The BBC: Not even pretending to be unbiased about independence

There’s no point in beating about the bush, for a long time it’s been obvious that BBC Scotland’s commitment to neutrality and even handedness has an unwritten rider saying *except when it comes to Scottish independence, but now the Corporation is just taking the piss. It is well known that young Scots are more inclined to support independence than those of older generations, this is a pattern which has been deeply entrenched in just about every opinion poll since the independence referendum of 2014. Amongst the youngest age cohort, those under the age of 24, majority support for independence is overwhelming, people in Scotland under the age of 24 support independence by a factor of two to one.

At least young Scots support independence by a factor of two to one, except when they are young Scots who feature in a BBC online article entitled: “Scottish independence: Is it still a priority for young Scots?” The online article was a trailer for a report due to be broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight Programme on Tuesday evening.

It does not auger well for the broadcast report. It appears that BBC young Scots not only oppose independence by a factor of two to one, but the two opponents of independence featured alongside a single supporter of the SNP are also former candidates for the Labour and Conservative parties, a fact which the BBC did not see fit to disclose. The piece glosses over the consistent and long established pattern in different opinion polls from different polling companies which find that by a very large majority young Scots favour independence and indeed the only age cohort in which there is a majority opposed to Scottish independence is the very oldest.

Nowhere in the article was there any acknowledgement of that reality, far less any attempt to examine why it is that younger people in Scotland apparently reject a British political identity and see Scotland’s future as an independent state. Neither was there any awareness that Britishness as a political construct is far weaker in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK and what role this weakening sense of Britishness might have to play in leading a large majority of young Scots to see Scotland’s future as an independent nation.

It could be argued that it is this weaker appeal of Britishness in Scotland which leads Scots as a whole, and young Scots in particular, to be less enthusiastic about big royal events than people elsewhere in the UK, or that it might be responsible for Scottish opposition to Brexit. It is plausible to argue that for Scots in general and young Scots in particular, a European identity and a European future are far more attractive and appealing than a British identity or a British future. This has been thrown into even sharper relief since the Brexit vote, now British and European futures are seen as standing in opposition to one another. The Better Together claim during the 2014 referendum campaign that by voting No Scotland could have the best of both worlds has been unmasked as a cruel joke.

All the piece has to say about the long established demographic pattern of large pro-independence majorities amongst younger age cohorts is :”Polls suggest Scots aged under 24 are more likely to back independence than the average person.” Then it quickly goes on to speak with one SNP supporter, one Labour supporter, and a Tory. The BBC certainly does not want to suggest that Scots under 24 are more likely to back independence ” than the average person,” an odd phrasing which suggests that if you do back independence you are somehow no longer an average or ordinary person.

This is not reporting in an unbiased way on an important story, it is not an honest and transparent attempt to inform the public in the rest of the UK about a very real and well established demographic fact in Scotland, a fact which is a demographic time bomb for the United Kingdom in its current form. What the BBC published is a clear and deliberate attempt to shape an anti-independence narrative.

Instead of a serious attempt to look at what the factors might be that are leading a large majority of young Scots to support independence, we got the usual BBC idea of ‘balance’ which is to stick on one person from the SNP and one each from the other large parties. In this case that turned the two to one support for independence amongst people under 24 on its head and gave us young people who two to one oppose independence. As noted above the BBC did not think it important to disclose that the Labour and Tory supporters had both been candidates for those parties. You might think that their own personal political ambitions would have a bearing on their views on Scottish independence, but not if you’re the BBC. In the BBC universe these two party candidates are more representative of the ‘average person.’ So that’s you telt, independence supporting youth.

However there was another and more insidious form of BBC bias on display here, the piece framed the independence debate through a party political lens. This is a framing which favours the anti-independence case as it portrays independence as being entirely about the SNP and so encourages people who may be sympathetic to the idea of independence but who are not necessarily SNP supporters to associate the concept of Scottish independence with a political party that they do not favour. This framing also avoids looking at more deep seated structural issues within the British state as being factors which have a role to play in creating a desire for independence. It means that the Westminster parties and the Westminster system do not need to look at themselves and their own failings, the wish for Scottish independence can then be conveniently blamed on ‘nationalism’ and the ‘grievance mongering’ of the SNP.

The BBC isn’t even pretending to cover Scottish independence in an even handed way any more. As SNP president Mike Russell said: “The BBC is now not even trying to hide its institutional bias against independence. This is not just lazy and shoddy programme making, it is an attempt to skew the debate. Those responsible shouldn’t be working in broadcasting.”

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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

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The clean fuel of independence

The reasons why Scottish independence is so badly needed for the success, sanity, and security of this country keep piling up. Just in the past few days more reasons have been added to the ever growing pile, not that most people in Scotland would know that because we are saddled with a parochial and provincial British nationalist media which is determined to ensure that Scotland remains parochial and provincial.

Scotland is an energy powerhouse, this country has the potential to produce vast amounts of energy, both from traditional fossil fuels and from clean renewable sources, either one of these can provide many times more energy than Scotland requires for its own domestic and industrial consumption, creating a huge surplus for export which could be sold to other countries and provide enormous national income which could be used to guarantee lower energy bills for Scottish consumers. That’s the theory, what happens in practice is very different. Energy policy is reserved to the Westminster government which imposes a system that gives Scotland the worst possible outcome. As a part of the UK Scotland is in the ridiculous position of being a country which produces more energy than its citizens could possibly need from resources that are the common property of all , yet its people suffer from record levels of fuel poverty and high fuel bills that many households struggle to pay.

There are conflicting claims about whether Scottish households pay more for energy than is paid elsewhere in the UK. In June, last year, during the worst of the cost of living crisis, the average fuel bill in Scotland was £1651 per year compared to £1554 for people in England and £1525 in Wales. British nationalist froth group These Islands denies that Scots pay more for energy than households in England, which we can file under – well they would say that wouldn’t they. But the point is not the relative amount paid by households in Scotland compared with those in England, the point is that the UK burdens Scotland with a broken energy system which delivers huge profits for the energy companies while thousands of Scottish households struggle with fuel poverty – defined as more than 10% of household income being spent on energy after housing costs (rent or mortgage costs) are deducted.

Figures provided by fuel poverty campaigners Energy Action Scotland show that 40% of people living in the Western Isles live in fuel poverty compared to just 13% in East Renfrewshire. The Scottish average was 24% of all households. Almost a quarter of households in Scotland live in fuel poverty thanks to UK Government mismanagement of energy policy. In a country as blessed with such abundant energy resources as Scotland, zero percent of households should live in fuel poverty.

