The moral and political failure of the Tories and the British state

On Friday, the energy price cap rose by 80%, threatening unprecedented fuel poverty for millions of households, and destitution for hundreds of thousands of the poorest households who are already struggling with impossible choices between having heat and hot water in their homes or putting food on the table. Yet Friday’s devastating news was by no means the worst of it, the energy price cap is predicted to soar by similar amounts in January and again in April, when it is forecast that the average household could be looking at bills of £7000 a year. We are now reaching the point where for many people, it will no longer be a question of struggling to pay their energy bills, it will simply be impossible for them to pay. If you take home the average UK annual salary of £31700, you are going to have to juggle soaring energy bills with rising costs of food and other essentials, increasing housing costs as interest rates go up, affecting mortgages, or rising rent bills. However if you are on a minimum wage or dependent on benefits, the increase in energy bills means that you will just not have the money to pay, no matter how you budget.

This is a truly terrifying development for millions of people, yet the so-called ‘leaders’ of the British Government were nowhere to be seen. No British Government minister was roused from his or her slumber to make the rounds of the TV studios and provide even a modicum of reassurance to worried and frightened people left to deal with the consequences of the meltdown of an energy policy which is reserved in its entirety to that government whose leaders were last seen sunning themselves on a Greek beach.

We did however get a statement from the acting, or rather play-acting, Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi saying that people needed to look at reducing their energy consumption. Glossing over the fact that this is pretty rich coming from a man who attempted to claim the heating costs for his stables on his parliamentary expenses, Zahawi’s horses will be warmer this winter than millions of families, it was a gob-smackingly arrogant statement which effectively tried to shift the responsibility for the catastrophic failure of the Conservatives’ energy policy on to those who are suffering because of Tory mismanagement.

According to Dr Sean Field, research fellow at the Centre for Energy Ethics at the University of St Andrews, told the Sunday National: “To put it bluntly – there is corporate responsibility in this, but this has been a catastrophic failure of political policy in the UK for the last 15 years.”

What all the various crises besetting the British state have in common is that they are the result of decades of British governments prioritising short term private profit over the longer term public good. The crisis in England’s water supply is due in part to private companies which preferred to cream off profits rather than invest in fixing leaks and building reservoirs to store the winter rains. Problems have been ignored for decades. Even now the Conservatives prefer to pander to the fossil fuel companies rather than fund the transition to renewable energy and funding the insulation of the housing stock that are the only long term solutions to the energy crisis. Liz Truss talks about abolishing the green levy on fuel bills and her party wants to prohibit on-shore wind farms, because apparently those are the problem, not the profiteering of the oil and gas giants.

The Conservatives permitted the energy companies to give up on gas storage facilities, meaning that the UK is hugely dependent on ‘just-in-time’ gas supplies from Europe to meet domestic needs. This deprived the UK of the ability to store large quantities of gas when the international market price was low and leaves the UK more vulnerable to large rises in prices on the international markets. We got into this position due to a combination of corporate greed and UK government failure. While the international wholesale price of gas was low it was more profitable for the energy companies to buy on the international markets than to invest in maintaining and repairing the storage facilities which existed at the time and the Conservative Government refused to grant a subsidy to help with the maintenance and repair costs of the existing gas storage facilities. The companies then announced that it was not cost effective to keep the storage facilities open and decided to close them down. The Conservative government compounded its sins by allowing them to do so.

We are now seeing those same companies reporting record profits while the Conservative wring their hands and bleat that “there’s a war on” even as they refuse to impose a windfall tax on the energy companies that could go a long way towards funding a freezing of the energy price cap. In this crisis, as always, the priority of the Conservatives is to protect the profiteering of the wealthy while ordinary people are forced to choose between freezing or starving. This is a catastrophic political and moral failure the blame for which lies squarely at the door of the Conservative party.

Even now, the Conservatives remain missing in action, more concerned about their internal party politics than the disaster facing millions. Neither of the two leadership contenders have said what they intend to do to deal with a crisis of their own party’s making. Truss’s camp has hinted that if she becomes Prime Minister she is considering cutting VAT by 5% across the board. However VAT accounts for less than 5% of the typical energy bill so a VAT cut would do little to reduce energy bills to an affordable level.

A reduction in VAT is effectively a tax cut for the better off. If you wanted to put more money into the hands of the sort of people who have high levels of discretionary spending, and the higher the discretionary spending the more money they’d get, then cutting VAT by 5% is what you’d do. It will do almost nothing to help make energy more affordable. To save £1,300 from a 5% cut in VAT, you’d have spend £31,200 a year on stuff that incurs VAT at 20%. There is no VAT on food or children’s clothing. VAT is not normally charged on rent or mortgage payments. A cut in VAT does nothing to help those who can only afford the essentials, yet this is her big idea, her ‘nuclear option’. It’s only nuclear in the sense that it will not solve the problem and will leave devastation in its wake. Truss’s resistance to offering targeted support for vulnerable groups is terrifying and unforgivable. Public anxiety is now raw, the fear is naked.

Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action, a campaign group, told the financial news site Money Week that cutting VAT will do little to give consumers respite from soaring energy bills because VAT accounts for only a minor proportion of the overall bill. The only realistic solution, in order to prevent millions from being unable to heat their homes is a freeze on the energy price cap ,funded by taxes on the energy companies, as called for by the Scottish First Minister and Keir Starmer of the Labour party. Ideally the energy companies should be nationalised But only the British Government has the legal power and the financial authority to do so and the Conservatives won’t go there. They will protect their corporate donors no matter how many elderly or disabled people die of hypothermia this winter.

Thanks to the British Government, energy rich Scotland, which has an abundance of energy resources both fossil and renewable, is unable to ensure that it can heat its citizen’s homes. That, Liz Truss, is far more of a disgrace than the fact that the UK imports most of its cheese. But Truss won’t let humanity get between her and a burning ambition that makes her pander to the worst right wing excesses of the Conservative party. She is going to be a far worse Prime Minister than even Boris Johnson. The only question is how much damage she will do before she in her turn is finally forced from office.

I am sorry but this bout of post-stroke fatigue is proving very difficult to shift. New blog posts may be rather intermittent this 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 Tories can’t save a Union they want to abolish

Ruth Davidson, the erstwhile Saviour of the Union according to the British media, at least before she realised that her cosmetic exercise in putting some modern and tolerant drag on the reactionary and rotting body of the Scottish Tories had failed and she buggered off to the House of Lords before facing inevitable humiliation at the hands of the voters, has denied reports that she and her fellow failed politician the unreconstructed reactionary Arlene Foster of the DUP who like Ruth left politics to go and join the circus, in her case the right wing clowns of GBeebies News, are to join up and embark on a Save the Union tour.

