witnessed more examples of big shiny boxes filled with farts. The first was the UK government’s surprise U-turn on tax credits, a move made not out of any great concern for the ill effects of austerity cuts on the low paid, but rather an attempt to wrong foot the Labour party. While it’s a good thing that the income of the lowest paid isn’t going to suffer a swingeing cut – at least for now – so that big corporations can continue to evade their tax bills, that wasn’t the motive for deferring the cuts. In the UK, scoring a cheap political point in the pantomime theatrics of the Commons is worth far more than protecting the poor and the vulnerable.

Labour’s Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell tried a bit of fartery of his own. But in the words of Chairman Mao, the running dogs of capitalist imperialism fart louder than the proletariat. And in the words of the great Lennonist, if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow, most certainly not with the UK media. McDonnell’s quip was obviously a joke, but when your opponents already believe that you’re a card carrying member of the international proletariat revolutionary brigade, quoting Mao is a bit too meta for the raw meat eaters of the media and the Commons. All that happened was that Labour lost the initiative and the focus was placed on John’s red face and not on Osborne’s embarrassing U-turn. Meanwhile the poor and the vulnerable in Britain are used as political scorecards, starving on the sidelines while the powerful jeer at one another and lob fart bombs across the floor of the Commons chamber.

Some of the British establishment’s fart bombs are factually fatal. This week the Conservative government and its Labour supporters want to take military action in Syria. David Cameron wants to ensure that he’s got a majority in the Commons before risking another vote. Losing the vote would be a victory for ISIS he claimed, because apparently in the UK in 2015 wanting peace is the same as supporting terrorism while wanting to bomb things means you’re opposed to violence. It’s all clear in the fog of farts, and boys get to play with toys and look important while reporters eulogise a new war.

It’s not that anyone thinks that British military involvement will actually make any difference, that’s not the point. It’s never been the point. The real point is that the British establishment is afraid of some other things even more than they’re afraid of the murdering terrorists of the so-called Islamic State of Islamic Apostates who’ve measured off a part of the infinite and who call it god. A part of the infinite that doesn’t include compassion, empathy or kindness. A part of the infinite that doesn’t include the realisation that if god is all-powerful, omnipotent and almighty then he or she doesn’t require assistance from a 20 year old with a grudge and a suicide belt. ISIS is fearsome in its ignorance and its violence, but it’s not what really frightens the British state. The British state has measured off its own part of the infinite too, a part that doesn’t include common sense, realism, or much in the way of self-awareness.

What really terrifies the British establishment is that Britain will be seen to be what it really is, not the great power of politicians’ pretensions, but a small European state whose glory days are long in the past, a useless appendage to the Pentagon whose only role is to provide a figleaf of internationalism to US military action. Britain is past it, a power in its own living room but nowhere else, and it’s desperate to cling on to what it once was because otherwise it’s faced with the realisation that it’s perfectly average and unremarkable. The British establishment is terrified of normalcy.

In the factory of international affairs, the UK is the guy with the clipboard who rushes about trying to look busy while never actually doing anything useful. A bombing campaign in Syria will produce more civilian casualties than it will damage ISIS. It’s more important to produce a fusilade of fatal fart fog, hiding the impotence of the UK. The fact that innocent civilians are likely to die in the cross fire is of no importance when the public image of the British establishment is at stake.

The bottom line is that British planes joining in the bombing campaign against ISIS will not make a shred of difference to the outcome. The Americans, and now the French, have been bombing ISIS for over a year, but there has been no real difference to the picture on the ground. ISIS has been driven out of some areas in the Kurdish north, but has made gains in Palmyra and other places.

It has already been reported that the US planes which are bombing the so-called Islamic State often return to base with their payloads complete because they can’t find any more targets to bomb. Adding a few more British planes isn’t going to change that any. ISIS won’t suddenly start putting targets in the open just to give the RAF something to hit. What British involvement does do however is to give the British media something to talk about, and allows the UK establishment to pretend that it’s doing something useful as it scooshes about the Middle East with a clipboard of destruction deploying the politics of fantasies. We don’t have a foreign policy in this country, we have a fatal fart bomb in a trance.