Yet in 2021 the UK National Grid spent £806 million pounds in fees, so called ‘curtailment costs’ paid to wind farms, 82% of which was paid to wind farm operators in Scotland because the National Grid has not been upgraded sufficiently to handle the renewable power that Scotland can generate. The costs of the shutdowns added over £500 million to energy bills across the UK. In addition there is the enormous loss of energy that could have been harnessed productively.

Vast amounts of energy which Scotland could produce are not being produced because the British Government has not invested enough in the National Grid in order to cope with the electricity that Scotland can produce from clean renewable sources. The shortfall must be made up with the polluting fossil fuel gas, much of which the UK imports from abroad. Energy which is produced in Scotland and fed into the UK National Grid incurs transmission fees as Scotland is far from the main centres of energy consumption in Southern England. The upshot is a financial penalty on Scottish energy producers.

Yet it doesn’t have to be like this, there are developing and existing technologies which could allow excess Scottish electricity production to be stored until it is needed, such as increased hydro capacity, green hydrogen production, or batteries or fuel cells.

A quick chemistry lesson is in order here. Hydrogen is a highly combustible gas. The airships of the interwar period were filled with hydrogen because a given volume of unpressurised hydrogen is considerably lighter than the equivalent volume of unpressurised air. However hydrogen is also highly reactive. A spark caused the hydrogen filled floatation bags in the Zeppelin the Hindenburg to explode with such catastrophic effect when it voyaged to New York in 1937. A similar disaster had befallen the British airship the R101 in 1930. Modern airships use helium, which is also lighter than air but unlike hydrogen is inert.

Burning methane, the combustible gas which is the primary component of the natural gas we use for cooking and heating, creates large amounts of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, the major contributor to the greenhouse gases which are responsible for anthropogenic climate change. However burning hydrogen does not create carbon dioxide, the product of burning hydrogen is water vapour. A water molecule is composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, so the world contains a supply of hydrogen which is limitless in practical terms in the form of the immense quantity of water in the world’s oceans.

Burning hydrogen causes the hydrogen atoms to react with oxygen and we end up with water again. It is also possible to produce hydrogen by separating hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules using electrolysis. However liberating the hydrogen from water molecules requires a huge amount of energy, and that’s where the excess energy from Scotland’s windfarms comes in. This clean energy could be used to produce hydrogen from water, the hydrogen could then be stored until it was required. The entire process is carbon neutral.

The exciting potential of this clean hydrogen is that it could theoretically be used in existing gas distribution networks to replace the methane gas we use for cooking and heating. Of course investment would be required to upgrade existing networks and appliances for hydrogen, as well as major investment in facilities to produce and store the hydrogen. This investment has not been forthcoming from a British Government which maintains an energy policy whose aim is to protect the profits of the fossil fuel giants.

British energy policy penalises Scottish energy producers and deprives the Scottish energy sector of vital investment which could permit Scotland to produce abundant amounts of green energy which would remain on tap even when the wind wasn’t blowing or the sun wasn’t shining. But that won’t happen until Scotland is in charge of its own energy policy, which can only occur with independence. Until then Scotland will continue to pay through the nose for energy.

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

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

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

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A tale of two opinion polls

Wednesday was a day of two polls, one of them was loudly touted by the anti-independence Herald and Scotsman newspapers, which these days are becoming almost unreadable in their strident and ceaseless attacks on the SNP even as they ignore far worse stories about the Conservative party. That poll was of course the YouGov poll which suggested that Labour could make very serious inroads into the SNP in the Central Belt at the next UK General Election. Both papers chose to make this poll headline news and retained the story as their lead throughout the day.

There’s no getting around the fact that the poll makes uncomfortable reading for the SNP leadership, it forecasts that the party would suffer losses even worse than those it endured during the 2017 General Election when the SNP lost 24 of its seats, many of which went to a resurgent Conservative party. During that election some very senior SNP figures lost their Westminster seats, including former First Minister Alex Salmond and the party’s then Westminster group leader Angus Robertson. The SNP remained the largest party in Scotland in terms of votes cast and seats won, but it was a hollow victory which was completely overshadowed by the losses which the party had incurred.

Several polls from a number of polling companies have recently shown that support for the SNP has declined. This is hardly surprising given the unceasing and furious wall to wall coverage that the Scottish media has given to the police investigation into SNP finances. Now I am most certainly not saying that this is not a story which the Scottish media should cover, of course it needs to tackle it, but there is a striking discrepancy between the relentless barrage of coverage given to the SNP finances story and the way in which the Scottish media has quickly glossed over the multiple scandals affecting the Conservative party even though unlike the SNP story these often involve taxpayers’ money in sums which are many multiples of the amount which is involved in the SNP finances story. To date there have been no suggestions that the SNP money being investigated by the police has been diverted into personal pockets, this is not the case with some of the many scandals assailing the Conservatives, which often do include allegations that taxpayers’ money has been diverted into private accounts, in one case allegedly being used to purchase a luxury yacht.

It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that blatant double standards are at play. However those who are determined to stop Scottish independence at all costs have managed to inflict some damage. If the SNP suffers significant losses at the next UK General Election the media narrative will be that Scotland does not want independence. That will be the established story even if the SNP remains the largest party in terms of votes cast and seats won and if the other pro-independence parties do manage to boost their vote share into double figures.

The fact that the second poll was completely ignored by the Herald and the Scotsman, at least I couldn’t find it anywhere on their websites, merely demonstrates that once respected publications are no longer serious newspapers, but have descended into being uncritical cheerleaders for British nationalism. This was of course the poll from Ipsos which was also published on Wednesday and which showed that support for independence is at 53%, and which although it has registered a drop in support for the SNP, still places the party well ahead of Labour in voting intention in Scotland. This poll was only given significant publicity by The pro-independence the National, which had also published news of the YouGov poll.

The Herald has joined the unreadable Scotsman in no longer seeming to care what sort of British state Scotland remains a part of, no matter how chaotic, corrupt or authoritarian the ruling party at Westminster may become, all that matters is that independence is staved off. This is what we are up against as independence supporters and campaigners, there is no level playing field in a Scottish media which will magnify anything which is damaging to the SNP and to support for independence and will ignore or trivialise anything which might boost support for independence.