It would have been the worst comeback since Sex in the City, more like Brass necks with no Pity. I wonder what it was about associating the cause of the Union with a dyed in the wool reactionary who is opposed to gay marriage and abortion rights and who is the darling of the Orange Order that made Ruth think that it was a bad idea? After all, this so called Union already a recipe for giving us the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, who barring an unforeseen upset is about to be replaced by Liz Truss, a woman for whom there is as much chance of winning an election in Scotland as there is of Arlene Foster’s voter base kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary and praying for the well being of the Pope and a united Ireland. For the lesbian Ruth to go on tour with the gay marriage hating Arlene would not only be as implausible a double act as Cliff Richard and Slipknot, it would also serve as a reminder of how limited democracy really is under the Westminster system.

Davidson’s denial came after it was reported that Arlene Foster, who has recently launched a new “non party political Foundation” called the ‘Together UK Foundation’ which Foster claimed would “bring mainstream pro-Union voices from across the entire country to highlight the benefits that the Union brings to us all – mostly without us realising it.” The report also announced that Foster would “hit the road with the likes of Ruth and show people what the Union means.” In the case of Foster’s supporters it means bonfires, big drums, and sectarian songs about being up to your knees in Fenian blood. This would appear to be yet another of those well funded anti-independence initiatives which enjoy a suspiciously high profile in the media.

Being lectured on the benefits of the Union by Arlene Foster is like listening to Harold Shipman explain why there is no need to supervise GPs whose vulnerable and elderly patients change their wills in their doctor’s favour.

Ruth Davidson is scarcely in any position to lecture Scotland on the benefits of this supposed Union, a Union which her fellow unelected Conservative politician Lord Frost has determined doesn’t really exist. The demand for independence is above all driven by a desire for proper democracy in Scotland and governments which are elected by and accountable to the people of Scotland. As a member of the unelected House of Lords, Ruth Davidson epitomises the democratic deficit that Scotland faces as a part of the UK.

The other difficulty that Ruth and Arlene are going to have in “selling the union” is that some of their Brextremist Conservative colleagues, like Frost, want to abolish it and replace it with a unitary “single country” of which Scotland would be nothing more than a ‘region’ with no more modern political import than Mercia or Wessex. Frost, who is a prominent supporter of the Conservative front runner Liz Truss, has urged Truss to ban her ministers from referring to the UK as a union of four nations but rather to stress that the UK is a ‘single great country.’  Truss has herself denied that the UK is a voluntary union of nations but has likewise insisted that it is a ‘single great country’.

Naturally there has and will be zero consultation with the people of Scotland about this radical change in the conception of the nature of the UK. The decision that the UK is not in fact a partnership of four nations but instead a “single great country” is one which the Conservatives are making unilaterally and imposing on everyone else. The reason that they are doing so is because it allows the Tories to justify to themselves their wish to ignore the democratic choices of the people of Scotland because the people of Scotland persistently reject the Conservatives at the ballot box. It is beyond hypocrisy that the Conservatives constantly harp on about how the SNP must respect the result of the 2014 independence referendum but they have repeatedly shown that they have nothing but contempt for the result of every single election in Scotland since 2014.

However if Scotland is merely a region of a “single great country” then it doesn’t matter how Scotland votes any more than it matters how an English county or city votes. All that matters is that the Conservatives secure a majority in the House of Commons to allow them to impose their will across the entire UK. Liz Truss has already said that she will expect her policies to apply across ‘the entire country’. Truss is not going to let a little thing like the devolution settlement stand in her way. Nicola Sturgeon recently remarked that the Conservatives are coming for the devolution settlement, but it is far far worse than that. What the Tories want is for Scotland to be abolished as a meaningful political entity for the electoral and party political advantage of the Conservative party.

The Conservative antipathy to devolution is well known, because they mistakenly blame devolution for creating the desire for Scottish independence. In fact devolution was created in an attempt to contain the desire for Scottish independence by giving Scotland some means to protect itself from the excesses of a Conservative party that Scotland did not vote for. However devolution has failed because devolution has been unable to withstand a Conservative party which is determined to ignore the democratic choices of the people of Scotland and which refuses to accept that the referendum result of 2014 was conditional on the Better Together parties coming good on the promises that they made in order to win that No result which they so badly craved.

The Tories have decided that the 2014 result meant that Scotland surrendered for all eternity to whatever the majority party at Westminster decided to impose on it, up to and including the unilateral abolition of the conceptualisation of the United Kingdom as a voluntary partnership of nations. That is the road down which this Conservative party is taking us. It’s a road to the destruction of Scotland as a meaningful political entity and leaving Scotland as nothing more than a historic region of a “single country” with no more modern political relevance than Wessex or Mercia.

 

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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.

Liz Truss’s Conservative chip pan fire

Having had the political equivalent of a major piss up in the pub with Boris Johnson,trashing the venue in the inimitable Bullingdon style and expecting the little people to clean the mess up, the Tories have now staggered home, still not ready to face the aftermath or deal with the consequences of their bad behaviour. With the likely election of Liz Truss by party members, a woman who was memorably described by former Conservative MP Matthew Parris as a balloon of vast ambition perched on a pin head, what the Conservatives are now doing is deciding that they fancy something to eat after their almighty bender, so still drunk, they’ve put the chip pan on, and now they are passed out on the sofa. Truss has no principles or ideology. For her it is whatever gives her power or gets her noticed. Every day is a new day for Truss What she said yesterday has no bearing on today, the whole of Scotland on the other hand, is to be held to the eight year old campaign rhetoric of Alex Salmond.

The Truss campaign is far ahead of Sunak in all the polls of Conservative party members that have been published, most polls have given Truss a lead in excess of 30%. There are only two weeks remaining in a contest that seems to have dragged on forever. Most of those eligible to vote will have already done so, and at this point it is vanishingly unlikely that Sunak could catch up, even in the implausible event that all those who are still to vote cast their vote for him.

Truss is so confident that the campaign is as good as over that her team have released details of who she is likely to appoint to her cabinet, so we have some idea of the chip pan fire that awaits us. An awful lot of barrels had to be scraped through to get to this lot. Kwasi Kwarteng, Suella Braverman, James Cleverly, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Kemi Badenoch will take key roles in the new cabinet under Liz Truss, according to a report in the Times. All of them are on the far right of a Conservative party that has moved increasingly to the right over the past decade. The far right John Redwood is tipped for a senior post under Kwarteng the likely new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Kwarteng was one of the authors of the infamous Britannia UnchainedRedwood is currently demanding that state regulation of water and energy companies be scrapped. Just imagine what these companies will do if they don’t face even minimal constraints. The privatised water companies in England are already pumping untreated sewage into the sea, Britain is literally sitting in a sea of shit. Meanwhile the energy companies are enjoying soaring profits as domestic energy bills go through the roof.

