The farce that is PIP

It seems that my bad experience with PIP is sadly typical, so I have decided to share it in more detail, partly in order to help me get my thoughts together for getting the DWP to reassess my claim but also because I hope that by sharing my experience it will put pressure on the Scottish Government, which is taking over PIP in Scotland and replacing it with Adult Disability Payment, to ensure that its new system makes more accurate, humane and sympathetic assessments which preserve the dignity of claimants and aid them instead of grinding them down and adding to the stress and exhaustion that living with a disability or chronic illness creates.

One of the lessons I have learned since my stroke is that while you can recover many of the functions and abilities that the stroke robbed you of, performing these tasks becomes far more time-consuming, exhausting and difficult. Before the stroke I could get washed and dressed in a few minutes. Now it takes the best part of an hour, and that’s on a good day. Before the stroke, I could write a one thousand word article in 30 minutes and then go about my day. Now it takes three hours or more to peck it out with my right hand and leaves me mentally and physically drained. I can only use a full sized keyboard, I cannot manage texting on a mobile phone.

A life with a disability is a life spent battling to achieve even the simplest of tasks. This takes an immense toll physically and emotionally. Studies have found that people who have a physical disability are three times more likely than able bodied individuals to suffer from depression. Taking care of your mental health is one of the most difficult challenges that you face when you have a physical disability or chronic illness.

So given all this, when you encounter a setback like your claim for PIP being wrongly assessed or turned down, it can have a devastating effect on your emotional and mental well being, potentially far worse than when a healthy and able bodied person encounters the same setback. It is so much harder for you to do anything about the injustice you have just suffered and to get it put right. This is what makes the shitshow of the UK’s benefits system for disabled people so vile and insidious.

I have significant disabilities which will be life long. I suffered a massive stroke which destroyed the parts of my brain dealing with motor control and sensation on the left side of my body. This was particularly difficult since I was very dominantly left handed before the stroke. Fortunately I escaped any serious loss of intellectual or verbal functioning, although I do have some memory issues and can no longer multi-task like I used to. My reaction times are also impaired.

I also have issues with inattention to the left. This is due to the stroke affecting the parts of the brain that process visual information. This problem was severe in the weeks and months after the stroke. The best way to explain it is that it’s like when you are looking for something but then realise that it’s been right in front of you the whole time. I would not notice things, even large objects, on the left side of my visual field. This problem is a lot better than it was, but it’s still there and always will be. I have learned to compensate by training myself to pay attention to the left, but of course this means I am not always paying attention to the right. This makes me prone to walking into obstacles and it’s why I have the unfortunate habit of leaving our front door open as the handle is on the left as you exit. All this means I need help to ensure that I am safe.

I have lost all fine motor control in my formerly dominant left hand. I have very poor sensation and proprioception (your sense of where your body is located in space) in my left hand, arm, foot, and leg. I only know where my hand and leg are if I am looking at them. I have very little feeling in my left hand, arm and leg. I suffer from bouts of muscle cramps and spasms as well as a general weakness in all the muscles on the left, in my torso and back as well as my limbs. Picking something up from the floor is difficult, exhausting, and painful.

These problems mean that I need help with many daily living tasks as I am liable to trip and fall and am at high risk of injuring myself without being aware of it. This is made more serious by the fact that the blood thinning medication I am on means that if I cut myself I bleed copiously and if I fall I am at very high risk of suffering a haemorrhage. I cut my left hand yesterday and have no idea how it happened. A couple of weeks ago when getting undressed there was blood all down my leg. I didn’t feel anything and don’t know how I injured myself. This kind of thing happens fairly often.

I am prone to bouts of post stroke fatigue. This is a common symptom in the months and years following a stroke. When this happens I am not able to do very much at all.

Even though we have an adapted bathroom, I have got stuck in the bath a couple of times and have also fallen a couple of times while getting out of the bath. I have also slipped and fallen a couple of times in the shower. I need help with showering as I need to hold on to a grab rail with my good hand, which means it’s difficult to wash myself. I can’t wash or dry my feet or lower part of the body. I can only shower or bathe if my husband is in the next room in case I get stuck or fall.

I need help to put on the creams and potions for my psoriasis, I can’t manage bottle caps at all. Childproof packaging is also stroke proof packaging. I need help to tie my shoelaces and do up the clasp on my trousers. I cannot manage cuff buttons at all and rely on a button puller (the best seven quid I ever spent) for other buttons. I can’t pull on a jumper sleeve over my right arm, I need help with that. I need help to put an overcoat on. Other household tasks, like changing the bed or doing laundry or the dishes, are beyond me.

I cannot cook at all. I have very limited dexterity in my one good hand, I struggle with packaging and cannot carry a plate of hot food so can’t even use the microwave. I need someone to cut my food up for me into bite sized chunks.

I need a stick to walk. I cannot stand for any distance or length of time even with a stick, without a stick or something to hold on to I can only stand for a matter of a few seconds. and can only manage a few steps. Even with a stick I can only walk a very short distance on a good day and cannot stand for long. Because of the problems I’ve already mentioned I am at very high risk of tripping and falling. I have fallen a few times. Additionally I have developed asthma since the stroke due to the weakness I now have in the muscles of my torso and chest. This means I need to stop and rest after even mild exertion, and further limits the already short distance I can walk.

I have been ruled medically unfit to drive, even with an adapted car. Public transport is massively challenging. I can’t stand at a bus stop or walk from the train station or bus stop to where I need to go. I can’t manage a shopping trolley and can only carry one plastic bag with a little shopping in it in the same hand I use for my stick.

All this was explained to the DWP when I applied for PIP. I was awarded the lower rate of the daily living component of PIP but nothing else. The award letter says that the DWP will not reassess my condition until 2025, so they recognise that I have a long term disability.

I was shocked when I got my award letter to find five areas in which I have been incorrectly assessed. I suspect this was done to bump me down from the higher rate of the daily living component of PIP to the lower rate. They said that I can wash and shower without assistance as I have an adapted bathroom. This is not true. They said that I can manage my medications without assistance, this is not true. They said I can dress myself without assistance using an aid – presumably they mean the button puller. But this is not true. They said I can eat and drink without assistance, but since I need someone to pour a drink for me and to cut up my food this is most definitely not true.

However most egregious was their assessment that I can prepare a simple meal using an aid. This is simply a flat out lie on their part. There was no discussion at all of cooking aids when I applied or had the face to face assessment. I have no cooking aids. I explained that I cannot cook at all, that I have injured myself in the kitchen, and that I can’t deal with packaging. The DWP have simply invented a phantom cooking aid in order to claim that I don’t need someone to help prepare food for me.

If the DWP had assessed me correctly in these five areas – and they were given accurate information, then I would have been awarded the higher rate of the daily living component of PIP.

But most gob smacking of all was their decision that because I can hobble a few metres with the help of a stick I have no mobility needs. They say I am able to plan and follow a journey myself because I can plan and follow a journey myself for as far as I can walk, which is not far at all. In effect they have ruled that there is no difference between me and a marathon runner in terms of mobility needs. They have paid no heed to my propensity for falling, tripping or colliding with objects or to my regular bouts of fatigue.

