It’s not Billy Kay’s Scots that’s embarrassing : It’s his Cringing critics

Apr28 by weegingerdug

On Tuesday Billy Kay, the writer, broadcaster, and advocate for the Scots language, gave an address to the Scottish Parliament, The Time for Reflection address is not meant to be partisan or party political and Billy’s eloquent speech most certainly was not. Instead he used his address to highlight the importance of the Scots language to Scottish culture, literature, and identity. Scots is a language which, despite decades of official neglect and at times outright hostility and oppression still has over a million and a half speakers in Scotland and many more who understand the language even if they don’t actively use it themselves.

A huge part of Scottish cultural and literary output was produced in the medium of Scots. There is an enormous quantity of writing in Scots, there’s the poetry of Robert Burns and Hugh Macdiarmid, Ane Pleasant Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis, a play written by the makar Sir David Lyndsey in the early 1500s intended for performance at the court of King James V, the translation of the New Testament by Lorimer, legal texts and chronicles produced when Scotland was an independent state, and the modern poetry of Tom Leonard or Liz Lochhead. There are Scots language translations of the children’s story the Gruffalo, Asterix the Gaul, Harry Potter, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. In terms of its quality and range, not to mention its sheer quantity, writing in Scots vastly exceeds writing in any English dialect.

The quantity of Scots is also evident in its vocabulary, The Scottish National Dictionary and the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue are massive multi volume works, nothing comparable exists for any mere dialect of English, and nothing comparable could exist for any of them. The reason for this is that as a language in its own right, there are regional dialects within Scots, and there are also different registers of Scots. There is colloquial Scots, and there is also formal literary Scots. However there is no such thing as formal literary Cockney, Geordie, or Yorkshire, because the formal and literary variety corresponding to these dialects is standard English.

From a linguistic point of view Scots is highly divergent from English. Without getting too technical all non creole English dialects and standard English have a vowel system in which some vowels are inherently long and others are inherently short, however all Scots dialects have a radically different vowel system in which the length of a vowel (i.e. the duration of its pronunciation) is predictable from its phonetic context. Scots also displays important grammatical and syntactic differences from English. These grammatical and phonological differences end sharply along the Scottish-English political border, in marked contrast to local dialects within England, which merge imperceptibly into one another.

Scots must be distinguished from Scottish Standard English, the form of English most widespread in Scotland. Scottish Standard English arose in the 18th century and is basically southern English pronounced according to Scots phonology. As such it is a form of English which is heavily influenced by Scots and which has accommodated partially towards Scots. Since this is the form of English most spoken in Scotland it gives many in Scotland the false impression that Scots is more like English (non Scottish English) than it really is. This impression is compounded by the fact that all Scots speakers are bilingual in English and most Scots speakers use neither pure English nor pure Scots but rather speak a varying mixture of Scots and English depending on the formality of the social situation and who they are speaking with.

English and Scots are very closely related. However English speakers without any previous exposure to Scots typically find Scots extremely difficult to understand and have to learn it as a foreign language. Being closely related to another language and partially mutually intelligible with it does not rule out language status for a linguistic variety. Norwegian and Swedish are closely related and are partially mutually intelligible, as are Czech and Slovak, but they are accepted as being languages in their own right. Ukrainian is very closely related to Russian. Russian nationalists claim that Ukrainian is merely a dialect of Russian and use this to assert Russian political dominance over Ukraine.

The Scots language, like the Gaelic language, is part of the cultural heritage of everyone in Scotland, irrespective of their political opinions or their views on Scottish independence. Billy Kay’s speech to Holyrood was not political, and he would be the first to stress that the Scots language should not be a pawn in Scotland’s constitutional debate, but it is significant that those who took to social media to howl in protest about him making a speech in Scots to the Scottish Parliament overwhelmingly defined themselves as opponents of Scottish independence and were quick to express their distaste for the SNP.

In order to clarify things for the British nationalist frothers who attacked Billy Kay for having the temerity to use Scots in a formal setting, the recognition of the status of Scots as a language has nothing to do with the SNP. It was the British Government of Tony Blair which ratified the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2001 and gave official recognition to the Scots language and also Gaelic, Welsh, Manx, and Cornish, as well as Irish and Ulster Scots in Northern Ireland. However it was because the British Government chose to give a higher level of recognition to Gaelic (and to Welsh) than it did to Scots that we have a Gaelic TV channel but not a Scots one, even though Scots has more speakers than Gaelic and Welsh combined.

As far as any measures to promote or foster the Scots or Gaelic languages are concerned, the Scottish Government is merely acting as the agent for the British Government in fulfilling Britain’s international treaty obligations in Scotland. You’d think Unionists would be happy that Holyrood was doing what Westminster expects of it, but not apparently when it comes to Scots or Gaelic.

One of the most common protest against Billy’s speech was that “no one speaks like that” and accusing him of using a “made up language.” However all standard and literary languages without exception are the artificial creations of linguists and writers who make conscious decisions to extend the use of existing words into new meanings , to create new terms from the internal resources of the language, or to use the language consistently and without the strong influence of a different prestige language. There is no other way that a literary language can come into being. They don’t magically appear because the language fairy waves her sparkly linguistic wand.

In the case of Catalan in the 19th century this entailed writing the language using a regularised and more consistent version of the orthography used for Catalan when the Kingdom of Aragon was independent of Spain, and purging the new written Catalan of the Spanish vocabulary which was crowding out native Catalan words. Other European languages were standardised in very similar ways. In the case of Estonian this actually entailed the wholesale adoption of words from Finnish (the previous prestige language in Estonia being German) and even the outright invention of new words.

No one is proposing anything so radical for Scots. However any attempts to extend the range of Scots or to use it in formal settings are met with howls of protest from linguistically illiterate people who invariably deride the language and insist that it is not a proper language at all, while they do their utmost to prevent Scots from ever being used as a proper language. Not only do these people wear their linguistic ignorance as a badge of pride, they almost always identify themselves as opponents of Scottish independence and assert that any attempt to use Scots outside of a narrow range of informal settings is “politicising” the language. In fact what is politicising the language is to insist that Scots must not be permitted to make use of the same tools of linguistic enrichment, or to be used in the same range of settings, as every other language in Europe, for fear of strengthening the appetite for Scottish independence.

Such people often claim that using Scots in the way Billy Kay did in Holyrood is “embarrassing” but this tells us vastly more about the person making the assertion than it does about Billy Kay or the Scots language. Objectively no language is any more or less embarrassing than any other. Saying that Scots is embarrassing tells us that person has strongly internalised feelings of Scottish inferiority and inadequacy, feelings which go a long way to explaining their visceral opposition to independence. They are terrified that if Scotland does have languages and a culture of its own, languages which are no better or worse than any other language, just languages which are distinctively Scottish , then perhaps Scotland might be something more than just a tartan bedecked region of a monolingually English speaking “British nation.”

It never fails to amuse just how willing those who suffer from terminal cringe are to not only display their ignorance for all to see, but that they are convinced that their ignorance is a virtue and demand that the rest of us must share in their ignorance too. It’s not the Scots language which is embarrassing. It’s them.

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Rory the Tory rides again

Apr27 by weegingerdug

Rory the Tory has been at it again. Rory Stuart, another of those old Etonian posh boys who infest the Conservative party, is nevertheless terribly keen to tell us in his cut glass upper class English accent that he is Scottish. Rory appeared in, wrote, and presented, an infamous BBC British propaganda exercise during the 2014 independence referendum campaign when the state broadcaster gave him an hour long, programme, masquerading as a historical documentary, which was a ludicrously pro-British exploration of the far north of England and the Scottish Borders in which Rory, who’s Scottish you know, attempted to sell us his highly idiosyncratic take on Scottish history.

