Escaping the vicious circle

I’m finally back blogging, a few days later than planned. Our visitors stayed longer than they had originally intended to and then I got some upsetting family news which meant that my head was just not in the game at all. However there has certainly been plenty to keep you all occupied in my absence with the SNP leadership contest. Like certain other independence bloggers I am not a member of the SNP and therefore do not get a vote, but unlike them I am not going to express a preference about who the next leader of the party and the next First Minister of Scotland should be. All three candidates are able and capable politicians, all have their positives and their negatives, but whoever finally emerges triumphant, all of us who support independence need to unite behind them and work together to build the case for independence so that it becomes the settled will of the people of this country that we all love and care for

Of course I have my own private opinion on who I would like to see as the new SNP leader and First Minister, but in the interests of unity I will be keeping that to myself. If it is not my preferred candidate who emerges victorious it will be harder to rally support behind the new First Minister. I will work to support whoever wins the leadership race. That person needs to be the candidate who is best able to appeal to the varied factions within the SNP and the broader independence movement, but more importantly to make a plausible case for independence which will resonate with that not insubstantial part of Scottish public opinion which is yet to be convinced that Scotland can only have a future as an independent nation if it wishes to retain a distinctive political culture and identity.

The direction of travel within the British state should be painfully clear by now. All Westminster offers is a future in which Scotland is subsumed in an increasingly aggressively English nationalist nation state, reduced to a historic region with no greater political relevance than Wessex or Northumbria. Keir Starmer’s Labour offers no permanent change from that, merely at best a brief respite before the pendulum of English politics swings the other way, and the Conservatives return to power to undo whatever Labour have done, just as they are currently subverting and undermining the devolution settlement. It is a salutary fact that Scotland has not voted Conservative since 1955 but in the 68 years since then Scotland has had Conservative governments at Westminster for over half the time, 38 years, and when Labour does take power it is only by aping Conservative policies, as we saw with Tony Blair in the 1990s and we are seeing now with Keir Starmer. Only independence offers Scotland a permanent escape from this vicious circle.

Unfortunately there has been far too much division , sniping from the sidelines, and back biting within the SNP and the broader independence movement over the past few years, divisions which have at times descended into sheer nastiness, these divisions have been instrumental in causing the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon.

I’d be lying if I said I had not thought about doing what she did too, and walking away from it for the sake of my mental and physical health and sanity. Over the past few weeks, prompted in part by the decision of Nicola Sturgeon, I have been thinking very seriously about whether I should throw in the towel and leave campaigning for independence to a younger and fresher generation. The recent short break gave me some much needed time to reflect. As regular readers know, I have my own personal challenges in terms of my health and disabilities which will be life-long. These are challenges which mean that I simply no longer have the physical, mental, or emotional stamina and resilience which I once did.

But I am far too gobby and opinionated to give up. Someone who supports independence needs to look beyond the obsession with process which has dominated the narrative for far too long and talk about the systemic failures of the British state which mean that democracy in Scotland can never be respected as long as Scotland remains a part of this dysfunctional polity which laughably calls itself a united kingdom. Someone who supports independence needs to shift the narrative from culture war topics that only benefit the Conservatives and focus on arguments which can appeal to undecided voters and those who are open to persuasion, arguments which demonstrate why the people of Scotland would be far better served by a Scottish government with the full powers of an independent state.

It is all the more important that these arguments are made and these discussions are had because the media in Scotland is woefully unrepresentative of the range of political and constitutional opinion in Scotland. As the BBC is very fond of telling us, Scotland is divided on the question of independence, the media in Scotland on the other hand, is anything but divided on the question of independence. It is, with a tiny handful of honorable exceptions, united in its opposition to independence. This is a media landscape which is extremely unhealthy and inimical to the functioning of democracy.

I do not pretend that this small blog has massive importance or impact, but I do believe that it’s vital to keep it going, and so within the constraints of my health and stamina, that is what I am going to keep doing, however I do need to recognise that my limitations are greater than they once were and that maintaining the pace and output that I managed with ease before the stroke is simply no longer possible. So instead of trying to post a new piece three or four times a week, I will instead aim for two or three and give myself time to recover over the weekends.

Over the next few weeks the focus will naturally be on the leadership contest, but when someone emerges as the winner from as process which the anti-independence media is determined to use as an opportunity to sow more division and rancour, we must come together and work to build an unstoppable movement that will take Scotland to that independence which this country so badly needs and escape the vicious circle of Anglo-British conservsatism which dominates Westminster.