I have asked for a reassessment. I have been told that the DWP habitually awards the lowest that they think they can get away with, knowing that many people will not appeal. However I was appalled by how poorly their assessment was done. Apparently this is typical. I am articulate and capable of explaining my issues in detail. If I am having this problem with my PIP application what is it like for people with verbal or cognitive problems.

I order to ask for a reassessment you have to phone and negotiate a cold and unhelpful automated menu system which many people with disabilities will struggle with. Then you are put on hold for ages until you finally get through to an advisor, and the first thing they tell you is that asking for a reassessment could result in your PIP award being reduced. It’s intimidation and bullying designed to put you off.

I have heard similar tales from dozens of people. This is a system which is not designed to help disabled people, but to fob us off and shut us up. Well this cripple will not be shut up.

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The Great Tory who’s the bigger bastard contest

We know now that it’s Rish! Sunak and the exclamation mark of ambition and the cosplaying play-doh Thatcher Liz, if you don’t like these principles I have others, Truss who are the final two candidates in the contest to become the next worst Conservative Prime Minister in living memory, although the word Conservative is probably superfluous in that sentence. The two are now trying to out-right wing bastard each other in a ballot of Conservative party members. May the gods help us all. Truss has vowed to send more asylum seekers to Africa, a promise that would not have looked out of place on a National Front leaflet in the 1970s. Not to be outdone, Sunak promises to incarcerate those who haven’t yet been palmed off on some third world dictatorship in prison ships, presumably so that their foreign feet will not defile Britain’s hallowed soil.

Truss using the Daily Mail in order to promise to send more migrants to Africa sums up this vile Tory party. There is no sense of social responsibility, no integrity. Compassion and empwthy are seen as weakness. All there is is a cruel and callous bigotry masquerading as governance in order to appeal to the profound insecurities of bitter right wing elderly white men who hanker for the 1950s when they could still tell themselves that Britain was a global power.

It ought to be obvious by now that a system which allows the members of a wildly unrepresentative political party to choose the Prime Minister is a system which is not only grossly undemocratic, but a system guaranteed to deliver an individual who is unfit for the highest office. However this is now the third time in six years that the Conservatives have subjected us to this farce and it has become normalised to the extent that the fact that it is an insult to democracy no longer warrants a mention in a British media which is too busy wetting its collective knickers about the respective candidates’ promises on tax cuts or their novel ways of being cruel to migrants and asylum seekers.

To give a flavour of how unrepresentative Conservative members are, a YouGov poll in 2021 found that 59% of those who voted Conservative in Scotland in 2019 (not party members) would support abolishing the Scottish Parliament, the only demographic group in Scotland amongst whom there is majority support for abolishing Holyrood. Only 20% of the wider Scottish population in this poll backed the abolition of the Scottish Parliament. We can assume that those who are committed enough to the Conservatives to actually join the party are even more unrepresentative of wider public opinion. Across the UK as a whole Conservative party members are disproportionately white, middle class, resident in the south of England, Brexit supporting, male, and elderly. These are the people who are going to choose the next Prime Minister.

Opinion polls of Conservative party members suggest that Truss will win. She’ll win in part because of the recent queues at Dover. No one in Britain from the media to the government to the opposition is allowed to name the real reason for those queues. It’s Brexit. We all know it’s Brexit, but it has taken a French minister to point out the obvious. The British media is only too keen to collude with the Tories and blame the French, the holiday rush, anything but the obvious. Before the Tory hard Brexit, cars were just waved through border control, but now thanks to Brexit everyone’s passport has to be stamped. Truss or Sunak won’t admit it’s because of Brexit, they certainly won’t do anything about it. Instead they will just cynically blame the French for doing what they themselves insisted had to be done.

Unfortunately the small and unrepresentative group of people who have the power to choose our next prime minister will look at those snaking lines of traffic and their Anglo-British nationalist cognitive dissonance will lead them to double down and blame the EU for castigating plucky little Britain for taking back control. They will see the traffic jams as an unjust punishment. In order to guard their feverish dreams of cake and sunlit uplands they will elect Truss, the self proclaimed champion of the Brexit myth, the defender of Johnson’s legacy.

When the Anglo-British nationalists voted to end freedom of movement it was the freedom of movement of Poles and other foreigners that they had in mind, not their own. When they decided that they wanted to take control of the border it was the UK border they thought about, not realising or caring that the point of a border is that there are two independent sovereign states on either side of it, while the mountain of luggage piles even higher at Heathrow because there are no longer EU citizens to employ as baggage handlers. Now the Brexiters are learning the hard way that Brexit means that France has taken back control of its side of the border. Truss and Sunak both collude in the comforting delusions of Anglo-British nationalism, but it’s Truss who has successfully positioned herself as the true heir to their deposed champion Johnson in the eyes of most Conservative members.

Truss shares many of Johnson’s worst characteristics, the boorishness, the contempt for democracy and accountability, the lying, the naked ambition, and the chameleon like willingness to change her, ahem let’s call them beliefs, in order to appeal to whichever constituency can further her career. What she lacks is Johnson’s upper class twit shtick and the patrician showmanship and Etonian charisma which to Scottish eyes are unfathomably appealing to a section of the electorate in England. Truss is so robotic in her delivery that she makes Theresa May seem warm and personable. She is easily the favourite amongst the Conservative party membership, despite warnings that she is incompetent and ineffectual, with her sole talent being her ability to take credit for the achievements of others. Dominic Cummings refers to her as the hand grenade because she destroys everything she comes into contact with.

Truss concedes that she may not be the most slickly presented, but insists that with her “what you see is what you get,” which is a bit of a worry because what we are seeing is an incompetent opportunistic and unprincipled idiot who cosplays Thatcher. What we are going to get is whatever promises her power, and that will consist of pandering to the far right Anglo-British nationalist frothers of the Tories’ European Research Group. To say the outlook is grim is an understatement.

Both Sunak and Truss have said that they would not “allow”, note the choice of words there another Scottish independence referendum. This is despite Sunak being on record as previously supporting another Scottish referendum after Brexit had been achieved, and Truss once stating that constitutional issues should be decided by a referendum. Naturally neither of them believes that they should be bound by their previous statements, however they are determined to ensure that the entire electorate of Scotland is bound by the campaign rhetoric of Alex Salmond and the SNP in 2014.

Meanwhile Johnson openly boasts that he will be back in number 10. Cummings speculates that Johnson is backing Truss because she will quickly crash and burn as Prime Minister, allowing him the opportunity to make a comeback. Johnson doesn’t care about the havoc she will wreak in the meantime. As long as Scotland remains a part of this dysfunction that calls itself the UK, we will have to care about the havoc, because it will continue to blight all of our lives.

This bout of fatigue isn’t lifting, not helped by the fact that I’ve had additional stress these past few weeks. I got ripped off by a seller on eBay, thankfully I’ve got my money back now, I got a bigger tax bill than I had been expecting, and a decision on my husband’s visa renewal is due this week. All this was stressful enough.

