Vulture politics

It’s obvious now who is going to win this Westminster general election. It’s going to be won by flag shagging British nationalists. We also know that it won’t be the Tory by flag shagging British nationalists, it will be the Labour by flag shagging British nationalists who have adopted a slew of Tory policies, followed by the Faragiste by flag shagging British nationalists on the frothing hard right. Despite the excited touting of some wildly outlying polls by GB News, Farage’s vanity company calling itself a party Reform Ltd. won’t actually win enough seats to form the official opposition to the Labour juggernaut, but it is likely to make that all important psychological breakthrough of getting Farage, and possibly a handful of his acolytes, elected to Westminster for the first time.

But the rise of the far right in this election is real and concerning. A poll by pollsters BMG published on Thursday evening put the Tories and Reform both on 19% with Labour on 42%, this would give Starmer a majority of over 300 on a minority of the vote. The Tories would be reduced to just 53 and Reform would win 5. However we are getting close to the crossover point where the first past the post system, which penalises the smaller parties would start to allow Farage to pile up seats.

Farage has his eyes set on a larger prize, the attention seeking narcissist is not trying to get into parliament in order to lead a tiny band of extreme right wing eccentrics on the opposition benches. With polls predicting the worst Conservative defeat in the modern democratic era, Farage intends to swoop down on the corpse of the Tory party and devour it. You’ve heard of vulture capitalism, this is vulture politics. Farage wants to transform the ruins of the Tory party into an authoritarian hard right xenophobic anti-immigrant party led by himself.

Farage is thinking about the election after this one when the public is heartily sick of Keir Starmer and his lies about change. He could then be in a position to get the first past the post system work to benefit him and in that election we could see a nakedly far right authoritarian English nationalist party led byFarage contend as the party of the next government. It’s quite possible that Farage’s position will improve even further by polling day in two weeks.

The Tory campaign has been a disaster, and continues to implode. It was already going poorly when Sunak decided it was a good idea to bugger off early from the D-Day commemorations in order to do an interview for ITV which will be remembered solely for the multimillionaire ex public schoolboy’s ham fisted attempt to make out that he understands the deprivations of the poor and low waged in this cost of living crisis his government bears much of the responsibility for because his parents wouldn’t get Sky TV when he was a kid.

The Tory campaign has been notable for the reluctance of cabinet ministers and big names to come out and defend the government, not least because most of those who have not stood down are eyeing up their chances of leading the party after Sunak’s inevitable resignation.

It’s maybe just as well however as those who can be persuaded to crawl out of the woodwork do more harm than good. Everyone talks utter bollocks on a come down from the excesses of the night before, but who the hell in Conservative campaign HQ thought it was a good idea to send Michael Gove out onto breakfast TV on Thursday to tell viewers that he thought it was still possible that the Tories could win on 4 July. Cocaine does make you wildly over confident, but even Gove knows, deep down in that shrivelled block of ice he calls his heart, that no one is buying his snake oil any more.

Chris Skidmore the Conservatives’ former net zero tsar and minister for universities under Theresa May, has defected to Labour, writing in the Guardian that he’ll be voting for Starmer’s party on 4 July because Sunak has been “siding with climate deniers” to politicise the energy transition.

It got worse for Sunak during the BBCQT leaders questions. Sunak got tetchy. He was dying on his arse as the audience shouted “shame, shame on you” when he talked about leaving the ECHR. An awful, out of touch man. Both him and his corrupt party will be decimated in two weeks time and he knows it. He looked lost and beaten.

Meanwhile at CCHQ: “You are in charge of the worst election campaign in history, Tony. Things can’t get any worse.” Tony Lee: “Hold my beer, will you.” Tony Lee is the Tory campaign director who on Thursday was forced to take a leave of absence after allegations were made that either he or his wife Laura Saunders, the Conservative candidate for Bristol North West allegedly placed a bet relating to the timing of the general election.

Saunders becomes the second Tory candidate to be accused using inside knowledge of the date of the election to make a quick buck. Tory MP Craig Williams, a senior aide to the Prime Minister, who is standing for re-election as the MP for Montgomeryshire and Glyndwr in Mid Wales, also reportedly bet £100 on the date of the election just before it was called.

Williams has admitted to placing the bet, calling it an error of judgement, saying: “I put a flutter on the General Election some weeks ago. This has resulted in some routine inquiries and I confirm I will fully co-operate with these. I don’t want it to be a distraction from the campaign. I should have thought through how it looks.”

