The shameful Tory response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis

As the fighting in Ukraine continues into its fourth day and there are reports of street to street fighting in Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, it looks as though Putin’s war of aggression against a neighbouring state may not produce the rapid victory for Russia that the Russian dictator was hoping for. Although all claims in war must be taken with caution until they can be independently verified,  the Ukrainians are claiming that they have retaken control of Kharkiv.

Of course for the Anglo-British nationalists on social media and the frothier end of the right wing British press, this tragic and unnecessary war merely serves to provide “proof” that Scotland could never become independent. Since I am one of the many people who has been blessed by being blocked by George Galloway on Twitter, I don’t actually know whether he and fellow Über-Yoon Neil ‘Bravehair’ Oliver have taken time out from waging a culture war on the weather to pontificate about the supposed destruction of the case for Scottish independence caused by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but it wouldn’t at all surprise me if they had.

But then what difference would it make if they did? A week or so ago reports in the media claimed that American intelligence was warning a Russian invasion of Ukraine was forecast to take place just after 20 February.The invasion actually took place a few days later and the not so gorgeous George popped up onsocial media on 22 February to purr that he had been proven correct in his assertions that Putin had no intentions of invading Ukraine, and that the warnings of an invasion were all just so much Western scaremongering and propaganda. He went on to Twitter and tweeted something that many people helpfully took a screen-shot of so that those of us who have been blocked could join in with the pointing and laughing. George smugly tweeted : “Y’all said Russia was about to invade Ukraine. I told you it wasn’t. You were wrong. I was right. Again. Show some bloody humility. Especially if they’re not even paying you to act like an idiot.”

Well that’s aged well hasn’t it? Incidentally – what is with the y’all? Is George American now? It’s pretty rich for George Galloway of all people to complain about other people having a lack of humility. That’s like Boris Johnson complaining that a teenager told a fib and preaching about the importance of honesty. A few days on and Russian tanks are moving on Kyiv. If George Galloway was the last man left in the world, he’d still be wrong about everything.

It doesn’t matter what happens, for certain opponents of Scottish independence absolutely every development confirms their belief that Scotland could never make it as an independent country. The fall in the price of a barrel of oil “proved” that Scotland couldn’t afford independence, the rise in the price of a barrel of oil “proved that Scotland could never afford independence because the oil in the North Sea is running out and Scotland could never afford to supply its energy needs. British membership of the EU “proved” that Scotland could never become independent because the UK would veto a Scottish application for EU membership. However when the UK left the EU that too “proved” that Scotland could never become independent because it would mean a hard border along the Anglo-Scottish frontier.

The global covid pandemic also “proved” that Scotland could never become independent because apparently it demonstrated that Scotland would be incapable of rising to the challenges of a global crisis. However as we have since discovered an independent Scottish government could have done a far better job than a corrupt Conservative government in Westminster which was far more interested in using the pandemic as an excuse to award lucrative contracts to their pals and in having boozy parties while the rest of us were in lockdown.

Scottish Tory MSP Murdo Fraser could stub his toe in his bathroom because he was too busy trying and failing to be a smart arse on Twitter to notice where his feet were going, and he’d still try and tell us that his limping was proof that it would be too dangerous for Scotland to become independent. Will no one think of Murdo’s little piggy that goes all the way home, or at least as far as the union flag branded building of Alister Jack’s Scotland Office.

The fact is that the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine provides evidence neither for nor against Scottish independence. Not everything that happens in the world is relevant to Scotland’s constitutional debate. The priority must be to demonstrate our solidarity with the people of Ukraine and to pressurise the British Government to do a lot more to help the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees currently fleeing the conflict. They could start by doing as the Irish Government has done and lift all visa requirements for Ukrainian citizens who want to come to the UK.

We must show that we are better than the shameful Conservative MP Kevin Foster who suggested in a now deleted tweet that Ukrainian refugees who do not have family links to the UK could apply for seasonal worker visas in order to come to the UK and pick fruit. Foster displayed there the instinctive reaction of the Conservatives, no matter what hideous situation is taking place, no matter what the human suffering, the first thought of a Tory is, “What’s in it for me?” and “How can we best exploit desperate people in order to make money?”

We must also demand that all the opposition parties in Westminster concentrate on the sleazy and corrupt links that the Conservative party, the city of London, and overseas British tax havens have to dirty Russian money. The UK must immediately stop facilitating the looting of Russia by Putin and his cronies, and must clean up British politics and put an end to the perversion of our democracy by the dark money and secretive donations which the Conservatives are so fond of. Tyranny thrives in the darkness. It’s time to shine a light on the Conservatives.

But the immediate priority must be to put all the pressure we can on the British government to significantly increase humanitarian aid to Ukraine, to support the refugees, and to show Putin that the world stands with Ukraine.

With all this going on my personal issues are quite trivial. However I thought regular readers might wish to know what happened at my recent NHS appointment. I have not been able to drive since I had the stroke because of the lasting physical problems I’ve been left with in my left, hand, arm and leg. Last week I had the first of a two part assessment from the NHS Scotland Driving Assessment Centre in Edinburgh. The first part of the assessment was to check whether the stroke has left me with visual or cognitive problems which would prevent me from ever driving again and I am pleased to say that I passed. I am now waiting for an appointment for the second part of the assessment which will test the extent of my physical disabilities and recommend any adaptions I might need to an automatic car in order to be able to drive again. It is unlikely that I will ever be able to drive a manual car again as I can’t manage the gear stick and lack sufficient strength, sensation, and coordination in my left leg in order to manage the clutch pedal.

The occupational therapist who assessed me said that I will most likely need some sort of adaption to the steering wheel to allow me to manage it with just my right hand (which was not my dominant hand before the stroke) and a device on the centre of the steering wheel to allow me to control the indicators and lights safely. I am not able to do this with my left hand.

She also recommended that I apply for PIP as this will help with the cost of any necessary adaptions and she thinks that I may be eligible for a mobility car as I cannot walk any significant distance, and that with a walking stick. I haven’t applied for any disability benefits as I am physically unable to fill the forms in and the local organisations here in South Ayrshire which could help me do so are neither doing home visits nor holding office appointments due to covid.

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

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

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

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

British news priorities

Priorities, priorities eh? Russia is making very aggressive moves which threaten the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. While this is going on the ruling Conservative party in the UK counts billionaire Russian oligarchs amongst its top donors, some of whom are members of the party’s secretive board with privileged access to government ministers, raising suspicions of untoward influence by people with links to Putin at the very highest levels of the British Government. The Conservatives have received over £2 million in donations from wealthy Russians since Johnson became Prime Minister, and you don’t get to be a billionaire in Russia unless you have close ties to Putin’s regime.