However to cap it all I finally got a decision on my PIP application. They have awarded me the lowest daily living payment, but have ignored at least five factors which would give extra points and entitle me to the higher rate. It’s a shocking ruling. It seems that they were just not listening to what they’ve been told about my condition and the help I need with daily living tasks.

Worst of all is that in their wisdom the DWP has decided that because I can hobble 50 metres with the aid of a stick and having to stop and rest halfway, I am not entitled to any mobility payment at all. In effect they have ruled that there is no difference between me and someone capable of running a marathon. They have ignored the facts that I suffer from post stroke fatigue, that I have fallen several times and have injured myself without being aware of it due to the lack of sensation on the left side of my body. They have ignored the fact that I have been ruled medically unfit to drive and have an inattention to the left which makes me liable to walk into lampposts and the like. They have also ignored the facts that I cannot stand for any length of time even with a stick, that I cannot carry anything because I need my working hand for my stick, so shopping is impossible, that I easily lose my footing because I have no instinctive sense of where my left foot and leg are, that I cannot leave the house at all when it is icy out, and that using public transport is, to put it mildly, challenging for me. None of this seems to matter. Even though I am utterly dependent on someone driving me about, apparently I have no mobility needs. It’s a nonsensical decision and a total farce.

Obviously I am going to appeal, but all this is additional stress and hassle that I really don’t need. I’d be lying if I said it was not affecting my mental health. I’m going to take some time off from the blog to prepare and submit this appeal and to find my equilibrium again. I hope to be back next week.

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

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

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

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The broken TV

The Conservative leadership contenders are vying with one another to see which can be the most unpleasantly right wing, like an episode of Britain’s Got Unbalanced. Johnson loyalists are briefing against the insanely ambitious Rishi Sunak, telling the right wing press that the former Chancellor is a socialist. Saying that Sunak is a socialist is like describing Jeffrey Epstein as a philanthropist who was deeply concerned about the welfare of pubescent girls. Sunak’s campaign has replaced the last i in his given name with an exclamation mark in order to make Rish! seem like he has a personality, which has the unfortunate effect of making him come across like one of those teenage girls who replaces the dots on the i’s in her name with little hearts, but only if she is an obscenely wealthy and out of touch child who had spent the last three years plotting to assassinate her tap dance teacher. Rish! launched his campaign by confessing that his worst fault was his perfectionism, which might have been more convincing, although it would still have been cringe worthy, if he hadn’t at the time been sitting in front of a sign which spelled the word ‘campaign’ wrong.

At this juncture all any of them have to do to be ahead of the game is to point out that unlike Liz Truss, they can actually find the exit from a room which only has one door. That’s how low the bar is set.

One of Sunak’s leading supporters in the Scottish Conservatives is West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine MP Andrew Bowie. Bowie is even more smug than Sunak is, which is quite remarkable since Bowie doesn’t have Sunak’s several hundred million pound fortune. Rish! is a man of the people, but only if the people can afford luxury yachts and their own private helicopters.

Bowie excitedly told the Times newspaper this week that one of the reasons he backs Rish! is that the Prime Careerist in waiting wants to introduce legislation allowing his government to ‘circumvent’ Holyrood because according to Tweedlesmug and Tweedlesmugger, ‘the SNP does not govern in the interests of the people of Scotland.’ Yes, it was actually a Tory party that imposed a hard Brexit on Scotland that Scotland didn’t want that said that. The Conservative party does not govern in the interests of the people of Scotland, a fact which the people of Scotland have recognised, which is why the Conservatives have not won an election in Scotland since the 1950s.

What Bowie is neglecting in his smuggery is that the only reason the SNP is in any position to govern at all is because the people of Scotland voted to put them there. Democracy in the UK has become so devalued that a representative of a party that has not won an election in Scotland for over thirty years before Andrew Bowie was born, can actually propose legislation to allow that party to overrule the Scottish Parliament because the people of Scotland obstinately keep voting in a way that Bowie’s party doesn’t like. It is not for the Conservative party to decide what the interests of the people of Scotland are, it’s for the people of Scotland.

The entire point of the devolved Scottish Parliament in the first place was to allow the British state to neutralise one of the strongest arguments for independence, which was that independence was needed in order to protect Scotland from Conservative policies and Governments that Scotland didn’t vote for. All the way through the 1980s and 1990s, the Labour and Lib Dem parties told Scotland that a devolved parliament could give Scotland the control it needed and would be able to mitigate damaging Conservative policies. We see now how hollow that promise is. Both Labour and the Lib Dems are determined to ignore Holyrood because the people of Scotland had the temerity to vote for a Scottish Parliament promising another independence referendum,. There is nothing that Holyrood can do to make up for Brexit and Holyrood is powerless against a Conservative run Westminster which is determined to unilaterally trash the devolution settlement despite all the fine words of 2014’s Vow.

Naturally this blatant affront to basic democracy has been met with howls of outrage in the Scottish media. Or at least it would have been outraged if it wasn’t so busy whipping up some SNP baddery about the Arran ferry or telling us how the next UK General Election cannot possibly be a de facto referendum, because reasons.

If the people do not believe that a governing party operates in their interests, they can vote against that party at the next election. That’s how democracy works in countries which actually have a functioning democratic system. In Scotland as a part of the UK a party that Scotland has rejected at the polls for seventy years and which has a mere six Scottish MPs can appoint itself the arbiter of what is in the interests of the people of Scotland, and that is just fine with most of the media in Scotland. Democracy in Scotland is broken and in no small measure that’s because most of the media in Scotland will hold power to account only when it’s Holyrood power.

All three of the major British nationalist parties are betraying Scotland. All three of them show by their deeds that they are British nationalist no matter how much they deny their own nationalism and try to make out that the only nationalists in Scottish politics are those who seek independence. All three of them collude to render meaningless the traditional understanding that this so-called union is a voluntary partnership of nations. Scotland, they keep telling us, has the absolute right to self-determination, but the second that it looks like Scotland might wish to exercise that right they find one reason after another to block the independence referendum that Scotland in a democratic election voted to have, and they keep finding spurious reasons for discounting that election result while hypocritically insisting that the outcome of the 2014 referendum must be respected – but not the promises and commitments that they made in order to win it. Scotland’s right to self determination in this UK is like being told by the British nationalists that we have the right to watch the TV whenever we want, but only after they have smashed the screen and hidden the remote control.

 

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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.

Addressing the democratic deficit

Fundamental to democracy are the abilities of the people to choose their government, and then to hold that government to account for the promises and commitments that it made in order to win power. Additionally, democracy cannot function if people are not permitted to change their minds in the light of new information. As a part of the UK, Scotland lacks all those abilities. Events since the independence referendum have brought the democratic deficit that Scotland suffers as a part of the UK very starkly into focus.