It’s partygate all over again at CCHQ but with betting instead of booze. It’s likely that the reason Sunak hasn’t taken decisive action over Laura Saunders, Craig Williams and Tony Lee- both Saunders and Williams are still Tory candidates, is because a whole raft of staff at CCHQ also placed bets for a giggle, and now they are all keeching themselves. The Tories have finally found a hill that they can die on, but no one expected it to be William Hill.

Gove popped up again on the evening news to say the behaviour of Saunders, Lee, and the others was “unacceptable” adding, “people shouldn’t be using privileged inside information in this way.” Is that what he told Michael Mone?

The Tories are in freefall and Farage is waiting at the bottom of the electoral cliff to feast on their battered remains. Look beyond 4 July and see what is coming down the road. Scotland needs to get out now and we can start by keeping the dream of independence alive and voting SNP on 4 July. Sure they’re not perfect, but look at the alternative and weep. If we don’t, it will be Scotland’s political corpse that Farage and the other Anglo-British nationalists will be picking over.

I am on holiday next week, we are going to the south of England to visit friends and family and to Cornwall for the launch of the Cornish map of Cornwall. It’s the first time we have got away anywhere since I had the stroke.  I will be back a week on Monday – 1 July. I’m sure there will be plenty to keep you occupied in my absence.

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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

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to weegingerbook@yahoo.com  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for other means to pay.

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. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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Labour in Scotland, a fantasy manifesto from a fantasy party

If I were to tell you that a major political party had published a manifesto for this Westminster general election which was largely about a different election for a different parliament – an election which isn’t due for two years, and that in its promises which do relate to Westminster it does not actually exist as a distinct political party, you might think that it would be laughed off the stage of its launch event and a furious media would tear into it for misleading the public and wasting everyone’s time.

But of course that would only happen in a sensible grown up universe, not this infantilised corner of the multiverse in which the media in Scotland colludes in and enables the deceptions and misrepresentations of Keir Starmer’s Scottish branch office.

Let’s start with the basics. Not only is “Scottish Labour” legally nothing more than an identifying mark for UK Labour in Scotland, as far as a Westminster general election is concerned, there is no such thing as a “Scottish Labour” manifesto. Any Labour MPs returned to represent Scottish constituencies will sit in the Commons as part of the UK Labour party, they will not form a distinct bloc of “Scottish Labour” MPs, they will not vote in an organised manner as a separate Scottish political party, they will take the UK Labour whip and will do Keir Starmer’s bidding, not Anas Sarwar’s. The document which Anas Sarwar presented to a receptive Scottish press today is a fantasy, not a political reality, and it is insulting the intelligence of the voters to pretend that this really represents the platform upon which Labour candidates in Scotland are standing in this election.

Many of the policies in the document which Sarwar presented at Murrayfield on Tuesday relate to devolved powers which are the responsibility of the Scottish Government. No Westminster MP of any party political hue has any power or influence over them. Sarwar would have been as well telling us what the position of “Scottish Labour” is on the French general election due to be held in a couple of weeks. That has got bugger all to do with MPs who sit in the House of Commons, and neither do powers exercised by the Scottish Parliament.

For example the “Scottish Labour” Westminster manifesto devotes 11 of its 113 pages to talking about the NHS and a further 10 to talking about education. NHS Scotland is devolved, education in Scotland is devolved but this supposedly Westminster manifesto gives over more than 20% of its length to discussing two areas which MPs in the Commons have no say over. Other devolved matters which feature in this manifesto include transport, social care, housing, and sport. Over a quarter, if not more, of this Westminster manifesto is not in fact about Westminster at all. Who you vote for on 4 July will make not whit of difference to these issues.

At every Westminster general election since the establishment of the devolution settlement, the Labour party and the other anti independence parties have campaigned on devolved issues which are the proper remit of the Scottish Parliament and yet far from calling them out for misleading the electorate, the media in Scotland has for the most part encouraged them to do so.

However the most gob smackingly hypocritical section of this fantasy manifesto comes on page 29, entitled “Our approach to democratic renewal”. That is nauseating coming from a party which conspired with the Conservatives to deny the democratic will of the people of Scotland following the Holyrood elections of 2021, when Labour, together with the other anti independence parties which lost that election traduced Scottish democracy in order to ensure that they got what they wanted even though the people had rejected it at the ballot box. Labour’s approach to democratic renewal consists of respecting only those democratic events which deliver a result to the liking of the Labour party and ignoring or Londonsplaining away those which don’t. How about starting with that democratic right of the people of Scotland to decide on Scotland’s future? Tell us exactly how the people of Scotland can exercise that right without being vetoed by a British Prime Minister Anas, then, just then, we might give you as hearing when you start to pontificate about democratic renewal.