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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 end of an era

The only story in town in Scottish politics is the sudden resignation of Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister. It’s bloody typical that this happens when I am trying to enjoy a few days rest. The haters have finally got what they wanted, but even for those who dislike her there can be no doubt that Nicola Sturgeon has been a towering figure in Scottish politics, and even after more than eight years as First Minister she still enjoys approval ratings that her opponents can only dream of, leaving Anas Sarwar, Douglas Ross and Alex Salmond trailing a long long way behind her. There had been some rumours in the past few days that she was about to resign, but the announcement when it came was a shock to most. It is very much the end of an era in Scottish politics.

At a press conference to announce her resignation, the woman we must now call the out-going First Minister categorically denied that her decision had anything to do with recent controversies such as the heated and often bad tempered debate about Gender Recognition certificates and refused to be drawn on questions about whether it had anything to do with the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances. She insisted that her decision had nothing to do with short term political pressures, noting that she had dealt with immense political pressures in the past. There are indeed plentiful examples such as the Salmond trial and subsequent investigation into what she did or did not know, and dealing with the covid pandemic. Such pressures, she noted, are very much part and parcel of the job.

She hinted in her resignation speech at the immense personal toll that being in such a high pressure job takes on an individual on a human level. Of course being in a high profile political job means that your actions and views become open to public scrutiny and criticism, that is part and parcel of a functioning democracy, however Nicola Sturgeon has been subjected to an intense, constant, and unceasing barrage of criticism, not all of it justified, and much of which has been unnecessarily and unpleasantly personal, some of which has verged into deeply nasty irrational abusiveness going way beyond anything that’s the normal back and forth of politics. According to some, Nicola Sturgeon is simultaneously a misogynist and a lesbian. This kind of attack is bad enough when it comes from your political opponents, but psychologically it is far more difficult to shrug off when it comes from those who are supposed to be on the same side as you are, even more so when your job means that the normal coping mechanisms the rest of us enjoy are denied to you. She can’t easily go for a quiet walk in the park, or meet with friends in a cafe for laughs and giggles. But she has dealt with those attacks with a personal dignity that is alien to those who resort to crude personal abuse and mud slinging against her.

Nicola Sturgeon certainly recognised that she has come to embody division and divisiveness, and I suspect that she was not referring to the divisions between die hard British nationalists and independence supporters, but rather to the divisions within the independence movement. As we approach a critical moment in the campaign for independence, a historic decision on how to proceed in the face of the anti-democratic intransigence of the Anglo-British Brexit parties, the need for unity within the independence campaign has never been more vital. It is to Nicola Sturgeon’s immense credit that she has the personal and political maturity to recognise that that much needed unity cannot be achieved while she remains leader of the SNP and First Minister of Scotland. That’s a maturity that is sadly lacking in certain other individuals. But one thing is certain, those amongst her critics who decried her as a careerist have been comprehensively proven wrong.

There will now be a contest for her replacement, the details of which will be announced in the coming days. Nicola Sturgeon will remain First Minister and party leader until her replacement is in place, which we must assume will have happened before the party’s special conference to decide the way ahead for a public vote on independence in the face of Sunak and Starmer’s denial of Scottish democracy. There have been calls to postpone the conference as the last SNP leadership contest took three months, The Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has said that the special conference should be postponed, a call supported by Mike Russell. it’s possible to expedite these things and have a new leader in place far more quickly, but at this stage it seems more likely that the conference will be postponed. We will learn more about the process in the coming days.

But those on the pro-independence side who have devoted their time and energy to demanding Nicola Sturgeon’s removal rather than building the case for independence should be very careful indeed what they have wished for. It’s not just that the special conference is now quite likely to be postponed, Nicola Sturgeon had made the case for using the next UK General Election as a de facto referendum her own. Her successor, whoever that is, may not feel the same obligation.

There is no obvious successor, that is not to say that there is a shortage of talent, but none of those who are likely to throw their hat into the ring enjoy a clear advantage at this early stage. Finance Secretary Kate Forbes has been mentioned as have Angus Robertson and John Swinney. One thing is certain however, it is now less likely that there will be an early Holyrood election used as a referendum on independence. Whoever wins will have very big boots to fill. The new leader will instead first and foremost wish to secure their position and settle in to their post, and get on with the crucial task of reuniting the independence movement. They will be highly reluctant to precipitate an early Holyrood election to be used as a de facto independence referendum until they have got the measure of their new job and of their opponents in the Labour and Conservative parties.