There has of course been Brexit and the betrayal of the Vow, and now for the third time in six years we see the Conservative party choosing the next Prime Minister without the slightest input from the wider public , the public over whom the dysfunctional British Constitution will give that Prime Minister almost unlimited power. This blatant assault on democracy has now become normalised as the way in which British Prime Ministers with their presidential powers are chosen. It is noticeable that the British media, fan-boying and fan-girling as it does about individual candidates, no longer bothers to remark just what an insult to democracy the entire process is, all the more so in the UK, which as we have seen with the lamentable term in office of the corrupt serial liar Johnson, lacks any meaningful methods of holding the Prime Minister to account.

From the anti-independence parties we hear the repeated refrain that “the SNP” needs to respect the result of the 2014 referendum as though the SNP is not currently the dominant party in the Scottish Government because the people of Scotland put them there. The SNP have respected the result, Scotland is still a part of the United Kingdom. However what is far more important is that the winners of a democratic vote respect the promises and commitments that they made in order to win it, and that the people have the ability to hold the winning side to account for those promises and commitments. If that is not possible, there can be no meaningful democracy.

What the Labour and Conservative parties are demanding right now is that they do not need to respect the promises and commitments that they made as part of the Better Together campaign and that they and they alone are judge and jury on whether those promises have been kept. They are determined to ensure that the people of Scotland cannot hold them to account.

In effect they are insisting that Scotland handed them a blank cheque in all perpetuity in 2014 and that they alone, not the people of Scotland, will decide whether they have acted in good faith in the years since that vote. They have abrogated to themselves the power to decide when and if they should face the verdict of the people. They bandy about time periods after which they might be prepared to consider ‘allowing’ another referendum, completely ignoring the fact that if the UK is as they claim a voluntary union, this is a decision for the people of Scotland to make, not them. And they certainly do not wish to acknowledge that the people of Scotland already made that decision using the only democratic means available to them, when they chose to elect a Scottish Parliament committed to bringing about another referendum within the term of the current Scottish Parliament.

As a part of the UK Scottish democracy is fatally compromised because Scotland’s MPs at Westminster are a small and permanent minority who can be sidelined and ignored. When, as is currently the case, the ruling party at Westminster has a majority which is greater than the total number of Scottish MPs, Scottish votes can make no difference at all to how votes in the House of Commons go.

Of course the usual retort of opponents of independence, especially outwith Scotland, is that regions or cities within England don’t necessarily get what they vote for either. The difference is that they are not constituent nations within what is always described as a voluntary union of different countries. Scotland is a nation with a long history as an independent state, and a distinct political culture and tradition of its own, a nation moreover whose continued existence as a distinctive polity within the UK was not extinguished by the Treaty of Union but rather was guaranteed by it. If it is relevant to the discussion that London or Yorkshire don’t always get what they vote for either, then the UK is not a union, but is rather the unitary state of Greater England.

Despite that infamous Vow, promising that the powers of Holyrood would be made permanent, the Conservative Government of Theresa May obtained a Supreme Court ruling that the Sewel Convention has no legal standing. Holyrood is entirely at the mercy of Westminster, which can use its non-Scottish majority to change, sideline or even abolish the devolution settlement. The Conservatives are deeply hostile to the Scottish Parliament, and all that is holding them back from an all out assault on the powers of Holyrood is the fear of another independence referendum.

We are also seeing Westminster using that built in Scottish minority position at Westminster in order to overrule the Scottish Parliament, and in effect to ensure that the losers of a Holyrood election are still able to get their way. The last Holyrood election was won by parties supporting a second independence referendum, but the losing parties, who opposed the referendum are relying on Westminster to block the referendum, making a mockery of last year’s Scottish Parliament election.

Given all this the publication of the Scottish Government’s second paper setting out the case for independence is timely indeed. The paper sets out the view that it is for the people of Scotland and no one else to decide how they are governed and to decide whether Scotland should become independent. Rather than rehash all the points raised in the paper, you can read it for yourself by clicking here :  However given the way governance in the UK has been going these past years, and the evident authoritarianism of the Conservatives, it is no exaggeration to say that the future of democracy itself in Scotland can only be secured through independence.

I’ve been blogging a lot this past couple of weeks but I am afraid that it has caught up with me and I’ve hit a brick wall of post-stroke fatigue, so I am going to need a few days to rest and recuperate. I’ll be back after the weekend.

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

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

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

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A democratic route to another referendum can’t exist if it’s a secret

Most of Scotland is now at the “Who cares?” stage in the parade of grotesques extremists, chancers and fools which passes for a Conservative leadership contest. All of them are vile, all of them enabled and all of them colluded in the corruption. lies, and law breaking of Boris Johnson, which not one of them had any problem with as long as they thought that Johnson was a vote winner for their party and the key to advancing their careers and ambition. Now all of a sudden they’re all about ‘integrity’ and are trying to appeal to the frothing zoomers who make up the Conservative party membership by trying to outdo one another in fantasy tax cuts and victim blaming.

All of the candidates are equally determined to block the operation of democracy in Scotland, and determined to fob Scotland off with one spurious reason after another for why Scotland really can’t be allowed the referendum that Scotland voted for in last year’s Holyrood elections. They are all insistent that Scotland really does, pinkie promise I swear on my expenses claim, have a democratic route to another independence referendum, but are all equally determined to side step any questions about how Scotland can exercise that right to self-determination that they keep telling us Scotland has. That’s because they don’t want to admit that if Scotland’s sovereign national right to decide its future for itself is contingent upon obtaining the permission of a British Prime Minister then Scotland does not actually have a sovereign national right to Scottish self-determination, All that the UK’s recognises is a Prime Minister’s sovereign right to determination, which is not the same thing at all.

The absolute best that any of them can offer is that they will be every bit as callous, anti-democratic, and inhumane as Boris Johnson, but will be more efficient at it. Meanwhile, while we are on the topic of the Prime Law Breaker, the Times has reported that Johnson has voted not to ‘fade into the background after his successor is appointed and has not ruled out making a come back should his successor’s government collapse. You can be quite certain that Johnson and his allies will be devoting their time and energies over the coming months to ensuring that his successor’s government will collapse, especially if the winner is Rishi Sunak, who is loathed by Johnson and his cronies. Johnson’s statement today is a signal that this Conservative leadership contest will solve nothing, the focus of a deeply divided Tory party will continue to be on internal party battles for the foreseeable future. Johnson is going to keep the Tories divided and fighting among themselves for years. So it’s not all bad news.

And let us not forget, these Conservatives, fighting with one another like rats in a sack, are the very same people who keep telling Scotland that Scotland can’t have another referendum because we should all be concentrating on recovering from the pandemic, the cost of living crisis, and the war in Ukraine.

On Tuesday what currently passes for a British Government made a legal submission to the Supreme Court, asking it to throw out the case brought by the Scottish Government which asks for a ruling on the lawfulness of the Scottish Government’s referendum bill in the absence of a Section 30 order. The British Government is seeking to have the case dismissed immediately, without any ruling on the substance of the issue, leaving the question in the same legal limbo where it has been for years. The British Government’s position seems to be that Holyrood has no right to hold a referendum on independence, even a consultative referendum, without the consent of Westminster, and that Holyrood does not even have the right to ask the Supreme Court to clarify the legal situation.