Rory, I bet you didn’t know that he was Scottish, was also responsible for that “join hands along the border nonsense” and a torchlit parade along Hadrian’s Wall, both which died a death due to a complete lack of interest, possibly because the only people prepared to join hands along the border were people like Rory – who is frightfully frightfully Scottish – who don’t actually believe that the border exists.

Rory, did I mention that he is Scottish?, has a view of Scottish history and cultural identity which makes Neil Oliver seem like a raging Scottish nationalist. According to Rory, and at this juncture it’s important to mention that he’s Scottish, being Scottish is basically nothing more than “a fun way to irritate the English,” news which will come as something of a surprise to five million Scottish people who hadn’t realised that their national identity was just a prank, and that our entire purpose as a nation is to be defined by and provide amusement for our English neighbours.

But then Rory, who was born in Hong Kong to a posh Anglo-Scottish father and an equally posh English mother, and who was brought up in the posher parts of London before being packed off to Eton, is himself Scottish and therefore has his finger firmly on the pulse of the Caledonian Zeitgeist, so who are we mere lifelong residents of Scotland to contradict him. We are just peasants who don’t feel the need to keep telling everyone that we are Scottish because it’s obvious every time we open our gobs and so can’t possibly understand being Scottish better than Rory, having had to go to comprehensive schools in Lanarkshire or Dundee and not having had the benefit of Rory’s very Scottish Eton education. Although it may be more accurate to say that Rory does not so much have his finger on the Scottish pulse as he has his hands firmly wrapped around the Scottish carotid artery as he desperately tries to squeeze the life out of it.

Anyway, Rory, who is Scottish, believes that Scottish national identity is basically a false construct overlying a far deeper, older, and supposedly more authentic British nationhood. In his, let’s call it a documentary, he tried to punt the proposition that the North of England and the Scottish Borders are really some “Middleland” which is neither Scottish nor English but really both, the Scottish-English border is really an artificial line dividing an essentially united Britain and that Scottish nationhood is an artificial construct. The BBC actually broadcast this nonsense during the independence referendum campaign as an “apolitical” historical documentary.

Of course the reality is that the Scottish English border is one of the oldest in Europe and the modern understanding of Scottish nationhood dates back to the Scottish wars of independence of the 13th century and arguably earlier, whereas the modern concept of Britishness is a far more recent invention, dating back at the very earliest to the Union of Crowns of the 17th century, but even then it remained a concept and identity restricted to the aristocracy and the elites until the Union of Parliaments of 1707, even then it took a long time to establish itself amongst the wider population, and never replaced the older and more organic Scottish identity which it overlaid, but rather co-existed with it, often uncomfortably.

Rory, did you know that he was Scottish? – is now back punting his Scottishness isn’t a real thing shtick. He’s allowed to say these things without being accused of being a clueless upper class English idiot because as he keeps reminding us, he himself is so Scottish that his dad liked to wear tartan trousers and even enjoyed bagpipes, rather than run screaming out of the room with his ears bleeding like a proper red-blooded Englishman.

In a recent podcast, Rory, during the gaps in between telling us how Scottish he is, said that it was “insane” to think that Cumbria and the Borders could be in different countries. I don’t know about you, but I had always thought that as far as the Borders is concerned, the clue is in the name. It’s called the Borders because it sits on the Border, if there was no Border it wouldn’t be called the Borders now would it. It would be called Northnorthumbria or Stillcumbria.

Rory thinks that Scotland and England can’t possibly be different countries because people on both sides of that, you know, border, speak the same language, listen to the same music and shop in the same supermarkets. Of course perhaps if Rory’s experience of Scottishness was rather deeper than it is he might realise that the Scots language not only exists but is still widely spoken, but his assertion that speaking the same language as a neighbouring country means that you can’t be a different country must come as news to French speaking Belgians, the Swiss, or Canadians. And for all that Tesco is very keen on plastering union flags on grocery packaging, I didn’t realise that shopping there meant that Scotland couldn’t be a country. No Scotland, you aren’t a proper nation because too many of you like Tesco own brand lamb jalfrezi.

Rory’s plea is just another misguided appeal to ancient history in an attempt to manufacture an emotional case for the Union. And it’s going to convince no one because it’s irrelevant to the question of whether Scotland in the 21st century is better served by an independent parliament, or a parliament in London. The fact that Rory keeps making these irrelevant and frankly intelligence insulting interventions only proves that he is utterly clueless about the Scotland he so desperately keeps telling us he belongs to.

I have a physiotherapy appointment tomorrow and will most likely be wiped out afterwards. So there may not be a new blog piece for a couple of days.

Johnson’s removal will not alter the British democratic deficit

Apr26 by weegingerdug

Boris Johnson’s self-inflicted troubles have not gone away, no matter how much the Prime Law-breaker tries to wrest back control of the narrative by play acting as a global statesman and buggering off for photo ops in India or in Ukraine, because he is now in such a state of disrepute that he feels more secure in an actual war zone than he does in Westminster. With rumours of more police fines yet to come and reports that the much delayed Sue Gray report will be damning in its account of Johnson’s behaviour and excoriating about the boozy culture of entitlement over which he presided in Downing Street, back bench Conservative MPs are once again making noises about unseating Johnson as they nervously anticipate Conservative losses at the local elections due a week on Thursday.

Of course what really motivates these Tories is not a desire to ensure the highest standards of behaviour from those who hold high offices of state, it is, as it always has been, to protect their own careers and to maintain the Conservative party as the party of power and influence. A bad performance for the Conservatives next week will tell those anxious Conservative back benchers that their party’s grasp on power, patronage, and influence is slipping. That will be especially true if the party polls poorly in those councils in the midlands and north of England, where victory for the Tories in the 2019 General Election was instrumental in securing the large Commons majority that Johnson enjoys.

That will be what motivates them to move against Johnson and unseat him from number 10, not any sudden discovery of moral standards or concern that the most powerful man in the UK is a serial liar and repeated law breaker with nothing but contempt for the rules and standards that everyone else is expected to abide by. If the Conservatives do better than expected in those electorally important regions of England, the Tories will be falling over to persuade us that Johnson’s law breaking and lies are a trivial matter and that it is churlish and unchivalrous of us not to accept his performative apologies and allow him to get away with it.

Meanwhile there will be more full scale deflection and whataboutery. We have already seen this with the frantic and frankly pathetic attempts of the Conservatives and their fellow travellers in the right wing British nationalist press to assert that there is a moral, legal, and political equivalence between Nicola Sturgeon forgetting to put her face mask on for a whole six seconds and Johnson’s repeated and deliberate law breaking and his constant and incessant lying about it after the story came to light. There’s going to be a lot more of that ahead. Apologists for Johnson tell us that this is not the timed to unseat him “because there’s a war on”. There has been a war on almost every year for the past three hundred years, mostly because of British imperialism and colonialism or its greed for power and other people’s resources.

But even if the Tory party does finally move against Johnson, they will only replace him with someone just as mendacious and morally bankrupt. The system which put such a manifestly unsuitable individual as Johnson into power will remain intact and his removal will only serve to ensure that system remains intact, not to reform it, and certainly not to replace it with a more robustly democratic way of choosing a British Prime Minister. It is a signal fact which illustrates the fundamentally undemocratic character of the British state that Conservative Prime Ministers are typically removed by their own party and a successor chosen by the Conservative party in an effort to perpetuate Conservative rule, rather than being turfed out of office by the electorate.

Since 1945, only three Conservative PMs have left power after losing a General Election. Alec Douglas Home in 1964, Ted Heath in 1974 and John Major in 1997, all the rest have either been removed by the Conservative party or have resigned after realising that they could no longer count on the support of Conservative MPs. That was back when Conservative ministers actually resigned after they had screwed up. There was Winston Churchill in 1955, Anthony Eden in 1957, Harold Macmillan in 1963, Margaret Thatcher in 1990, David Cameron in 2016 and Theresa May in 2019. In all these cases a successor was chosen by the Conservative party with no input from the public despite the fact that under the Westminster system the Prime Minister enjoys almost unlimited power without the checks and balances and limitations on the executive found in democratic states with a written constitution.