However we are now moving into a new era, both for the independence movement and for Scotland as a whole. You can bet your house that whoever succeeds Nicola Sturgeon will very quickly become a new object of the irrational hatred of the we’re not nationalists we’re British types, who will devote themselves to getting #RESIGN(INSERTNAMEHERE) trending on social media, but we can hope that her stepping down will give the independence movement the opportunity it needs to come back together and to focus on challenging the real opponents of independence, those British politicians who lie to and deceive the people of Scotland about the nature of this so-called union and deny Scottish democracy. British nationalist rejoicing will be short lived.

Scottish independence is not and never was about Nicola Sturgeon, just as it was never about Alex Salmond. It’s about all of us and our hopes and dreams for a better fairer country. Nicola Sturgeon has stepped away in order to give the rest of us the chance to come together and to concentrate on making the case for that better, fairer Scotland. Let’s seize that opportunity with both hands.

OK, now I really am going to take a few days off.

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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.

Battery recharging

I need a wee break from the blog in order to recharge my batteries. I am having another bout of fatigue – although these episodes are certainly getting less frequent, less intense and less long lasting than they were in the months after the stroke. However we have visitors coming to stay from the USA later this week, so I need to marshall my energy in order to play at tour guide – “Oh look, there’s a castle. “Oh look, there’s a castle too.” “Oh look, there’s another bloody castle.” Americans love that sort of thing.

I will be back refreshed and raring to go, and thoroughly castled out, the middle of 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.

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.

A matter of (dis)respect

Members of Holyrood’s Finance Committee have for a second time written to the Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt, asking him to appear before a meeting of the committee in the Scottish Parliament so that he can answer MSPs’ questions about the impact of British Government economic and financial policies on the Scottish budget. Members of the committee had previously written to Hunt early in November last year to make the same request. Eventually, Hunt’s minion John Glen, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote a brief letter in mid-January saying that neither he nor his boss would be attending. It took them the best part of three months to say that they would not be coming. You can put money on an eventual refusal from Hunt to attend after this second invitation.

There is now a very clear pattern of Conservative Government ministers snubbing invitations to appear before Scottish Parliament committees in order to give an account of British Government decisions. In just the last month Scotland Secretary Secretary Alister Jack has declined invitations to the equalities and constitution committees to give evidence on his decision to block the Gender Recognition Reform (GRR) Bill and to explain to MSPs what changes the Scottish Government can make to the bill in order to meet his objections. A couple of weeks prior to this the Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch also dismissed an invite to the equalities committee to discuss her concerns about the GRR legislation, despite going public about her reservations. It seems that UK ministers want the Scottish Parliament to flail around blindfolded in the dark, playing a legislative game of pin the tail on the donkey so that when Holyrood makes an attempt to meet their concerns they can go, “Haha! That’s not it!”

It was a similar story last year when Scottish Government minister Keith Brown was repeatedly snubbed by Conservative ministers when he was on a trip to London. Then Home Secretary Priti Patel and defence minister Leo Docherty both declined invitations to meet him, apparently being unable to take 40 minutes out of their hectic schedules of pulling the wings off flies in order to meet with the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Veterans. But fair’s fair, at least they deigned to reply. Attempts to arrange meetings with Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab were not even answered.

Likewise it took numerous attempts in order to arrange for Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove to appear before Holyrood’s Finance Committee in order to answer questions about the replacement of vital EU funds with the UK Government’s levelling up agenda. At least Gove did finally show up, after repeated snubs, that’s more than can be said for his colleagues.

This is not proper or sensible government. It’s childish and insecure lightweights playing pathetic power games, making an ostentatious show of exerting their dominance over Scotland. This is the sort of thing you’d expect in a troop of monkeys, bullying less dominant members in order to ‘put them in their place.’ If it had only happened very occasionally that a Conservative minister snubbed the Scottish Parliament, or it only involved a single individual, we could put it down to circumstance or to the arrogance of a particularly self-important cabinet minister – we are looking at you, Alister Jack. But these snubs happen repeatedly and involve many different Conservative cabinet ministers.