But it gets worse. Labour, a party which supports the hard Brexit imposed on Scotland by the Tories despite the fact Scotland voted heavily against it writes in this surreal document. “The UK’s departure from the EU will result in many more powers for the Scottish Parliament in the coming years.”

That is gaslighting of the very worst kind. Far from more powers being delivered to the Scottish Parliament as a result of Brexit so far the Brexit that Scotland roundly rejected has been used by Westminster as an excuse to undermine, sideline, and circumvent the devolution settlement. If Anas Sarwar is telling us now that the UK’s departure from the EU will result in many more powers for the Scottish Parliament in the coming years, then the onus is on him and his party to tell us what these powers are precisely, and to give us a firm timetable for their transfer to Holyrood. Failing that this promise is just so much more of the jam tomorrow bollocks that we have seen from the Labour party in the past.

Every time that a concrete proposal has been put to the Labour party for additional powers that ought to be transferred to Holyrood in order to tackle a Scotland specific problem, the Labour party has said no. That has been the case with the transfer to Holyrood of employment law – Labour said no. Despite this this “Scottish Labour manifesto claims “We support further devolution of powers to Holyrood including borrowing and employment rights” even though Angela Raynor, the UK shadow minister responsible for employment rights specifically ruled out their devolution asserting that her new deal for workers – which has since been gutted – rendered it unnecessary.

It was the same when it was suggested that Scotland needs control over aspects of immigration policy – Labour said no. So if it’s not employment law or immigration, just what are the additional powers that the Labour party tells us will be coming to the Scottish Parliament in the coming years? This is a fantasy manifesto from a fantasy party.

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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

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to weegingerbook@yahoo.com  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for other means to pay.

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. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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The rise of Farage spells the fall of the Union

Yesterday an opinion poll gave a result that was previously unthinkable. The vanity party of Nigel Farage, the hard right racist bloviator who has been a plook on the face of British politics since the 1990s, overtook the Tories as the second most favoured party in the Westminster general election. According to a YouGov poll, Labour is still far ahead on 37%, Reform is on 19%, and the Tories are trailing in third place on 18%.

This is a single poll, other polls continue to put the Conservatives ahead of Reform and even in this poll the Reform lead over the Tories is well within the margin of error, but it’s an alarming result nevertheless. The fact that Nigel Farage’s hard right wing English nationalist populist party is neck and neck with the governing Conservatives represents a seismic shift in the electoral landscape.

Nigel Farage is already crowing that his party is the real opposition to the Conservatives. Farage has made no secret of the fact that he wants to take over the Tories. On Friday Farage proclaimed himself the “real leader of the opposition” and demanded that he be included in next week’s leaders’ debate on the BBC with the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and the SNP, he also demanded a one on one debate with Keir Starmer on immigration.

Farage tells voters that Britain is broken, and so it is. Farage wants us to think that it’s immigrants who broke it, but the real reason it’s broken is because a bunch of absolute shysters whipped up fear and racism in a country battered by austerity, aggressively silenced opposition and lied their arses off to impose a Brexit that promised control but inevitably delivered chaos. Shyster number one was Farage himself, he turned the Tories into Ukip, but that wasn’t enough. The Tories allowed Farage to pull them further and further to the right over the years, and now they are being eaten alive by the far right authoritarian English nationalist populism which he embodies.

According to The Guardian Tory leadership hopefuls are already on the move for the leadership contest which will take place after 4 July. The paper reports that the early favourites for leader include former secretaries of state Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, Penny Mordaunt and Grant Shapps. However depending on the magnitude of the Tory defeat some of them might lose their seats in the general election. It is notable that all those named are on the right of the party.

A Tory wipeout would be a glorious sight to behold, the epitome of political karma, were it not for two things. Firstly there’s the matter that the immediate short term beneficiary of the well deserved political demise of the Conservatives is the Labour party of Keir Starmer, a centre-right corporatist project that fully supports the Tories’ hard Brexit, denies Scotland its right to self-determination, wraps itself in the British flag, and denies that it is nationalist.