It looks as though the British Government is asking the Supreme Court not to rule on the case until after the bill has been passed by Holyrood, knowing that the bill cannot be put before Holyrood because the Lord advocate hasn’t consented to it, thus trapping the entire process in a Catch 22. Then they can continue to insist that there really is a democratic route for Scotland to hold another independence referendum while refusing to say what that route is. It’s a super dooper invisible magic route which is to be found at the end of a British nationalist rainbow.

This is because the British nationalists know that whatever way the ruling goes, they will lose control over the political process, Their entire strategy for avoiding another independence referendum rests upon maintaining the legal ambiguity which allows them to continue to assert that the union is voluntary while refusing to specify how Scotland might exercise its right to end it. But the truth is that democracy means the rule of the people and if a political party keeps the democratic route to another referendum a secret from the people, then it cannot exist.

A Supreme Court ruling puts an end to that fairy story and creates a concrete foundation. Either the court rules that Holyrood does have the right to hold a referendum without a Section 30 order, or it rules that it does not.

If the court were to rule that Holyrood could hold the referendum the anti-independence parties would be forced to contend a referendum that they had fought tooth and nail to stop happening. They’d be forced to explain to the people of Scotland why they refused to accept that Scotland has a sovereign right to self-determination. However if the court were to rule against the Scottish Government, as many observers think would be more likely, the political consequences for opponents of independence could be catastrophic.

Such a result would not spell the end for hopes of a vote on independence, it would merely trigger the conversion of the next UK General Election into a de facto referendum, and that would be the British nationalists’ worst nightmare. Although this development would give the British nationalists the advantage that it would be contested on the Westminster franchise, 16 and 17 year olds and non-British citizens would not have the vote, they would be unable boycott the vote, and would be forced to stand as individual parties facing a potentially united Yes campaign. Under Westminster’s first past the post system, a British nationalist wipe out is a distinct possibility.

Additionally the British nationalists will have been stripped of their beloved fiction that they are anti-nationalist unionists because the Supreme Court will have ruled that the generations long cornerstone of traditional Scottish unionism, that this is a voluntary union, has no standing in law and that a British Prime Minister that Scotland didn’t vote for has the absolute right to overrule the people of Scotland and the Parliament which they voted for.

It will effectively be a ruling that there is no union, there is no sovereignty inherent in the people of Scotland, there is only a unitary British state in which the Scottish Parliament has no greater legal standing than an English county council, both ultimately subject to the absolute authority of whoever leads the party with most seats in a Parliament where Scotland’s representatives are a small and permanent minority. No wonder it’s a ruling that the Conservatives don’t want.

With this farce of a Tory leadership contest and the British Government’s legal machinations, the UK’s democratic deficit has never been more starkly apparent. The issue of democracy itself will be crucial in the independence campaign in the months ahead.

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

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

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

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

The ‘stars’ of the Conservative Party

I am delighted to announce my candidacy for the Great Conservative Ghoul Off. I will be standing on a common sense platform of kicking away the crutches of disabled people so that they learn to stand on their own two feet, ending free school meals to teach the poors that they must not expect something for nothing, giving tax breaks to the top earners and big corporations because getting something for nothing is a reward for donations to the Conservative party, I will put the Great back into Britain by bringing back National Service, hanging, the birch, imperial measurements, and good old pounds shillings and pence. I will introduce a law to make it compulsory that every mention of senior members of the royal family in the broadcast media is immediately followed by the rhetorical question, “Aren’t they maaarvelous.” Yes I do appreciate that this is already standard practice on the BBC but putting it on a legal footing will give us all the assurance that we need that republican nonsense will not be tolerated.

I will maintain the cohesion of this Precious Union by telling those uppity Jocks to suck it up. This wonderful partnership of nations, the most perfect in the history of the world is indeed a voluntary union but it is long past time that the Sweaties learned that when we said that the union is voluntary, it was our will we were talking about, not theirs. There is a lawful and democratic route to another referendum, but my Conservative party will make it illegal to tell the Scotch what it is. They can have their referendum when we tell them they can have it, which will be at some indeterminate date in the distant future when we can be absolutely certain that Yes will poll less than 5%.

This Tory leadership contest is like being shown a list of the more disgusting and disfiguring conditions that have featured in episodes of Embarrassing Bodies and being told that Kevin the far right incel with the bad case of scabies and mange from episode three is going to pick out a suppurating skin disease to inflict upon you. The candidates are competing with one another to see which can be more hideous in their callous cruelty and more out of touch with how ordinary people actually live their lives. And this is before Priti Patel and Jacob Rees Mogg have officially launched their campaigns. Meanwhile the candidates are vying to put integrity back into the heart of British politics by leaking dossiers listing the alleged involvement of their rivals in drug abuse, the use of prostitutes, tax dodges, illegal loans, and secret illegitimate children. A dozen candidates have now put their names forward, and that’s if we only count Grant Shapps once, even though he has at least three names and personas.

It’s only going to get worse as the candidates who get through the early rounds race to the bottom to appeal to the frothing moon howlers who lap up GBeebies News and the Daily Mail who make up the bulk of Conservative party membership, the Scottish representatives of which infest the comments section of the Herald fulminating about the Berneray ferry while the Conservatives at Westminster break international law and trash the few remaining democratic safeguards that are afforded by what passes for a constitution in the UK. They are a strange bunch, absolutely adoring another country that doesn’t give one single toss about you while despising your own.

The candidates are also engaged in a contest to make out that the last couple of years of the Johnson government in which they all had prominent positions were nothing to do with them. It’s scarcely surprising then that in a recent opinion poll, Rishi Sunak, the current favourite with MPs, was rated by the public behind Don’t Know, None of the Above, Jesus Wept, and For God’s Sake Please Just Make Them All Go Away. That would be the Rishi Sunak who is campaigning in the belief that a UK which wanted to get rid of the entitled man who was fined for illegally partying, would prefer to vote for the other entitled man who was fined for illegally partying. Sunak has the largest number of MPs who back him, he also has the largest number of MPs who are determined to stop him at any cost, one of whom characterised Sunak as a “treacherous bastard”, and that was one of the more polite descriptions.

This sorry roll call of incompetents and fools are supposedly the stars of the Conservative party. They are stars, but only if they are white dwarfs, incredibly dense, composed of degenerate matter, no longer generating anything new, and lingering on unproductively until their inevitable self-destruction. This party of economic geniuses have given the UK the slowest recovery from recession in history, the highest debt for 200 years, the highest tax since 1947, highest inflation for 50 years, most expensive housing in Europe, and the worst performing economy in the G8. They have stripped British citizens of freedom of movement in Europe, erected trade barriers with our closest neighbours, trashed the devolution settlement and not one of the much vaunted Brexit benefits have materialised.

Jeremy Hunt for our sins one of the front runners, says that one of his top priorities will be to slash Corporation tax, because all those companies who have made massive profits during the pandemic have already suffered enough. At 15% Corporation Tax in the UK is already amongst the lowest in the OECD, so Hunt is proposing that what is really needed is to give the UK a competitive edge that it already possesses, an edge which has had bugger all effect on improving the UK’s dire economic prospects.