This can only mean either that there is a deliberate policy on the part of the Conservatives at Westminster to display what they believe to be their superiority over the Scottish Parliament, or that there is a widespread attitude of contempt amongst members of the British Government for the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament. Admittedly these two possibilities are not mutually exclusive. Cabinet ministers might hold back on open displays of naked contempt in public, but Conservative journalists and commentators need not be so circumspect. In January there was an appalling display of blatant anti-Scottish hate speech from Conservative journalist Rod Liddle when he wrote a piece for the Spectator, a publication with a history of anti-Scottish racism, about his horror at the discovery that his genetic heritage was majority Scots. The piece was naturally brushed off as ‘banter’ to which only a ‘dour and humourless Scot’ might object.

However can you imagine the outcry if I had penned an equivalent piece in the National about learning I had English DNA. Anglo-British nationalist double standards strike again. But you will have to imagine it, because I’d never have written such a racist piece of dross, I would not be remotely concerned if I found out I was of English ancestry, but if I had suffered some brain fart even worse than the stroke and had written it the National would never have published it.

Just this week another Conservative journalist, Amanda Platell of the Daily Mail, dismissed the Scottish First Minister as an ‘overstuffed little haggis,’ on G Beebies TV and then laughed at her own joke, because is seems that asinine racial stereotypes count as wit and repartee in the Daily Mail.

The likes of Platell and Liddle say out loud the kind of thing that senior Conservative ministers think but dare not openly say. Conservative politicians and Conservative journalists move in the same social circles, the attitudes and prejudices that the journalists and commentators openly express are equally held by the politicians. But Tory politicians do not need to say such things for us to know that they have nothing but contempt for Scotland, it is abundantly clear from their actions. Their message comes across loud and clear.

We have come a very long way from the respect agenda which the Conservatives swore to adopt if Scotland voted No in the referendum of 2014. That ‘Union of equals’ which we were also promised has turned out to be as mythical as the benefits of Brexit. But then the Tories were only ever going to show respect for Scotland up until the moment that Scotland gave them that No vote which they so badly craved. Once the No vote was in the bag, it was back to contempt as usual. Contempt is all that Scotland will ever get as long as it remains in this so-called union.

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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 Conservatives are gunning for our human rights

The European Convention on Human Rights was drawn up after WW2 in the Hague in order to ensure a framework of legal protections designed to prevent the rise of fascist regimes like those which had only a few years previously torn the world apart and led to the deaths of millions at the hands of the Nazis and their allies. A British lawyer, the Edinburgh born David Maxwell Fyfe, played a key role in drafting the Convention, which was and is entirely distinct from the European Union. United only by their hatred of Europe and their willingness to pander to the most base scaremongering in the right wing gutter press about migrants, the Conservatives are now seeking to take Britain out of the ECHR despite having no mandate to do so. The ECHR is a fundamental pillar of the European democratic political order, part and parcel of being a member of the Council of Europe.

The Tories and their allies like to conflate the ECHR with the EU-only European Court of Justice based in Luxembourg. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) is based in Strasbourg. International law scholars consider the ECtHR to be the most effective international human rights court in the world. the court interprets and rules on the ECHR. Judges are elected to the court by the Council of Europe in respect of each member state although the judges sit as individuals not as representatives of each state. A British judge, Tim Eicke KC, sits on the ECtHR.

After attacking real wages, and introducing repressive laws to crack down on the right to strike and the right to peaceful protest, the Tories are now targeting human rights. They want the UK to join Russia and Belarus as the only European countries which ignore the ECHR. The Tories and their right wing allies used hatred and prejudice against migrants in order to take the UK out of the EU, then they used that to attack everyone’s employment and consumer rights, despite vehemently denying that they planned to do any such thing. Now they are using hatred and prejudice against migrants in order to take the UK out of the ECHR, and they will absolutely use that to attack everyone’s human rights, to attack the rights to assembly and to protest, the right to a fair trial, the right to freedom of political expression. Of course they will deny that they intend to do any of these things, but if there is one thing that even the most obtuse voter ought to have learned about the Conservatives by now it’s that they lie. It’s the classic power play of the authoritarian bully to scapegoat a minority as an excuse to remove everyone’s rights. However either we all have human rights or no one does. If human rights are taken away from any group of people, they’re not human rights at all. They’re just privileges granted by the powerful, which can just as easily be taken away by the powerful. the Tories say that they need to extinguish rights so they can do vile things to immigrants that a convention on human rights would prevent. Okay… But who would be next? Because it never stops there. The homeless? The unemployed? The vulnerable? How rich must you be to have rights?