However there is more than a glimmer of hope. It is famously said that a week is a long time in politics and the next UK General Election is not expected to be held for around eighteen months. That gives the SNP time to develop effective lines which will stem the loss of votes to Labour in working class and Yes supporting areas of Central Scotland. A clue to what that might be comes from that Ipsos poll that was effectively ignored by the anti-independence press. Just as a number of recent polls from different polling companies have agreed in showing a drop in support for the SNP recently, the polls have also concurred in showing that support for independence has not suffered in popularity along with the SNP. It’s almost as though voters in Scotland understand that a vote for independence is not the same as a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity, for all that the anti-independence media in Scotland is desperate for them to believe that it is.

Under Keir Starmer the Labour party has moved quite far to the right, it is now a supporter of Brexit and of many of the authoritarian and anti-democratic policies of the Tories. Like the Tories Starmer’s Labour pays lip service to the notion of the United Kingdom as a voluntary union of nations even as Starmer refuses to set out what the democratic path to another independence referendum might be. Labour is as hostile to Scottish democracy as the Tories are, and promise to introduce right wing policies which pander to the English nationalism of the so called Red Wall seats which are key to a Labour victory at the next election. Starmer’s Labour is no friend of Scotland.

The SNP can stem the loss of support in yes supporting and anti Brexit Scottish constituencies by ensuring that independence is front and foremost in its campaign for the next UK General Election. That means a de facto referendum, with the threshold for victory being winning a majority of Scottish seats and the largest share of the votes cast, the normal threshold for winning a democratic election. Only the SNP promises the people of Scotland a say in their own future. All Labour offers is a brief respite from this hideous Government, a Scotland which continues to be marginalised and ignored, and Tory policies delivered more apologetically.

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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.

Charting a way forward

The SNP has announced a new date for the special independence convention which was originally scheduled to be held on March 19 but was postponed due to the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. The event was intended to give SNP members the opportunity to decide how to proceed with achieving a vote on independence in the face of the UK Supreme Court’s ruling that the Scottish Parliament does not have the legal authority to hold an independence referendum without the consent of Westminster and the refusal of the Labour, Conservative, and Lib Dem parties to accept that the current Scottish Parliament has a mandate for an independence referendum despite the fact that the issue of another independence referendum dominated the last Holyrood elections and the parties opposing another referendum lost by a significant margin.

It has now become evident that the Westminster parties will only accept the outcome of democratic events in Scotland if they produce a result which is acceptable to them. We also see this in the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in which Scotland’s resounding vote against leaving the EU has been discounted by both the Labour and Conservative parties. Had the outcome of the 2014 independence referendum produced a 55% victory for the Yes campaign, it seems clear with the hindsight of everything that has happened in British politics since then that the Westminster parties would have found some means, however dubious, of refusing to accept the result. They don’t call it perfidious Albion for nothing.

The SNP’s special independence conference will now be held in Dundee on 24 June at Caird Hall in Dundee. The previous conference had been due to debate whether the party should contest the next UK General Election as a de facto independence referendum, whether to use the next Holyrood election for this de facto referendum, or to adopt some other strategy for breaking the log jam of the refusal of the Conservative and Labour parties to recognise the Scottish Parliament’s democratic mandate for another independence referendum.

In an article in the National on Sunday, First Minister Humza Yousaf said that he would make an announcement shortly on a summer of independence campaign activity to take a positive message to every corner of the country. During his campaign for the party leadership he promised to set up regional assemblies across Scotland “to bring together and harness the energy of our members to discuss how we cross the line and win independence.” Work on organising these has been underway and an announcement can be expected soon.

Of course the usual suspects are unhappy, claiming that the Dundee event is only being organised in order to give the First Minister an ‘excuse’ for not addressing the AUOB march and rally being held in Stirling the same day, or that it is a ‘betrayal’ because the event is being billed as being “solely focused” on how to hold a legally-binding referendum, which some are taking to mean ‘how to extract a Section 30’ order from a Westminster that keeps saying no. Naturally supporters of other parties are going to attack the SNP, they have their own party agendas to promote.

However it means no such thing. SNP deputy leader Keith Brown, who made the comment about the event being solely focused how to hold a legally binding referendum, went on to add: “We have won election after election and have a cast iron mandate for a fresh independence referendum – but the Westminster system is refusing to respect Scotland’s democratic wishes. As the only mass membership political party in Scotland we are calling on our members – the lifeblood of our party and movement – to help us secure that key vote that our country needs.” He made no mention of going cap in hand begging for a Section 30 order, indeed his comments make it clear that he does not expect any such order to be forthcoming.

The Scottish Government’s independence minister Jamie Hepburn defended the decision to hold a special convention just for SNP party members and answering a question about the involvement of the wider independence movement said: “Of course, yes, the independence cause doesn’t belong to the SNP. It belongs to the wider independence movement. The SNP is part of the wider independence movement, and of course in advance of a General Election it is entirely right that we consider what our particular platform will be.”

There is more than one way to skin the proverbial cat. As I pointed out above, I have no confidence at all in assurances from the Westminster parties that they will respect the outcome of any Scottish vote which does not give a result to their liking. Under what passes for a British constitution there can be no such thing as a legally binding referendum, and as such Keith Brown’s choice of phrasing was unfortunate. The 2014 referendum was not legally binding, the Conservative Government of the day merely made a political promise to respect the result. We have all seen what happens to Tory promises to respect Scotland. David Cameron’s government could not legally compel any future Westminster government to abide by his promise. This runs directly against the doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Westminster which is so fetishised by British nationalists. Indeed during an interview on Good Morning Scotland on Monday Keith Brown made clear that what the party was seeking was a lawful vote on independence.

In the UK there can only be lawful votes and campaigns in which all parties participate, and by doing so implicitly recognise their democratic legitimacy. What the SNP needs to bring about is a vote on Scottish independence in which the anti-independence parties participate and which the British Government cannot rule as being unlawful. It would certainly do so if Holyrood attempted to pass a bill to bring about another referendum. However the British state cannot rule that it is unlawful for the SNP and other pro independence parties to fight the next UK General Election or the next Holyrood election as de facto referendums, neither can it rule it unlawful for the SNP to make the transfer to Holyrood of the power to hold another referendum a condition of SNP MPs propping up a minority government at Westminster. Speaking on Sunday Jamie Hepburn insisted that using the next General election as a de facto referendum was still an option under consideration.

We are now making progress toward the SNP having a clear strategy for obtaining a lawful vote on Scottish independence, and despite the usual chorus of criticism that is to be welcomed.