If the Conservatives do remove Johnson they will choose a successor from within their own ranks, and the entire British undemocratic circus will continue. Those of us who are subject to the self-serving rule of the Conservative party will once again be mere passive spectators as the Tories make their calculations about the best way to maintain their power, and to preserve intact the privileges and wealth of that small minority in whose interests they govern.

The excesses, lies, entitlement and contempt which we see with Johnson will not cease once the Tories calculate that they must remove him in order to maintain their grip on power. They will simply continue with whoever it is that they find to replace him. Anyone chosen by the Conservatives will have been a party to and complicit in, the lies, corruption, authoritarianism, and deceit which has characterised the Tory party under Johnson. Johnson might be brought down by partygate but any successor will have seen what Johnson was able to get away with, which was a considerable assault on the UK’s fragile democracy, and will continue in a similar vein.

Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. The UK is rotten, and is incapable of reforming itself. Labour is just as guilty as the Conservatives. Here we are in 2022, and the UK still has an unelected second Parliamentary chamber and an electoral system which can give a party a huge and crushing Commons majority on just 43.6% of the popular vote. Both the two main UK parties are equally in thrall to the absolute power and unlimited patronage that the Westminster system offers to the victor in a general election, both have a vested interest in keeping things as they are.

The UK is a pretend democracy where corruption, lies and law breaking go unpunished and in which there are no means of holding power to account beyond a grossly unfair electoral system. Even the fixed term Parliaments Act is easily subverted, and the Prime Minister retains the power to call a General Election when he or she calculates that it’s in their party’s interests to do so.

This is a system which is never going to change because when you get the power to change it your self-interest depends on you keeping things the same. Scotland cannot change things. Scotland can only ensure its democracy by becoming independent. Independence opens the road to choices which would otherwise not be possible, that’s the point of independence, democracy and accountability are not possible on the Westminster road.

Labour’s message to Scotland : It’s not us, it’s you

Apr24 by weegingerdug

The Labour party branch office in Scotland has unveiled its slogan for the council elections Labour due a week on Thursday. In four short words it neatly encapsulates the entitlement of the Labour party which was instrumental in the fall from grace of a party which one dominated the Scottish political landscape and illustrates how it has learned precisely nothing from the electoral rejection which it has suffered ever since the 2014 referendum and its catastrophic decision to get into bed with the Conservatives. “Come Home to Labour” is the slogan upon which Anas Sarwar hopes to base a Labour recovery, it’s also a slogan which implies that the Labour party has done nothing to merit its desertion by voters in Scotland and that its repeated electoral humiliation since 2014 is the fault of the voters, and not the fault of a Labour party which has shown, and which has continued to show, that it is just as willing as the Conservatives to ignore the decisions which the people of Scotland make at the ballot box if those decisions are not to their liking.

After being rejected by the voters in election after election, the Labour party in Scotland wants us to know that it is willing to forgive us for turning our backs on them. It’s not like they have acknowledged what they did to cause the voters of Scotland to spurn them. “It’s not me honey, it’s you,” was never a formula that was going to have much success in repairing a broken relationship, but it seems like it’s Labour’s best shot.

We had a Scottish Parliamentary election just a year ago. The question of a second independence referendum was easily the most dominant issue in that election campaign. No one in Scotland can have had any doubts about what it meant to cast a vote either for one of the pro-independence parties promising another referendum, or for one of the anti-independence parties opposed to another referendum.

The result of that election was abundantly clear, at least to everyone except Anas Sarwar and the Conservatives. The people of Scotland returned a Scottish Parliament with its largest ever pro-independence majority, and that despite a well funded and concerted campaign of tactical voting promoted by a shadowy anti-independence organisation. Yet here we are a year on and the Labour branch manager in Scotland is still telling us that he opposes another referendum and that Labour will side with the Conservatives in order to block it. In January the Labour party in Scotland dismissed as “fantasy” the suggestion that it might allow candidates to support a second independence referendum or independence itself. Sarwar has said that Labour candidates in May’s council elections ” must support the Union.” Labour has since allowed as candidates former senior members of the Orange Order and has ruled out any coalition deals with either the SNP or the Conservatives. Recently the Labour group leader in Glasgow Malcolm Cunning and the deputy leader of the Conservative group on the council were photographed together at an event hosted by the über-unionist frother organisation, “The Majority” which has called on the British Government to introduce legislation to outlaw “secession.”

“Come Home to Labour, we’re still fighting an election that we have already lost” might not be a particularly appealing slogan, but it’s a far more accurate one, as is “Come home to Labour so that we can continue to ignore you and cosy up to British nationalist howlers who want to abolish Scotland’s status as a nation with an inalienable right to decide its own future.”

It’s not just those of us who support independence who think that Labour’s position on a second independence referendum is untenable and undemocratic and unlikely to win back all those voters that Labour has lost to the SNP, voters that Labour needs to attract back if it is to begin to reverse its losses of the past few years. If you used to vote Labour – like I did – but stopped voting for them because of their opposition to independence and their dishonesty and deceit with Brown’s Vow and their subsequent decision to play devolution Jenga with the Smith Commission.

Roz Foyer, the Secretary General of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, this week spoke out against Anas Sarwar’s knee-jerk unionism and opposition to a second independence referendum saying that the party needed to “take a look at itself” over its opposition to something that the Scottish electorate has given the Scottish Parliament a very clear and unarguable mandate to deliver. Foyer challenged Labour to side with the people of Scotland and not with the Tories and noted that on the issue of another independence referendum there was a “policy difference” between the Labour party and the wider labour movement.

In an interview with the Record newspaper she said : “The Labour Party has to look very carefully at this. I think just rejecting the idea of a second indy referendum ever happening is not a viable way forward,” and added, “I think we have to engage to some extent with the constitutional debate and I think that we should be actively thinking about coming up with options for the future.”

If the polls are to be believed, Labour does have a very good chance of overtaking the Tories and once again becoming the second largest party in Scottish politics, but this is not because of any revival in Labour’s fortunes but because of a potential collapse in the Conservative vote due to widespread public revulsion about Boris Johnson’s serial lies and law breaking over “partygate” and the shameful way in which the Conservatives like Douglas Ross are continuing to debase themselves by trying to defend the indefensible and insulting our intelligence in the process.

It is a sign of just how woeful the Labour party has become that they still cannot significantly improve their position even when up against a Tory party led by a habitual liar and a lawbreaker who presides over a corrupt administration which has no respect for basic human decency. Instead the Labour party of Anas Sarwar wants Scotland to remain powerless to resist the Conservative assault on democratic standards and the rule of law.

Labour in Scotland are the co-dependents who enable the Conservatives’ attack on democracy. They will never recover electorally until the self-proclaimed people’s party actually starts to listen to the people, and more importantly to take what it has been told on board. So far, despite repeated electoral defeats, numerous “reviews” and promises that Labour is going to change, there is no sign that the Conservative enablers of Labour in Scotland is about to do that.

Suffocating democracy in a tupperware tub

Apr21 by weegingerdug

Boris Johnson has appeared before MPs in the chamber of the House of Commons to give an account of himself after being found by the police to have on more than one occasion to have broken a law that he himself went on the telly every night to remind everyone of the importance of abiding by. Yet throughout all this it seems that it never occurred to this entitled and narcissistic buffoon that the law which his own government devised and which it went to enormous lengths to inform the public of the vital importance of upholding should also apply to him and his cronies.