Once the Conservatives have given themselves the power to override fundamental human rights, they will use it, and they will not just use it against undocumented migrants, they will use it against climate change protestors, they will use it against Black Lives Matter campaigners, they will use it against trade unions, they will use it against Scottish independence campaigners. They must be resisted.

The fundamental truth that the Conservatives hope we do not notice is that if you can only introduce the measures that you want to combat undocumented migration by trashing an international treaty guaranteeing basic human rights, it’s not the treaty on human rights that is the problem, it’s your immigration policy. For all the Conservative cant about tackling the people traffickers who trade in human misery, exiting the ECHR will not punish the people traffickers, it merely heaps more misery on their victims. It’s like claiming to help the victims of a violent assault by punching them in what is left of their teeth.

The Conservatives bleat that Canada and New Zealand are also outside the European Convention on Human Rights, they are also outside of Europe even in its most extended geographical sense. Canada has a written constitution which codifies and enshrines the human rights of Canadian citizens and individuals under Canadian jurisdiction, New Zealand has a Bill of Rights which is considered to be a fundamental part of the constitution of New Zealand, a constitution which also ensures checks and balances between the various branches of government which are entirely lacking in the UK where there is little effective check on the absolute power of a Prime Minister who like Rishi Sunak can occupy the post without being elected by anyone at all. New Zealand also has a proportional system of voting which ensures that a party which fails to win a majority of votes cast cannot win a majority of seats in the Parliament. None of these guarantees and checks and balances exist in the UK meaning that outwith the ECHR our human rights are hostage to whatever party manages to win a majority of seats at Westminster, even though that party is highly unlikely to have won a majority of the popular vote.

The so-called migrant crisis is in any event an artificial problem manufactured by the far right press and the likes of Nigel Farage. The truth is that the UK receives fewer migrants and asylum seekers than most other European states. There were 72,027 asylum applications (relating to 85,902 people) in the UK in the year ending September 2022. In the same period, a total of 244,132 asylum applications were filed in Germany and 96,510 in France. In 2021 Sweden (which has a population of 10.5 million compared to the 67.5 million population of the UK), accepted 240,854 refugees and asylum seekers. None of these countries feel the need to exit the ECHR in order to cope with migration.

However having aired the idea, Sunak was quick to insist he had no plans to leave the ECHR after a number of Conservative MPs went public with their opposition to leaving. We may have been saved, this time, by Sunak’s weakness and his inability to ensure that his warring back benchers comply, but next time we may not be so lucky. We can be sure that the right wing of the Tory party and the frothing right wing media will keep agitating until they get a Prime Minister who will do their bidding. There are reports that the Conservatives intend to campaign at the next General Election on a platform of taking the UK out of the ECHR. They may lose that election but the Anglo-British nationalist right wing will eventually see the electoral pendulum swing back its way, and then there will be a bonfire of human rights in the name of ‘British patriotism’. Democracy and human rights in Scotland cannot be safe until Scotland is an independent nation.

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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.

There’s no delusion like Tory self-delusion

There’s common or garden delusion, and then there’s the industrial strength delusion of former Prime Minister Liz Truss who in her brief time in office cost the public purse some £30 billion according to the Resolution Foundation. This works out at over £612 million for every day of her 49 day tenure in Downing Street. Remember that figure the next time Douglas Ross bangs on about the ferries. Truss is now reportedly attempting a political rehabilitation, despite the fact that the only conceivable less welcome return to public life would be if Prince Andrew was to be appointed as head of the Girl Guides.

Liz Truss has spent the last 100 days engaged in intense introspection trying to understand what went wrong with her time in office, and this deep soul-searching has resulted in her claiming she was completely blameless but she had been done down a nefarious left wing financial establishment that only exists in her imagination. Clearly Truss is as good at introspection as she was at being Prime Minister.

In pursuit of her return to public life, Truss has penned a 4000 word whingefest for the Telegraph. That’s one word for every £75 million that she wiped off the value of UK public assets. Truss uses the essay to blame the ‘left wing economic establishment’ for her downfall. Yes you read that right, Truss was really brought down by those well known socialists of the banking and financial sector. That ‘left wing economic establishment’ consists of the Bank of England, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the bond markets, and currency traders, all of whom Truss believes can regularly be found waving Socialist Worker placards and agitating for improved employment rights, better public services and higher taxes on the rich. Bankers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but a collapsed bond market, soaring mortgages, and tanking pension funds. Unfettered capitalism took 12 years to make Truss and just six weeks to destroy her. Those pesky left wing oligarchs. So mischievous.