Starmer will almost certainly become the next Prime Minister, and will probably do so with a record majority, but he will rapidly become deeply unpopular as he will no longer be able to escape the consequences of his many lies. Starmer will not bring about the change that he is being elected to deliver, all we will get is the same arrogant and high handed contempt for the opposition parties and for peaceful protest that characterised Tory rule. His government will usher in a new era of austerity and continued decline.

This brings us to the second issue, the devastated Tories, whether or not they are taken over or merge with Farage’s party, will move even further to the right, whipping up hatred of immigrants of minorities and stoking up culture wars as they seek to capitalise on the rapidly growing unpopularity of Starmer’s government and turning themselves into the English version of Trump’s odious MAGA Republicans. When there is another general election that hard right authoritarian English nationalist party will be poised to sweep into power. It could even be led by Nigel Farage. That party could win an absolute majority on a minority of the popular vote because the very last thing that Starmer is going to do is to make meaningful reforms to the House of Commons, its unfair electoral system, and its inability to hold the Prime Minister to account. Starmer could end up with a landslide majority even though he wins fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2019. The upshot of this insult to democracy is that we could even face the appalling prospect of Prime Minister Nigel Farage within a few years.

During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign Better Together contemptuously dismissed as scaremongering by Yes campaigners the warning that we could end up with Boris Johnson as prime minister and be taken out of the European Union. Now the prospect that Farage could end up as leader of the Tory party or a merged Tory-Reform party is an all too real and sobering possibility.

What we know all too well is that where the Tories go, Labour is sure to follow. During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign Better Together also claimed that Scotland would fall prey to political extremism if it became an independent country. Now we see that the real threat to Scotland from political extremism comes from a resentful English nationalism. You can be quite certain that independence supporting Scots will rank amongst the minorities that the Faragised Tory party will demonise and castigate, they already routinely defame independence supporters as anti-English racists. It is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility that they would seek to criminalise ‘separatism’.

The good news is that in a couple of years time the Scottish independence movement will be turbo-charged. The not so good news is that we are in for a rough few years in the intervening period and a British state that is moving further to the right will not make this easy for us. But history and demographic reality is on our side. The rise of Farage means the fall of the UK

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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

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to weegingerbook@yahoo.com  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for other means to pay.

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. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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It’s all over for the Tories

It’s all over bar the weeping and wailing and gnashing of Tory teeth – Rishi Sunak can afford to go to a private dentist and has never needed to worry about the struggles involved in getting registered with an NHS dentist – so as he ruminates upon the magnitude of the well deserved electoral humiliation which awaits his miserable party, he can gnash his teeth to his heart’s content without having to worry about losing a filing.

On Wednesday evening Sky News hosted a debate between Sunak and Starmer, yet again Scotland was ignored. Well, it was billed as a debate but the two leading proponents of centre-right Anglo-British nationalism did not actually debate one another, rather they were each individually questioned by host Beth Rigby before taking questions from the audience in the auditorium of the town hall in Grimsby, a town in which almost 70% of the population voted to leave the EU, so you knew that neither Tweedledee nor Tweedledum was going to be asked hard questions about the immense damage that Brexit is causing to the British economy.

Rishi Sunak had previously given us a cringeworthy moment during an interview broadcast earlier on ITV, this was the interview that he’d buggered off early from the D-Day commemorations to get to. As it turned out, the interview merely compounded his D-Day woes, as he began it by apologising for showing up a bit late, claiming that the D-Day events had overrun. The interview contained just one moment of note, the multimillionaire Sunak’s bid to blag himself some relatability by telling us that he had to do without Sky TV when he was a kid, opinions are divided over whether this was because – as Sunak would have us believe, his mum and dad were scrimping and saving in order to send him to an expensive private school – or because middle class social climbers in the late 1980s and early 1990s thought that having a big satellite dish bolted to the side of your house merely advertised how common you were.

This is what he left the D-Day ceremonies early for, the reason he’s so apologetic about that now is because he realises how little it was worth it.

Still, young Rishi would have been spared the humiliation he suffered during the Sky News Not Actually a Debate where in another doomed bid to appear relatable he told Beth Rigby that he ate far too many Haribo sweets. He couldn’t have been more embarrassing if he’d done the child voice that characterises that company’s adverts.

But then it was on to the more usual political embarrassment. Sunak at times appeared genuinely lost and crestfallen as he was grilled on his failure to fulfill the five pledges that he’d told us to judge him by. You’d almost feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such a lying entitled bastert. He was genuinely discomfited as he was booed by the studio audience after he blamed striking junior doctors for the lengthening waiting lists in the NHS. Sunak had pretty much mentally checked out by this point, wishing he was sipping a Mexican Coca Cola on a private executive jet en route to his luxury beachfront apartment in Malibu.