No matter who wins, the rest of us will lose. All of them are equally vile, were equally happy to enable the shit show of the Johnson regime, and equally keen to trample over Scottish democracy. Even the Mafia had a code of honour, this bunch of right wing Z -listers care about no one but themselves.

Our future is being decided by a contest amongst selfish sociopathic careerists, the winner to be chosen by selfish sociopaths who haven’t managed to make a career out of it who vent their rage on social media, blaming, Europe, immigrants, asylums seekers, minorities, the poor, the ‘woke’ and the marginalised for making them feel victimised. Being asked which of this line up of scary clowns is the least bad option is like having to choose which stick covered in dog mess you want to brush your teeth with.

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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 nationalism’s dirty little secret

If the losers of a Holyrood election can appeal to a PM that Scotland didn’t vote for to ensure that they can still get their way even though they put their proposition to the voters of Scotland in an election only for it to be rejected by the electorate, then Scotland is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. It is not democracy when the losers of an election still get to impose their will and overrule the parties who won. Everyone in Scotland knows that the issue of a second independence referendum was by far and away the dominant and defining issue in last year’s Holyrood election. The pro-independence parties were standing on a platform of asking the voters for a Holyrood mandate to hold another independence referendum, for their part the anti-independence parties were asking the voters for a Holyrood mandate to prevent a second independence referendum. The voters listened to the arguments, Anas Sarwar and Douglas Ross told us at great length why they were opposed to another referendum, equally Nicola Sturgeon and the leaders of the pro-independence parties explained why they believed that there needed to be one.

The voters listened, they weighed up the arguments and decided to elect a Scottish Parliament with its largest ever pro-independence majority. By the rules of the election, rules which had been devised and implemented by the anti-independence Labour and Lib Dem parties, the pro-independence parties not only won an election in which they had clearly and unequivocally asked for a mandate for another independence referendum within the five year term of the newly elected Parliament, they won that election handsomely.

Yet here we are over a year on from that election and Ross and Sarwar are still trotting out the same slogans and arguments from that election campaign last year which they lost. It’s as though the election never happened. It is perfectly legitimate for them to continue to oppose Scottish independence, but it is not legitimate for them to appeal to extra-parliamentary authorities in order to ensure that they still get to implement the propositions which they put to the people of Scotland in an election which they lost. Disagreement is at the heart of democracy, but what is also at the heart of democracy is accepting the outcome of a democratic vote. The British nationalists are refusing to do so.

Of course the immediate retort of the apologists for British nationalism is that those of us who seek another independence referendum are not respecting the result of the first one. This is a spurious argument for two reasons, firstly what the British nationalists are trying to do now is to over rule the outcome of a Scottish election whose results were not to their pleasing by appealing to an external authority which has no democratic mandate in Scotland. Supporters of independence are demanding that the people of Scotland be allowed to revisit the question of independence after the people of Scotland themselves explicitly voted for a Scottish Parliament which offers them that choice. It’s not Nicola Sturgeon or the SNP which is demanding another referendum, it’s the people of Scotland.

Secondly it is spurious because what the British nationalist parties are doing is appealing to that external authority in order to ensure that they cannot be held to account for the promises and commitments that they made during the 2014 campaign in order to secure that No vote which they so desperately craved. Meanwhile they are insisting that the side which lost that campaign be held to what was not even a promise, but was rather campaign rhetoric aimed at boosting voter turn out and participation. If the Yes side must be held to account for the “once in a generation” line, what mechanism does Scotland possess for ensuring that the Better Together parties are held to account for their litany of broken promises?

The short answer is that the British nationalist parties are determined to ensure that Scotland has no such mechanism. The dirty little secret of Anglo-British nationalism in Scotland is that Westminster was only ever prepared to concede that the United Kingdom is a voluntary union founded upon the consent of its constituent nations as long as the Westminster parties believed that there was no realistic prospect of Scotland putting that to the test and opting for independence.

Even now British nationalist politicians are still claiming that this is a voluntary union founded upon consent but whether Labour or Conservative, they all refuse to set out the democratic steps through which Scotland can exercise this right. When pressed on this question they all refuse to answer, some going so far as to smugly assert that it’s not for them to come up with the answer, it’s for those who seek another referendum. But when those of us who want that referendum point to the mandate for another referendum that the people of Scotland gave to Holyrood in 2021, and say that this is the only possible democratic means through which the people of Scotland can express their desire to revisit the question of independence those same British nationalist politicians triumphantly proclaim, “No, that’s not it. Try again.”

We all know what’s really going on here, even though it is the very last thing that Labour or the Conservatives would admit to. The two big Westminster parties will never agree to facilitate another independence referendum as long as they fear that there is a chance that Scotland would go for it.

The question of whether a democratic route to another referendum really exists if no one knows what it is and the parties responsible for blocking the referendum refuse to explain it sounds like some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare, but that is the current reality of the state of democracy in Scotland.

The reality is that Scotland is going to have to take its destiny into its own hands and either see the UK Supreme Court rule that Holyrood can go ahead with the referendum without that infamous Section 30 order that the British nationalists are wielding as the key to the prison cell door, or we turn the next UK General Election into a de facto referendum in which Labour and the Conservatives will both stand exposed as democracy denying liars and the true undemocratic nature of the UK can no longer be hidden.

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.

Johnson and the so-called union, both living on borrowed time

The whole thing is unbelievable. As I write these words, Gordon Brown is still holed up in Downing Street. He is like some illegal settler in the Sinai desert, lashing himself to the radiator, or David Brent haunting ‘The Office’ in that excruciating episode when he refused to acknowledge that he has been sacked. Isn’t there someone – the Queen’s Private Secretary, the nice policeman on the door of No 10 – whose job is to tell him the game’s up?

Boris Johnson, the Spectator, 10 May 2010.

Ever since the First Minister made her announcement about the Scottish Government’s route map to another lawful vote on Scottish independence, the anti-independence parties aided and abetted by Scotland’s predominantly anti-independence media have been showing their true British nationalist contempt for democracy in Scotland by falling over themselves to delegitimise any democratic route to giving the people of Scotland that to which those same anti-independence parties have always insisted Scotland has an absolute sovereign right, the ability to make a democratic choice about the form of government best suited to Scotland’s needs.

The British nationalists – which is precisely what they are no matter how much they assert their opposition to ‘nationalism’ have been engaged in a shameful exercise of conveyor belt goal posts. When those seeking to put the issue to a popular vote attained the mandate for one which was demanded prior to 2014, all of a sudden the question is to be decided by cherry picking opinion polls ,or it must be postponed to some date which is conveniently far in the future, because reasons. You can be quite certain that if we waited patiently until that date there would be some other reason why a referendum cannot be allowed.