To a man and woman this lot are demented pseudo-libertarian lunatics who believe that the problems of the British economy are largely due to working class people on working hard enough. It’s kind of surprising that they are all so viscerally opposed to socialism considering how frequently they have been publicly owned. Their answer to the cost of living crisis is tax cuts. How can tax cuts for people who don’t pay tax help people who don’t earn enough to pay tax, they can’t, it’s a nonsense. Tax cuts put money in the pockets of the better off. Hundreds of thousands won’t be able to afford their energy bills and we are in addition facing a real threat of black outs during the coming winter. The Conservatives promised that their Brexit would deliver sunlit uplands, what they are delivering is unlit slumplands.

Like May and Johnson before her, Truss has no intention of governing in the interests of the UK as a whole,and most certainly is not interested in any idea of reconciliation with that half of the UK that voted remain, or the half of Scotland that wants independence. Truss intends to bludgeon the opposition into obedience. The European Reasearch Group is now in charge. With Braverman as Home Secretary and Rees-Mogg as Levelling-up Secretary, it can indeed be even worse than Johnson, Patel and Gove. We are about to experience an even deeper dive into the stinkpit of unthinking Tory bigotry. Truss promises a disunited Kingdom weighed down by the hateful uselessness and vindictiveness of what it pleases itself to call a government.

Suella Braverman is tipped as the next Home Secretary, a woman who makes the current incumbent seem reasonable and empathetic by comparison. And you thought Priti Patel was terrifying. Braverman wants to dump the ECHR, she is heavily involved with Freeports and Charter Cities that will be sold off to private firms who will be able make up their own rules and will not be bound by rules on holiday or sick pay, minimum wages, or the right to unionisation.

Jacob Rees Mogg is likely to be appointed Minister for Levelling Up. That sounds like a joke, and indeed it is, although Truss is apparently deadly serious about it. That’s the Rees Mogg who said that he would not serve in any government except Boris Johnson’s. He has also changed his mind about there having to be a General Election if Johnson was deposed as leader and replaced with someone else. See, you ARE allowed to change your mind from a previously espoused political position. But not you Scotland, not you.

Rees-Mogg, who questioned the common sense of those who were killed in Grenfell, is now to be put in charge of the department managing the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect image of this entire chip pan fire of a government than a performative fake aristocrat in a cosplay Victorian frock coat being given the job of improving regional inequality. The idea of Rees-Mogg being in charge of levelling up is as bizarre as putting George Michael in charge of driving lessons. Still, as far as Truss is concerned Rees-Mogg will be ideal for the job since we all know that to this Conservative party ‘levelling up’ means withdrawing much needed funding from deprived inner city areas and giving it to leafy Tory districts like Tonbridge Wells.

It’s only going to get worse in Liz Truss’s Great British chip pan fire. Buckle up. We are in for a bumpy ride.

 

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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.

Truss is a gift to the cause of independence

Fresh from the hustings at Perth, where Liz Truss, the front runner in the Great Tory Thatcher in their Eyes contest, assured a gaggle of elderly Scottish Tories that she will not “allow” Scotland to have another independence referendum and lied about the SNP agreeing to the referendum being a once in a generation event as a condition of being granted permission to hold it. The play doh Thatcher’s campaign team revealed her big plan to halt the independence movement in its tracks and send it hamewards tae think again.

The basics of Truss’s plan were detailed in a report in the digital i-news by Katy Balls, who is the deputy political editor of the Conservative Spectator magazine which was once edited by Boris Johnson, although you might have greater confidence in her reporting if this deputy political editor knew that Nicola Sturgeon was the leader of the Scottish National Party and not the “Scottish Nationalist Party”. But then Balls is a Tory journalist and won’t want to acknowledge that the Conservatives are the English Nationalist Party. But I digress.

Balls tells us that if elected as Prime Minister by the membership of the Conservative party, Truss intends to revive the combative and confrontational so-called muscular unionism championed by Johnson in the early days of his premiership before being persuaded to abandon it by Michael Gove, who feared that it was counter productive and a gift to the independence cause. Because if there is one thing guaranteed to make your average Scottish person go, “Aye, that WILL be right, pal.” it is being hectored and disrespected by an unpopular Conservative leader that they didn’t vote for.

Truss believes that because she went to primary school in Paisley for a few years she has an instinctive understanding of what Scotland wants and how to best get her message accepted by Scottish public opinion. There is however one way in which Liz Truss does indeed have her finger on the pulse of the Scottish zeitgeist. She thinks Michael Gove is an oily wee skelf too, so she is not at all inclined to take his advice on how to handle the demand for Scottish independence, or indeed anything else for that matter. According to Balls : “Truss has no plans to even give Gove – with whom she has clashed on a range of issues during her ministerial career – a job in the Cabinet, let alone a role on the union. Her instincts differ from his.” So it’s going to be back to the blatant hectoring and disrespect. It will be an active aggressive approach instead of Gove’s passive aggressive one.

Central to the new aggressive approach will be an instruction to ministers and Conservative MPs to cease mentioning the i-word. They will be told to no longer mention Scottish independence but rather only to refer to “Scottish separatism.” Truss thinks that this will frame independence as a negative act, possibly in the deluded belief that Scottish people will think that separating Scotland from her government is a bad thing.

Perhaps Truss wants to move away from talking about Scottish nationalism because it does not sound so bad when contrasted with the blatant English nationalism of Truss’s Conservative party, but it is unlikely that she possesses that much self-awareness.

In any event, calling Scottish independence “separatism” is rather like insisting that someone you know who intends to emigrate to a new and better life in a country with a sensible and democratic government is planning a trip to the airport where there will be queues and passport control and their luggage might get lost. It’s childish and petulant and redolent of a self-centred attitude, so it’s very much on brand for Liz Truss then. It’s an infantile attempt to frame Scottish independence as being all about England.

Truss also wants to make further unilateral changes to the Scotland act in order to give parliamentary privilege to members of the Scottish parliament, her hope is that this would allow for “more robust questions” of the SNP government from opposition politicians, by allowing them to lie with impunity. Truss is one of those Tories who believes that the Scottish media gives the SNP an easy ride. Now that’s practically the text book definition of delusion.

There are plenty among the Scottish Conservatives who fear that Truss’s aggressively confrontational approach will blow up in their face, Balls reports : “As one Scottish Tory put it to me during the parliamentary stages of the contest: ‘I’ll back anyone who is not Liz.’ They worry that Truss’s rhetoric could backfire – and push people in favour of independence if the Tories sound as though they are talking Scotland down.”

Truss’s basic problem is that this sort of nonsense might appeal to the moon howling British nationalist contingent on social media, and to the union flag wavers of the Conservative party membership, but it is likely merely to provoke at best eye-rolling and at worst outright anger from that wider Scottish public to whom Truss must appeal if her new strategy is to have any success. Why not go the whole hog Liz? You could call it Scottish rupturism or Scottish Grand Canyoning instead.