Starmer was his usual glib and evasive self, stammering a bit when asked by an audience member why he was such a political robot, there was a glitch in his programming. He gave a singularly unconvincing non answer when asked why he’d wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister in 2019. Beth Rigby asked him: “You said, ‘I do think Jeremy Corbyn would make a great prime minister’, did you mean that?” But all that weasel words Starmer would say in reply was : “I was certain that we would lose the 2019 election.” That would be in no small measure due to the fact that Starmer and his allies on the right of the Labour party were doing their utmost to undermine Corbyn from within.

It wasn’t that Starmer did well in the debate but that Sunak did appallingly. In that respect the programme encapsulated the general election campaign in miniature. The post debate poll found that 64% thought Starmer did best while 36% opted for Sunak, proving only that 36% of people are idiots. There’s no love or enthusiasm for Starmer’s Tory-lite Labour party, but the actual Tories are just so hideously appalling that everyone except that 36% are actively repelled by them. And even many of that 36% won’t vote for them.

The Tories know the game is up. Earlier this week the Minister for multiple personalities Grant Shapps warned of the danger of allowing Starmer to win a supermajority. That’s not the sort of thing that a man who is convinced his party is going to do well would say.

At First Minister’s Questions in Holyrood, Douglas Ross was a shadow of his normally obnoxious self. His heart just wasn’t in it, he couldn’t work up the energy or enthusiasm for his usual snide interjections. He knows he’s yesterday’s linesman, he’s lost the trust of his own party due to his nasty carpet bagging, stabbing a sick colleague in the back in order to get himself a seat in which he stands a better chance of getting himself back into the Commons, which is where he really wants to be, not in some devolved parliament whose very existence he most likely secretly despises. But he overreached himself and discovered to his chagrin that there’s a level of despicable behaviour that’s too much even for the Tories. Now it’s him who is facing allegations of misuse of parliamentary expenses . The anger generated over his disgusting treatment of sitting Tory MP David Duguid means that he faces an uphill battle to get back into Westminster. Hell mend him.

Meanwhile The Guardian reports that the Tory campaign on the ground is descending into disarray with a chronic lack of staff and volunteers and a rising sense of panic even in seats which were once considered so safe that the party had never had to campaign to keep them.

The original Tory strategy was the so called 80:20 approach, mounting a spirited defence in their 80 most marginal seats while trying to win the 20 most marginal seats held by other parties. But this strategy has disappeared as Tory MPs struggle for political survival. One party official told The Guardian: “The 80:20 plan no longer exists, if it ever did. We are diverting resources to safer and safer seats. People in seats which have been Conservative forever are basically shitting themselves. There is no strategy – it’s pretty much disarray.”

With the Tories in this much of a mess, Labour absolutely does not need Scottish seats to depose the Conservatives. Don’t fall for the lies, Starmer wants to trounce the SNP not to defeat the Tories but to shut Scotland firmly back into the Union flag themed Great British shortbread tin.

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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

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to weegingerbook@yahoo.com  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for other means to pay.

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. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

Mappa Kernow – a Cornish language map of Cornwall

It has been over ten years in the making, but at long last my Cornish language map of Cornwall is back from the printer. This map has been produced jointly by myself and the place name panel of the Cornish language umbrella body Akademi Kernewek and its predecessor, the place name and signage panel of Maga (Cornish for Growth), the Cornish Language Partnership /Keskowethyans an Taves Kernewek, an organisation which was wound up in 2015 and whose functions were taken over by Cornwall County Council’s Cornish language development office and Akademi Kernewek.

This map contains approximately 1200 place names in the Standard Written Form of Cornish, all of which have been researched and agreed by the place name panel of Akademi Kernewek. This map is the first ever detailed Cornish language map of Cornwall, a map of Cornwall as a country with its own distinct language and culture, meaning that for the first time ever, Cornish people – and the rest of us – can see Cornwall through the prism of Cornwall’s own language. The map is entirely in Cornish, the place names, the legend, and all the text. I drew and designed the map and all the graphics and artwork. The Celtic knotwork border which frames the map is in black and white, a nod to the white cross on a black background of the Cornish flag. The Cornish Celtic compass contains a chough, the national bird of Cornwall, grasping a globe, signifying that the Cornish language is a language for the modern world.