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

Altered State : part 3

Nov25 by weegingerdug

The third and final instalment of Phantom Power’s documentary looking at the role of the media during the independence referendum campaign.

Apocalypse vow

Nov23 by weegingerdug

So you remember all those things that were going to be safe only if Scotland voted No last year? How’s that all working out then. It would appear that the infamous vow wasn’t so much of a vow as a serving suggestion with ingredients that Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to eat on account of us having to make do with the crumbs from the Westminster table. The vow has been called a lie, but that’s unfair to lying. Telling the weans that if they’re good then Santa will bring them lots of nice prezzies is a lie. That’s a cute and cuddly sort of lie, but if you think that Gordie Broon is cute and cuddly you’re probably the sort of person who coos at the sight of slime and snuggles with snotters. So George Osborne then.

What the No campaign did was to tell Scotland that if we were good then Santa Westminster would give us lots of power prezzies. But Santa Westminster didn’t deliver, so that was a lie and if things were left to lie there then all it would be would be a lie. Only Santa Westminster didn’t just fail to deliver, he also came and took the Lego, smashed the Playstation and hid the TV remote control while telling us that the real message of Christmas was that Scotland should be excluded from voicing opinions on the North Pole. As if that wasn’t enough he made Rudolf into a venison casserole he served up to the bankers at the Mansionhouse dinner, and then slashed the incomes of the elves and other people on zero hours contracts.

This week another broken promise joined the increasingly lengthening list of broken promises of things we were assured would only be safe if we voted No, so Scotland voted no to discover that they weren’t safe after all. We were told loudly and often that the only way that the Royal Navy would commission ships to be built on the Clyde would be if Scotland voted No. Scotland voted No but the ship building is a no too. The Royal Navy isn’t going to commission the promised 13 new frigates after all, the order is to be cut to eight, and even that number isn’t certain. 3000 jobs on the Clyde are being put at risk so that Westminster can afford to pay for its weapons of mass destruction. The reduction is because the cost of Trident has soared by £6 billion, so real skilled jobs on the Clyde are to be sacrificed for the fantasy jobs at Faslane that only exist in Jackie Baillie’s imagination. The UK isn’t keeping Scotland’s jobs safe, it’s costing us jobs, it’s making us unsafe.

The UK is like a late middle aged man with impotence. He still strives for the glory days of his youth so he spends on expensive toys that he can’t afford and lets the kids go hungry to compensate for the fact that he can’t get it up any more. This is a country which is about to go to war yet again, not because British military intervention would actually make any real difference. A few more bombs from the handful of planes that the RAF can spare won’t change the outcome of the war in Syria. The reason that the UK is going to war is because it allows Davie Cameron to pose as an international statesman. It allows an aged superpower that’s no longer a power in its own living room to pretend that it still matters in a world where it’s long since been an irrelevance. The only thing that the UK can still get up is the Prime Minister’s tongue up the backside of the US President. It would be laughably pathetic if it weren’t for the fact that people are going to die.

Last week it was the closure of the steel works which were supposed to be safe if Scotland voted No. Then it was the closure of tax offices costing hundreds of jobs, the very same tax offices that we were told needed the UK to keep alive. And the scare stories told to pensioners about the risk to their pensions if Scotland voted Yes have turned out to be true, because Scotland voted No. Scotland’s budget is being slashed. The new powers are responsiblities without power. How many more promises will unravel before Scotland realises that we were had last year. But then the Unionist parties never had any intention of fulfilling any of their promises, they were promises and commitments in the exact same way that a junkie swears blind that they’re going to change when they’re faced with the prospect of their drugs being taken away.