Boris Johnson was unable to sell his so called muscular unionism to a doubtful Scottish public. Johnson is a liar and a cheat but like all successful con artists he is basically a show man, even so, the people of Scotland proved immune to his charms. Liz Truss’s problem is that she has no charm at all. She comes across as a low rent Artificial Intelligence version of Margaret Thatcher, only without the intelligence part, strangely robotic and awkward, bereft of empathy or emotional intelligence. If the Conservatives are remotely serious about stopping independence, they have to demonstrate that they can come up with a message that has an appeal beyond the monarchy loving Winston Churchill worshipers who make up the core of their support in Scotland. So far they have dismally failed to achieve that, and Truss looks as though she will merely make things worse.

Truss is not even in Downing Street yet but she is already proving that she is a gift to the independence movement.

I won’t be about tomorrow as I need to prepare some paperwork for my appeal against the DWP’s ridiculous PIP decision.

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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 hustings in Perth are the last gasp for the Tories in Scotland

The Conservatives are holding a leadership coven, sorry, hustings in Scotland today. This is the seventh hustings of the leadership Lie-Off and the only event to be held in Scotland. Ballots have already gone out to party members who tend to vote early, so most of the tiny number of people eligible to vote will already have done so and this evening’s event will be more a species of extremely tedious right wing British nationalist theatre than anything which will have a significance on the outcome. You can put money on the stage having a union flag or two prominently on display while Truss and Sunak wax, well I was going to say lyrical, but this is Truss and Sunak we are talking about here, about “this great British nation” which is “one great country” while they rail about vile and divisive nationalism without an iota of self-awareness.

In previous hustings the issue of Scotland’s future has scarcely registered, reflecting the deep lack of interest in Scotland or care about its concerns amongst the Conservative party in the rest of the UK. The future of what Truss recently insisted is not a union of four nations but rather “one great single country” will certainly be a prominent issue at this evening’s event where it is a safe bet that Truss and Sunak will compete to be the most hard line on ruling out another referendum forever and a day and in promising to find further ways to undermine a Scottish Government and a devolution settlement which they and their Scottish Tory audience loathe so intensely. Naturally neither of them will propose seeking a mandate from the wider Scottish electorate to do so, they have anointed themselves, not the people of Scotland, as the sole judge and jury for deciding what Scotland wants and what its interests are, and they will rely upon the strength of the Conservative majority in the Commons, a majority based upon the seats they won in England not Scotland, in order to impose the will of the Conservative party on a Scotland which has the temerity to repeatedly and consistently refuse to vote Conservative.

On Sky News on Tuesday morning they hopefully suggested that this might be the event at which the leadership candidates announce how they are going to “save the union”, or maybe not. There is no conceivable way in which the “union” is going to be “saved” because of a couple of right wing Tories trying to out-intolerance one another as far as Scottish self-determination is concerned in order to make themselves more appealing to the membership of the Conservative party in Scotland.

All that will happen will be some sound bites about refusing to allow “the SNP” another referendum, which will be gleefully seized on by the anti-independence media in Scotland in order to remind the Scots not to get above their station and to reinforce the message that in this supposedly voluntary union, decisions about the future constitutional status of Scotland are not to be made by them or any Scottish Parliament that they choose to elect.

The Conservatives are a minority party in Scotland for a reason, and that reason is that their policies and whatever self-serving offence against democracy and common decency they happen to be pushing at any given moment are wildly out of kilter with what most people in Scotland agree with. This is particularly the case where devolution and the prospect of another independence referendum are concerned. Opinion polls have consistently shown that most people in Scotland are in favour of even greater powers for the Scottish Parliament. However a clear majority of Conservatives in Scotland, at least according to a YouGov poll a couple of years ago, would like to see the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and a return to the situation which held until the referendum of 1997.

It is obvious then that in making their leadership pitches to the members of the Conservative party in Scotland, neither Truss nor Sunak is going to gain any traction by promising to listen to what people in Scotland want as expressed through the ballot box in elections in Scotland and delivering the closest thing possible to federalism that was vowed in 2014. Far less are they going make any compromises on Brexit in order to assuage the deep and widespread unease that the Conservatives’ hard and uncompromising Brexit has created in Scotland.

What we can expect are nostrums about the UK being “one great nation,” an outright denial that Holyrood has a mandate for another referendum and promises that a section 30 order to facilitate another referendum will not be forthcoming. Naturally there will be nothing at all about what the democratic route to another referendum might be since it does not appear to consist of the people of Scotland voting for a Scottish Parliament which is committed to bringing one about.

However we can expect to hear Truss and Sunak insist that they will expect their policies to apply across the entire United Kingdom, and they will also tell us that they intend to hold the Scottish Government to account, because apparently this is a job for a Prime Minister in Downing Street without any democratic mandate whatsoever in Scotland, and not for the people of Scotland themselves through the ballot box at a democratic election. The voters of Scotland held the Scottish Government to account at the last Holyrood election in 2021, and even though there was a concerted and suspiciously well funded British nationalist tactical voting campaign, the Tories and their allies failed dismally to prevent the election of a Scottish Parliament with an unassailable majority for another independence referendum. Yet having failed at the ballot box the Conservatives are now resorting to nakedly undemocratic measures in order to thwart the will of the people of Scotland.

Although it’s the last thing that either Truss or Sunak would ever admit, it’s obvious that they want to subvert the normal operation of democracy in Scotland because in the wider country outside the Tory bubble zone in the hall in Perth’s Concert Hall, the real electorate in Scotland persists in voting in ways which the Conservative party does not like. Tonight’s event will not “save the union”, it will merely highlight that this so called union is intellectually and politically bankrupt and that it can only be shored up by the denial of democracy in Scotland.

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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.

Fury, denial and intellectual poverty : the state of British nationalism in Scotland

Possibly it was an outbreak of masochism, or a curiosity verging on the foolish, but the other day, using a burner account, I had a peek at anti-independence social media to get a feel of where the opposition is at. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting a huge amount, but I was shocked by the complete lack of anything approaching an analysis of why the political landscape in Scotland lies as it currently does. Such an analysis is vital if opponents of independence seek to remove what they see as the ‘threat’ of independence permanently from mainstream Scottish political discourse.

Instead what I found is that right wing Anglo-British nationalism in Scotland is characterised by fury, denial, and an abiding sense of victimhood. Blame for all these ills is heaped squarely at the door of the SNP, the other pro-independence parties scarcely seem to register with them and the existence of non-party political support for independence is not acknowledged. Any attempt to point out the manifest short comings, never mind the outright lies and corruption of this Conservative Government is airily dismissed as “grievance mongering.”