A quarter of Johnson’s cabinet have accepted donations from wealthy individuals who have links to Russia. One such donor, Lubov Chernukhin, who is married to an oligarch with close ties to Putin, has alone donated £2.1 million to the Conservative party. In 2018 she paid £20,000 at a Conservative fundraising auction in order to have lunch with Ruth Davidson, a lunch date which the Conservatives claim has not yet taken place.

Companies owned or controlled by Russian-British businessman Victor Fedotov have given donations to the election campaigns of at least 34 Conservative MPs. Fedotov made his millions from an allegedly corrupt Russian pipeline deal.

Johnson is himself close personal friends with Evgeny Lebedev, owner of the Standard newspaper which employed George Osborne as editor. Lebedev is son of the Russian oligarch and former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev. While mayor of London, Johnson made repeated trips to Lebedev’s villa in Italy, on what were described as “purely personal visits. Johnson gave Lebedev junior a peerage in 2020. In 2018 Johnson was photographed in an Italian airport returning home from one of these “purely personal” visits and looking decidedly worse for wear.

The Conservative party is fuelled by Russian money from wealthy shadowy figures whom it is reasonable to suspect of using their wealth to buy influence at the highest levels of the British Government.

Meanwhile the financial sector in the City of London is a veritable mains sewer for dirty Russian money. London is the global capital for laundering the corrupt gains of kleptocrats from around the globe, not the least of which are Russian billionaires with close links to Putin’s regime.

In 2018 the Guardian reported that according to the Russian Federal State Statistics Service, Russian investors held financial assets in the UK worth a total of £2.6 billion. The UK Office of National Statistics uses a broader measure of a Russian investment in the UK, and assessed it at the end of 2016 to be around £25.5 billion. However the paper points out that these figures considerably underestimate the true amount of Russian wealth flowing into the UK since most of it arrives via tax havens in British territories such as the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands and Bermuda. Over the past decade £68 billion has flowed into the UK from British controlled tax havens. This money is merely registered in tax havens with strict banking anonymity rules allowing its true origin to be hidden.

This means that if you are a corrupt Russian official whose wealth vastly exceeds your salary, you can use UK tax havens to hide the source of your money, allowing you to buy that luxury penthouse apartment in London, or make a sizeable donation to a British political party giving you the ear of a British Government minister.

The Conservative party floats on a sea of dirty money. The UK is flush with corruptly acquired cash – a goodly proportion of which has close links to the Kremlin regime.

But what is it that is most exercising the British media in Scotland? Why yes – the real problem here is that a man who has not been a member of the SNP for years and who holds no elected office, hosts a talk show on the Russian funded RT channel, a show which he insists is editorially independent and in no way controlled by the Russian state. All day representatives of the British media have been queuing up to press elected members of the SNP and the Scottish government to condemn Alex Salmond and to urge him to cut his links to the Russian funded channel, much of whose output, if not Salmond’s show itself, is Russian propaganda and disinformation.

Boris Johnson used Salmond’s involvement with RT to make some cheap jibes during PMQs at the expense of the SNP and conveniently divert attention from the far more concerning way in which the Conservative party and the British financial sector feeds off Russian money. The Speaker was later forced to clarify that Alex Salmond is neither a member of the SNP nor a member of the House of Commons and the SNP is in no way responsible for his actions. However that did not prevent a gleeful BBC in Scotland from running with the story as its main piece for the day, while the Conservatives’ far more alarming links to figures associated with the Russian regime scarcely merited much consideration.

As a private individual who is neither a member of the ruling party in Holyrood, nor an elected member of either the Holyrood or Westminster Parliaments, Alex Salmond is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases. His actions have nothing to do with the Scottish government and the Scottish government is neither responsible for them nor answerable for them.

However Alex Salmond’s involvement with a Russian TV channel is not wise, for precisely the reason we have seen today, it gives opponents of independence an easy stick with which to beat the SNP, the Scottish Government and by extension the broader Scottish independence movement., and in doing so distract attention from the far more alarming links that the Conservatives have to Russian money.  It is also noticeable that the British nationalists who are condemning the former First Minister for having a TV show on RT are not rushing to condemn the arch-Unionist George Galloway with anything approaching the same vehemence, even though he also presents a programme on the same channel. The British media will always prioritise as “news” anything that it can use to attack the cause of Scottish independence, even as it turns a blind eye to the rank corruption and hypocrisy of the Conservative party and the British state.

I have an NHS assessment tomorrow (Friday) to see if I will be able to drive again following my stroke. I suspect that I am going to need a specially adapted car as I have some physical disabilities which are long term and likely to be permanent, mostly weakness and a lack of coordination and sensation in my left arm, hand, and leg. This is the first part of a two part assessment which will determine what needs I have in order to drive again and regain some important personal independence – wish me luck!

Just to let you know, after a period without many problems, my post stroke fatigue is back with a vengeance.  I will have to take it easy and slow down a bit until my energy levels recover.

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

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

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

The Union is dead, welcome to the corruptocracy of Anglo-Britannia

There can no be absolutely no doubt that the choices facing Scotland are either independence or the rolling back of devolution and the integration of Scotland into an increasingly centralised UK in which Scotland, one of the founder members of this so-called Union, is relegated to the same status as a region of England. Never mind Labour’s pie in the sky promises of a federalised UK and a more powerful devolved Scottish Parliament. The existing devolution settlement is on life support and the Tories are poised to pull the plug.

Writing in the Telegraph on Sunday, David Frost, the Tory lord and Brexit negotiator, not the late broadcaster – who would have made short work of the lying buffoon who currently inhabits Downing Street, laid out his plan to save Johnson’s premiership, and “unite the UK”. The former Brexit negotiator Frost, who was awarded a peerage by Johnson for services to the big lie that is Brexit, wrote in The Telegraph that Johnson needs to “unite the kingdom” in order to ensure that he keeps his job as Prime Minister.

The plan would in fact destroy the UK, as it boils down to stripping Scotland and Wales of many of the existing powers of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. This is a favourite trope of the Conservative right, who labour under the misapprehension that it’s the existence of the devolved governments which create the distinct identities of Scotland and Wales rather than the distinct and long entrenched national identities of Scotland and Wales which demanded political expression and which led to the creation of the devolved governments. Right wing Anglo-British nationalist Tories seem to think that if they weaken or destroy the devolved governments then people in Scotland and Wales will suddenly realise that our countries are not in fact countries at all, but are really just regions of a unitary British state. Like we’re all going to wake up the morning after the Tories abolish Holyrood and say to ourselves “Ey oop, I always did feel like I was from Yorkshire.”

Unity can only be created organically, despite what Frost and other Tories like him seem to imagine, it cannot be ordained from above. What he calls a plan for unity is no such thing, it is really a plan for domination and Westminster hegemony.