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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.

National Conservatism, self-pity, idiocy and English fascism

The Brextremist hard right culture wing of the Tory party, which these days is most of it, has been holding a conference in London to air its delusional and self-pitying views. The so-called ‘National Conservatism’ conference is giving the Tories full throttle to blame all the ills of modern Britain on migrants, the EU, the poor, trade unions, and a supposedly all powerful globalist liberal elite which however was not powerful enough to stop Brexit from happening. The event was organised by the right wing Edmund Burke Foundation, one of those right wing think tanks with an opaque funding structure. The conference show cased the reality-phobic right wing authoritarian, xenophobic and minority bashing politics which are in store for the UK unless the Conservatives are utterly thrashed at the next General Election, an eventuality which is looking less and less likely as that election draws closer.

The National Conservatism conference represents the Trumpification of British politics, it is nakedly and shamelessly nationalist and British exceptionalist and triumphalist even as it denies that it is nationalist. The event platforms an authoritarian populist form of Conservatism which is all but indistinguishable from fascism. Delegates to the conference discussed the Tories’ favourite culture war tropes, a form of political masturbation which could not be further removed from the issues which will really determine the outcome of the next election. It’s the Daily Mail comments section in the flesh.

When I first heard about this conference, I imagined it was going to be held in some vast hall, like the QE2 Centre in Westminster. Instead, it’s being held somewhere as tiny as some of the minds on display. The modern Tory party is presenting us with Suella Braverman as one of its great thinkers. It’s the political equivalent of praising a toddler as a genius because it managed to get most of the poo in the potty.

It seems the Tories have given up on winning the next General Election outright and are contenting themselves with depriving Starmer of a majority. The Conservatives have learned nothing since they were given a message at the English local elections. What they appear to have taken from that defeat, which saw them lose more than one thousand councillors, is the same lesson that Liz Truss took from her disastrous and thankfully short chaotic term as Prime Minister. It’s the people who are wrong, the Tories need to double down on the extremism and go even further.

The populist extreme right of the Tory party has run Britain into the ground with Johnson and Truss, and a disaster of a Brexit which even Nigel Farage has had to concede has failed. So the Tories sticks Sunak into power in order to take the blame for their inevitable defeat at the next General Election, thus permitting the hard right-wing to take full control of the party again in the wake of the General Election. But even if defeated at the election their ideas will live on through Starmer’s Labour party.

This conference would be laughable were it not so dangerous, a direct threat to democracy railing against liberal values before our eyes. We had the ludicrous spectacle of Tory MP Marian Cates railing against the UK’s low birthrate, which make inward migration necessary. According to Cates the reason the birthrate is falling is ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘excessive education’ and not the late stage capitalism which she so strongly defends even as it makes a small number of people obscenely rich and condemns the majority to a cost of living crisis unaffordable housing, soaring childcare costs, and the collapse of public services. But no, it’s really all the fault of university academics pointing out the evils of British imperialism and Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. It would be a joke were this woman not a legislator with the power to shape public policy.

One speaker was right wing historian David Starkey, who insisted that left-wing activists are “jealous” of the Holocaust and want to replace it with slavery. I have no idea what that means although it’s obviously both asinine and offensive. Starkey went on to claim that groups such as Black Lives Matter were attempting to destroy “white culture” and “do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust. And this was coming from one of the supposedly more intellectually distinguished contributors.

Right wing author Douglas Murray averred that people were not ‘allowed’ to be proud of being British, in his own words He could “see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century”. The Holocaust, and a war of aggression that killed 70 million people are “mucking up.” In his book” The Strange Death of Europe”, Murray pandered to the tropes of the extreme right wing white nationalist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, arguing that Europe “is committing suicide” by allowing non-European immigration into its borders and losing its “faith in its beliefs.”

Another speaker at the conference was the academic Matthew Goodwin who asserted that during the past 50 years the people of Britain have been victims of a revolution imposed on them by the left. It’s clearly escaped Goodwin’s attention that over the past 50 years the UK has only had 13 years of Labour government, and that was the government of Tony Blair, whose wholesale adoption of previously Conservative policies was described by Margaret Thatcher as her greatest achievement, a cruel trick now being emulated by Keir Starmer.

Goodwin is one of those right wing poster boys who constantly rails against cancel culture even as he has no apparent shortage of high profile platforms from which to air his grievances. This is the guy who wrote a book entitled ‘Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics’ a book whose contention that ‘liberal elites’ are responsible for all that ails Britain has been enthusiastically taken up by the right of the modern Tory Party. Despite its title, nowhere in its 240 pages is there a single mention of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. The dominance of the right in the British media and the dark money which floods into right wing British nationalist and pro-Brexit politics are likewise given short shrift by Goodwin. For Goodwin, as for the right of the Tory party for whom he is the modern guru, England and Britain are synonymous terms, British nationalism is identical to English nationalism and its distinguishing feature is its refusal to admit that it’s nationalist at all. One reviewer of Goodwin’s book noted that Goodwin had become “part of the right-populist movement he once sought to explain.”

In the UK, as we have seen with Trump in the USA, the Law and Justice party in Poland and Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party in Hungary, there has been a creeping right wing populist authoritarianism, which prioritises ‘culture war’ issues and claims that an out of touch global liberal elite does not care about the working class even as it cracks down on the ability of trades unions to organise, introduces tax policies which favour the wealthy and has little to say about low wages, the casualisation of the workforce or the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, the real elite whom the right protect and defend.

It’s a right wing which increasingly trades in conspiracy theories and which rejects any attempt to hold it to account, dismissing elections which it loses as ‘rigged’ or introducing measures to suppress the participation in elections of demographic groups which oppose it.

This is the future of British politics. This is what English fascism looks like in the 21st century, deeply xenophobic, reactionary, and hostile to any distinctly Scottish political expression. Labour cannot protect Scotland from this as its response to English nationalist right wing populism is to co-opt its garb, its language and its policies. All Scotland can do is escape. If Scots want their country to be more than a neglected region of an authoritarian, right wing and intolerant Greater England, independence is the only option left.

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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.

Starmer’s transforming Labour into the Tories’ Mini-Me

In a speech to the Progressive Britain conference in central London last week Labour leader Keir Starmer insisted that he didn’t care if people think that his party’s priorities sound conservative. We’ve noticed that Keir, we’ve noticed. In an attack on the the Tory government of Sunak, he claimed it “can no longer claim to be conservative.” That’s a mantle that Starmer is determined to adopt. Under Starmer the Labour party has become a vehicle for the imposition of conservative policies.