They’re creating a wasteland and calling it a Union. Westminster’s strategy is to weaken and impoverish Scotland so that Scots will fear that we’re incapable of making our own way in the world. But it’s not going to work. We know who has their hands on the levers of macro-economic powers, we know who’s responsible for setting overall budgets. We know who has made Scotland’s MPs second class representatives. We know who has replaced good governance for Scotland with scare stories and fear campaigns. And we know it’s not Scotland or the Scottish government. But don’t worry, we’re still going to get control over road signs.

So it’s not technically correct to say that the vow was a lie. It was a farrago of fibs wrapped up in a tissue of tall tales, marinated in mendacity, fricasseed with fabrications, then delivered with a side order of cant and served up with larceny and an assault on common decency. They can tell us until they’re red white and blue in the face that they’ve delivered the vow, but we can see what’s being delivered for ourselves. It’s job losses. It’s the loss of influence in a parliament that is still Scotland’s too. It’s impoverishment. It’s war. It’s benefit cuts and poor wages. It’s insecurity and debt. It’s Apocalypse Vow. But it’s not an apocalypse for Scotland, it’s an apocalypse for the Union.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE BOOK LAUNCH in Edinburgh on 24 November at 6.30pm in Power Press Bookshop in West Nicolson Street. Come along and meet me and the dug and get a signed copy!

Barking Up the Right Tree has now been published and is an anthology of my articles for The National newspaper and is being published by Vagabond Voices press, who also publish Jim Sillars. The dug is in exhalted company. None of the articles collected in this book have appeared on this blog.

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

A short blog break and a book launch

Nov12 by weegingerdug

I’m going to have a short break from blogging because I’ve got a visitor coming from the USA and my services as a tour guide will be required. Peter is a very special friend, we’ve chatted online for 18 years but had never actually met until I visited Boston over the summer. When you chat with a person for that length of time you know that you’re going to get on, but neither of us expected what happened when we finally met – let’s just say there was a Grangemouth’s worth of chemistry. This is Peter’s first trip to Scotland, and I hope that he’ll fall in love with this small damp country of ours as much as he seems to be enamoured with me! Normal blogging service will be resumed after the 23rd of the month when he goes back to America.

Meanwhile the launch of my new book Barking Up the Right Tree will be on Tuesday 17th November at the Yes Bar in Drury Street in Glasgow. The launch starts from 7pm and everyone is welcome to attend. I’ll be there with the dug signing copies of the new book and it will be great to see you there. You can meet me, and more importantly Ginger the Dug – who loves attention and will happily pose for photos in return for a doggy treat.

Published by Vagabond Voices, the book is an anthology of my articles for The National newspaper and can be purchased in all good bookshops or online on the Vagabond Voices website or on Amazon for the bargain price of £7.95. There’s also going to be an Edinburgh launch, probably on 24th November at Word Power books in West Nicolson St, details to follow when they’re confirmed.

Signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps are still available for £21.90 the pair plus P&P. Contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for ordering details.

Matron Dugdale’s Bide-a-Wee Mitigation Care Home

Nov11 by weegingerdug

This week’s word is mitigation. It was last week’s word too, and it will be next week’s as well, and the week after that, stretching ahead into a depressing future where it doesn’t matter if you take the red pill or the blue pill – you’re always going to wake up with the Tories. In the nightmares past and the nightmares still to come Labour doesn’t cease with its demands that the Scottish Government mitigate the damage done to public services and the low paid and the vulnerable by bastert Tories looking to mitigate the tax bills of rich people and large companies. Mind you, Labour is a whole lot less keen on doing anything to prevent the need for mitigation in the first place. Labour is the party of respite care, not the party of cure.

Being force fed red pills and blue pills means that periodically Scotland comes down with a bout of the Tories. We live in a country whose body politic is sick and ill, infected by the disease of Toriness giein us the gyp and the humph. Symptoms include weakness, depression, raging anger, and projectile vomiting whenever Fluffymundell comes on the telly and does his colonial governor act. It’s a raging epidemic, when we’ve got one of our regular attack of the Tories thousands of people aren’t able to go into work, because they discover that they’ve been made redundant.