It is obvious that the British nationalists – that would include you, Labour branch office in Scotland, were blindsided by Nicola Sturgeon’s announcement that if they block a referendum then the next UK General Election in Scotland will become a de facto referendum on independence. This is a lawful vote that they cannot prevent from taking place, and since it is an election for Westminster MPs they cannot boycott it either, instead they are reduced to asserting that the SNP and the other pro-independence parties ‘cannot’ stand on the single issue of seeking a mandate from the people of Scotland for independence, again, because reasons. As I have remarked on this blog before, the British nationalist parties may have no qualms about undermining Scottish democracy, but their power does not extend to telling other parties what platform they are allowed to stand on. The possibility of a plebiscite election is one which the British nationalists were not expecting and which they have no real idea how to respond to.

So for example we had the recent pronouncements of Alister Jack,forgotten but not gone. The Governor General for the northern territory is clinging on to his job solely because his boss won’t accept the democratic verdict of his own party and is floating around in Downing Street like an especially persistent turd which refuses all attempts to flush it away. Jack remains one of Johnson’s greatest champions in the cabinet, not least because no other Prime Minister would give this useless patrician waste of space the time of day, never mind a cabinet seat.

If during the next election the Dumfries and Galloway constituency campaign isn’t plastered with with leaflets and posters detailing every time Jack stood by Boris Johnson, despite all Johnson’s lies and deceit, someone will not be doing their job properly. Even as his colleagues were resigning en masse, Jack said of Johnson “He has never said one thing and done another and has never tried to pull the wool over my eyes.” He never needed to pull the wool over your eyes Jack, because your tongue was always rammed so far up Johnson’s arse that you could lick his tonsils. It’s the kind of statement we’d expect from Jack, who is certainly not about to jeopardise his chances of a peerage in Johnson’s resignation (dis)honours list.

Jack recently asserted tha the SNP ‘cannot’ use a UK General Election to win a mandate for independence because the constitution is a reserved matter. It’s a delusional argument. It’s not even an argument. In a UK General Election Scotland is voting to express its views on reserved matters.

Meanwhile Jackie Baillie claims that a UK General Election cannot be used to win a mandate for independence because ‘people will be voting on other issues’. Ahem, Jackie, I appreciate that you might not have noticed, what with what you believe to be your god-given right to ignore the result of last year’s Holyrood election, but you can’t actually dictate to the electorate what they will be casting their votes on. That’s ever so slightly fundamental to this whole democracy thing that you appear to be struggling with. If the pro-independence parties stand on a platform that a vote for them is a vote for independence, and they win a majority of votes. That’s a mandate for independence no matter what you say.

Labour has shown that it and the Tories are merely two cheeks of the same Brexit supporting Scottish democracy denying arse. Adopting the exact same tactic as Douglas Ross, Baillie refused to set out what the democratic route to another independence referendum actually is. The British nationalists insist that such a route does exist, but it’s top secret and they are not going to say what it is because that might encourage people to use it.

Meanwhile Johnson continues to cling on in Downing Street hoping against hope for something miraculous to crop up and save him, just like British nationalists trying to fend off a vote on Scottish independence.

We all know what the real reason for the British nationalist reticence is, even though it’s the last thing that they would ever admit to. They are terrified of the verdict of the Scottish people on the contempt which Westminster has shown for Scotland since the 2014 referendum. And they know that they cannot simply state that they will never allow Scotland a vote on independence if they fear that they might lose that vote because to do so would explode the traditional foundations of Scottish unionism and alienate thousands of soft-noes and undecideds. It’s a delaying tactic whose time will soon be up. Both Johnson and this so-called union are living on borrowed time.

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Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached, it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  I could not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

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.

Get Borexit done

If you are one of those Tory apologists on social media who thinks that Johnson’s non-resignation speech was ‘dignified’ you can get in the bin. Johnson’s resignation speech was not dignified and it wasn’t even a resignation speech, because the bloviating abandoned mattress with clown hair didn’t actually resign. He is still Prime Minister and the words “I resign” did not cross his lying lips. All he conceded was that the chair of the 1922 Committee should start the process of electing a new leader of the Conservative party, Johnson intends to remain in office until then.

In his petulant speech Johnson blamed a ‘herd mentality’, he blamed the media, he blamed everyone except himself for the predicament he now finds himself in. There was absolutely no recognition that it’s his own lies and deceit which have brought him down. Even at this late stage there is no sign of any contrition or that he has learned anything at all. His speech dripped with entitlement and self-pity.

Despite this supposed resignation Johnson is still offering cabinet posts, he’s still re-shuffling, and he chaired a Cabinet meeting this afternoon. Johnson is still effectively running the country. So in what meaningful sense has he resigned? Surely it is the job of the deputy Prime Minister to step in. But Johnson is carrying on as though nothing has happened in a Trumpian denial that the game is up.

This is an alarming and dangerous development. Saying that Johnson is a caretaker Prime Minister is a sick joke. When has Johnson ever taken care of anything other than his own self interest and selfish ambition. The longer he is allowed to remain in power the more time he has to use every dirty and underhand trick at his disposal to maintain his stranglehold on power, choking off what little oxygen remains for democracy and accountability in British politics. Johnson cannot be trusted. For the sake of what remains of democracy in the UK, Borexit means Borexit. It’s time to get Borexit done.

Starmer is threatening a vote of no confidence in Johnson in the Commons in an effort to get him out if the Conservatives don’t do so immediately and if Johnson tries to stay in post until the Conservatives get around to electing a new party leader. Funny isn’t it, Tory Ministers are allowed to change their minds, a mere four weeks after the last vote of no confidence in Johnson, but neither the Conservatives nor Labour think that Scottish electorate should be allowed to change their minds on Scottish Independence after eight years in which everything has changed. Where’s their cries of “They had a vote, they should accept the result.” now?

If the Commons was to vote no confidence in Johnson, it would then be for the Queen to appoint the person best-placed to command a majority in the Commons as Prime Minister. In the event that no such person could be appointed, Parliament would be dissolved and a general election held. Right now, would it not be hysterical if Durham Police found that Starmer had indeed broken lockdown rules?

This sordid episode and the events of Johnson’s time in office have illustrated just how fragile democracy in the UK really is. The apologists for British nationalism have always patted themselves on the back about the supposed better quality and higher standards of democracy under the Westminster system, indeed during the 2014 referendum campaign we were told that democracy in Scotland depended upon Westminster, and that left to our own devices Scots would rapidly deteriorate into a corrupt authoritarianism and the destruction of meaningful democracy. But that is precisely what has been happening with this Conservative party. Under the Westminster system, democracy and political accountability depend upon those who hold high office acting with honour, decency, and propriety, but when power is seized by liars, charlatans and cheats, as it has been with this Conservative party, the Westminster system is rendered powerless.

Johnson wanted to be in office for three terms, he fancied himself as the Churchill for the 21st century. But today Johnson instead ties with Neville Chamberlain for number of days in No 10. Theresa May and Jim Callaghan both served longer. Johnson will go down in the history books as one of the worst Prime Ministers that the UK has ever had, the man that destroyed the conventions, customs and traditions that underpin the famously unwritten British constitution. And in addition he destroyed the traditional foundations of unionism in Scotland. This so called union is now no longer a partnership of nations founded on consent. Johnson has disabused us of that notion in a blatant denial of democracy that has been enthusiastically adopted by Keir Starmer’s Labour party.