“I assumed upon entering Downing Street my mandate would be respected. How wrong I was.” wrote Truss. This is a woman who is spectacularly deranged, the imaginary left wing financial establishment is to blame for showing imaginary disrespect for her imaginary mandate. She had as much of a mandate as she has self-awareness, unless it said in the Conservative manifesto that the Conservatives planned to introduce tax cuts for the rich, protect the windfall profits of the energy companies, raise mortgage costs and tank the economy.

Truss is the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which holds that people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge because they do not have enough understanding to appreciate just how little they actually know. She is the perfect example of all that is wrong with the Conservative party.

Oh dear, who to believe? The Liz Truss in February 2023 saying that her budget was fantastic but those pesky lefties in the City of London ruined it. Or should we believe the Liz Truss in October 2022 saying it was all the fault of Kwasi Kwarteng who hadn’t consulted her and that’s why she had to sack him for implementing her policies. Now Truss is claiming that no one had warned her of the likelihood of the disaster that she created which led to her becoming a global laughing stock, an eventuality which might not be unrelated to the fact that she had sacked the person responsible for warning her.

The thing about having a comeback is that you you have to have been a huge success and very popular. Then you go away much to everyone’s immense disappointment. Then you ‘come back’. However if you cause havoc, and are finally deposed to the great relief of everyone, even those who put you in power in the first place, and then you reappear without displaying the slightest contrition or awareness of why you had to be sacked, then that is not a comeback. You’re basically herpes.

The Conservatives can only hope to improve their dire polling figures if they start to engage with reality, but we all know that’s not going to happen. Those Scottish Tory MSPs who backed Truss bear responsibility for the billions she cost the Scottish public purse, at least £3 billion by some estimates, but there is no sign of contrition from any of them, no admission that they got it disastrously wrong.

Truss’s attempted comeback and the obsession with culture wars are however a convenient smokescreen to hide the corruption and sleaze scandals which are currently battering the Conservatives.

Truss was really brought down because the Institute of Economic Affairs /Telegraph / ERG groupthink is unhinged and detached from reality. It is also utterly incapable of admitting that it could ever be wrong even when we are all standing in the smoking rubble that results from implementing its insanity. We saw that with austerity, with Brexit, and with Truss. What Truss, Johnson, and Zahawi all have in common is that none of them accept responsibility for their own misdeeds. It’s always the fault of ‘lefties’ or ‘remainers’ or ‘the liberal establishment’. Every failed Conservative leader creates a personality cult of supporters with Boris Johnson it’s magical thinking and the fairy tale of British exceptionalism being done down by remainers. Truss is now also trading in paranoid conspiracies. When Sunak is ousted, as he inevitably will be, someone else will be given the blame.

That is why they are so dangerous, because given half a chance they would do it all over again only next time they’d double down and do it even more intensively. The scary thing is that there are still plenty of influential people in the Conservative party who are itching to give them the chance to do it all again. It ought to be unthinkable, but if the last decade in this binfire Britain has taught us anything, it’s that the worst thing that can happen will happen, and it will be cheered on by the right wing press and platformed by the BBC.

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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 politics, a consensus of delusion

Every time the deputy Prime Minister Demonic, sorry, Dominic Raab appears on the telly I can’t help but think about one of those crime dramas in which an arrogant area sales manager with a terrible temper and a permanent smirk is spied on by his neighbours in the dead of night, pouring concrete for a new patio shortly after his put upon wife has just gone off ‘for a visit to her parents.’

It might be Raab’s political career which is shortly buried under a hastily built patio, as Rishi Sunak appears to be distancing himself from Raab, who is mired in multiple allegations of bullying and demeaning junior staff in various government departments. Earlier this week ‘Integrity’ Sunak insisted he was not aware of any complaints about Raab’s behaviour when he appointed Raab as deputy Prime Minister in October. A senior civil servant told the press that Raab “has zero self-awareness of what he’s doing, or the impact he is having on the civil servants who have to work with him.” This is a supremely arrogant man, who is both incompetent and inadequate, living off the wits of his subordinates, and making everyone’s life a misery with his furious insecurity. He seems like the kind of boss whose idea of staff motivation is to give them a wedgie and hold their head down the toilet, which may well be how he persuaded Rishi Sunak to give him a job.