Now while Frost’s mad act of petulance which he seems to think is a plan for unity might work for members of certain flute bands in cheap polyester uniforms, for the rest of us it has as much chance of success as an abusive parent slapping their crying child’s face on a wet and windy sea front and screaming at them to enjoy themself. It only creates anger and distress and lays the groundwork for a lifetime of alienation.

Without a shred of self-awareness, Frost opined while defending the Conservatives’ hard Brexit which he was instrumental in bringing about : “A country with self-respect cannot have its laws set by others.” He then went on to demand that that is exactly what should happen to Scotland. From this we can only take the lesson that like the historically and politically illiterate Alister Jack, Frost does not think that Scotland is really a country, but rather a “region” of the UK, or that he thinks that within the UK Scotland is not deserving of self-respect or the respect of the Westminster administration.

Either way this tells us that there is no place for a self-respecting Scotland as a nation and a country within the UK in the Conservative plan for a post-Brexit British state. It tells us that there is no Union, and therefore no UK. There is only the single nation and unitary state of Anglo-Britannia. That is most decidedly not what Scotland was promised in return for a No vote in 2014. Back then we were assured in one of the Tories’ many broken promises that devolution was as safe and secure with Westminster as Scotland’s place within the EU and that no changes would ever be made to the powers of Holyrood without Scotland’s express consent.

Now Frost loftily informs us that the experience of the pandemic has shown that devolution is untenable. He writes that his plan aims to “save Boris, the Conservative Party and the country”, notice the order of priorities there, and note that although he talks at length about eviscerating the devolution settlement, nowhere does he trouble himself with what the people of Scotland or Wales actually want themselves. The “country” that he has in mind is the right wing Tory wet dream of a post-Brexit Anglo-Britannia, it is most certainly not a union of the nation, country and kingdom of Scotland with the nation, country and kingdom of England. In the Conservative concept of Anglo-Britannia, Scotland merits no more consideration than Lincolnshire or Devon.

Naturally Frost ignored the corruption, and sleaze of the Johnson administration. This corruption and sleaze is not merely an unfortunate lapse in an otherwise healthy democracy in which there are robust measures in place to ensure that those in power can be held to account, it is a defining feature of a modern Conservative party which takes full advantage of the fact that the Westminster system has few if any effective means of ensuring public accountability for those in high office.

Just this weekend we learned that ultra wealthy Conservative donors were given unprecedented access to the British Government and and the Prime Minister through a secret advisory board. The Sunday Times reported that members of the group were able to lobby government ministers directly on Covid-19 procurement and strategy. Each of the board members had donated at least £250,000 to the Conservative party. This is cash for access on an industrial scale. It is rank corruption as government policy. This is the Anglo-Britannia that Frost and his fellow right wing Brextremists want to subject Scotland to. It is not unreasonable to wonder if the only reason the Tory right wanted to take the UK out of the EU was in order to escape any possible scrutiny of their graft, sleaze, and corruption.

Welcome to Anglo-Britannia, where Scotland is no longer a country and democracy is for sale to the wealthy who fund the Conservative party.

Just to let you know, after a period without many problems, my post stroke fatigue is back with a vengeance.  I will have to take it easy and slow down a bit until my energy levels recover.

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

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

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

British nationalism means power is never held to account

Boris Johnson’s big gift to the Scottish independence campaign, his assertion that he is determined to lead the Conservative party into the 2024 General Election, was overshadowed on Tuesday by another big gift to the Scottish independence campaign, the out of court settlement reached by the Andrew formerly known as prince with Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of sexually abusing her when she was a teenager who was a victim of the sex-trafficking activities of the convicted sex predators Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

You don’t reach an out of court settlement if you are both innocent and convinced of your ability to disprove the allegations made against you. So it looks like Andrew was sweating after all. According to the terms of the settlement the disgraced royal will pay an undisclosed sum of money to Virginia Giuffre and in addition will make a “substantial donation” to a charity supporting the victims of sexual abuse. Andrew now “commends Virginia Giuffre’s bravery in standing up for herself and others” after he accused her of lying, vilified her, and dragged her name through the mud. She only ever needed to be brave because the Queen’s favourite son acted like an unmitigated shit, and was enabled to do so by his entitled, privileged and self-regarding family, who shielded him and paid for his extremely expensive lawyers.

On the News at Six on BBC1 we had the grotesque sight of Nicholas Witchell suggesting that a route back to public life for Andrew could be campaigning for the victims of sex trafficking. That would be like Harold Shipman campaigning for better protections for vulnerable elderly people.

The money that is being paid in order to make this scandal go away will not come out of Andrew’s pocket personally, not unless he’s going to start doing regular shifts at Pizza Express. Andrew has still not admitted that he has done anything wrong, he has just got his mummy to throw a lot of money at his sins so that he won’t have to answer for them.

Like the costs of his lawyers, the money for this settlement will come from his mother and from milking the funds that the state pays to the royal family, which means that ultimately it will be ordinary taxpayers in the UK who will pay the bill so that a pampered and unaccountable member of the British establishment can remain pampered and unaccountable. When I paid my taxes I don’t recall seeing that the breakdown of where my taxes went included “covering settlements for royal sex pests so they don’t have to face a court for their misdeeds.” However I’d like that bit of my taxes back, it can go toward covering the increase in the gas and electric bill.

This settlement merely confirms what we already knew. The British establishment is fundamentally corrupt and will never be held to account for its actions. The Windsors sit at the pinnacle of a mountain of patronage, graft, and duplicity which is rotten to the core. And it is never going to change. Expecting the Westminster system to reform itself so that it is democratic, accountable, and transparent is like expecting a zombie cannibal to embrace veganism.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson, that other walking example of immoral British establishment entitlement and lack of accountability, has asserted that both he and Douglas Ross will still be in their jobs in 2024 which if it does come to pass would prove conclusively that power cannot be held to account in the UK and that Douglas Ross is indeed a spineless ineffectual lightweight who has zero influence in the British government which he is determined to keep ruling over Scotland.

The Conservatives say that they love Scotland. And in fact you could say that they do treat Scotland like a god, in that they completely ignore it until they want something.

Opponents of Scottish independence are realising that their chances of winning another independence referendum are growing slimmer with every passing day as evidence of the dysfunction and corruption of the British state continues to mount. The Conservatives have blown up many of the strongest arguments deployed by the Better Together campaign in 2014. It is now British nationalism which stands exposed as reactionary, parochial, and xenophobic. Brexit has stripped the UK of much of the international influence which was touted by opponents of independence in 2014. No one will now give any credence to promises of strengthened devolution, indeed the continuing future of the devolution settlement and the Scottish Parliament is now very much in doubt. Equally the futures of the NHS and the meagre British state pension are now in question.