After he was found out he has done nothing but to lie repeatedly about it, to Parliament, to MPs, to the cabinet, to his own party, to the press, and to the public. And yet he is still here, still the Prime Minister, still bloviating, still gaslighting, still distracting, still lying. But you’re not allowed to call the lying Johnson a liar in the chamber of the House of Commons even when he is blatantly lying. Because the only thing worse in the Westminster Parliament than lying is calling out a liar for his intelligence insulting lies. The Speaker objected to SNP’s Richard Thomson for calling Boris ‘Pinocchio’. Which is rather like objecting to Rolf Harris being referred to as a bit handsy.

Johnson can still count on the support of the morality free zone that is the Conservative party, whose representatives continue to debase themselves, and more importantly to debase public standards, by excusing and minimising his behaviour, effectively telling Johnson that he has got away with not being held accountable again, and is unlikely to be held accountable in the future. All they are doing is to enable and empower him, some of them claim that they have accepted his – let’s call it an apology – and want to move on because they believe that Johnson has learned his lesson, but the only lesson that they have taught him is that if he continues to lie, to gaslight, and to distract, they will let him get away with any transgression, no matter how offensive or repugnant.

Meanwhile apologists for Johnson try to make out that that Nicola Sturgeon forgetting a face mask for a few seconds before quickly rectifying her mistake, and later admitting her error and apologising for it is the same as Johnson having numerous parties during the worst of the pandemic and then lying about it repeatedly and trying to insist against all evidence to the contrary that he didn’t know that he was breaking the law even though we now know that he instigated at least one of the parties. Additionally he has been seen to have appeared in public places on several occasions without a mask, including on a visit to a hospital. But aye, sure, totally the same. Just like a doctor who momentarily starts to write out the wrong dose of a drug on a prescription before correcting the error before any harm is done is exactly the same as Harold Shipman.

Hands up anyone who is surprised by that Johnson remains in office after all this. Anyone? … Nope. Nobody. The most surprising thing about this entire sorry episode is that so many people, supposedly serious and intelligent political operators, are prepared to trash their reputations and rapidly diminishing credibility in order to defend this shambling binfire of a serial liar whose only constant is an entitled contempt for any rule or law that he finds to be a personal inconvenience.

Mind you. You’d be hard pressed to describe Andrew Bowie, whose sole political distinction is that he is a holder of the boy scouts badge for smugness, as a serious and intelligent political operator. On Monday, when wearing masks in Scotland in indoor public places and on public transport ceased to be a legal obligation, Andrew Smowgie tweeted that he was very pleased that from today people in Scotland will be trusted to make their own decisions, and in the process became an inadvertent advocate for Scottish independence.

Yesterday Johnson shuffled into the House of Commons and performed the apologies that he knew were expected of him. He repeated his lie that he didn’t know he was breaking the law that he was going on telly most evenings to tell the public not to break. Johnson doesn’t believe that the laws that the public have to obey should apply to him.

However Johnson’s performative contrition was simply a sham for public consumption, he later addressed back bench Conservative MPs at a meeting of the 1922 Committee, so called because the Conservatives think that Downton Abbey is the best model for the governance of modern Britain, and it appears that he immediately returned to his yah boo sucks bombast. According to veteran Conservative MP Sir Roger Gayle, having run through his I’m so, so, sorry” routine in parliament, apparently Johnson gave a “pantomime performance” to the members of the 1922 Committee from which Gayle thought it was fair to conclude that Johnson “doesn’t take it seriously”. Gayle said that he left the meeting after a few minutes because he found the mood “unacceptable.”

Had Gayle stayed, he’d have heard Johnson lay into the Archbishop of England for daring to point out that the government’s cruel, immoral, and despicable plan to send asylum seekers on a one way trip to an impoverished dictatorship with an appalling human rights record was not exactly what Jesus had in mind when he preached about loving thy neighbour, and slandered the prelate by falsely asserting that he had not criticised Putin in such strong terms. Challenged on his remarks Johnson has refused to apologise. Because Johnson is the real victim here.

On Thursday the Commons will debate a Labour motion calling for Johnson to be referred to the Parliamentary Standards Committee for his law-breaking and his repeated and numerous lies. Regardless of their private views, Tory MPs are being whipped to vote against a Privileges Committee inquiry into Johnson. If there was ever a freedom of conscience issue it’s this one. And this is how Parliamentary democracy in the UK dies, suffocated in the Tupperware box containing the cake that Johnson was allegedly ambushed by.

Thanks to their majority of almost 80, Johnson will comfortably win the vote in the Commons tomorrow. He won’t be in attendance himself, having jetted off on a trip to India to play act at being an international statesman. Douglas Ross won’t be there either, he’ll be staying at home and maybe visiting B&Q to buy some MDF from which to construct himself an artificial backbone. And when the Tories do win that vote, they will merely have succeeded in proving that their party is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and the institutions of the British state are unfit for purpose and incapable of holding power to account.

Still vote until you boak

Apr19 by weegingerdug

There’s a need to do a wee explanation of STV for dummies because there seems to be a lot of confusion about it. Admittedly when you look at a typical Saturday evening’s entertainment on STV and it’s wall to wall Ant and bloody Dec, it’s pretty apparent that they’re pretty good at doing dummies all by themselves. But it’s not that sort of STV I mean. We’re talking about Single Transferable Voting, the voting system used in Scottish local elections.

I first published a version of this article before the last council elections way back in 2017, but it is still relevant to this May’s election, perhaps even more so since there is now a new pro-independence party that is an option on some ballot papers, a party about which opinions are, to put it mildly, divided.

I am not going to tell anyone who to vote for, I have my own personal preferences about the independence parties which I will rank most highly, and I am sure that you do too. It is abundantly clear from the experience of the past year or so that bloggers, myself included, have at best only a marginal impact on the outcome of elections in Scotland. All I would counsel is that you rank everyone on the ballot, and that you rank the candidates who represent pro-independence parties above those who represent parties opposed to independence. I am not going to offer any opinions on the order in which you should choose to rank your preferences.

However I will say that you should always rank the Tories and any other right wing British nationalists in last place, and will note that our mendacious media and the anti-independence parties will always use the SNP vote as a proxy for independence support and will ignore the votes received by the other pro-independence parties as they attempt to push an anti-independence narrative.

One of the sources of confusion is that in Scotland we use different voting methods in different elections. In Westminster elections it’s first past the post. In Holyrood elections it’s first past the post in the constituency vote, which is then topped up by the regional vote list where the d’Hondt method is used. And when we used to have elections to the European parliament before the Tories robbed us of this, the entire vote was conducted according to the d’Hondt method. The local elections that we are having in May are determined by a different system of proportional representation, called Single Transferable Vote, or STV. Because different voting systems require different approaches to tactical voting, confusion easily arises.

First past the post is the oldest voting system, and the one that’s most entrenched in the minds of voters. Under first past the post you have a single vote, and you mark an X beside the name of the candidate you want to see elected. Under STV you rank candidates 1, 2, 3, etc. You need only rank those you want to vote for, you only need to put a 1 beside your favoured candidate for your ballot to be valid. Or if there are three candidates from your favoured party you can rank them 1, 2, 3, and that’s all you need to do. You get as many ranking choices as there are candidates on the ballot paper, although you don’t have to rank every single one of them for your vote to be valid.

However you can influence who else gets elected after your number one choice by ranking everyone on the ballot. Under first past the post, you cast a vote FOR a candidate, and that means many voters are reluctant to exploit their STV ballots to the full because they feel that by ranking everyone on the ballot they are voting for candidates or parties that they may not wish to vote for, or even despise.