However despite his previous denials it now transpires that Sunak was warned about concerns about Raab’s behaviour in his previous departments long before giving him a senior role in his government. Sunak has the same relationship to the truth as his predecessor Boris Johnson, a man whose lies and deceit Sunak was happy to enable for some years only moving against him when he thought he had a chance of taking the top job for himself and Sunak is seeking refuge in a weaselly definition of ‘formal complaint.’ Sunak was not aware of any ‘formal complaints’ against Raab even though he was warned that Raab was the Tory party version Biff Tannen from Back to the Future.

Sunak appointed Suella Braverman even though he knew that she had broken the ministerial code, he appointed Nadhim Zahawi even though he knew there were questions about Zahawi’s tax affairs. He appointed Gavin Williamson, another smirking area sales manager even though allegations about Williamson’s bullying ways were common knowledge on the Conservative benches. And he appointed Dominic Raab despite being warned of allegations about Raab’s behaviour, a man who as foreign secretary refused to return from holiday as the Taliban were approaching Kabul and who denied that he had been paddle boarding as Kabul fell, because he claimed, “The sea was closed.”

Yet Sunak does nothing because he is too weak to act, a hostage to the plotting factions who war with one another on the Conservative back benches. Meanwhile Johnson swans around as though he were still Prime Minister, biding his time until he can plunge a knife into Sunak’s back as Sunak did to him. This is why Sunak is so weak, so afraid to take action about the misbehaviour of his ministers. He is too afraid of gifting Johnson a powerful ally on the back benches.

So Sunak’s government drifts along rudderless and buffeted by one scandal after another, desperately clinging to power in the hope that something might turn up which can turn the Conservatives’ dire polling figures around.

When not refusing to do anything about the appalling behaviour of members of his government and then trying to assure us with all the self confidence of a business consultant whose power point presentation has unaccountably started to display images from the tractor porn pages of Porn Hub that he has acted decisively, Sunak spends his time making equally unconvincing declarations that Brexit has absolutely “nothing to do” with the UK’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis despite figures which show that the UK’s economic outlook is worse than that of similarly sized countries, countries which do not have the benefit of substantial domestic reserves of oil and gas.

However Sunak on Wednesday at PMQs Sunak insisted that the “number one cause” of the cost of living crisis was inflation created by the rise in energy prices as a result of the war in Ukraine, conveniently ignoring the fact that every other country in Europe is also affected by the war in Ukraine, many of them were considerably more dependent on Russian oil and gas than the UK was yet they still have lower inflation than the UK does. Germany’s inflation rate in January was 7.9%, the USA’s was 6.5%, France’s was 6.7%, Italy’s was 10.1%, all of which are lower than the 10.5% reported for the UK.

This week The International Monetary Fund reported that the UK economy will shrink and continue to perform worse than that of other advanced economies, even including Russia, as the cost of living continues to hit households,. The IMF said the economy will contract by 0.6% in 2023, rather than grow slightly as previously predicted, the main cause of this is British Government policy, which perpetuates the economic self-harm of Brexit and which protects the profiteering of the energy companies over protecting households from the rising cost of energy. There is money to invest in public services and in wages for public sector workers, but this government prefers to see it go offshore into the already bloated tax haven bank accounts of the obscenely wealthy. The truth is that the UK does not have a cost of living crisis, it has a cost of Tory crisis.

But then the Labour leader Keir Starmer is quite happy to give a free ride to Sunak over his Brexit denialism because Starmer is equally keen to pander to the pro-Brexit prejudices of voters in the Midlands and North of England. We are all being held hostage to that minority of the electorate which laps up the scare mongering nonsense of the right wing gutter press.

Demonic Raab will most likely be ousted sooner rather than later and another Conservative scandal will be along to take his place in the headlines. Meanwhile both Labour and the Tories will conspire to avoid blaming the B word for the ills which assail the British economy. The only consensus in British politics these days is a consensus of delusion. The Tories would rather burn the entire UK down as they cling to power than call an election and lose office with dignity. The only sane option for Scotland when an election finally comes is to use it to vote for independence.

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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.

Brexit : Three years on, lies, deceit and delusion

On Tuesday 31 January it was the third anniversary of the UK crashing out of the EU with Boris Johnson’s half baked and fundamentally dishonest Brexit deal. None of the much heralded Brexit benefits have materialised, there is still no sign of the advantageous trade deals that the rest of the world was supposedly poised to offer Britain. Instead of the reductions in food prices promised by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, shoppers in British supermarkets are having to cope with a rise in the prices of food and beverages of 16.9% in the twelve months to December 2022. British citizens have lost their right to freedom of movement and no longer have an automatic right to work and settle in EU member states. instead of being waved through at border control upon arrival in an EU country British citizens must now have their documents inspected and must prove that they have a return ticket and funds to support themselves during a stay which cannot exceed 90 days in any period of 180 days. But hey! Blue passports! which aren’t blue, which are printed in France, and which the UK could have had all along if it had wanted.