In their panic Anglo-British nationalists are scare-mongering about pensions, about the supposed costs of independence and about the supposed threat of violence from independence supporters. We all know that there is only one side in this debate which has form for violence, that would be those who wave union flags and who went on a violent rampage in Glasgow after the 2014 independence referendum, attacking peaceful independence supporters in what the BBC shamefully described as “clashes” between supporters and opponents of independence.

Likewise there is only one side in this debate which is openly discussing anti-democratic and authoritarian tactics. That would be those opponents of independence like the fringe Scottish Unionist Party and right wing journalists like Stephen Daisley who are proposing to shut down all democratic routes to Scottish independence by making it illegal for Holyrood to work on any preparations for another independence referendum without the prior consent of Westminster. They also seek to get the Conservative and Labour parties to pledge that they will never consent to another independence referendum no matter what the people of Scotland desire.

Just as you don’t agree to an out of court settlement if you are confident that you can win your case in a court of law, you don’t try to close down all democratic paths to another independence referendum and give a British Prime minister the power of veto over the right of the people of Scotland to determine their own future if you are confident that you will win your case in the only court that counts, the court of free and democratic choice. That’s where British nationalists are now, they want to write their unaccountability into law. In British nationalism a lack of accountability is not a bug,it’s a feature.

These musings on the part of Daisley are not a reflection of the strength and determination of opponents of independence, they are a sign of their fear, their weakness and their panic.

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

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

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

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

Scotland : independent or a lamp post

The liar Johnson who is still Prime Minister is in Scotland today (Monday), or as it is known by the Express newspaper, “certain parts of the UK”. He is on a self-proclaimed mission to unite the people of Scotland, or as it is known by the BBC “the north of the UK”. Johnson is here to do his usual thing of keeping as far away as possible from any actual Scottish people in case they prove to him that they are indeed united in their loathing for Boris Johnson.

This time Johnson isn’t just keeping away from Scottish people in case they have pro-independence tendencies, or belong to the dwindling band of Labour supporters, he’s also keeping as far away as possible from the Scottish Conservatives. With the exception of toady in chief Alister Jack, who knows that without Johnson in Downing Street he’d be out of a job as soon as you could say “ineffectual colonialist toff”, all the other elected representatives from the Scottish Conservatives have either already come out and said that Johnson should resign, or they are doing their best to keep as low a profile as possible in case anyone asks them if they think that Johnson ought to resign. This is being made easy for them by a Scottish media, sorry, a media in the north of the UK, which isn’t exactly hounding them for answers. It’s far too busy with the vital job of telling scare stories to pensioners for that.

It’s a sign of how dysfunctional British politics have become that Johnson is still in office. It tells us that there is no accountability in the Westminster system, and without accountability there is no real democracy.

Johnson didn’t come to Scotland in order to learn anything. He most certainly didn’t make the trip in order to engage with Scottish opinions or views. He has zero concern for Scottish opinion. He is only here in order to demonstrate that he is the man in charge, the world king gracing a part of his domain with his presence. Johnson is visiting Scotland in the exact same way that a dog visits a lamp post and cocks its leg on it. To assert ownership and territorial dominance. It is pathetically transparent. Johnson is here for some photo opportunities which he hopes might impress the only people whose opinions he does care about – at least for the time being – the opinions of those Conservative back bench MPs whom he intends to threaten, cajole, browbeat, or bribe into keeping him in office.

It’s not just Johnson who has made it clear that he has no interest in listening to Scottish opinion, the Labour party leader Keir Starmer is just as bad. While Johnson was avoiding contact with any Scottish people, Keir Starmer was in the north of England where he asserted that there was “no case” for rejoining the European Union and made it clear that he would not try to take the UK back in. During an interview on BBC radio Newcastle he said: ” We have exited the EU and we’re not going back, and let me be very clear in the north east about that – there’s no case for rejoining.”

There is of course a case for rejoining. Starmer doesn’t want to make that case, but to say there exists no case for for rejoining the EU is flat out false. We’ve already got one UK party leader who is defined by his lies, we don’t need another. Starmer is telling that lie because he knows that his only route to Downing Street lies through recovering the so-called “red wall” seats in the north of England which voted in favour of Brexit and which fell to the Conservatives in the December 2019 General Election. The interests of strongly remain voting Scotland are to be sacrificed to Northern England’s political imperatives. In Scotland we know that there is a very strong case for rejoining the EU, but the British Westminster politicians who claim that they want Scotland to remain a partner in this so-called Union won’t even allow that case to be given an airing. And that right there tells you all you need to know about how Scotland’s needs can never be met within the United Kingdom.

Starmer hasn’t just given Scotland a lesson in how the UK is fundamentally incapable of meeting Scotland’s needs or providing a forum for Scotland’s concerns, he has also just blown up the small and diminishing chance of the Labour party in Scotland of recovering even a fraction of its former power and influence. Labour has already made it clear that it is just as disposed as the Conservatives to ignore the outcome of the democratic process in Scotland and continue to try and block any attempts by the Scottish Parliament to do what it was elected to do and deliver a second independence referendum. This makes it all but impossible for the Labour party to regain those voters in Scotland who defected to the SNP because they either support independence or because they see the necessity of another independence referendum in order to settle the constitutional question. In the Tories Scotland already has a party which defines itself by its visceral opposition to Scottish independence. It doesn’t need another.

Now Starmer has shown Labour’s remaining supporters in Scotland, a majority of whom were opposed to Brexit and who feel alienated by the self-harming course that the UK has taken since leaving the EU that they cannot look to Labour to undo the damage of Brexit and to restore the rights of European citizenship that were lost when the Conservatives took the UK out of the EU and into the hardest possible Brexit for purely selfish party political ends.

Scotland has already been abandoned by a Conservative party which knows that it does not need Scottish votes in order to secure power in Westminster. Now Scotland has also been abandoned by a Labour party which has as its over-riding priority the need to shore up its support in the English regions. Labour merely enables the Tories and can only ever attain power in Westminster by adopting Conservative policies.

If Scotland has been abandoned and rendered voiceless within the UK then there is no point at all in remaining within the UK. Independence is the only way that Scotland can either rejoin the EU or return to the Customs Union and Single Market. But more than that, independence is the only way that Scotland’s voice can be heard. Scotland deserves better than to be nothing more than a lamp post upon which British nationalist politicians mark their territorial dominance.