Because all the names and Cornish language text have been agreed by Akademi Kernewek and are in the Standard Written Form of Cornish, this map is as official as it is possible for a Cornish language map to be. I hope that the map will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn Cornish, to promote or celebrate Cornish, or just as a statement of pride in Cornwall and its venerable Celtic language.

The map consists of the main map of Cornwall at a scale of 1:200,000 or 1 cm to 2 km. It is printed on heavy 250g paper and is A1 in size – 59.4 x 84.1 cm and will make an attractive wall map. The map also contains insert maps showing extra information in greater detail, again all in the Standard Written Form of Cornish. There is a map of the Scilly Isles at a scale of 1:100,000 or 1 cm to 1 km, a map of Cornwall’s civil parishes, a map of the Cornish hundreds or traditional districts, and finally there are detailed maps of the Cornish capital of Truro, the largest town, Camborne, and a schematic map of railway lines in Cornwall in the style of the famous London Underground map, which I hope may help prompt train operators in Cornwall to agree to bilingual station name signs such as already exist in Scotland and Wales.

Back in spring 2014 I was a full time carer for my late husband Andy, who at the time was in the advanced stages of vascular dementia. I had already produced a Gaelic map of Scotland and was in search of another project which could give me something to take my mind off the stresses of caring full time for a loved one with advanced dementia who could not be left unattended. Celtic language maps were something I could do on the computer in the corner of the living room where Andy could see me – if he lost sight of me he panicked because he could not remember where I was.

I figured that a Cornish language map of Cornwall could be a manageable project which could be completed in a couple of months. Famous last words. I had found the list of place names in the Standard Written Form of Cornish which had been put online by Maga and realised they provided an ideal launch pad for a detailed Cornish language map. The map itself was drawn fairly quickly using copyright-free and open source resources, then the work of putting in Cornish language names could begin.

However it soon transpired that some 300 names had yet to be researched and the map stalled at that point. Then life intervened. Andy passed away in September 2014, I moved house, started writing for The National, met my current husband, and after some years of a long distance relationship back and forth across the Atlantic, we got married, he moved to Scotland, I suffered a massive stroke which left me disabled, and we moved house again.

But it always annoyed me that I had not completed the Cornish map. It was unfinished business. In Autumn 2023 I happened to look up one particular place name that had always bugged me, Dozmary Pool, and discovered that the Cornish Language Partnership had been superceded by the Akademi Kernewek and that its place name panel had researched many of the names that had been missing from the map. I got in touch with the Akademi and was delighted to find that they were as keen as I was to get this project completed. Over the past few months we have worked together to finalise all the names and Cornish language text on the map.

The map is, at long last ready. It will be officially launched at an event at Kresen Kernow, the Cornish Archive Centre, in Redruth on 26 June between 1pm and 4pm. I will be travelling to Cornwall for the launch. The map will go on sale throughout Cornwall after that and will be distributed and sold by Cornish language organisations. However I have a limited number of pre-publication copies for sale through this blog.

The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  A total of £22.  Payment can be made by PayPal to weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Please remember to include the postal address you want the map sent to. Postage to locations outside the UK can be expensive please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details.

Goodbye and good riddance, Douglas Ross

Goodbye and good riddance Douglas Ross, you won’t be missed. Scotland’s leading political hypocrite and back stabber has announced that he is standing down as the leader of the Scottish Conservatives. He also announced, in a shameless instance of hedging his bets, that he will also stand down as an MSP, but only if he succeeds in winning the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East Westminster constituency that he half inched from a colleague lying ill in a hospital bed.

Ross had lost the confidence of his own party. Firstly the Scottish Tories had been angered by Ross U-turning on a previous commitment to step down as an MP at this general election in order to focus on Holyrood. They were then infuriated by the downright nasty and underhand way in which Ross had carpet bagged himself a potentially winnable seat at the expense of an ill colleague, sitting Tory MP David Duguid. Duguid strongly denied claims made by Ross that he was too unwell to campaign, reiterated his desire to remain the Conservative candidate, and damningly for Ross released a statement claiming that no one from the Scottish Conservative management board had visited him in hospital to inform him that they were considering deselecting him, and they had not sought medical advice about his supposed unfitness to stand.

There was such anger amongst the Scottish Tories that someone decided to give Ross a taste of his own back stabbing medicine and leaked highly damaging information about Ross’s Westminster expenses claims to the Sunday Mail. The Tory leaker alleged that on several occasions Ross abused his Westminster expenses to pay for travel expenses to and from his side gig as an assistant referee. Ross is alleged to have wrongly claimed expenses 28 times. That’s not an error, that’s a habit, and the Tories covered it up even as they were screaming for Michael Matheson’s head on a plate over a single instance of wrongly claimed expenses. Ross denies any wrong doing.