Starmer is a Labour leader for whom Tony Blair’s neo-liberal New Labour is dangerously left wing. In the speech, Starmer said that in order to secure victory at the next General Election the Labour Party would have to “change our entire culture” and compared his efforts to reform the party to former prime minister Tony Blair’s symbolic rewriting of Clause Four, but “on steroids.” In this speech Starmer signalled that under him the Labour party will move even further to the right than it did under Blair and Brown, with the clear implication that he intends to shape Labour into a party which appeals to English nationalist Brexit voters in the midlands and north of England, the so-called red wall seats which fell to the Conservatives and were instrumental in delivering Boris Johnson his landslide Tory victory in the December 2019 General Election. The only reason that Starmer is able to pose as a social democrat is because the Conservatives are in the grip of people like the right wing authoritarian English nationalists of the European Research Group who are but a hairsbreadth away from outright fascism. However viewed objectively, Starmer’s Labour party occupies much the same political space as the Conservatives did under John Major. It was to get rid of those Tories that Scotland gave Labour a landslide in 1997, now Starmer wants us to let those so called one nation Tories back in, rebadged and rebranded as the Labour party.

Starmer knows that his route to power depends upon winning those seats back for Labour. Despite his cant about achieving a Labour recovery in Scotland, he knows that he needs to win in England in order to have any chance of winning the next General Election. He can win without Scotland, he can’t win without England. The electoral arithmetic is very simple.

How Scotland votes can only make a difference when the outcome in England is finely balanced, there are just not enough Scottish constituencies to affect the final result when England votes decisively one way or the other. Scotland has only 59 Westminster MPs, a number which will be even lower following the planned review of constituencies which will see Scotland with only 57 Westminster constituencies. These new boundaries may be in place prior to the next General Election, which is not scheduled until late in 2024. England on the other hand will have ten more MPs than it currently does, with 543 MPs. Since Scotland does not return many Conservative MPs, and there is no sign that the Conservatives are benefitting electorally in Scotland from the current difficulties of the SNP, how Scotland votes will have very little impact upon the total amount of Conservative MPs at Westminster.

So despite what Starmer and the Labour party might tell voters in Scotland, Scotland and Scottish interests are not a priority for Starmer and his party. His assertion that voters in Scotland need to vote Labour in order to ‘get the Tories out’ is factually incorrect. Indeed, voting Labour simply means voting for an alternative vehicle for the delivery of conservative policies. Starmer has given us a Labour party shorn of any decency and idealism which it once may have had and which promises nothing more than to apply Tory policy, only more competently and with a sad face. Starmer is the true heir to Blair, a man who fakes sincerity as a means to tell a more convincing lie.

What we have now is a Labour party which is committed to Brexit, which promises to be every bit as vile as the Tories to migrants and asylum seekers, a party which refuses to repeal the authoritarian legislation introduced under Boris Johnson and his successors, and which, crucially as far as Scotland is concerned, refuses to recognise the right of the people of Scotland to choose another independence referendum by voting for a Scottish Parliament which is committed to delivering one. Labour pays lip service to the notion that the United Kingdom is a voluntary union of nations, but effectively denies that it’s an idea which has any meaningful political content. Starmer has consistently refused to spell out what the democratic route to another Scottish independence referendum might be. He’s not going to say what it is, even as he insists that it exists, because he is determined to prevent another independence referendum from ever taking place. He will only consent to one when his path to Downing Street depends upon it, but that’s the last thing that he’d ever admit to.

Nothing Starmer says can be taken at face value. He will say whatever it takes in order to win over those crucial votes in pro-Brexit English constituencies, and his stated refusal to do any deal with the SNP must be viewed in that light.

As I pointed out on this blog a few days ago, Starmer will be haunted by the memory of the Conservative attack adverts which did such damage to Ed Miliband in the 2015 when the Tories produced adverts showing Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket. The Tories had not expected to win an absolute majority in that election, but in the event they did, with the catastrophic consequence for the rest of us of them having the votes in the Commons to force through the EU referendum which was held the following year. Starmer will be determined to avoid giving the Tories the opportunity to mount a similar attack on him which might deprive him of the victory he craves.

Colin Talbot, emeritus professor of government at Manchester University, said he would “never say never” when it came to whether Starmer would go back on his promise to refuse to deal with the SNP. Certainly Starmer will continue to vehemently refuse to do any sort of deal with the SNP prior to the election, but he will insist that there will be no deal with the SNP right up until the moment that he needs one. The price of that deal will be to transfer to the Scottish Parliament the power to hold a lawful independence referendum. Only then will Scotland have a chance to escape the danse macabre of the Tories and Labour in lockstep

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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 SNP are still a force to be reckoned with

Reports of the demise of the SNP are most definitely premature. An opinion poll by YouGov published this week shows that the SNP still enjoys a commanding lead over Labour in voting intentions for the next Westminster General Election. The poll showed that the Tories are losing support to Labour with Conservative vote share plummeting to 17%, the SNP is on 40%, down 5%, with Labour on 28%.

Meanwhile a poll by Survation out this week shows that support for independence seems to be impervious to the vicissitudes of the party (mis)fortunes of the SNP.

There’s no denying that support for the SNP has slipped back, but it has not catastrophically collapsed in the way that Conservative support imploded during Liz Truss’s disastrous and thankfully brief period of time in Number Ten. All these polls have been carried out against the backdrop of an incessant media barrage of negativity about the SNP and the huge publicity given to the police investigation into the party’s finances, so it is only to be expected that the polling figures for the party are going to take a hit. However the outlook is not entirely dismal for the leading pro-independence party. There are also encouraging signs that things are moving in the right direction for the SNP, with a surge in party membership in recent weeks as people have joined the party with some reporting that they have done so out of disgust with the disproportionate attention and criticism given to the issue of SNP finances whereas Conservative party scandals involving vastly larger sums of public money have passed almost without remark.

As the media focus moves on from the SNP’s finances despite the best efforts of the party’s many enemies and the anti-independence media to keep stirring the pot, the SNP has a chance to regain the support that it has lost.

There will most likely not not be a UK General Election until the end of next year by which time the current travails of the SNP will be a distant memory to most voters. It’s famously said that a week is a long time in politics, a year and a half is an aeon. There is no room for complacency, but that is plenty of time for the SNP to frame an attractive pitch to Scottish voters.