One of the biggest differences between FPTP and STV is that with FPTP you only vote for a single candidate. With STV you can also use your vote to vote against a candidate. Under STV, when you rate a candidate last, you’re not voting for them, you’re voting against them, you’re saying that you want everyone else to get elected before them. Don’t think of it as voting for a particular candidate, so much as rating them all from epic all the way down to wanker. Or, as they put it in Northern Ireland where they use STV for elections to Stormont, Vote Till You Boak. That’s how the nationalist parties in Northern Ireland managed to deprive the Unionists of an overall majority for the first time ever.

For me, and I suspect for most of the readers of this blog, the boak-making candidates in most local authority wards will be Tories and also, in some areas, your actual out and out fascists. Those are the candidates I’m going to rate lowest of all, because they’re the most boak inducing. By rating everyone else on the ballot above them, I am helping to ensure that everyone else will be elected before the Tories or the far right. Ranking them at the bottom of my list of preferences is not a vote for them, it’s a vote for anyone but them. It’s a way you can use your STV ballot in order to have the best chance of getting a council that you approve of, or at least the one that you least disapprove of.

Think of your STV ballot paper as you being a school teacher giving out grades. Give the good grades to the candidates you approve of, those nice independence supporting people who’ve done their homework and promise to bring you the apple of independence, regular rubbish collections, and better local public services, or whatever is most important to you. Then rate the ones who are neutral, who you think could do better.

And then you give the failing grades to the Tories who are basing their entire campaign on not allowing the people of Scotland to have a voice on a subject that local councils don’t get to influence anyway and saying that it’s everyone else who’s obsessed about that referendum that they talk about to the exclusion of everything else. If there are six candidates on the ballot, rating the Tory as a six is equivalent to giving them an F. It’s certainly not a vote for a Tory. It’s saying that you’d rather that everyone else on the ballot was elected before the Tory. And that’s because you’re a reasonable human being with a functioning moral compass, and not an apologist for the despicable Tory migrant and refugee policy, or Johnson’s law breaking, or for soliciting party donations from friends of Vladimir Putin.

The Tories are advising their voters to rank the SNP last. So we need to employ the same tactic in order to minimise the Tory vote. Abstaining after you’ve ranked all the pro-indy candidates doesn’t help to minimise the Tory vote because other people, like Tory supporters or the frothing howlers who comment on the Herald website, are going to rate them highly. If you don’t rate non-Tory candidates, you make it more likely that a Tory is going to get enough votes to get over the finish line.

Under STV, a candidate is elected once they reach the necessary quota. This quota is determined by a formula. The formula is the total number of votes cast, divided by the number of available seats in the ward plus one, then one is added to the resulting number. At which point the eyes of most normal people start to glaze over. It’s better to illustrate it with a simple example.

Imagine an election in which there are two seats to be filled in the ward and three candidates are standing: Indy Irene, Tory Tom, and Federalist Fred. There are 1500 people eligible to vote, and 1000 voters turned out to vote and cast valid votes. The formula for deciding the quota for election is 1000 divided by 2+1, plus 1. This equals 334.333, which is rounded down to 334 because you can’t get .333 of a vote, not even if you’re one of Ruth Davidson’s burly men. 334 votes is what a candidate needs in order to get elected.

450 voters ranked Indy Irene as their number 1, and 300 ranked Tory Tom as number 1, the remaining 250 ranked Federalist Fred as number 1. These first preference votes get counted first. Indy Irene has received 450 first rankings, so she’s declared elected with 116 votes to spare over the quota of 334.

Now the second rankings get counted to decide which of the other two gets elected, this is where the transferable part of a Single Transferable vote comes into play. Either Tory Tom or Federalist Fred is going to win the second seat. In this election, Federalist Fred is the lesser of two evils, because unlike Tory Tom he doesn’t advocate selling off his grandmother to an American health corporation. If all of the people who voted for Indy Irene ranked Federalist Fred as their number 2, her spare 116 votes will go to Federalist Fred.

That means that in the second round of counting, Federalist Fred now has 366 votes (his 250 first rankings plus 116 from Indy Irene’s supporters second rankings), and this takes him over the quota of 334 and Federalist Fred is declared the winner of the second seat. Even though Tory Tom got more first preference votes than Federalist Fred, Tory Tom still loses. At which point all right thinking people go, “Ha. Ha. Loser!” and do that L thing on their foreheads.

If none of Indy Irene’s supporters ranked Federalist Fred as their number two and they all had abstained, then Tory Tom would have picked the seat up in the second round because there would have been no second preferences from Indy Irene to redistribute. Which only goes to show that if you don’t rank the lesser of two evils as your number two, then the real shit will win.

As long as you rank all the other candidates, you don’t actually need to rank Tory Tom, just ensure that he’s pushed to the bottom. But you do need to rank the other candidates to ensure the Tory is at the bottom of the pile. It’s just easier, and safer, to explain to people to list all the candidates on the ballot in order of gorgeous to god-awful. This is why you need to use your second third fourth etc preferences, and vote until you boak to keep the Tories and their little helpers out.

Putin’s retaliatory list is a badge of honour

Apr17 by weegingerdug

The First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been included on a list of politicians from the UK who have been sanctioned by Vladimir Putin’s regime and banned from ever visiting Russia again. We can be sure she’s about as gutted by this development as you would be if you had just been informed that you are no longer welcome at the AGM of the Nigel Farage fan club. It’s not so much a sanction as it is a badge of pride.

There are far worse things than never being allowed to visit Putin’s Russia, such as being taken there against your will and then not being allowed to leave, after the Russian army has blown up your home and killed your neighbours, a fate which has apparently befallen thousands of Ukrainians from the besieged and destroyed city of Mariupol.

Much to the chagrin of the howling British nationalists who infest the comments section of the Herald newspaper, who used the news as an opportunity to indulge themselves in their frothing hatred, Nicola Sturgeon is the only Scottish politician who has come to the attention of the Putin regime, and been subjected to Russian retaliatory measures. Douglas “I’m totally focused on the situation in Ukraine” Ross has been ignored by the Russian regime, which is not entirely surprising seeing as how he is also ignored by his own colleagues in Westminster. The Putin regime obviously shares their opinion that he is a lightweight. You don’t waste time dealing with irrelevancies.

As we all know, international affairs are a matter which is very firmly reserved to Westminster. Under devolution it is not up to the Scottish Government to decide what sanctions to impose on Putin and his cronies or to make decisions about military or humanitarian aid for the Ukrainians. As we all also know, and Russian intelligence also certainly knows, the Conservatives in Westminster do not consult with or seek input from the Scottish Government even when dealing with issues which have a direct effect on devolved matters or the devolution settlement,so they are certainly not going to seek any input from Holyrood on an international issue which is the sole preserve of Westminster.

The Russian government most assuredly knows that the Scottish Government and Nicola Sturgeon have had very little, if any, input in shaping the British response to Putin’s war in Ukraine. It was notable that the list of people who are to be subject to Russian retaliatory sanctions did not include any of the other leaders of the devolved administrations. Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford was not amongst those banned from ever setting foot on Russian soil. Apart from the Scottish First Minister, all those on the Russian list are senior figures in the British Government and the Conservative administration in Westminster.

So it is worth asking why the Putin regime has made such an exception, given that the Russians know that the devolved governments have no influence on the British Government’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of the aforementioned British nationalist howlers have claimed that the inclusion of Nicola Sturgeon on the Russian sanctions list is merely a fiendish attempt by Putin to stir up Scottish nationalism and have managed to contort reality to such an extent that they have convinced themselves that the declaration by the Kremlin that Nicola Sturgeon is persona non-grata is somehow proof that the Scottish independence movement and the SNP are in Putin’s pocket. However, were it purely a matter of this being a Russian attempt to foment divisions within the British state they would certainly have included the Welsh First Minister on their list too, and also quite possibly leading nationalist politicians from Northern Ireland as well.