On Monday Ross bowed to the pressure from within his own party and announced that he will be standing down as leader of the Scottish Tories from the date of the general election. If he wins the seat he backstabbed David Duguid for, he’ll stand down as an MSP as well. It says a lot about the anger within the contingent of Scottish Conservative MSPs that they were prepared to scuttle their party’s Westminster General Election campaign just to get rid of Douglas Ross.

A party does not force its leader to resign in the middle of an election campaign unless there is something very seriously wrong indeed.

On the BBC UK lunchtime news there was no mention at all of Ross’s expenses scandal, even though the episode was assuredly instrumental in leading to his resignation. On BBC Scotland’s news where you are Ross’s expenses scandal was quickly glossed over in a single sentence. No representatives from the other parties were asked to comment on it. It’s reasonable to wonder what other dirty little secrets did Ross fear might be leaked by an angry Scottish Tory insider unless he fell on his sword and resigned as leader and gave an assurance that he would not simultaneously be an MP and an MSP. We will never know, certainly BBC Scotland has no interest in looking under that particular rock.

The contrast with how BBC Scotland handled the story of Michael Matheson’s expenses claim is stark and telling. Ross is alleged to have been a serial abuser of expenses and this has led to his own colleagues taking the drastic and desperate step of forcing him out in the middle of an election campaign. His own party is no longer prepared to cover up for him, yet BBC Scotland is curiously uninterested in digging deeper into the story.

This is markedly different from the Michael Matheson story, which BBC Scotland kept going for weeks by offering platforms to opposition representatives to attack Michael Matheson at every turn. The Corporation is signally not doing so with the scandal of Douglas Ross’s expenses even though the Scottish Tory leader’s offence is arguably far worse. Michael Matheson’s offence related to a one off incident. Douglas Ross is alleged to have made a habit of abusing his expenses on repeated and multiple occasions. Ross’s alleged offence is in addition compounded by hypocrisy. All the while that Douglas Ross was on BBC Scotland fulminating about Michael Matheson’s one off expenses claim, he was himself – allegedly – making repeated and habitual abuses of his Westminster expenses. Ross demands that Michael Matheson be held to a far higher standard than Ross wants to be held to himself, and BBC Scotland is complicit in allowing him to do so.

To be very clear, I am absolutely not saying that the BBC and the Scottish media should not have investigated and reported on the allegations made against Michael Matheson, of course they should have. But if the BBC really is the unbiased public service broadcaster that it claims to be, then it should be investigating and reporting on the allegations made against Douglas Ross with the same energy and vigour.

Ross remains the Tory candidate for Aberdeenshire North and Moray East. The question of Ross’s character is now central to the local campaign. This is a man who is alleged to have repeatedly and habitually abused his expenses in pursuit of his extra parliamentary career. He has stabbed a colleague in the back not once but twice, first Jackson Carlaw when Ross ousted him as Scottish Tory leader, then David Duguid in order to land himself a winnable Westminster seat. If someone is prepared to betray those who are supposed to be his friends for his own personal advancement, he would not hesitate to betray his constituents if he sees it as being in his own interests.

Ross’s bad character has been on display every week in Holyrood during First Minister’s Questions. He has encouraged Scottish Tory MSPs to behave in the same boorish and barracking manner which characterises the Conservative benches in Westminster. Here’s hoping that he will not be elected as an MP and then can languish in obscurity on the Tory back benches in Holyrood alongside that other Scottish Tory failure, Jackson Carlaw. He will not be missed. He comes across as a thoroughly unpleasant individual.

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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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Nasty Tories in a panic

The Tories have a well deserved reputation as the Nasty Party and during this general election campaign as they stare at electoral devastation in the face, the Tories appear to have decided that the reason they are so unpopular is because they are not being unpleasant and out of touch enough. The Conservatives are the political equivalent of that bullying kid at school who courts popularity by throwing rocks at a dug.

Let’s begin with Scotland’s very own Mr Nasty Tory, Douglas Ross. During his tenure as Scottish Conservative leader there has been a noticeable increase in boorish and hectoring interruptions from the Tory benches during First Minister’s Questions, very often led by Ross himself, who is clearly determined to bring Holyrood down to the adolescent barracking so characteristic of that House of Commons which is his spiritual home.