As things currently stand in the state of play of the polls, Labour is not on course to win an absolute majority in Westminster at the next General Election although it does look set to become the largest party. Most observers believe that the recent local elections in England show that Labour will fall short of a majority in the next Westminster Parliament. This is particularly likely given that the polls tend to tighten in the lead up to an election and the Tories will undoubtedly have a few dirty tricks up their sleeve which they will deploy in an effort to stave off or minimise defeat.

Labour leader Keir Starmer has categorically ruled out any deal with the SNP if Labour ends up as the largest party but falls short of a majority following the next Westminster elections. A precondition for the SNP propping up a minority Labour government would be for Starmer to agree to another independence referendum. The SNP have also signalled that they would expect Labour to end its opposition to the UK rejoining the European Single Market and to agree to the restoration of freedom of movement.

However Starmer’s electoral strategy, for all that he pays lip service to a Labour recovery in Scotland, rests upon pandering to pro-Brexit English nationalism in the leave voting seats in the north and Midlands of England which Labour lost to the Conservatives in 2019. Starmer will be keen not to allow the Tories to repeat their effective campaign of 2015 which portrayed then Labour leader Ed Miliband as being in the pocket of Alex Salmond, playing into the widespread English stereotype that the English are victims of anti-English racist Scottish nationalists. Neither will he want to allow the Tories the opportunity to claim that Brexit is threatened by the Scots. So it is scarcely surprising that Starmer is keen to quash any suggestions that he’d be open to doing a deal with the SNP.

The SNP’s Westminster leader Stephen Flynn has predicted that Starmer would change his mind once the General Election is over and the predictable Tory attack lines are rendered politically toothless. He pointed out that Starmer has a long track record of changing his mind, telling BBC Radio’s Good Morning Scotland programme: ” This is the same Keir Starmer who quite openly dropped his opposition to Brexit, he dropped his opposition to nationalisation, he dropped his opposition to scrapping tuition fees, and he dropped his opposition at the weekend to repealing anti-protest legislation.”

More pertinently, Starmer is unlikely to maintain his opposition to any deal with the SNP if that was all that stood between him and the keys to Number Ten and he no longer needed to worry about Tory claims about Labour being in the pocket of the SNP having an impact upon the number of Labour MPs at Westminster.

The reality for Starmer is that the SNP will still most likely remain the third largest party at Westminster. The Lib Dems may currently be buoyant about their prospects but realistically they will have to more than treble the number of MPs they have if they are to be confident about overtaking the SNP as the third largest party in the Commons. That’s a very big hurdle to overcome. If Labour is returned as the largest party but falls short of a majority it’s going to be very difficult for them to form a government while ignoring the SNP. Starmer will do a deal with any party which holds the balance of power, and that party is most likely to be the SNP.

In the meantime the SNP can maximise its support in Scotland by stressing its opposition to Brexit, contrasting this with Labour’s attachment to the extremist Brexit of the Conservatives and highlighting that it would force a minority Labour government to restore freedom of movement and to rejoin the single market.  That will allow the party to pick up votes from remain voters who are not necessarily sold on the idea of Scottish independence. It must also stress that it is the only party which has an unequivocal commitment to Scotland’s right to determine its own future as opposed to a Labour party which is as eager to ignore Scottish democracy as the Conservatives are, while it highlights that Scotland can only introduce effective measures to tackle the cost of living crisis if Holyrood has the full range of powers of an independent nation. It must also stress that should the SNP go backwards in the General Election and lose a significant number of seats, Labour will backtrack on its already weak proposals for extra powers for the Scottish Parliament and its uninspiring plans for reform of the House of Lords. Only the fear of Scottish independence makes the Westminster parties pay heed to Scotland, and the only metric by which they measure that is the electoral strength of the SNP.

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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 authoritarian abhorronation and SNP opportunities

The abhorronation has finally finished, barring the usual interminable post match analyses from a British media determined to keep Chas’s special day going on for as long as possible, as it congratulates itself with the assertion that no other country could have put on an event like Saturday’s. That same media, in all its hours of broadcasts, still can’t find space for anyone to point out that the real reason no other country could have put on an event like the coronation is that they all have far too much self-respect for an exercise in feudal toadying in fancy dress. Charles, didn’t actually need a coronation ceremony, he became king automatically the moment his mother died. He refused a pared back event which would have displayed some sensitivity to the fact that hundreds of thousands of his subjects depend on food banks and struggle to heat homes that they don’t know how they’re going to pay for.

But having insisted on full fat flummery and the entire panoply of ludicrous pseudo-mediaeval ritual at an estimated cost to the public purse of over £100 million, and put thousands of people to quite considerable and unnecessary bother, all so he could be the centre of attention, the Kingzilla spent the entire day with a face that looked as though he was suffering from a severe case of impacted haemorrhoids and he was enduring an event that was an outrageous imposition on him. That is what entitlement and privilege look like. He puts considerable demands upon everyone else, but it’s far too much of a bother for him to even crack a smile. This is not a gracious king.

To compound the offence against democratic decency, the Met police arrested anti-monarchy protestors assembling on Trafalgar Square and confiscated their Not My King placards even before their protest had begun. Graham Smith, the chief executive of the anti-monarchy campaigning group Republic, who was among those arrested, tweeted: “Make no mistake. There is no longer a right to peaceful protest in the UK. I have been told many times the monarch is there to defend our freedoms. Now our freedoms are under attack in his name.”

Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, joined in the criticism and said: “Being in possession of a megaphone or carrying placards should never be grounds for a police arrest and Human Rights Watch said reports of arrests of peaceful protesters were incredibly alarming and something you would expect to see in Moscow, not London.”

The police were making use of new powers to clamp down on protests and demonstrations which were rushed in by the Conservative Government. The Tory response to protest is not to address the grievances that led to the protests, but to attack all our civil liberties and freedoms. On Sunday senior Labour MP David Lammy told a caller to his LBC radio show that Labour will not repeal the Conservatives’ Public Order Act if it forms the government after the next election. The new law includes a 12-month prison sentence for protesters in England and Wales who block roads, a six-month jail term or unlimited fine for anyone who locks on to others, a building, or an object, and gives police powers to stop and search protesters even without suspicion that they intend to cause disruption.

Naturally the Conservatives defended the arrests, with Tory deputy chairman Lee Anderson demanding that if anyone wanted to protest against the monarch they should leave the UK. We’re trying Lee, we’re trying.