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

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

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

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

Douglas Ross Ted Cruzes himself

The American senator for Texas, Ted Cruz, is one of the most odious members of the odious Trumpist Republican party. Cruz had originally stood against Trump as one of the candidates for the Republican nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in the 2016 presidential election which saw Trump take the presidency. Before Trump won the Republican nomination, Cruz accurately called him out as a “pathological liar” and asked : “Trump cannot be trusted with common sense, why should we trust him in the White House?”

Trump had previously suggested that Ted Cruz’s father may have been involved in the assassination of John F Kennedy, was believed to be behind stories in a newspaper owned by a Trump ally that Cruz had had multiple extramarital affairs. Trump also attacked the physical appearance of Heidi Cruz, Ted Cruz’s wife.

Despite all this, after Trump won the presidency and Cruz saw how the political land was lying, he transformed into one of Trump’s staunchest and most toadying supporters. He has continued to support Trump’s self serving lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and has distanced himself from criticism of the mob of pro-Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol building on 6 January 2021 seeking to hunt down the Vice-President Mike Pence and the speaker Nancy Pelosi and hang them for refusing to subvert the Constitution and award the election to Trump.

Ted Cruz’s unwavering determination to do whatever is good for Ted Cruz has earned him the reputation as the most reviled man in American politics, which is quite an achievement in a very crowded field. Completely bereft of principles, he is loathed even by his fellow Republicans. The senior Republican senator Lindsay Graham once observed : “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”

As Cruz’s former college roommate, Craig Mazin, once put it, “One thing Ted Cruz is really good at: uniting people who otherwise disagree about everything else in a total hatred of Ted Cruz.”

It now looks as though we have our own mini-me Ted Cruz in the making here in Scotland in the shape of Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross, a man who appears willing to toady to Boris Johnson and the Conservative party in Westminster no matter what insults and indignities they heap upon Scotland or upon him personally.

Having called for Johnson to resign over the allegations of multiple parties in Downing Street and describing him as “unfit for office”, Ross seems poised to execute a humiliating Ted Cruz style U turn now that Johnson remains in office and the chances of him being forced out any time soon by rebellious Conservative back benchers are receding and Johnson has made it clear that he will fight tooth and nail to stay in power and most certainly will not be shamed into resigning. That was never going to happen, in order to be shamed into resigning Johnson would have to possess a sense of shame. You’d be as well expecting Dracula to cook you garlic chicken after he’d spent a lazy day sunbathing.

The Scottish Tories have now backtracked on their previous assertions that Johnson would not be invited to the Scottish Conservative conference in Aberdeen in March. Johnson will now address the Scottish Tories via video link from the UK Conservative conference being held in Blackpool at the same time. This will conveniently ensure that he doesn’t have to be in the same room as the Scottish Conservatives who have demanded his resignation, and will even more conveniently avoid embarrassing encounters that even the anti-independence Scottish press would struggle to ignore.

That would still be true even though the frothier Anglo-British nationalist end of the media in Scotland goes to quite extreme lengths in order to avoid anything which might boost support for independence, or even to paint Scotland in a positive light. Last week, following the decision of the Scottish Government to extend the existing free bus pass scheme for over 60s to people under the age of 22, the British nationalist comic the Express – calling it a newspaper would be fake news – carried the headline “Free bus pass scheme opens for Britons – but only in certain parts of the UK”. Other right wing British nationalist publications decided that the real news was that the application for the pass includes an entirely voluntary equal opportunities questionnaire containing questions (which, it bears repeating, do not have to be answered in order to get a bus pass) on sexual orientation and ethnicity. Even giving all young people in Scotland a free bus pass has to be dragged into British nationalism’s right wing populist culture wars.

We can shortly expect the Express to publish a song book of British nationalist versions of traditional Scottish classics, such as ” You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll be in certain parts of the UK afore ye.”, “Certain parts of the UK the brave”, and “Oh flower of certain parts of the UK”.

Johnson is scheduled to visit Scotland this week. It will as usual be one of those carefully stage managed and controlled events during which Johnson is kept out of heckling range of any actual Scottish people. He’ll dress up in his Bob the Builder costume, pose for photos for the press from “certain parts of the UK” and will assert that the Union is in robust good health. This time however, he is also to be kept away from most of the Scottish Conservatives as well as from your average Scottish punter.

With their humiliating decision that Johnson will after all address the Scottish Conservative conference, in a far more socially distanced way than was managed at any of the many parties in Downing Street, the Scottish Conservatives have Ted Cruzed themselves and Douglas Ross. They are proving that Ross is indeed the lightweight that Jacob Rees Mogg dismissed him as being, and that the entire Scottish Conservatives, sorry “certain parts of the UK” Conservatives, are ineffectual lightweights whose opinions count for nothing in Westminster and who will meekly roll over and accept whatever their Westminster masters demand of them, no matter how humiliating or embarrassing. By refusing to resign, Ross demonstrates that he is spineless and lacking in authority and credibility and lacks the courage and conviction to follow through on his own words. He will have demonstrated that he is as bereft of principles as Ted Cruz, and is every bit as opportunist.

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

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

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

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

Malice in Blunderland: the Tories through the looking glass

We are truly through the looking glass now. On Tuesday we had the UK Government minister charged with challenging online disinformation spreading online disinformation, and refusing to call out Boris Johnson’s repetition of a far right conspiracy theory out for the falsehood that it is. It’s only four months since an MP was stabbed to death by a knife wielding conspiracy theorist nut job, and the Prime Minister’s remarks emboldened and legitimised a mob of anti vax climate change denying conspiracy theorist nutjobs to threaten and intimidate the leader of the Opposition.

In response to this the Conservatives have backed Johnson’s refusal to apologise and former cabinet minister Peter Lilley actually said that”both sides should apologise”, as though there was a moral equivalence between the liars who deliberately kickstarted a riot of violent fanatics in order to distract attention from their own misdeeds and the innocent people who as a result got death-threats from a baying mob.

Then another former Conservative cabinet minister, Robert Buckland, suggested on the BBC Politics Show that the SNP MP David Linden had no right to criticise Johnson after Linden pointed out that Johnson has prior history of making “incendiary” comments, and cited instances of Johnson making racist, homophobic and islamophobic remarks.

Buckland then attempted to draw an equivalence between Johnson’s racist statements and comments made by independence campaigners, asserting without offering any evidence that these were often “below what we would regard as civilised debate”, and saying : “We can point to plenty of examples during the independence referendum where frankly some of the language of the campaign for separation was incendiary, divisive.”  He then failed to point to any of that “evidence”.

That would be the Conservative party which insists at every opportunity and without ever presenting any evidence that the SNP promotes anti-English racism. But apparently incendiary and divisive disinformation that incites harassment and abuse is just fine as long as it comes from the Conservatives.