In order to get over the last long lasting attack of the Tories, Labour innoculated itself with the Thatcher virus and stopped being the workers’ party. It became the party of managing the expectations of the workers on behalf of the bosses. Now it makes no difference whether you vote Labour or you vote Tory, you get Tory. Take the red pill, same as the blue pill, they’ll both make you boak.

Labour didn’t vote against the latest round of cuts that the Tories are diseasing us with, they abstained. Then Labour’s peers in the Lords voted down a Lib Dem motion to send the tax credits cuts back to the Commons and instead voted for a motion to delay the effect – but to make them worse in the long term. It’s a bit like saying you’ve helped a family in debt by arranging a bigger loan at a higher rate of interest to pay off the loan that they were struggling with in the first. Vote Labour, get wongapolitics, and pay through the nose for Tory cuts. This is Labour’s definition of voting against the cuts – by voting for deeper cuts later on.

Then having failed dismally to vote against anything, Labour’s miserable shower of maliciously incompetents finally decided it was time that they did something. So they voted against devolving tax credits to the Scottish parliament. After all, who wants the power to stop a mad Tory axeman chopping off your legs when you have Labour to mitigate the damage with some uncosted bandages.

But never fear, Labour in Scotland is organising a national day of action on Saturday against the Tory cuts. They’re going to come to a shopping centre near you for an hour or two and hand out some leaflets, because that’s really going to put the shiters up George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith. No, say Labour, we’re not actually going to do anything to protect you from the Tories, and we’re not going to allow you to protect yourself from them. But look, isn’t this a lovely leaflet. Labour’s Walter Mitties and their mitigation are the methodone of politics, and they’re lost in a reverie where they’re actually relevant.

Now stepping out of the haze comes Gordie Broon, the man who worked his little ex-prime ministerial socks off, pacing up and down church halls in front of tiny invited audiences of media people up and down the land to make sure that Scotland would remain at the mercy of the illness, is terribly upset about how unwell we’ve all become. Labour is more concerned about the hypothetical virus of nationalism than they are about the very real contagion of Conservatism, and by denying us the cure they’re part of the disease.

Scotland wants a cure, not a wee trip to Matron Dugdale’s Bide-a-Wee Respite Care Home, but Labour and the Tories voted down a proposal to give the Scottish Parliament the power to choose when or if Scotland should have another independence referendum. Red pill, blue pill, both stick in the craw. But the red pill and the blue pill pushers don’t want us to stop taking the medicine that makes us sick. You can’t cure yourself, said Labour, you can have some of our mitigation medicine instead. Take this red pill, it comes with a cost to your self-esteem and your self-confidence. Take a dependency trip and we’ll put a bandage on the cuts that the nasty Tories inflicted. But we won’t let you escape from them. Labour needs the Tories to keep harming us all so Labour can pose as the angel with the red lamp, whoring Scotland for electoral profit. All for the myth of mitigation.

It’s not even like our illness is self-inflicted. England suffers from bouts of the Tories too, but in their case they bring it on themselves due to their unhealthy diet of Daily Mails and Telegraphs. Scotland may come under a barrage of criticism for our supposed love of deep fried food, but at least we don’t vote Tory. And now we won’t vote Labour either. Their games are transparent, their lies are obvious. For them politics is a buggin’s turn of pill popping that keeps us all sick and dependent on them. You’d think that the results of the General Election in May might have shaken some sense into them. But no, they’ve got worse. So we’ll just have to do the same in May next year. Mitigate that, Labour. Mitigate yourselves. Mitigate your own oblivion.

When the mitigation medicine is part of the illness then it’s time to cure yourself. We’ve already started to purge ourselves of red pills and blue pills. It’s only a matter of time before we get them out of our system and flush them away for good.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE

My new book is due to be published on 23 November. Barking Up the Right Tree is an anthology of my articles for The National newspaper and is being published by Vagabond Voices press, who also publish Jim Sillars. The dug is in exhalted company. None of the articles collected in this book have appeared on this blog.