The Tories must have been particularly grateful for the coronation, not just because it gives them an opportunity for the flag-shagging that they love so much, but more importantly because it provided a welcome distraction from their catastrophic performance in the English local elections on Thursday. Prior to the elections, the Tories had engaged in an expectation management exercise and were briefing the press that they could lose as many as one thousand council seats. They did this so that if they ended up losing several hundred councillors, a poor performance on any reckoning, Conservative politicians could spin the results as being far less bad than they had expected and claim that they were managing to turn around their recent spate of bad polling results.

However in the event the Conservatives ended up losing over a thousand council seats, 1058 according to the BBC, and lost control of 45 councils. There’s karma for you. The Conservatives’ 26% projected national vote share was one of its worst performances since the 1995 local elections when it won just 25% of the English vote. These elections were followed two years later by Blair’s landslide. However in that election Labour won 47% of the vote, as compared to just 35% on Thursday. The main difference is the split now of the anti-Tory vote between Labour, the Lib Dems, and the Greens.

Labour gained 536 council seats, making them the largest party in English local government, a position which Labour has not enjoyed for over a decade. Worryingly for the Tories the Lib Dems also made substantial gains, winning an additional 405 council seats. The Greens also had a good night, winning an additional 241 council seats, and taking control of a council for the first time, winning Mid Suffolk council from the Conservatives, taking 24 of the 34 council seats, and also becoming the largest party in the erstwhile Tory stronghold of East Hertfordshire. The Greens took 19 seats with the Tories on just 16 in a local authority where the Conservatives had won all 50 council seats in 2015. The Conservatives now face the nightmare situation of being squeezed between Labour in the midlands and north of England and the Greens and the Lib Dems in the south, victims of a tacit anti-Conservative alliance. Tactical voting may be a factor in the next General Election on a scale not seen for decades.

However in terms of vote share Labour is only 9% ahead of the Conservatives, and this in an election where voters know that they can give the governing party a kicking without it leading to a change in government. Although it’s unquestionably a good result for Labour, the party is still some way from the figures it needs in order to be certain that it can form a majority government following the next General Election. This gives the SNP, still likely to be the third largest party with some leverage to use to secure another independence referendum from a Labour party which is as keen to deny Scottish democracy as the Tories are.

The outcome of this election means that Starmer is likely to double down on the pro-Brexit and right wing direction in which he has pushed his party as he seeks votes in Brexit supporting English constituencies where voters are disenchanted with the Conservatives. This provides the SNP with another potential advantage in Scotland, allowing it to make a pitch to voters who are opposed to Brexit and who feel that their more left wing sensibilities are being ignored by an increasingly right wing and English nationalist Labour party which won’t repeal the authoritarian laws of the Tories.

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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 English local elections and the Tories’ voter suppression tactics

On thursday there are council and mayoral elections in England, the first big electoral test for Rishi Sunak since he became leader of the Tory party following Liz Truss’s disastrous short stint in Downing Street. There are elections in 230 local authorities across England as well as elections for mayors in Bedford, Leicester, Mansfield and Middlesbrough. Over 8000 council seats are being contested. With the Conservatives trailing Labour by 18% in the polls, it is widely expected that the Conservatives will take a serious beating. The Lib Dems are fielding their largest number of candidates since 2007 and the party hopes that it is well placed to exploit the unpopularity of the government in the Tory heartlands in the south of England. This could result in the Tories being caught in a pincher between advances made by the Lib Dems in the south and south west of England and a resurgent Labour party in the English Midlands and the north.

Conservative expectation management is already out in force, with party managers bracing themselves for heavy losses and gearing up to spin anything short of complete annihilation as a victory for Rishi Sunak. Conservative sources have told the BBC that they expect to lose as many as a thousand seats, anything less than that will be presented as evidence that Labour can’t win the next General Election. However it’s likely that the Conservatives will see hundreds if not a thousand of their councillors losing their seats and could lose control of dozens of local authorities.

A bad showing for the Tories might reanimate Conservative back bench disquiet and reignite the Conservative rebellion which lost steam when Boris Johnson failed to motivate a significant Tory vote against Sunak’s Brexit deal in March. However back bench Conservatives, particularly those in the so-called Red Wall seats which the Conservatives took from Labour in the 2019 General Election, remain nervous and a poor showing from the Tories tomorrow will only aggravate matters within a deeply divided party which has barely papered over the cracks between its various warring factions. A serious drubbing for the Tories might well provoke more open rebellions on the Tory benches and renewed calls for a change of leadership although by this point you’d think that even the densest Tory MP, and there are plenty of those, should realise that it’s not a leadership problem that the Tories have, it’s a problem with reality.

The Conservatives have defined themselves by Brexit and must continue to defend it even though it has been a total disaster which has manifestly failed to deliver any of the many benefits that the Tories insisted it would bring. The party which has always proclaimed itself as the party in whose hands the economy is safe has presided over a year of chaos. The Tories have given us a dreadful cost of living crisis which has seen food and energy bills soar even as the energy companies report massive profits. Strikes spread across the public sector and public services are stretched beyond breaking point. The Tories remain mired in allegations of scandal and sleaze from which they attempt to distract by demonising migrants and trashing what’s left of the UK’s democratic safeguards.

There will be more pressure on Labour leader Keir Starmer as tomorrow will also be his first big electoral test since he took over from Jeremy Corbyn and started to take the Labour party to the right, aping Tory policies on Brexit and vying with them on being cruel to migrants. Within the past few days Starmer has gone even further to full throated Conservatism by signalling that he’s about to do a U turn on Labour’s previous commitment to abolish university tuition fees in England. Starmer needs to achieve a double digit lead over the Tories in the English local government vote if he is to have a convincing chance of victory at the next General Election, widely expected to be held sometime in the latter half of 2024.

However that task will be made harder because tomorrow also sees the first outing for the Conservatives’ voter suppression tactics. The Tories have been taking a leaf out of the book of the ideological allies the American Republicans, and have introduced measures aimed at suppressing voter participation amongst demographic groups which tend not to vote Conservative. As of tomorrow voters will have to produce valid photographic ID at the polling station before they will be permitted to cast a vote. Campaigners estimate that between one and two million people in the UK lack the necessary forms of ID, and they disproportionately come from groups which have a higher percentage of opposition supporters, young people, poorer people, and ethnic minorities.