On Tuesday we also had Jacob Rees Mogg being appointed as the Minister for Brexit Opportunities. That would be the very same Jacob Rees Mogg who knows so much about the opportunities created by Brexit that he moved his business and investments to Ireland so that they would not be affected by it and so that Rees Mogg’s business would continue to have unfettered access to EU markets even after Brexit. Jacob is a staunch believer in Brexit, but he is an even more staunch believer in ensuring that his not insignificant wealth is not negatively affected by it.

This is also the same Jacob Rees Mogg who said that it would take the UK up to fifty years before it sees the full economic advantages of Brexit. So clearly he’s not going to be in any sort of a rush to deliver on his new brief. It’s going to take considerably longer than fifty years for anyone to see any sort of advantage of Jacob Rees Mogg.

However even the most curmudgeonly Remainer would have to admit that the post of Minister for Brexit opportunities is perfectly suited to Jacob’s talents, because the opportunities of Brexit are as non-existent as Jacob’s talents. No wait, not quite, there is one opportunity, this appointment makes Jacob the only person in the UK who can boast that they have secured a job that was created by Brexit. There’s your Brexit opportunity right there, it’s yet another opportunity for a rich old Etonian Conservative to prove that he’s an entitled hypocrite, although the UK was already abundantly provisioned with those even before Brexit.

Rees Mogg got the job because he’s a liar and a fantasist who told the House of Commons in December that the NHS had already received the promised £350 million per week dividend that we were told Brexit was going to deliver. You need to be a liar and a fantasist in order to claim that Brexit brings any opportunities at all. Liars and fantasists are one thing that are not in short supply in the post Brexit Conservative party.

Appointing a Minister for Brexit opportunities is like appointing a voyage activities coordinator on the Marie Celeste, or saying that you are an interior designer who specialises in turning the results of projectile vomiting into a conversation piece in a sealed and locked room whose key you’ve flushed down the toilet, the conversation being “Just how out of it and detached from reality are you?” while you insist that that disgusting smell means liberation from those oppressive European rules and regulations, with their fresh air and easy access to the outdoors.

It was only Tuesday, but already this week in the Tory malice in blunderland we had culture secretary Nadine Dorries – whose closest approach to culture is some mouldy veg at the bottom of her fridge – dismally failing to grasp the concept of an interview. Nadine appeared for the interview, in which she was simultaneously offended and surprised that the interviewer was asking her questions, in front of a bookcase that was as bereft of books as the Conservative party is bereft of talent, empathy, and intelligence. What kind of monsters are we to expect that the Culture Secretary might have some appreciation for books and literature?

The only reason we cannot categorically state that Nadine is not the densest cabinet minister is because in Liz Truss we have a foreign secretary who doesn’t know the difference between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, a distinction which is ever so slightly relevant given that the topic under discussion is the situation in Ukraine. Geographical illiteracy seems to be a requisite for Tory Foreign Secretaries, Liz replaced Dominic Raab as Foreign Secretary, a man who confessed to be surpised at the discovery that Dover was a major port.

Johnson has made some new office appointments in his efforts to persuade Conservative MPs that he’s changing the boozy working culture of Downing Street, a culture that he himself created and perpetuates. His new Press chief Guto Harri got off to a great start by assuring us that Johnson is not a “complete clown”, I hope that you are reassured to learn that Johnson is just mostly a clown. One of those clowns who stands in storm drains offering balloons saying “Global Britain, get Brexit done!” to passing innocents. And we’re only just half way through the week. There’s plenty of time for more, and we haven’t even heard much so far this week from Michael Gove.

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

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

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

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

Westminster’s Robert Maxwell tactics

Don’t let it be said that the British royal family don’t have their uses, on Sunday they did Boris Johnson a solid and managed to bump him and his multiple difficulties off the headlines, providing the bloviating liar with a respite from the speculation about his leadership and a chance to help firm up his fading grasp on power. Sunday was the 70th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne, the actual anniversary, which is to be followed up this year by a series of nauseating bouts of state mandated sycophancy which will be dominating TV screens and forcing you to ask your ex nicely if they don’t mind giving you their Netflix password so that you can escape it.

The BBC and the frothier end of the British print media which is to say most of it, marked the occasion by deciding that the most important issue of the day was not the lies, deceit and corruption which have come to characterise the British government, it’s not a cost of living crisis which will leave thousands of families unable to heat their homes while Boris Johnson gets a Conservative donor to foot the bill for wallpaper that costs £1000 per roll and members of the Windsor family ponder which helicopter to take to one of their many palatial country estates in order that the Andrew formerly known as Prince can avoid being put in mobile phone range of an American judge.

The biggest issue is not that the Bank of England has said that households in the UK must brace themselves for the biggest annual fall in their standard of living since comparable records began three decades ago. The bank doesn’t have to tell us that the various royal households are not included in this forthcoming disaster. We can take that as read.

No, despite the many problems besetting the UK, not the least of which is the ever growing chasm between the haves and the have nots and a British establishment which grows ever more corrupt, entitled and dishonest with every passing day, apparently the most important issue facing the UK this weekend is what Camila Parker-Bowles is going to be called once Charles becomes king and gets his privileged mug on coins and stamps. I know what I’d like to call Camila and her husband after the Queen shuffles off this mortal coil – “pensioned off” – and that’s the family-friendly version.

You can tell that another independence referendum is on its way because as well as trying to nauseate us into submission with the evil spells of Nicolas Witchelcraft, which is all that passes for a positive case for the Union these days, the usual apologists for the nationalism that isn’t nationalist at all because it’s British are rehearsing the scare stories with which they intend to bludgeon us in the months ahead.

As the threat of war looms in Ukraine, we will be told by the Conservatives and their allies that supporting Scottish independence plays into Putin’s hands. That would be the same Conservative party that has accepted donations worth £1.93m from donors trading in Russia or who are alleged to have links to the Russian leader.

We have already seen the pension threat being trotted out, opponents of independence actually seem to think that it’s a persuasive argument against independence to tell us that the British state will do a Robert Maxwell and rob the pension entitlement of hundreds of thousands of Scottish taxpayers who paid National Insurance into Westminster’s coffers for decades in the expectation that this would entitle them to a meagre state pension once they reach retirement age. Robert Maxwell diverted the funds that were supposed to go to paying his employees’ pensions into his own pockets, and that is exactly what the Conservatives and their allies are threatening that Westminster could do.

Mind you if the Conservatives really did follow through on their channelling of Robert Maxwell and we found them floating in the ocean after they had fallen off the royal yacht under suspicious circumstances, that might not be quite so bad, but that’s not what they have in mind. The only ones who will be thrown to the sharks are the ordinary people in the UK who will have to foot the bill for Tory misrule.

The message is “Stay with us Scotland, because we are vindictive bullies who will steal from you and make you suffer if you try to escape.” It’s a very far cry from the love bombing and the respect agenda that we were promised isn’t it.