Whoever eventually takes over from Johnson will be a creature in his image. It will be a Conservative minister who has spent the past months and years colluding with and enabling Johnson’s assault on standards of decency in public office. There are many names of potential candidates being bandied about. One of the reasons Johnson has clung on so long is because the Tories have no clear successor in sight. In no small measure that’s because Johnson promoted talentless non entities like Alister Jack or Nadine Dorries whose sole political usefulness was their willingness to keep defending Johnson no matter how egregiously he broke the rules.

One thing is certain however, Johnson’s successor will be a creature in his own authoritarian sleazy, and deceitful image. It is being reported that Rishi Sunak has already set up a temporary leadership campaign office in a Westminster hotel. It’s bound to be a swanky hotel.

The only reason that Johnson is being forced from the Conservative leadership now is not in order to protect and defend the highest standards in public office. It is to ensure that the Conservatives maintain their corrupt grasp on power. Nothing is going to change even when Johnson is finally dragged kicking and screaming out of number ten. This is all happening so that things can stay the same and so that the Conservatives can win the next UK General Election and the Tories can continue to trash democracy, accountability, and honesty and decency in public office for years and years to come.

There’s only one way in which Scotland can be certain that we can get Borexit done and that we will not be subject to Johnson’s democracy denying Conservative heirs, and that is through independence. It’s time.

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

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

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

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A zombie government defending a zombie union

At the time of writing, an important caveat there, Johnson is still Prime Minister, but by Wednesday evening no fewer than 38 members of his government had resigned including the senior cabinet ministers Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid and Michael Gove. Johnson may cling to power for a while longer, but by this time he is a zombie Prime Minister leading a zombie government, defending a zombie union. They are like flies that have been doused in fly killer, noisily and angrily buzzing and whirling away, but they are politically already as good as dead. When all you’ve got left are Nadine Dorries and Alister Jack, you’re as well locking yourself in your bedroom with a ton of cocaine and the soundtrack of an Aberdeen nightclub. Allegedly that’s what works for Michael Gove.

Johnson is not the resigning type, taking responsibility for his actions is alien to his nature. According to the Whitehall correspondent for the Mirror, one of his Conservative sources tells him that not even if the 1922 Committee changes the rules to allow another confdence vote and he loses, he still would refuse to resign. Instead he would claim that he has a personal mandate from the 14 million who voted Conservative in the last General Election and threaten to force a General Election, but not before deselecting all those who had turned against him. Johnson is certainly selfish and self-centred enough to blow up the Conservative party before giving up power.

As Johnson was making his delusional appearance before the Commons Liaison Committee on Wednesday afternoon, he was asked by Conservative veteran Bernard Jenkin if he would dissolve Parliament in an effort to save himself, Johnson refused to say that he wouldn’t. It’s unclear just how plausible that threat is, it’s not at all certain that Johnson could force an election given that the Tory turkeys will not want to vote for Christmas, but all any supporter of Scottish independence can say is ha and indeed, ha ha. A General Election now could have historic consequences, it could see the end of the Tory Party and Scotland vote for independence. Conservative MPs put Johnson in office in full knowledge of his greed, lies, and selfish deceit, it would only be fitting if Johnson’s last act was to destroy them and their so called union. That’s karma in action.

Scottish Tory MP Andrew Bowie tweeted on Wednesday afternoon that he had again written to the chair of the 1922 Committee to ask for another vote of confidence on Johnson’s leadership, despite saying after the last vote just three weeks ago that the Conservatives need to focus on the issues facing the country and not internal fights within the Conservative party. Nice to see that a Scottish Tory MP recognises that people can change their minds and have another vote. But not you Scotland, not you. Does anyone want to remind him that that was a once in a year vote. At this juncture it seems appropriate to remind Bowie and his Scottish Conservative colleagues of their own words , “You can’t just keep having votes until you get the result that you like. Oh the irony. It’s amazing just how much things change in three weeks, never mind eight years.

By tea time the threshold for triggering another vote of confidence had been reached and the 1922 Committee was preparing to change the leadership rules so that another confidence vote could be held as early as the beginning of next week.

While politics watchers were transfixed by the clownfall of Boris Johnson, in what may prove to be one of his last acts as Prime Minister, the Prime Law-breaker (at least at the time of writing, by this time tomorrow he might be just the law-breaker) wrote to Nicola Sturgeon to formally refuse a Section 30 order. He even had the brass neck to reference Ukraine in his missive of colonial domination and the unmitigated gall to insist that “our shared priorities must be to respond effectively to the global cost of living challenge, to support our NHS and public services as they recover from the huge disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and to play our leading part in the international response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.” This from a man whose entire attention and energies right now are focused on saving his own miserable skin.

The truth is, it no longer matters, whether Johnson consents or not, the question that occupied Scottish politics for the past year or so, “What if Johnson says no?” is now an irrelevance. It’s an irrelevance because Johnson’s time in office now has a shorter life expectancy than a carton of milk left out in the sun on a hot day, so it will be a decision for his successor to take. But even that is irrelevant, because the First Minister’s announcement last week setting out the route to a lawful vote on independence changed the game. There will either be a lawful referendum with or without the consent of a Conservative PM, or at the next General Election the pro-independence parties will be seeking a mandate for independence, by which time the union as it has been conceived for generations will be legally dead and the British nationalist parties will have lost all control over the process, and have been left trying to defend a UK in which democracy in Scotland can be overruled by parties which have not won an election in Scotland.

A delegation of senior Conservatives met with Johnson after his appearance before the Commons Liaison Committee in order to tell him that the game is up and that it is time to leave. Priti Patel was also among the contingent, although she had not been seen to enter Number 10 via the front door. That’s because she had adopted her form as a bat and flown down the chimney. It’s not clear if Patel has joined the delegation in order to tell Johnson to go, or if she plans to bite them all in the jugular and suck out their life force so she can offer it as a sacrifice to Cthulhu in thanks for him devising her Rwanda policy.

By 8pm the ITV News deputy politics editor Anoushka Asthana was tweeting that her sources had told her that Johnson is absolutely defiant and is not going to resign. She said that they had told her Johnson “put his 14 million mandate on the table.” He’s threatening that if they force him out he will force a General Election. This was always always how it was going to end – the most shocking thing is that anyone is surprised. The Conservatives created a monster, and now they are being consumed by him. We’re going to need a smaller violin.

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Many thanks to everyone who kindly supported the annual fundraiser. It’s always a nerve wracking time, I’m literally asking people to put their money where my mouth is. I’m delighted to say that the target of £5000 wasn’t just reached, it was smashed. From all sources, the Gofundme page, PayPal donations, and direct donations by cheque or into my bank account, the grand total raised was an incredible £11,094. In my wildest dreams  I could not have expected it to go so well and my deepest thanks to everyone who contributed.  It is heartening to know that so many people value my writing and that there is still an appreciative audience for a positive pro-independence message that concentrates on making the case for independence and debunking the arguments of the real enemies of Scottish independence, the Conservatives and their little helpers.  That’s what I will keep doing thanks to you.

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.