The rule was introduced to combat the supposed ‘problem’ of voter impersonation, even though data from the Electoral Commission showed that there were only seven allegations of voter impersonation at polling stations the year before this new legislation was introduced, and no police action was taken. The Tory reason for bringing in this requirement was a blatant lie. The legislation introducing it also contained measures which undermine the independence of the Electoral Commission, bringing it under the ultimate control of cabinet ministers. It’s a particularly alarming development in a UK whose parliament is already unable to hold the Government to effective account.

If the Tories cannot win a vote fairly, they have no compunction about introducing undemocratic measures which will allow them to win unfairly. So much for Sunak’s promise to restore accountability and integrity to government. That was yet another of the Conservatives’ many lies, in reality the Conservatives continue to drag the UK ever closer to authoritarianism, and the Labour party eagerly tags behind in its wake.

In Scotland, elections to local authorities and the Scottish Parliament remain unaffected by this anti democratic Conservative voter suppression tactic, these elections are the responsibility of the Scottish Parliament which determines their franchise and what ID if any voters must produce at polling stations. However voters in Scotland at the next Westminster General Election and any Westminster by elections held in Scotland will have to produce photo ID at the polling station in order to cast a vote.

Labour might give the Tories a bloody nose on Thursday but it won’t do anything to change the repeated battering given to democracy and accountability in this failing British state which is currently obsessing over a parade of fancy costumes and looted jewellery as it celebrates a vain, privileged and entitled monarch who is as out of touch with the people as his parliament is.

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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.

Swearing at the Kingzilla’s special day

Are you all getting ready for the Kingzilla’s special day? People in Scotland are either not interested or actively repelled by the festival of compulsory British nationalim. At the weekend fans at a Celtic match were filmed singing, “You can stick yer coronation up yer arse,” Scotland’s official entry in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.

BBC Scotland is getting increasingly desperate in its attempts to find someone who gives a toss. In a report which hurriedly glossed over an opinion poll which found that almost three quarter of people in Scotland intend to be washing their hair that day, including those of us who are bald, the BBC interviewed some posh wummin who is apparently the Lord Lieutenant of Caithness, which is a real thing in Britain in 2023. As the official royal representative in the far north of Scotland, she was naturally keen to tell us that contrary to popular belief the royal spaniel is really deeply Scottish, as evidenced by the fact that he likes to put a kilt on when he’s not even attending a wedding.

Following this we were treated to the opinions of some character who heads up one of Charles’s rural development charities, a charity which probably wouldn’t be needed if the spaniel coughed up some of that personal fortune of £1.8 billion he reportedly has. Anyway, apparently the king loves nothing more than channelling his inner crofter, and talking to the tatties he’s planting with his sausage fingers while the wind whips round his nads under his kilt. Apparently you can’t get more Scottish than that. Who knew.

But the BBC kept the best for last, it then presented us with some ridiculous figure who was cos-playing a court herald from one of those movies about a teenage American girl who finds out that she’s really the heir to the throne of Buggerovia. Presumably he felt that the fancy costume gave him an air of authority as he assured us that Scotland is really deeply involved in the Coronation and not just in the next game of Dungeons and Dragons that he’s organising. Disney herald guy told us how he’d be accompanying what may or may not be the real Stone of Destiny to the ceremony, but he said nothing about the Pebble of Fortune, the Rock of Doom, or the Briquette of Next Week’s Lottery Numbers.

This charade is costing the public purse some £100 million while billionaire Charles continues to rake in millions annually in public funds ,benefits from lucrative tax breaks and the ability to influence legislation that might have an impact on his vast personal fortune. But according to the British media this petulant and bad tempered man with several palaces, and an enormous retinue of staff who once commandeered a Canadian RAF jet to fly a thousand miles and back to retrieve a shoe horn is famous for his frugality.

We then had respected historian Professor Tom Devine claiming that due to the current travails of the SNP, ‘independence is dead for a generation’ and Charles faces no immediate threat to the unity of his kingdom. However as the good professor of history is very fond of observing, “the future is not my period.” What all of this has to do with Scotland’s lack of interest in the coronation is not entirely clear. Tom Devine’s speculations about the timing of independence are no more valid than anyone else’s, and it’s highly relevant that support for independence does not seem to be affected by party issues within the SNP. It’s almost as though the people of Scotland understand that an independent Scotland will be a democracy in which they do not have to vote SNP. That’s a lesson that the media in Scotland don’t appear to have grasped. But trust the BBC to turn an opinion poll showing a growing disconnect in public attitudes between Scotland and the rest of the UK and how this royal event is actively repulsing many Scots into an attack on Scottish independence.

Anyway, this weekend we learned that the public is to be asked to give a ‘great cry’ in a mass swearing of allegiance to #NotMySpaniel. This is the very definition of a great cry for attention. North Korea called, it wants its personality cult back. It’s all a bit sad and desperate and definitely not a cult, oh no. There will certainly be mass swearing, just not the kind that Charles might enjoy listening to. I’m rehearsing my swearing already. I’ll also be raising something to welcome the new king, it will be a hand with the middle finger extended.

We’re in for an entire week of this sycophantic bollocks, regaled with pseudo mediaeval rituals which were invented by Victorians off their faces on opium and this entire high camp charade of dressing up in silly and outlandish costumes will be treated with po-faced reverence by the very same people who pontificate about the immense damage done to impressionable young minds by drag queens. Still, if nothing else the pantomime has the merit of diverting the attention of the Scottish media from its favourite diet of SNP bad stories.

That would be the same media which hounded the SNP about accountability and openness and then virtually ignored how the Conservatives tried to prevent journalists from questioning Rishi Sunak after his recent appearance at the Scottish Conservative conference. It’s only some parties which are expected to be open to press scrutiny it seems, just like it’s only some parties which are to be hounded until they reveal their membership figures. In an interview over the weekend Douglas Ross yet again refused to answer when asked how many members the Conservatives have in Scotland.

We all know the reason for the reticence. It’s because the answer to that question is an embarrassingly small number. If the Tories, or Labour for that matter, had anywhere close to the same number of members in Scotland as the SNP they’d be proclaiming it from the rooftops as proof that the SNP does not speak for Scotland. But the truth is that they are both minor parties in Scottish terms who enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence and favourable media attention only thanks to their strength in England. The likelihood is that the combined membership of the Labour and Conservative parties in Scotland is but a small fraction of SNP membership, a tiny number of people, even fewer than the number of those who are interested in the ludicrously costumed display of sycophancy and entitlement at Westminster Abbey next weekend.

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