It is striking that there is absolutely no attempt amongst opponents of independence to discern why support for independence should be at the level it is, given what die-hard British nationalists believe to be the self-evident advantages of Westminster rule. You might imagine that understanding this would be vital to devising a strategy to halt the independence movement in its tracks and to put it into reverse. However all there appears to be is a furious anger at the SNP for “stoking up division” and a supposed anti-English racism, the ‘proof’ for which is deeply contrived and seems to consist of evidence free assertions that references to “Westminster” are in fact code for “the English” with no recognition of the political reality that as part of the UK, Westminster is a parliament with authority over Scotland too.

There is no recognition whatsoever that the actions of the main British political parties following the 2014 independence referendum might have played any part in creating the level of support for independence which currently exists in Scotland. All there is is a burning resentment that the SNP “refuses to accept the outcome of the 2014 referendum,” again there is no apparent awareness of other pro-independence parties or of civic Scotland in pushing for a second independence referendum, insofar as this is acknowledged, it is explained away as being because they are in the pocket of the SNP. No one in Scotland who supports Scottish independence or who believes that it is a democratic imperative that there must be another independence referendum is thought to have any sort of agency of their own. It’s all because of some all powerful SNP pulling the strings of Scottish society like some evil puppet master.

There is outright denial that the failure of the Westminster parties to honour the promises and commitments which they made as part of Better Together have any role to play in creating the current level of support for independence. Indeed there is rarely any acknowledgement of any failure at all on their part. Brexit is waved away because apparently “we all knew” it was a realistic prospect in 2014, and in any case Scotland didn’t vote against Brexit because it was a UK wide vote, so it’s irrelevant to them how people in Scotland voted. Equally there is no recognition that the Conservatives have been assiduous in their unilateral attempt to undermine and subvert the devolution settlement despite the promise that Westminster would not “normally” make any changes to devolution without the express consent of Holyrood.

We are dealing with a peculiar species of alternative reality which is angry and confused about the realities of modern Scotland and which lacks the conceptual framework to engage with it in any meaningful way. It’s a British nationalism which is putting all its eggs in the basket of refusing to accept that there can or will be another vote on independence in Scotland, because even though they would angrily deny it, they have no intellectual ammunition to win that debate.

The denial extends to outright denial of the existence of British nationalism, never mind a recognition of its dominance in the modern Conservative party. The only nationalism in Scotland is Scottish nationalism. Yet just this weekend Liz Truss, the front runner in the Conservative leadership contest denied the existence of the union and even the existence of Scotland as a nation in its own right, casually overturning generations of Scottish Unionist political thinking. Truss announced that she intends to personally take the post of Minister for the Union and said “We are not four separate nations in an agreement of convenience, as some would have us believe. We are one great country which shares a history and institutions, but also family and friends, memories and values.”

That is an explicit declaration of British nationalism and an outright denial that Scotland is a member nation in a union of nations. Truss went on to claim she would ensure that her policies were implemented in “all corners of our country,” adding “For too long, people in parts of our United Kingdom have been let down by their devolved administrations playing political games instead of focusing on their priorities. If elected prime minister, I will deliver for our whole country.”

This is an effective declaration of war on the devolution settlement , note that Truss cannot bring herself to accept that Scotland or Wales are countries in their own right, and certainly cannot acknowledge that they have governments, no, they have “devolved administrations”. This is what the Anglo-British nationalism of the modern Conservative party looks like, as it alienates the entire UK from Europe and identifies the parliaments in Edinburgh and Cardiff as enemies. If the Conservatives cannot win political power in Scotland or Wales through the ballot box, then the Welsh Senedd and the Scottish Parliament must be bludgeoned into submission using the Conservatives’ Commons majority which is of course based upon their English seats. But apparently pointing that out makes you a racist.

Yet British nationalism does not apparently exist when you are a British nationalist, even as British nationalist politicians wrap themselves in the British flag and make explicit denials that Scotland is a nation. One British nationalist social media account I came across expressed itself perplexed by the term British nationalist and asserted no such thing existed. Yet the account used a photo of Winston Churchill in its header and was friends with other accounts which draped themselves in Union flags, although of course, given what Truss has just said, these are not Union flags at all, but rather the flag of “one great country.” That’s not nationalist at all, oh no.

The intellectual poverty and denialism of much of the opposition to independence makes it singularly ill-equipped to fight another referendum campaign. That means that when there is a vote, as there inevitably will be, Better Together 2.0 will have nothing to draw on except anger and fear and the vacuous British bullshit of the Conservatives – with Starmer’s Labour running along in the Tory wake playing catch up. As soon as the vote is called, they will have already lost.

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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.

This is a cost of corporate greed crisis

An American Buddhist nun called Perma Chödrön wrote a famous self-help book called When Things Fall Apart, she later expounded on the message of the first book with a follow up, subtitled A Guide to Fearlessness. The books give advice to dealing with personal crises such as the loss of a loved one, or dealing with a life-changing illness, but the lessons that help people through those personal and intimate challenges are also apposite for the challenges that are currently facing us all as a society.

Right now the UK is falling apart, I don’t just mean that the so-called Union is falling apart, although it certainly is, but many of the wider structures and services that have allowed most people to live reasonably comfortable and decent lives are falling apart. From widespread difficulties in getting a driving test to the near impossibility of registering with an NHS dentist, so many things that were once simple now pose huge challenges. And that is by no means the worst of it, already there are unprecedented levels of food bank use, an entire generation struggles to find suitable housing, job insecurity is widespread, hundreds of thousands are trapped into low paid jobs in the so called gig economy which don’t offer any prospect of advancement or the things like holiday pay or sick leave which previous generations in the workforce took for granted. Inflation is soaring, expected to reach 13%, adding even further to the burden of paying for essentials.

All of these problems are compounded by the obstacles created by Brexit, for all that the Conservatives refuse even to acknowledge that their ideologically driven hard Brexit could possibly be a contributory factor to the economic problems which have made the British economy the worst performing out of those of the G7 by a significant margin. Household incomes in the UK are now falling in real terms, and we have a British government which willfully lies and denies that Brexit could have anything to do with it, blaming the global factors which every other economy has to deal with, yet is dealing with markedly better than the UK. We have a British government of right wing fantasists which insults everyone’s intelligence and refuses to engage with reality.

And it continues to get even worse. Just yesterday there was dreadful news about soaring gas and electricity bills which threaten to throw over half the households in the UK into fuel poverty at a time when millions are already struggling to pay their bills. It was also reported that the British Government is making plans for organised blackouts for industry and households over winter when cold weather may coincide with gas shortages. This is happening in no small measure because successive Conservative governments deliberately ran down the UK’s gas storage capacity. Millions are facing a freezing winter and possible destitution.