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

The fog of Union

Nov10 by weegingerdug

The vow was the cunning plan of the Unionists in the last fevered days of the independence referendum. The entire point of the vow was to phrase things in a sufficiently vague manner so that the Westminions could claim that what was on the table was superdooper devomax, the most federocious federalissimo, and the devolviest devolving in the devolution of devolvement, when in fact what they intended to do was whatever it took to ensure that Scottish independence supporters would never put the shiters up Westminster ever again. A year on and the Westminions claim that the vow has been delivered, a claim that they keep repeating in the vain hope that if they say it often enough then someone other than the editor of the Daily Record might actually believe them.

The problem for the Unionist parties is that fogginess smothers both ways. According to a recent opinion poll, a mere 9% of Scots believe that the vow has been fulfilled, because just as the Unionists constructed the vow so that it could mean anything at all, the people of Scotland came to their own conclusions about what the vow was going to mean. We decided it was going to mean what the Unionist parties implied it meant in the days before the independence referendum, and we decided we were going to hold them to that promise – which is why there was an SNP landslide in May. However Westminster is fixated on the referendum vote and would prefer not to think about the subsequent election.

The piss poor proposals of the Smith Commission were Westminster’s response to the referendum vote, they’ve still not responded to May’s election results. The result of that lack of response is to tell Scotland in no uncertain terms that how we vote in Westminster elections doesn’t matter, but if that’s the case they’re also telling us that Westminster doesn’t matter either. They can’t have it both ways. They want to have it both ways, but they’re dealing with an electorate which can recognise a pauchle as quickly as it takes to say that the vow has been delivered.

Monday evening’s debate on the Scotland Bill was a farce. Well I say debate. It was a debate in the same way that a drunk man in a different room with his fingers in his ears going la-la-la-la is taking what you say seriously. The Westminions were notable only for their absence, and unlike Aliestair Carmichael most of them didn’t have the excuse of being up before a judge for telling a big fat porkie. They were in the Commons bars instead, with their fingers in their ears going la-la-la-la we’re not listening to what Scotland is saying. Then when a vote was called the gentlemen and ladies of the Commons who had voted to deprive Scottish MPs from having a say on English legislation scurried out from under their rocks to vote on Scottish legislation. And they voted down every amendment put forward by the party which was returned in 56 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies just a few short months ago.

There were a few MPs from English constituencies in attendance, and they got most of the speaking time. For the first half hour of the all too short time allocated to Scotland by the Commons, we were regaled by a discourse on the importance of English devolution. Then we got the balloon brained Alberto Costa, a Scottish Tory who represents an English constituency, telling us how it was a good thing that there are no Scottish representatives on the Commons committee that’s going to strip us all of our human rights, because human rights are a reserved matter. In Alberto’s world, Scottish MPs are not allowed any influence on British matters. But as the evening unfolded we discovered that Westminster doesn’t want Scottish MPs to have any influence on Scottish matters either.

Although they were asked a number of times, Tory ministers have refused to confirm that any top up payments made by the Scottish Government to mitigate tax credit cuts won’t be clawed back by the UK Treasury and the DWP. That’s just a risk you’ll have to take, smirked Fluffy Mundell when he was asked directly about it by Mhairi Black. Which means that’s precisely what the Tories will do. Any additional payments made by the Scottish Government to those affected by tax credit cuts will be deemed income by the DWP and the Treasury, and other benefits will be cut accordingly and the tax paid will be raised proportionately. The effect will be zero benefit to those affected. The politicking and positioning of the last few days was shown to be a charade by Mundell’s refusal to give a simple answer to a simple question.

Being genetically incapable of imagining that Scotland can have control of anything, Labour voted against allowing Scotland to control abortion law, because we need a male dominated Westminster to defend Scotland’s women from the female led parties in Holyrood. The move was motivated by nothing more than anti-Scottish racism, the deep rooted belief amongst certain sections of the British establishment that Scots are atavistic primitives who think feminism means allowing the little woman to decide what’s for tea.