We are also seeing scare stories about the Anglo-Scottish Border, another topic which is likely to loom large in the independence referendum campaign that lies ahead. Just a few days ago, the Daily Express took a break from its usual fare of telling us that it had secured an exclusive interview with the ghost of Princess Diana in which she told us via a Ouija board that she was a big supporter of Brexit, in order to tell some blatant lies about the post-independence border. According to this publication which is unaccountably still described as a newspaper, if Scotland becomes independent you will need to have a passport in order to cross the Scottish-English border. Possibly the Express got this information from the ghost of Princess Diana via a Ouija board, but if so that would make it more reliably sourced than most of what makes it into print in the Express.

Of course, back in the real world, after independence Scotland will remain a part of the Common Travel Area along with England Wales, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Channel Islands. You do not need a passport to travel to independent Ireland from the UK, and you won’t need a passport to travel to England after Scottish independence. Any border checks which are necessary after independence will only be required for commercial traffic,and most of those can be done away from the border itself. This is a subject which will be explored in much greater detail in the weeks and months ahead.

However the nature of the border will be a major issue in the referendum, and it will be ripe for British nationalist scaremongering and threats. We must not lose sight of the fact that thanks to a reactionary and regressive Anglo-British nationalism the UK has chosen to erect a hard border between itself and the 27 countries in the EU. Scottish independence means that those 27 borders can be dismantled.

The important thing to remember is that opponents of independence are threatening, scare-mongering and bullying because their positive case for the Union was threadbare in 2014, but now it’s non-existent. It’s all they have left , scare stories, threats, and copying Robert Maxwell’s corrupt practices.

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

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

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

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

Pensioning off Murdo’s scare story

Since the Conservatives are once again trying to scare Scottish pensioners with the threat that they would lose their state pension if Scotland votes for independence, it’s worth revisiting the pensions question.

During the independence referendum of 2014, there were numerous reports of anti-independence activists who were canvassing on doorsteps, telling elderly people that if Scotland became independent, then they would lose their pensions. Now, in a pathetic attempt to distract from multiple scandals surrounding the corrupt liar whom they put in Downing Street, and the divisions which rend the Conservatives from top to bottom, the Scottish Tories are at it again.

This is scaremongering of the very worst sort, an overt attempt to bully elderly people who very often subsist on one of the worst state pensions in Europe, threatening them with losing even the meagre pittance that the British state pension provides. The threat is absolutely, categorically, untrue. What made it all the more vile was that the British Government itself had already guaranteed that existing pensioners would continue to receive their state pensions. It is equally untrue to insist that the Scottish Government would look to English taxpayers to foot the bill for Scottish pensions after independence. This is a desperate distraction technique from a failing party which sees that it has lost the arguments of the second independence referendum campaign before the campaign has even officially begun.

The first point to be made here is that private pensions, local and central government pensions, and employee pensions will be unaffected by Scottish independence, at least from the point of view of the pensioner. The companies and agencies providing these pensions will continue to have an obligation to the pensioner no matter whether Scotland is independent or not. As a pensioner you have a right to one of these pensions because of an individual contractual agreement between you and the pension provider and because you have contributed to the pension fund throughout your working career. Following Scottish independence, there may be internal administrative issues for these pension providers to deal with, however this should not affect the amount of pension due to the pensioner nor their entitlement to that pension.

In the exact same way, you continue to be entitled to your private or employee pension should you decide to retire abroad to sunnier climes in Spain or the Caribbean. If the pension provider were to turn around and say, “Oh well, you no longer live in the UK, so we don’t have to pay,” you could sue them. And you’d win.

What we are really discussing here is the state pension. As already noted, the British Government has already guaranteed that existing pensioners and those who would become of pensionable age after a Yes vote but before Scotland becomes independent would be unaffected.

On 7 May 2014, the then UK pensions minister Steve Webb told the Scottish Affairs Committee in the House of Commons that older people would be entitled to continue receiving the current state pension even in an independent Scotland. He acknowledged that there would have to be a negotiation between Holyrood and Westminster about how these pensions would be administered, but assured the committee that Westminster would continue to have an obligation to pay the pensions to existing pensioners. When asked by a Labour MP if the pensions of existing pensioners would be secure following a Yes vote, Steve Webb confirmed that this was the case, saying “Yes, they have accumulated rights into the UK system, under the UK system’s rules.”

Then he added, “Take a Scottish person who works all their life and then retires to France… they still have an accumulated pension right in respect of the National Insurance they have paid in when they were part of the United Kingdom.”

Some opponents of independence claim that by voting for independence, people resident in Scotland will have voted to deprive themselves of any of the benefits of British citizenship, one of which is pension entitlement. This is nonsense. When the pensions minister was asked if a person’s citizenship made a difference, he replied, “Citizenship is irrelevant. It is what you have put into the UK National Insurance system prior to separation. Answer [for example] 35 years, that builds up to a continued UK pension under continuing UK rules. They are entitled to that money.” The minister’s remarks were reported by the BBC,  here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-27309215

As an aside, with respect to the citizenship issue, if you were born in what was UK territory to parents who were UK citizens, you will still have the right to UK citizenship following Scottish independence. As a resident of Scotland, you will also be entitled to Scottish citizenship, but assuming that the UK government doesn’t alter its citizenship laws (which it didn’t following Irish independence), then you’ll still have the right to UK citizenship should you choose.

What the pensions minister told the Scottish Affairs Committee was merely confirming what the Department of Work and Pensions had already informed an individual who had queried the matter of pensions in an independent Scotland. On 4th January 2013, the DWP wrote, “If Scotland does become independent this will have no effect on your state pension; you will continue to receive it just as you do at present.”
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/13124648.salmond-dwp-confirmed-no-change-pensions-post-independence/

So if you are already in receipt of a UK state pension, you can be confident that you will continue to receive it after Scottish independence. Likewise if you are due to retire following a Yes vote but before Scotland becomes officially independent, your entitlement to a UK state pension is unaffected. It doesn’t matter what Gordie Broon or Murdo Fraser tells you on the doorstep. Both the British and Scottish governments have a cast iron commitment to ensuring that existing pensioners will be unaffected by Scottish independence.

The real question here is why are the Conservatives threatening that the British Government will steal the accumulated pension rights of Scottish residents who have paid National Insurance to the UK Exchequer all their working lives? They are actually threatening to rob pension rights from people if they do not vote in a way that is to the liking of the Conservative party. The “positive case for the Union” has turned into extortion with menaces.