Yet the big oil and gas companies report soaring profits, the largest oil and gas producers made close to $100bn in first quarter of 2022 on the back of record prices for oil and gas caused by increased demand following the pandemic and supply issues created by the war in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia. Shell posted record earnings of $11.4bn (nearly £10bn) for the three-month period from April to June and promised to give shareholders payouts worth £6.5bn. Meanwhile Centrica, the owner of British Gas, reinstated its dividend, handing investors £59m, after reporting operating profits of £1.3bn during the first half of 2022.

The cost to the government of the help to the poorest households is claimed to be £37 billion over the year, which is less than a half of the profits recorded by the biggest oil and gas producers in just three months.  And the big idea from the Tory leadership candidates is to reward them with tax cuts.

It’s not just the big energy companies however, Amazon has also posted record profits, surging to $14.32bn for the last quarter of 2021. Alphabet, the owner of Google, reported profits of $19.45 billion in the second quarter of 2022. We need to be clear here, what we are facing is not a cost of living crisis, it is a cost of corporate greed crisis. Ordinary households are suffering while a small minority become rich on the backs of their misery.

It is beyond scandalous in a country like Scotland, which has an embarrassing wealth of energy resources, both fossil fuels and renewables, that people are facing a winter without heat and power in their homes. Yet as part of this dysfunctional UK, there is nothing that Scotland can do beyond hope that the right wing ideologues of the Conservative party who have always prioritised private profit over public good will do something about it. The signs are not good. Liz Truss thinks that the way to deal with the industrial and social unrest which this crisis will inevitably provoke is to crack down on public protest and striking workers, not to do anything about the underlying issues which created the protest and the strikes in the first place.

The British Government is paralysed while the Conservative party consumes itself with its internal party politicking and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak compete to out-Thatcher one another in an effort to appeal to the overwhelmingly white, male, southern English, elderly and middle class membership of the Conservative party which will decide who is to become the next worst Prime Minister in modern times. The British Government is absent, refusing to engage with the issues, claiming that everything must be put on pause while the Conservatives focus on their leadership contest. Johnson is basically on gardening leave and the others are too busy campaigning and nothing will be done until a new Prime Minister is elected.

Meanwhile influential Tories continue to indulge themselves in fantasies divorced from the real world, the Truss supporting architect of Brexit Lord Frost has called on his favourite to forget about “mediaeval” wind farms and even as Europe burns and faces an unprededented drought insists that there is no climate emergency, calling on Truss to expand fracking and nuclear energy. His absurd claims come even as scientists say that the recent record breaking heatwave which saw temperatures in parts of England exceed 40C would not have been possible without climate change.

For her part Liz Truss is more interested in how she can appear in Vogue magazine than in doing anything to tackle the crisis. A study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation foundation found that £6 of every £7 of her tax cuts will go to the better off.

Scotland has an escape from this madness, but as Perma Chödrön explains, we must be fearless, that does not mean denying that fear exists, change is always frightening, but we must recognise that there is no status quo any more, change will happen whether we like it or not, and the choice for Scotland is to be a victim of the change that is imposed on us by Truss and her allies, or an agent of change. Put like that it is not a difficult choice.

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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.

Hasta la vista, he wants to come back

The new Prime Minister is due to take over from Boris Johnson on 5 September, that however is unlikely to be the last that we hear from the serial liar and law breaker who spent years plotting and conniving to get the top job only to be wheeched out of it just halfway through a five year term despite winning the Tories their largest majority since Thatcher, after even the craven enablers in his own government started to realise that his dishonesty and entitlement posed a severe risk to their own political careers and the Conservative party’s chances of re-election. They are creatures in Johnson’s own image, concerned only for themselves.

The most likely winner according to a number of opinion polls will be the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, a woman who has passionately held political convictions, and if those passionately held political convictions aren’t going to help her career advancement she’s got some different political convictions that she will hold just as passionately. Truss is the ultimate political chameleon.

However Truss has successfully positioned herself with the party membership who will choose the next Prime Minister as the Johnson continuity candidate. She has the support of all the prominent Johnson loyalists such as Nadhim Zahawi and Jacob Rees-Mogg as well as the Johnson fan girl Nadine Dorries whose declarations of unconditional loyalty to her spurned prince would make her come across as a deranged stalker if she was not actually a cabinet minister. There are rumours that Dorries will be elevated to the peerage in Johnson’s resignation dishonours list, this will leave a vacancy in her ultra safe Conservative constituency and some have speculated that Johnson intends to take her place rather than face the humiliation of losing his more marginal Uxbridge seat at the next election or if he is found to have mislead Parliament and has to face a recall. Dorries has described the investigation by the Commons Privileges Committee into whether Johnson misled Parliament – spoiler alert – he did, as a witch hunt and “the most egregious abuse of power witnessed in Westminster,” adding that “it will cast serious doubt not only on the reputation of individual MPs sitting on the committee, but on the processes of Parliament and democracy itself.” Would you call a senior politician of a NATO country dropping his security detail and flying over 1,000 miles to have undeclared meetings with an ex KGB agent and Kremlin associate whose son he later ennobled an ‘egregious abuse of power’ or is it just plain and simple treason? Just wondering, Nadine.

Sorry Nadine, the entire world knows that the object of your hero worship isn’t going to leave his wife for you. He will leave her, just not for you.

Truss’s political career has largely consisted of achieving nothing on her own merit but ruthlessly taking credit for the achievements of others. She gave herself the lion’s share of the credit for securing the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori from prison in Iran, which was the result of long and complex negotiations carried out by civil servants at the Foreign Office, for the most part under her predecessors.

Pauline Buchanan Black wrote about her experience of Liz Truss for The New European . At the time Truss was the Environment Secretary. Ms Buchanan Black who was the director general of a tree planting charity, wrote a damning assessment of Truss, saying : “It quickly became apparent to me that Liz Truss is someone who likes to take credit for work that is not hers, and shun those whose work it actually is. I see that as the worst quality a leader can have.”

Truss recently dismissed Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of being an “attention seeker,” there was a heavy dose of psychological projection there. Truss is notoriously obsessed with publicity and her social media profile so much so that employees at the Department for International Trade supposedly joked that they worked at the Department for Instagramming Truss.

According to Dominic Cummings, who knows a thing or two about transactional politicians, the real reason that Johnson has told his supporters to get behind Truss is because he knows that she will be a disaster. Cummings described Truss “as close to properly crackers as anybody I have met in parliament,” and said that she was called the hand grenade because she destroyed everything she came into contact with. Cummings believes that Johnson thinks that Truss will be just as much of a hand grenade in Number 10 and will prove utterly incapable of rising to the challenges of the cost of living crisis which will bite in a serious way next year. Truss will be a prisoner of the extreme right of the Conservative party and will concentrate on policies aimed at pleasing her core support. We have already seen signs of this in just the few short weeks of the leadership contest. Truss has managed to anger swathes of Scottish and Welsh public opinion, not just independence supporters.