Despite making a song and dance for the last couple of weeks about how the Scottish Parliament ought to mitigate tax credit cuts, Labour voted against the devolution of tax credits, thus making themselves look like massively hypocritical opportunists. Since the Tories were going to vote the measure down anyway, Labour could have voted for it safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t going to pass, and then the Tories would have copped all the blame. Instead they allied themselves with the Tories yet again. Labour’s only got one job along with its one Scottish MP, and that’s to oppose the Tories. They can’t even do that.

That wasn’t here here you heard in the chamber of the Commons, it was the sound of nails being hammered into the coffin of the Labour party. In this debate Labour proved that not only is it determined to frustrate the will of the Scottish people, that it’s self-centred and selfish, that would be be bad enough, but on top of all that it also proved that it’s very very stupid. But then you only need to hear James Kelly MSP open his gob and you can work that one out for yourself.

The Union is dying, and it’s dying because the people who say that they love it don’t love it enough to keep it alive. They love their power and their privilege and their entitlement far more. And with every move they make to keep hold of their power, the end of the Union comes ever closer, smothered to death in a fog of conceit. But the fog will clear and we can see an independent nation taking shape. Bring it on.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

Remembering the appearance of things

Nov9 by weegingerdug

So it was Remembrance Sunday yesterday, warmongerers and advisors to arms companies put on their best suits and their blood red poppies and stood in silence in memory of those they’d killed in the furtherance of their careers and for the advancement of their bank balances. Tony Blair was there, bowed like a vulture weeping for the bones it’s picked clean. He prayed to his god that he won’t go to hell for the lives he’s lost and the deaths he’s cost. It was a ceremony best watched in silence, if only because then we wouldn’t have to hear the oleaginous voice over by Nicholas Witchell, casting establishment judgement in the BBC’s impartial way.

There was only one man who was being judged yesterday, and it was the one who wasn’t responsible for war and death. We live in a country where the powerful and influential see fit to question the motives of the man who doesn’t want to kill en masse, who will go to extraordinary lengths to preserve life and peace. This is the guy we’re supposed to be suspicious of, not Tony and his toxic tongue. Jezza gets so much criticism in the press that you’d almost think he was a member of the SNP. Almost, but not quite.

The big news was that Jeremy Corbyn didn’t bow as obsequiously as the Daily Mail and the Sun might have liked. The Sun is the paper that traduced the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, so that publication taking the moral high ground on respect for the dead is a bit like Al Capone complaining that widows completely ruin the spirit of Valentine’s Day or getting a lecture on care of the elderly from Dr Harold Shipman. Although if Jezza had prostrated himself full length on the ground in front of the Cenotaph, the poppy fascists would just have complained that his jacket was covered in mud and muck and how dare he disrespect the veterns by appearing in public in clothes that need a good wash. Our grandparents fought and died for Fairy non-biological you know. Jeremy Corbyn attracts more press acreage about his clothing than Kate Middleton does, discussion of the leader of the Labour party in the national media is the very definition of shallow.

You might think that the fact that an avowed late middle aged left winger who isn’t Italian has a sense of style that makes a Chums catalogue look fashionable is news in the same way that Nicholas Witchel is a vacuous brown-noser is news. Anarchodandyists like myself who believe in bringing about the downfall of global capitalism while being terribly well dressed are few and far between. Even so there was still more press discussion of the colour of Jezza’s tie and the state of its knottage than there was of the real scandal of Remembrance Sunday – the fact that General Sir Nicholas Houghton the Chief of Staff of the armed forces went on national TV in full uniform emblazoned with his blood red hipocripoppy and showed that he’s got little understanding of the democracy that all those service people died to protect. But then generals in splendid uniforms don’t tend to die in action, just the men and women they command.