Meanwhile the Tories are poised to abolish all the EU laws and legislation which remains in force in the UK, many of which ensure basic standards which guarantee consumer and employment rights.

Even many of those who voted for Brexit back in 2016 now regret the decision. Even the most delusional English nationalist is hard pressed to identify any sunlit uplands that the UK has arrived at thanks to Brexit despite the best efforts of G Beebies News to present a televisual equivalent of the anti-EU nonsense regularly published in the Daily Mail, the Express, and the Telegraph. When idly switching through channels recently I briefly alighted on G Beebies to see the presenter telling viewers that Britons had experienced a narrow escape because the EU had recently ‘introduced crickets into the food chain’. Despite the scaremongering of Nigel Farage who announced that he ‘didn’t want locusts for breakfast’ and called for a ‘proper Brexit,’ the EU is quite clear that no one is going to be forced to eat insects. The greater the harm that Brexit causes and the more elusive its benefits the more the likes of Farage and his right wing media enablers demand an even ‘purer’ and more extreme form of Brexit. It’s like having been crippled because you foolishly allowed Farage to batter your kneecaps with a hammer, he’s now insisting that you’ll be able to run a marathon in record time if only you give him a bigger hammer.

In fact the UK Food Standards Authority admitted that it had made a mistake in banning edible insects at the end of the Brexit transition period and transitional measures were made law allowing the legal sale in the UK of insects for human consumption until December 2023 after which companies selling insect products for human consumption can apply to the Food Standards Agency for a novel food authorisation. So crickets are already ‘part of the food chain’ in the UK.

But of course that doesn’t stop Brextremists in search of a non-existent threat that Brexit can supposedly save us from. They don’t have any real Brexit benefits to boast of so they have to make stuff up. This is how risibly pathetic they have become.

Ever since leaving the EU Britain has been mired in economic problems and political chaos. Public services are falling apart, industrial action spreads across many different sectors. ‘Take back control’ has translated into the real world as delivering chaos. Energy prices soaring puts the basic human dignity of being able to heat their home out of financial reach for many households, this in a country with an abundance of energy resources. Yet the priority for the government is to protect the bloated profits of the energy companies.

Last year we reached the current nadir when we had three Prime Ministers and four Chancellors of the Exchequer. But we cannot be sure that the Conservatives do not have further depths to plumb. Sunak’s administration lurches from one scandal to the next, in permanent crisis management mode. Despite the Conservatives having a current working majority of 67, Sunak’s grip on his fractured party and its warring factions is weak and tenuous. There is a very real possibility that he will lose control.

Scotland looks askance upon all of this. Scotland never voted for Brexit and opposition to it has only grown as the appalling magnitude of its catastrophic impact became apparent. Scotland has had no say at all on the form that Brexit has taken, every concern or suggestion from the Scottish Government was brushed aside without consideration. An opinion poll in August 2022 found that 72% of respondents in Scotland thought that Brexit was a mistake and 69% would vote to rejoin the EU if given a chance to do so, a chance that both Labour and the Conservatives are determined that they should not have. Indeed both the major British parties are partners in a conspiracy of silence not to mention the B word even as the negative effects of Brexit become harder and harder to ignore.

Heaping insult upon injury the Conservatives are hell bent on using the Brexit that Scotland did not vote for in order to undermine the devolution settlement that Scotland did vote for. The vision of a post Brexit centralised British nation state that the Conservatives are pursuing is incompatible with the devolution settlement and indeed with the concept of the UK as a voluntary union of different nations. naturally the Conservatives have no interest in seeking a mandate from the Scottish people to by pass the Scottish Parliament or to rewrite the foundations of this so-called union. They know that such a mandate would not be forthcoming so they just dispense with Scottish democracy, another casualty of Brexit along with economic and political stability and truth and accountability in British politics. It’s a sad and sorry story after three years. Brexit has delivered all the most dire predictions by Better Together of what would happen to Scotland if it voted for independence in 2014 only without a Scottish Parliament with the power to chart Scotland’s own path. Vote No for the best of both worlds they said, but they have given us the worst.

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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.