The rising public anger and industrial unrest which will be provoked by the cost of living crisis and the inability of Liz Truss to deal with the widespread problems that will crop up for the government next year with ever increasing frequency will lead to a catastrophic showing in the polls for the Conservatives. The reality is that this is not a cost of living crisis, it’s a cost of corporate greed crisis. Truss will do nothing to deal with that. She will reward the rich with tax cuts. Truss will attempt to crack down on protests rather than tackle the underlying issues which led to the protests in the first place. Johnson is banking on panicking Conservative MPs ditching Truss in order to save themselves just as he was ditched, and then he hopes to ride their wave of discontent back into number 10. The havoc that will be wrought on public services and ordinary working people in the meantime is of no concern to Johnson or the Conservative party.

However should by some miracle the equally insanely ambitious Rishi Sunak beat the odds and take the top job, Johnson and his supporters will devote themselves to plotting against him from the back benches. It will be a repeat of the way in which the right wing extremists of the European Research Group plotted against and undermined Theresa May. Johnson really is the English nationalist Trump. He’s not going to concede defeat even after he’s been forced out of office and a successor has been appointed. Johnson’s baleful legacy will be casting its shadow over British politics for quite some time to come. Johnson is determined to return, which is why he finished his churlish and graceless final statement to the Commons as Prime Minister with the words Hasta la vista, a Spanish phrase which means See you later or until the next time. Hasta la vista baby is most associated with the Terminator from the movies, an amoral machine for wreaking havoc and destruction, completely lacking in empathy or compassion, so very much like Johnson then.

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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.

Scottish democracy will be the big loser of the Tory leadership contest

It ought to be unnecessary in a country with a long and well established democratic tradition that the basic principles of democracy and parliamentary mandates should have to be explained and reiterated. Sadly however that is where we are in Scotland in 2022 where in their panicked desperation the opponents of Scottish independence, who are very much Anglo-British nationalists despite their strident protestations that they are against ‘nationalism’ are resorting to all sorts of implausible contortions in order to reconcile their mutually contradictory assertions.

In order to escape the charge that they are denying the democratic will of the people of Scotland, and caught between their claim that its up to the Scottish people to decide whether Scotland remains in the UK or not while insisting that they will not ‘allow’ another referendum, the anti-democratic British nationalists must find some formula for denying that the Scottish Parliament was indeed given a mandate by the people of Scotland for a second independence referendum.

As anyone who was paying even passing attention is aware, the issue of a second independence referendum dominated the Scottish Parliament election of 2021. The SNP and the other pro-independence parties made it clear that a vote for them would result in a Scottish Parliament which would bring about another vote on independence. For their part the anti-independence parties made it clear that if elected to Holyrood they would vote against any bill or proposal for another vote on independence.

As we all know,of the pro-independence parties, the SNP won 64 seats and the Scottish Greens won 8, thus ending up with 72 pro-independence and pro-referendum seats between them in Holyrood and giving them a comfortable majority over the anti-independence parties who between them won just 57 seats . (Conservatives 31, Labour 22, and Lib Dems 4) 72 is a much bigger number than 57, it is in fact by some margin the largest pro-independence majority that there has ever been in the Scottish Parliament, so you might think it was unarguable that the electorate had given Holyrood an unequivocal mandate for another independence referendum.

You would of course be wrong. Before the new MSPs had even got their bums on their seats the anti-independence parties, their supporters in the media, and the moon howling red white and blue contingent on social media were falling over themselves to brit-splain the outcome of the election to us and tell us why this resounding mandate for another independence referendum was in fact no such thing.

Right away we had assorted Tories telling us that because the SNP had not won an absolute majority in its own right there was no mandate for another independence referendum. The 64 SNP MSPs were outnumbered by the 65 MSPs from all the other parties, apparently the 8 Green MSPs are so much chopped meat and the fact that they too support another referendum seemingly doesn’t count, so if you voted Green and got a Green MSP elected it seemingly doesn’t matter. There was a concerted effort amongst opponents of independence to vote tactically in order to deprive the new Parliament of a pro-independence majority because the opponents of independence were well aware of what a majority pro-independence Scottish Parliament would mean. They failed, but having failed tried to shift the goal posts so that Green MSPs didn’t count, only SNP MSPs mattered where a mandate for another referendum was concerned. They would have done exactly the same had any of the other pro-independence party succeeded in winning seats.

However the new Presiding Officer Alison Johnson, was chosen from amongst the ranks of Green MSPs. The Presiding Officer renounces affiliation with their party and does not generally cast a vote except to break a tie. Even then, the convention is that when the presiding officer does use their tie-breaking vote, they do so in favour of advancing debate, but on final ballots, they vote to retain the status quo. This means effectively the SNP does have a majority in its own right as all the other MSPs combined cannot outvote it.

More to the point, the SNP cannot be outvoted on any vote concerned with advancing another independence referendum, since this is also Green policy. The majority status of the SNP led Scottish Government was later cemented when the SNP agreed a deal with the Greens.

Even though they are faced with a pro-independence Scottish Government whose majority is unassailable, this has not stopped the British nationalists and their enablers from trying to come up with arguments which they hope might persuade the public that the mandate held by Holyrood isn’t “really” a mandate, and therefore they are not authoritarian democracy deniers by appealing to forces beyond Holyrood such as the UK Supreme Court or Downing Street in order to block the second independence referendum and undermine Scottish democracy.

Thus we hear a lot of selective appeals to opinion polling from the parties which seek to traduce the outcome of the 2021 Holyrood election because they cannot, in Trumpian fashion, accept that they lost. We do not have government by opinion poll in this or any other country. But if we did then the anti-independence parties would have to respect all polling, not just the polls that suited them. If that were the case the Tories and Labour would have to concede that most people think Brexit was a disaster that needs to be undone, yet both of them are committed to a hard Brexit and keeping the UK out of the Single Market and Customs Union. We don’t hear much from them about opinion polls on that topic, funny that.

The other desperately pathetic attempt to deny democracy is commonplace on social media, especially amongst the staunch brigade. These types love to point out that the pro-independence parties combined received 48.98% of the share of the votes in the constituency vote, which of course is not an absolute majority. Usually they just fixate on the SNP vote share alone, which was 47.70% in the constituency vote and 40.34% in the regional list vote.

They are less keen to highlight that between them the SNP, Greens, Alba, and other minor pro-independence parties obtained 50.18% of votes in the regional list vote.