The fact that the Putin regime did not do so means that the Russians must have singled out Nicola Sturgeon for a different reason, because they genuinely believe that she is a threat to Putin’s interests and his Russian nationalist desire to destroy Ukrainian independence and Ukrainian nationhood and to incorporate the Ukrainian nation into his Greater Russia as “Little Russia.”

This can only be because Nicola Sturgeon is respected internationally as an articulate and influential voice and a strong and capable politician who is looked up to and admired throughout Europe for her convictions and principles and who is capable of swinging international support and opinion behind her, all qualities in which the serial liar and deceitmeister Boris Johnson and his government of law breaking immoral chancers are signally lacking.

Meanwhile Johnson and his Conservative lackeys shamelessly use the tragedy of Ukraine as a shield behind which to hide the Prime Minister’s and the Chancellor’s law breaking, trying to gaslight the UK into accepting that a period of international crisis is no time to get rid of a liar and a cheat who has repeatedly demonstrated that the only interests he cares about are his own. In fact this current crisis is precisely why Johnson must go, and go immediately. However the Conservatives will not move against him for purely selfish and short sighted party political reasons, because there is no obvious successor, the reputation of Rishi Sunak, the erstwhile golden boy of the Tory party having spectacularly imploded in multiple scandals deriving from his privileged entitlement. He wasn’t so much golden as brass necked.

The contrast is a stark one. In Nicola Sturgeon Scotland has a leader who has international heft and clout and who has the moral and political authority to influence public opinion across the whole of Europe, she has spoken out and condemned the Russian attack on Ukraine in the strongest possible terms and has been vocal about the need to do more to support Ukrainian refugees and has not hesitated to condemn the British Government’s heartless insistence on visas and continues to urge Westminster to align its policy more closely with Europe. That is why the Putin regime has lashed out against her. It shows us that with independence, Scotland could have even greater clout and influence on the world stage and be a force for good in the world, unencumbered with British nationalism’s exceptionalism and delusional fantasies of global power.

I’ve had a few folk contacting me to ask if I am OK after last week’s news that I will never drive again. I was a bit down although not so much because of the driving thing but rather because it made me think about all the other things that I will never be able to do again due to the stroke. It’s been a year and a half now, which means that any improvement I might make in future will most likely be marginal. I will never be able to get back to the artistic pursuits I used to enjoy, and my dominantly left handed brain just isn’t built to allow me much dexterity in my right hand no matter how much I practice. Equally if I ever do get another dog, taking it for long walks in the countryside isn’t on the cards.

I will definitely never return to public speaking, not just because of the difficulty in getting to venues, but more importantly due to the sheer effort it takes to project your voice to an audience and “perform”, and the fact that I can no longer stand for any length of time, even with the aid of a stick. They told me when I was in hospital that the way I was pushing myself before the stroke, blogging just about every day, writing for the National, and driving all over Scotland to public speaking engagements may have been a contributory factor to the stroke. Perhaps the hardest lesson that I have had to learn is to pace myself better and to slow down. The brutal truth is that ye’re nae yuis tae naebdie if ye’re deid.

I prefer to concentrate on what I can do rather than on what I can’t, but I needed a few days to allow myself to mourn what’s been lost and to accept it.

Anyway, pity parties don’t help. I will be fine. I’m made of sterner stuff, and there is important work to be done which I am still able to do, attacking the pretensions of British nationalism and making the case for independence, and that’s what I am going to keep doing.

Douglas Ross : The definition of a charlatan

Apr14 by weegingerdug

There are very few things in Scottish politics which can unite people from across the political spectrum, but in recent day we have witnessed one of those rare beasts which is harder to find than Priti Patel’s compassion or Boris Johnson’s sense of shame. Just about everyone in Scotland, even quite a few Tories, although most of them are too reticent to say so in public, thinks that Boris Johnson needs to resign now that he has added law-breaker to his long and growing list of personal failings. Equally just about everyone, again including quite a few Tories although most of them are reluctant to say so in public, thinks that Douglas Ross, Scottish Conservative jellyfish in chief, is a spineless hypocrite. He is so bereft of political credibility that his own party won’t put his face on their election leaflets.

The Tory excuses for Johnson’s law breaking are gob smacking in their ludicrous brass neckery. Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries, who is to culture as Kanye West is to self-effacing modesty, said that Johnson’s law breaking should be forgiven because he only attended the lockdown busting party for which he has received a fine (at least in this round of Met Police fixed penalty notices) for only nine minutes, as though it were fine to break the law as long as you only do so for a short period of time. “Yes Your Honour, I did rob the bank, but I was in and out again before You gotta fight for your right to party had finished playing on the radio, and therefore I don’t think that the court should punish me.”

Meanwhile the Daily Mail splashed on its front page that the cake with which Johnson was allegedly ambushed never left its tupperware box, which is a defence that the Mail will no doubt stand by next time a drug user is prosecuted for possession of cocaine, especially if it’s Michael Gove.

Here in Scotland Douglas Ross has trashed what little credibility he had left, which wasn’t a great deal because he never had much to begin with. Ross has previously demanded the resignation of the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, even before the independent enquiry into whether she had breached the ministerial code had reported its findings and had said that she had not. He told the BBC, “Evidence against Nicola Sturgeon has been mounting, it has been growing… you cannot continue as First Minister of Scotland if you have mislead parliament and breached the ministerial code.”

When Nicola Sturgeon briefly stood up at a funeral gathering and forgot to put her mask on for a considerably shorter time than nine minutes, the Scottish Tories fulminated on their official Twitter account that “There cannot be one rule for Nicola Sturgeon and another for everyone else.”

But now that Boris Johnson has been found to have misled Parliament on numerous occasions and has been found to have broken the actual law, never mind breached the ministerial code, all of a sudden the Tories are terribly keen that there should be one rule for Boris Johnson and another for everyone else.

These would be the same Scottish Tories who claim to be the party of law and order and attack the SNP for being “soft” on crime, but all of a sudden they are terribly keen to excuse the law breaking of a Conservative Prime Minister and Chancellor.

Being someone who has written about the hypocrisy and rank corruption of the Conservatives for a long time, I had thought I was hardened to their lies, shamelessness and deceit, but few of us can ever have heard such dissembling bullshit as Douglas Ross was spouting on Reporting Scotland this evening. Using the tragic situation in Ukraine as a shield behind which to hide from the consequences of Johnson’s law breaking was beneath contempt. Ross refused to say what we all know, and what we all know that he knows too – that Johnson is dishonest. It was frankly pathetic to watch.

France hasn’t allowed the war in Ukraine to prevent it from holding its presidential election. The Tories didn’t allow the threat of an imminent Nazi invasion when the UK was actually in the midst of a world war to get in the way of them ditching Nevile Chamberlain in order to replace him with Churchill. But the same Tories who fetishise the role of Britain in WW2 and who are insisting that Ukrainians fleeing the agonising plight of their country must jump through bureaucratic hoops in order to find refuge in the UK are brazenly hiding Johnson’s selfish law breaking behind the rubble of Mariupol.

The lock down busting parties were bad enough, but when they came to light, Johnson lied repeatedly about them in an attempt to weasel his way out of his self-inflicted troubles. He lied to the press, he lied to the public, he lied to his own party and his cabinet colleagues, and he lied to Parliament. He trashed the trust placed in those in high office, he breached the ministerial code, he broke the law, and all this is just fine with the Conservative party.

What makes Ross’s spineless hypocrisy even worse than that of the rest of the shameless careerists of the Conservative party is that just a few short months ago he loudly protested that Johnson had to go and asserted that he would not back down. Jacob Rees Mogg dismissed him with a patrician wave as a lightweight. But now that the Conservative MPs who wrote letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee to say that they had lost confidence in Johnson have meekly fallen into line, Ross has joined them, which means that he knows that what Johnson has done and how he has behaved is beyond the pale, but he values his own job and his own position more than he values those principles which he so loudly proclaimed not so long ago. That is the very definition of a charlatan.