How state pensions are administered in an independent Scotland can’t be settled until after Scotland has voted for independence. Pensions will be a subject to be dealt with in negotiations between Holyrood and Westminster following a Yes vote. However the key thing to remember is that this is a matter for the pension provider, and that both the Scottish and British Governments have guaranteed that existing pensioners will be unaffected.

Although your entitlement to a state pension is based on the number of years you have been making National Insurance contributions, unlike employee pensions and private pensions where you pay into a pension pot during your working life, the state pension is “pay as you go”.

The British government chooses to allocate funds to pay the state pension to its current general revenues, not to a specific pot of money that has been saved up from National Insurance contributions and set aside specifically for the purpose of paying pensions. Today’s state pensions are paid by today’s workers, and those workers in turn will have their state pensions paid by future workers. This would appear to be the source of Murdo Fraser’s jibe that the Scottish Government expects English taxpayers to pay for pensions in an independent Scotland. However Westminster does not cease to have a liability for Scottish pensions upon Scottish independence because it chose to spend prior NI contributions from Scottish taxpayers to support pension payments elsewhere in the UK. That, Westminster, would be a you problem. Westminster does not get to keep the assets contributed by Scottish taxpayers, but escape the subsequent liabilities.

The real issue here is what happens to people in Scotland who are not yet of pensionable age, and who won’t become of pensionable age until after Scotland becomes independent. The amount of money Westminster will have to pay Scotland in respect of the years of NI contributions made to the UK Exchequer by Scots who have not yet reached retirement age will be a topic for independence negotiations. This money has been used to support pensions paid to retired people in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

What is clear is that under no circumstances will an independent Scotland be expecting “English taxpayers” to foot the bill for Scottish pensions, and that state pensions will continue to be paid. Indeed the SNP has committed to raising the meagre British state pension in an independent Scotland to a level that will permit older people to have a dignified standard of living.

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

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

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

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

The unanswerable case for independence

With the British Government proving that the institutions of the Westminster Parliament are incapable of holding to account a known liar like Boris Johnson, a man whose alleged law breaking is currently subject to a police investigation, the democratic argument for Scottish independence is now unanswerable. Independence is no longer required just so that the people of Scotland can be assured that Scotland will always get governments that the people of Scotland vote for and in order to be certain that policies like Brexit, which has never enjoyed the support of a majority in Scotland, will no longer be forced upon Scotland against its will.

Independence is also an imperative so that Scotland has an effective means of holding the powerful to account. Under the Westminster system, if the office of Prime Minister is held by a corrupt and deceitful liar who breaks the laws that he imposes on the rest of us because he professes to be ignorant of them, action can only be taken against the Prime Minister if enough members of the Prime Minister’s own party decide that it is in their party and personal interests to depose him or her, and then to replace them with another apparatchik from the same party.

Even if enough Conservative MPs do eventually write to the chair of the party’s 1922 Committee to trigger a vote of no confidence in Johnson, that is still not accountability, it is a recipe for Conservative autocracy. We will simply end up with another Conservative who was quite happy to support Johnson’s lying, rule-breaking and attacks upon any independent means of holding the Prime Minister to account when they thought that Johnson was a Tory vote winner. They will have absolutely no incentive to change the system that put a manifestly unfit opportunist like Johnson into the highest office, because they themselves will be an opportunist who rose to power in the exact same way that Johnson did.

Impeachment processes are far from perfect, as we have seen with the twice impeached Donald Trump, who survived both impeachments thanks to a supine and craven Republican party, but in the UK we don’t even have that much, and to make matters worse there is no effective separation of powers under the British system, only an unwritten constitution which unprincipled charlatans like those in the modern Conservative party can easily subvert to their own ends, and the institutionalised patronage of the House of Lords which doesn’t even pretend to be democratically accountable. Not for nothing has the British system been described as an elective dictatorship, a phrase that was popularised by the former Lord Chancellor of the United Kingdom, the Conservative Lord Hailsham, in a Richard Dimbleby Lecture at the BBC in 1976.

However when the UK’s elective dictator is a man like Johnson, who is bereft of honour or principles and who is happy to traduce the customs, traditions, and practices which have hitherto formed the only checks and balances on the power of the Prime Minister, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the UK’s descent into a blatant authoritarianism where the Government whips up an ugly Anglo-British nationalism in order to distract from its chaos, corruption, and contempt for the norms of a functioning democracy. That is the trajectory that the UK is currently on.

It is only with independence that Scotland can be sure that this country will always get governments that the people of Scotland have voted for, and it is only with independence that we can get a written constitution which puts explicit limits on the powers of the leader of the government, and which formulates a specified method of holding him or her to account if they exceed their authority or behave in an unacceptable manner. In 2014 opponents of independence argued that Scotland required the Westminster Parliament in order to guarantee democratic standards. Now we can see that the only way in which democracy in Scotland can be guaranteed is for Scotland to escape the corruption and patronage which forms the foundation of the Westminster system.

The apologists for Anglo-British nationalism within and outwith Scotland know that the democratic case for Scottish independence cannot be countered, they know that vague promises of future reform of the British state will no longer be believed. They had their chance to implement their promised reforms in the aftermath of the 2014 referendum, and they failed dismally. Instead we got Brexit, the undermining of the devolution settlement, and the offence against common decency that is Boris Johnson.

This is why opponents of independence desperately try to avoid engaging with the democratic and political arguments for Scottish independence. They simply do not have a leg to stand on. The best that they can manage is Keir Starmer’s promise that Gordon Brown of all people will head a commission to look into reforms of the British constitution. Given Brown’s infamous Vow and his promise that he himself would ensure that British party leaders delivered on it, Starmer’s commission is both risible and insulting. The fact is that if Brown’s Vow had indeed been delivered in full, there would be no need for the Labour party’s constitutional commission, and indeed no popular and widespread support in Scotland for pro-independence parties.

Instead what we get are apologists for Anglo-British nationalism trying to gaslight and threaten Scotland with scare stories and lies about Scotland’s supposed penury and its imaginary dependence on “handouts from English taxpayers”, a line most recently touted by former Labour Home Secretary and Iraq War enthusiast Jack Straw. Straw made the remark in an interview on Sky News in which he implied that a Scottish MP like Ian Blackford had no right to object to the dishonesty of Boris Johnson because in Straw’s view, Scotland has been bought with English gold and we should shut up, remember our place, and meekly accept whatever insults and indignities Westminster chooses to throw at us.

With his arrogance and contempt, Straw has just strengthened the democratic case for independence even further, because even if it were true that Scotland benefits from the largesse of English taxpayers, and it is most certainly not true, it is obvious that in the eyes of British nationalist politicians like Straw that this is no Union and certainly no family of nations. For them Scotland is a mere possession which must do what it is told, a possession which has no right to complain, far less to expect its interests and needs to be taken into account.

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