While percentage vote share might be of interest to political anoraks, this was a parliamentary election, not a referendum. The fact that the SNP got ‘only’ 47.70% vote share in the constituency vote in no way undermines or invalidates its mandate for another independence referendum. No British Government has achieved over 50% of the popular vote since 1935 when the National Government headed by Stanley Baldwin won 51.8% of the votes cast. Even Thatcher’s landslide in 1979 was won with a mere 43.9% of the popular vote. Tony Blair won his landslide in 1997 with 43.2% of votes cast. The current Conservative government won its 80 seat Commons majority on just 43.6% of the vote. If you want to argue that the Scottish Government doesn’t have a mandate for a second independence referendum because it failed to win a majority of votes cast, then you are conceding that no British government for almost 90 years has had a mandate to implement its manifesto.

Yet this is where we are now, forced to defend the fundamentals of democracy. All by itself this should make you realise the very real danger that democracy in Scotland faces from British nationalists who deny that they are a threat to Scottish democracy as vehemently as they deny that they are nationalists. It’s only going to get worse.  Both Sunak and Truss are fully invested in these attempts to deny Scottish democracy and won’t only refuse to acknowledge the democratic choice Scotland made at the last Scottish Parliament election, they will take a wrecking ball to the devolution settlement.

No matter which of the two candidates for Prime Minister who are currently trying to appeal to the basest instincts of the Conservative party ends up as the winner, democracy in Scotland will end up the loser.

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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 real nationalist extremists we need to worry about

One of the supposed advantages of being British which those who oppose independence are so proud of used to be the freedom to criticise the government, the monarchy, the army, the establishment, or the myths and sacred cows of Britishness without any repercussion. This was the much vaunted tolerance which we were always told was one of the defining characteristics of Britishness. During the 2014 independence referendum campaign Better Together supporters made much of this, some even going so far as to say that deprived of the moderating influence of Westminster, Scotland would rapidly descend into an intolerant authoritarianism where those deemed to be insufficient or unenthusiastic in their Scottishness or who refused to participate in state-sponsored anglophobia would be hauled off to re-education camps where they would be strapped into chairs and subjected to high decibel renditions of Harry Lauder and Fran and Anna music until they confessed the error of their ways.

Better Together supporters took it for granted that freedom of speech was a core British value, one which was guaranteed by a Britain which they viewed as one of the most robust and secure democracies in the world. There would never in the UK be any threat of laws such as the Spanish legal ban on insulting the royal family. In April last year a pro-independence and anti-fascist Catalan rapper Pablo Hasél was sentenced to a prison term of nine months for insulting the Spanish royal family, insulting the Spanish armed forces and police and for praising banned organisations including the pro-independence Basque and Catalan paramilitary organisations ETA and Terra lliure (Catalan for Free Land). According to Spanish law any person who defames or insults the king, the queen, their ancestors or their descendants can be imprisoned for up to two years.

One of the tweets which the Spanish courts used to justify the claim that Hasél was a supporter of terrorism, a claim which he strongly denies, was pointing out that Joseba Arregi Izagirre, accused of being a member of ETA, was tortured to death in a Madrid prison in 1981 by serving members of the Spanish National Police.

Another pro-independence Catalan rapper, Josep Miquel Arenas Beltran, known as Valtònyc, was arrested at the age of 18 for a song whose lyrics were ruled by the Spanish High Court to insult the monarchy, glorify terrorism and slander on the person of the king. He was sentenced to three and a half years in prison but fled to Belgium in 2018, the day before he was due to report to prison to begin his sentence. The Spanish authorities attempted to have him extradited but in October 2021 the Belgian Supreme Court ruled that the offences he was found guilty of by the Spanish courts infringed his right to freedom of speech and refused to allow the extradition.

Such laws are widespread, particularly in authoritarian states, under Turkish law it is illegal to insult the Turkish nation, the Turkish Republic, Turkish government institutions, and Turkish national heroes. It is also illegal to insult the President of Turkey, many countries, including France, Germany, and Poland make it an offence to burn or desecrate the national flag.

Of course we were always assured by the apologists for Westminster that nothing like this could ever happen in the UK. You can burn any flag in the UK as long as you own the flag and you don’t cause damage to anyone else’s property. We are told it’s a part of the freedoms guaranteed to us by the British state. But such confidence is misplaced. In 2006 the prominent Conservative MPs Michael Fabricant and Daniel Kawczinsky signed a House of Commons motion calling for legislation to make it a criminal offence to burn or desecrate the union flag.

As part of his self-declared war on woke culture, a pathetic attempt at attention seeking if ever there was one, Rishi Sunak is now proposing that if he becomes Prime Minister he will expand the definition of extremism which prompts state intervention to include those who “vilify Britain” and so that those identified as “vilifying Britain” are referred to the deradicalisation Prevent programme. It’s unclear what this means exactly but it sounds deeply sinister. The Tory Party itself has become a vehicle for extremist, dumbed-down English nationalism.

Sunak seems to have in mind those who seek an open and honest acknowledgement of Britain’s many historical sins, the legacy of the slave trade and colonialism, apologies for great wrongs committed by the British state such as the Bengal and Irish famines, the genocide of the aboriginal population of Australia. It is a long and inglorious list. But campaigners also seek a righting of modern day wrongs such as structural and institutional racism. These demands have the Tories clutching their metaphorical pearls, pearls which were no doubt stolen during an imperialist foray into some nation which was unfortunate enough to end up as a British colony. So they have decided that the real problem here is not structural racism or the airbrushing of the crimes of Empire, no, the real problem are those Britain vilifiers who want something done about it. Sunak has pledged that his focus would be on “rooting out those who are vocal in their hatred of our country”. Former counter-terrorism chief Sir Peter Fahy, who was also chief constable of Greater Manchester police, said that Sunak’s plan was “straying into thought crimes and political opinions.”

Truss’s campaign criticised Sunak’s plan, but mainly on the grounds that it doesn’t go far enough.

In recent weeks we have seen culture secretary Nadine Dorries intervene to protect a plaque in Oxford celebrating the British Imperialist robber baron Cecil Rhodes after attempts to have it removed from Oriel College in Oxford. Rhodes was an overt racist who wrote that the “Anglo-Saxon race” was the “first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.” Rhodes nakedly imperialist and colonialist ambitions caused him to be a controversial figure even during the heyday of the British Empire. When Rhodes died in 1902, his obituary was damning, with one newspaper editorial saying: “The judgment of history will, we fear, be that he did more than any Englishman of his time to lower the reputation and to impair the strength and compromise the future of the Empire.”

However in modern Britain it is less acceptable to the government to be critical of Cecil Rhodes  today than his contemporaries were during the height of British imperialism and colonialism. It is a very short step from categorising those who “vilify Britain” as dangerous extremists to ruling that those of us who seek independence from Westminster rule for Scotland and Wales are dangerous anti-English extremists.

And let’s remember that we were told that Boris Johnson was a unique aberration and that once he was out of office calm, sensible and grown up government would be restored. But no, batshit insanity is the new normal. This level of authoritarian madness is here to stay. The nationalist extremists that we really need to worry about are those in the Conservative party.

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