I had my NHS driving assessment yesterday. Sadly it did not go well. To cut a long story short, I have been told that I will never be able to drive again. I still have some issues with a lack of attentiveness in the left side of my visual field, it’s minor, but enough to make driving unsafe. My eyes are fine, but the part of my brain that processes visual information was damaged during the stroke. My reaction time is too slow. On top of this the only hand I can use is my right. I was very dominantly left handed before the stroke and really struggled to use the adaptation which allows driving with just one hand. I found it very difficult to position the car correctly on the road, it’s not just steering but I would also have to use my right hand to manage the lights, windscreen wipers and horn, all of which are controlled from a button pad mounted on the steering wheel. I just don’t have the dexterity to do it.

It has now been eighteen months since the stroke, and the occupational therapist carrying out the assessment said that realistically any future improvements to my condition are going to be marginal, and not enough to allow me to drive again. So I need to accept that I will never get behind the wheel of a car ever again. It would not be safe for me or more importantly for other road users. I am very disappointed, but not entirely surprised. On a more positive note she did say that she thinks I may be eligible for the higher rate of the mobility component of PIP as walking and using public transport are both challenging for me. The application for PIP has been made but it will be many months before I get a decision.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit down about this development. Even though it did not come as a great shock I had hoped that I might be able to regain some personal independence, and it’s saddening to be confronted in such stark terms with the fact that driving is one of the many things that the stroke has taken from me.

But there is nothing to be gained by moping or by dwelling on it. This is the reality I have to deal with, and deal with it I shall.

Rishi Sunak : non-dom in the realities of life for ordinary people

Apr12 by weegingerdug

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who has seen his political fortunes plummet more quickly and comprehensively than those of the Labour party in Scotland after the 2014, the previous record holders in the speed and completeness of political death drops. The former golden boy of the Tory party has been revealed as nothing more than a shameless chancer with a carefully burnished brass neck. It’s an astonishing U turn in just a few short weeks, at the beginning of February it was widely doubted by political watchers whether the lying abandoned mattress in 10 Downing Street could survive the week, and Sunak was making none too subtle manoeuvres to put himself in prime position to take the top job. Now it’s equally widely accepted that Johnson has survived and won’t be unseated by Tory MPs even if it turns out that he was fined by the police for his lock down busting parties and is revealed to have lied to Parliament.

It is Rishi Sunak’s career which is now thought to have a shelf life as limited as the many breads which he, or rather, his staff, get from the supermarket for his family at whichever of their many homes they are staying in that day. Sunak’s attempt to avoid answering a question about the price of a loaf of bread by saying that everyone in his family ate different breads was a quip which illustrated just how hopelessly out of touch this immensely wealthy man is with the struggles that ordinary households are facing in order to cope with the soaring cost of living. The tens of thousands of families who now thanks to Conservative policies have to rely on foodbanks in order to keep food on the table aren’t able to choose artisanal loaves in order to pander to the dietary or taste preferences of finicky family members.

The wheels started to come off Sunak’s carefully curated image and his equally carefully plotted path to Number 10 within a few days of his recent spring budget statement. It was a statement which was breath takingly cynical even by the standards of a Conservative party for which breath taking cynicism is now the only thing which counts as a guiding political principle. It was a statement characterised by a complete indifference to tackling even the edges of the hardship facing much of the public due to soaring energy and food bills at a time when the UK is experiencing the greatest fall in living standards since the 1950s.

A man who showed himself unable to deal with using a debit card on a supermarket petrol station forecourt in order to put petrol in an “ordinary car” which it later came out had been borrowed from a supermarket worker for a staged photo op is not a man who has a first hand understanding of the struggles of a low paid worker who can only scrape together the £30 a week it takes to buy petrol to get them to their job by turning down the heating and shopping in the yellow sticker shelves of the supermarket.

When it later came out that Sunak’s wife, the heiress to an Indian billionaire who is reportedly more wealthy than the Queen, had availed herself of the controversial non-dom status in order to save paying an estimated £20 million in tax on overseas earnings, Sunak’s instinctive response was to lie, by attempting to conflate his wife’s non-dom status with her Indian citizenship. Non-dom status is independent of citizenship. It is a tax avoidance measure by which wealthy individuals can pay £30,000 per year to HMRC and no longer have to pay UK taxes on income earned abroad. If the Chancellor’s wife lives in the UK, she is a tax resident in the UK. The fact that she is an Indian citizen is not relevant – non-dom status is a choice. For most people £30,000 is a great deal of money. You are only going to choose to pay the UK tax authorities £30,000 a year if your overseas earnings would otherwise incur a UK tax bill of considerably more than £30,000 a year.

The Chancellor has protested that his family’s tax arrangements are entirely within the rules, but that is to spectacularly miss the point. These are rules which are only accessible to and which are designed to benefit, those who are already extremely wealthy. The man in charge of setting taxes for UK residents who are just doms and not non-doms was happy for his own family to benefit from a tax avoidance scheme even as the rest of us see living standards plummet and public services squeezed to the bone. It’s a classic example of one rule for the rich and another for the rest of us.

Sunak hit out by asserting that the revelation was an attempt to “smear” him, seemingly forgetting the crucial point that it’s not a smear if it is the truth. He responded to the revelations with resentment the wounded self-pity of an entitled man who was witnessing the extent of his entitlement coming out, and undoing all the carefully crafted image burnishing upon which he was basing his bid for leadership of the Conservatives.

But it got worse, it later transpired that both Sunak and his wife held US green cards until late 2019. In order to get a green card you must file annual US tax returns and are “responsible for reporting your income and paying taxes on any foreign earned income”. The Chancellor has not clarified whether his wife paid US taxes on her overseas earnings, but not UK tax, while taking advantage of her non-dom status.

The Chancellor now wants an investigation to find out who it was who leaked the information about his wife’s tax status to the press. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that the occupant of number 11 Downing Street need not look much further than his neighbour in number 10.

However here’s a wee suggestion for Rishi, Instead of an inquiry into who leaked his wife’s non-dom tax status, and caused him political embarrassment by revealing the truth about his own family’s tax avoidance, how about an inquiry into how £4.3 billion has been “written off” to fraudulent furlough payments and another into how a US Green card holder can become a Chancellor here?

The Conservative are the party of those who are awash with wealth and entitlement who are unwilling to help those who are left out as money and property are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. This is what happens when you have a political system like Westminster’s which prevents the powerful from being held to account.

Update : Just an hour or so after publishing this piece it was announced that both Johnson and Sunak are to be fined by the police for breaking the law during lock down and attending gatherings in Downing Street in breach of the rules the rest of us had to follow. On 7 December 2021 Rishi Sunak told MPs in the chamber of the Commons, “No, I did not attend any parties.” Given that the police have fined him for attending an illegal gathering it now looks as though this statement was either misleading or an outright lie, unless Sunak is going to tell us that it couldn’t have been a party because he was wearing a suit. Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have been exposed as law breakers who have misled Parliament and the public. If there was a shred of honour and decency left in public life in the UK they would both resign, but there is more chance of Putin admitting that his war in Ukraine was catastrophic mistake than there is of that happening.

Tomorrow I have to go to Edinburgh for an NHS assessment to find out what I will need in order to be able to drive again. I have been told that the only way I will be able to drive in future is with a specially adapted car. Tomorrow’s assessment is to find out what specific adaptations will be needed. Being able to drive again will go a long way to restoring my independence as I can only walk very short distances with the aid of a walking stick and am unable to carry shopping as I need my good hand for holding the walking stick. I can only use public transport with great difficulty as I cannot stand for any length of time. I’ve been told that the adaptations needed to a car are likely to cost around £1300, although if my application for PIP is successful it will be only £200 and I may be eligible for a mobility car. The advice centre worker who filled in the PIP application form for me said that she thought I had a very good case for getting PIP as I require significant assistance with daily living tasks, however applications are taking months to be processed, so I won’t find out the result of my application any time soon.