Because when you’re a high ranking officer who briefs the press anonymously that you’d support a coup d’etat to overthrow an elected government if that government threatens your boy toys, or you’re an army chief of staff who goes on national TV in uniform and pontificates about the undesirability of a government that threatens your boy toys, then you cross the line and are no longer defenders of democracy who deserve the respect of the public. You become a threat to democracy who should be court martialed, because you’ve demonstrated that you put the interests of the armed forces above the interests of the country they’re sworn to defend. You make the people your enemy and you become the enemy of the people. This is the danger of the poppy fetish, it puts the armed forces beyond criticism or reproach, and when that happens democracy is endangered and remembrance of the fallen topples that which they died to uphold.

Who invited a general onto Andrew Marr’s politics show anyway? It’s not the first time that Andrew Marr’s programme has done a disservice to democracy in its pursuit of a headline. The general should have known better, and Marr should have known not to indulge him, because the thing about soldiers in a democracy is that when an elected government tells them to do something that’s legal, they do it. If an elected government tells the armed forces that it wants to get rid of nukes, then the only appropriate response from the armed forces is “How deep a chasm do you want them chucked into Sir/Madam?” In a democracy they are servicepeople, the clue is in the name. When they cease to serve then they become a danger that must be kept in check.

The army has no role to play in policy making. It’s not up to generals to decide whether the country has nukes or not. But even more shockingly, the general’s intervention was supported by Maria Eagle, Labour’s own defence spokesperson. Labour is no stranger to internecine warfare. Maria could teach the general a thing or three about back stabbing.

The UK has got armed services where there are more admirals than ships and more generals than regiments. The defence services are overblown, oversized, and their senior officers are over privileged – and still overwhelmingly come from the same small social groups which are likewise over represented in Parliament and in the media. They protect themselves from criticism, hiding behind a poppy and the service of working class kids who are thrown out into the streets once their time in uniform is up, left to the mercy of mental illness and work assessments while Davie Cameron bows his head and wears a blood red poppy.

Increasingly the army is beyond criticism. When that happens, democracy dies, and the army kills what it has pledged to protect. The UK’s democracy has always hung by a slender and tenuous thread, and yesterday General Houghton took a swing at it with the sword that army officers still wear on ceremonial occasions. But it’s not his motives which were questioned, it was the guy who wants no more wars. This is the UK, the shallow land where the powerful remember that all that matters is the appearance of things, not their substance. Britain cares only about how things look, not about what things mean.

BARKING UP THE RIGHT TREE

You can submit an advance order for the book on the Vagabond Voices website at http://vagabondvoices.co.uk/?page_id=1993

Price is just £7.95 for 156 pages of doggy goodness. Order today!

A limited number of signed copies of the two volumes of the Collected Yaps is also still available. See below for order details.

Altered State : part 2

Nov8 by weegingerdug

Second part of PhantomPower’s documentary. Winner Take Nothing begins with the increasingly desperate ‘No’ campaign arranging Her Majesty’s backing. The impact of Project Fear’s negativity, elite self-interest, media imbalance and last-minute promises finally proved too much to overcome for the Yes campaign. Interviewees consider aspects of voter behavior and results as well as flaws in the Yes argument that require attention before considering a second referendum. In a campaign that saw the unionist parties prepared to destroy themselves to win, perhaps the real winner was the newly politically aware Scottish public who are still deeply engaged in a conversation about their constitutional future, a debate that seems destined to arrive at only one conclusion.

This episode includes interviews with Derek Bateman, Janice Galloway, James Kelly, Paul Kavanagh (Wee Ginger Dug), and Christopher Silver.

	Capella on Quantifying BBC bias
	Bob Lamont on Quantifying BBC bias
	Welsh_Siôn on Quantifying BBC bias
	John on Quantifying BBC bias
	andrewgscott on Quantifying BBC bias

Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

Monthly Archives: November 2015

Labour still hasn’t found what it’s voting for

Great British double standards

A fatal fart bomb in a trance

Altered State : part 3

Apocalypse vow

A short blog break and a book launch

Matron Dugdale’s Bide-a-Wee Mitigation Care Home

The fog of Union

Remembering the appearance of things

Altered State : part 2