UK energy security review – not enough energy and no security

Apr10 by weegingerdug

The agonies of Ukraine continue to dominate the agenda. We are now two months into the war that the Kremlin continues to insist is not a war, demanding that the world denies the evidence of its own eyes, while thousands are killed, millions flee their homes and the gruesome evidence of war crimes keeps mounting. Meanwhile within Russia, Putin has intensified his transformation of that country into a totalitarian dictatorship where any expression of dissent is harshly punished.

The war has exacerbated an energy crisis which has already seen energy bills soar and highlighted the extent to which Europe is dependent on imports of oil and gas from Russia, the payment for which is Putin’s main source of income and which is paying for his war machine.

The issue of energy security is now of prime importance. Reliance on Russian fossil fuels not only continues to give Putin the money he needs to fund the Russian military, it also gives him a powerful way to blackmail the West and keeps adding to global carbon emissions and the environmental destruction wrought by Russia’s notoriously dirty fossil fuel extraction industries. Whatever way you look at it, reliance on Russian oil and gas is a bad thing.

Spurred on by the multiple crises besetting the energy sector, the British Government has published its long-awaited Energy Security Strategy. Although it is called an energy security strategy, industry experts have criticised the British government’s policy, saying that it will fail to provide either enough energy or sufficient security. It has been described as being more of a collection of aspirations than a strategy. The plan, if we are calling it that, aims to end the UK’s reliance on gas and oil, but the decision of Downing Street to ignore quick wins like insulation and instead to favour expensive nuclear power over renewables has been widely questioned. The strategy does nothing to provide any hope of relief in the short term to households which are struggling to pay soaring energy bills right now.

Like many European states, the UK has a heavy reliance on natural gas for heating homes and generating electricity, and so it has been hard hit by the soaring price of gas, which was high even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was true even though the UK, unlike most European states, has significant domestic production of gas, mostly from the North Sea. Some 44% of UK gas consumption comes from its own resources. However as a result of British Government decisions, the UK has significantly less gas storage capacity than other European states. This reduces the ability of the UK to cope with surges in the wholesale prices of gas. The recent increase of a government-set price cap on energy has left many people struggling to afford to heat their homes.

The British Government’s Energy Security review fails on many levels. The best way to reduce energy bills, whether in the short or the long term is to use less energy. An efficient and relatively quick way to achieve this is by insulating buildings better. Much of the UK’s housing stock is poorly insulated which means that a significant part of those energy bills which so many households are struggling to pay is being spent on heat that escapes through roofs, walls, and windows. For many years, energy experts including the Climate Change Committee, the UK’s official advisory body on meeting climate targets, have been calling for more to be done. Back in 2018 a report from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) warned that insulating lofts and boilers was not sufficient and said that instead, the aim should be to completely transform houses to make them “net-zero”, which means insulating an entire house to a very high standard.

So it’s not like the Johnson regime had not been warned, but despite this, the Energy Security strategy includes no major new energy efficiency measures and instead summarises policies previously announced. It claims that “by 2025, around 700,000 homes will be upgraded”, but it is far from clear how this will happen. Last month, the Climate Change Committee warned that the government’s current plans for insulating homes wouldn’t deliver on its targets, and this new strategy sheds no light on how those targets are going to be met.

The quickest and cheapest way to deliver new sources of carbon zero energy is to invest heavily in onshore wind and solar power, the strategy favoured by the Scottish Government. Scotland has a massive potential for renewable energy production which has only just started to be tapped. This potential has been effectively ignored by Downing Street.

The British Government, pandering to the not in my backyard tendencies of Conservative MPs, will not change the planning regulations in England which make it almost impossible to get planning approval for onshore wind farms, even though these can be built and brought into production far more quickly and cheaply than offshore wind, yet it’s offshore wind which the British government wants to expand.

The British Government has instead decided to embark on a massive expansion of nuclear energy. Nuclear power plants are not only eye wateringly expensive, they also take a very long time to design and build. The energy review seeks to have 25% of the UK’s electricity produced by nuclear by 2050, and up to eight new nuclear power plants. This is a highly ambitious, and many would say unrealistic goal. The first new nuclear power plant in Europe for decades, the Olkiluoto plant in Finland, has only just started to produce electricity, 12 years late and €8 bn over its original €3 bn budget.

However even if the UK is able to bring new nuclear power plants on line within the timetable optimistically forecast by the British Government, and without experiencing massive overruns in costs, switching to nuclear energy does not necessarily ensure that the UK is no longer dependent on imports from authoritarian regimes. Nuclear power plants require uranium as a fuel, and currently 41% of the world’s supply of uranium comes from Kazakhstan, whose authoritarian government is concerned to remain in the good books of the Kremlin in case Putin decides to “liberate” Kazakhstan’s large ethnic Russian minority.

The strategy also foresees increased production of oil and gas from the seas around Scotland. This is a backward step as far as moving toward net zero carbon is concerned. It’s also interesting that the British government wants to increase the extraction of North Sea oil and gas while at the same time it tells Scotland that the oil is running out whenever the topic of independence is raised. Professor Michael Grubb ,Chair of the international research organization Climate Strategies, headquartered at Cambridge University, described the review as the “most stunning and cowardly failure in the strategy”, adding that onshore wind and solar power capacity can be installed in just months compared with several years for offshore wind power and could help bring prices down fast for domestic consumers.

What is not at all surprising that the British Government has not consulted with the Scottish Government on either a ministerial or official level in the production of this strategy even though it is Scotland which contains the majority of the UK’s energy potential, whether that’s fossil fuels or renewable energy. Michael Matheson, the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy pointed out that Scotland exported 20.4 TerraWatt hours of electricity in 2020, enough to power every household in Scotland for 26 months. In addition Scotland exported 17 Mtoe of natural gas to the rest of the UK in 2019, which accounted for 42% of the rest of the UK’s total gas consumption.

The best and quickest route to energy independence and security for Scotland, the only route which will ensure that the needs of consumers in Scotland are taken into account, is with independence. Otherwise we will forever be held hostage to the grandiose schemes of a Westminster which views Scotland as nothing more than a source of resources to be pillaged. Despite being one of the most energy rich nations in Europe, under Westminster we face a future of soaring energy bills ,continuing energy insecurity, and continuing carbon emissions.

Thank you all for your patience during my recent break. I feel much more refreshed now, the break was badly needed. I am going to have to pace myself more carefully in future in order to avoid hitting a brick wall of exhaustion again. I did manage to – finally make an application for PIP. I had avoided doing this this for a long time as I am no longer able to hold a pen and needed help to get the form filled in. Unfortunately all our local Citizens Advice Bureaus were closed due to covid, but I eventually got a phone appointment with a local advice centre.

The main reason I had been putting off making an application is because it means psychologically accepting that the stroke has left me with significant and permanent disabilities. I have been told that the only way I will be able to drive again is with a specially adapted car, and with a successful PIP claim I will be eligible for help with the cost of this or possibly even eligible for a mobility car as my mobility is now significantly reduced due to the stroke. I also require fairly substantial help with basic daily living tasks, and that is likely to be permanent. I have now accepted that I will never regain the use of my formerly dominant left hand and that I will continue to have to deal with weakness and lack of sensation and coordination in my left arm and leg. I will always have to walk with a stick, but at least I can walk, and I no longer need the wheelchair that they gave me when I left the hospital.

However I prefer to concentrate on what I can do rather than dwell on what I am no longer able to do. I may have to slow down a bit but I can, and will, continue to write and blog until the day comes, as it surely will, that Scotland regains her rightful place among the independent nations of the world.

	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: April 2022