Just a day before nominations for the general election closed, three jobs Ross showed Scotland just how nasty he really is. Despite claiming just as recently as a few days ago that he had no intention of standing for Westminster as he was focused on his job as an MSP and leader of the Tory group at Holyrood – at least that is when he’s not focused on his job as a football linesman – Ross has changed his mind and is going to stand for Westminster after all, in the Aberdeenshire North and Moray East seat of sitting Tory MP David Duguid who has suddenly been deselected. Duguid had expressed his determination to stand again as Scotland really needs his services as a no mark mediocre Tory MP. However he is currently in hospital battling a serious illness. His colleagues have stabbed him in the back, the front, and the sides. Not even the Tories can trust the Tories.

Ross claims the decision to drop Duguid as a candidate was made by an independent Scottish Conservatives’ selection panel, a panel so independent that Ross sits on it. But then Ross knows a thing or two about Scottish Tory stitch ups, he only got the gig as Scottish Tory leader after the previous incumbent, Jackson Carlaw, who had been elected by the membership, was ousted in a putsch organised by Ruth Davidson. The Tories don’t respect Scottish democracy, but then they don’t respect their own internal party democracy either.

It’s a shabby and sordid move by Ross. If Ross had an atom of decency in his body he would pledge, that if he is elected, he will stand down when David Duguid is fit to return. But then David Duguid will most likely be bumped up to the House of Lords in Sunak’s resignation honours list. However this nasty and scummy little episode tells us all exactly who Douglas Ross is, both as a politician, and as a human being. This decision is most likely not unrelated to the fact that Ross has a wafer thin majority of just 513 in his Moray seat whereas Duguid’s majority is a rather more comfortable 4118 and the Tories hope to hold the seat, whereupon Ross would be ideally placed to throw his hat into the ring as leader of the Conservative party.

Ross has fled his Moray seat for a safer bet in order to escape the embarrassment of losing his Moray constituency, which would be to the general glee and amusement of the nation. To secure a seat where he had a better chance of winning, he arranged a stitch up at the expense of a desperately ill colleague. That, coming on top of the underhand and dirty way in which he became the leader of the Scottish Tories in the first place, tells you all you need to know about his character. This is one deeply unpleasant individual, a nasty man for a nasty party.

Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes decried Ross’s underhand manoeuvre saying: “To quote one of Douglas Ross’s own colleagues, ‘this is straight out of the Farage playbook’ and I do not think it portrays the Conservatives in any decent light.”

Here’s hoping that as they cast their ballot, the voters of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East consider the character of the man who seeks to become their Conservative MP. If Douglas Ross is prepared to do the dirty on one of his own colleagues as he lies in a hospital bed recovering from a serious illness, he’d certainly be prepared to sell out the people of Aberdeenshire North and Moray East if they are foolish enough to vote for him.

On Friday Duguid released a statement in denying that his health precluded him for campaigning and he had very much looked forward to the campaign. He added that the management board of the Scottish Conservatives – on which Ross presides – that had taken the decision not to allow him to stand and it had done so without seeking medical advice or visiting him beforehand.

Duguid added that he was “very saddened by the way this whole episode has unfolded and it would be wrong of me to pretend otherwise”.

While the BBC was preoccupied with D-Day, that favourite obsession of British nationalists, it came to light that the Tories had continued to accept substantial donations from Frank Hester, even after it became public knowledge that Hester had made remarks about Diane Abbott which were widely condemned as racist and misogynistic. Hester had said that seeing Abbott, Britain’s longest-standing black MP, on TV made “you want to hate all black women,” and called for her to be shot.

The Conservatives refused to return the £10 million that Hester had donated to the party with one cabinet minister claiming the comments were made half a decade ago while Michael Gove said that Hester deserved “Christian forgiveness.” It has now transpired that the real reason Gove was so keen to offer Hester “Christian forgiveness” was because his party was still proffering the collection plate and Hester had given the Tories a further £150,000 after the story of Hester’s misogynistic and racist comments about Abbott had been made public.

It was confirmed on Thursday that Hester had given a further £5m to the Toriesbringing his total donations to more than £15m in a year. New allegations have been made that Hester has made repeated comments about race, religion and ethnicity long after the remarks he made about Diane Abbott, including in recent years.

Speaking to The Guardian, two former employees of TPP described Hester talking about an individual at a hotel in 2021 and saying she was attractive for a black woman.

That the Conservatives continued to take more money from Frank Hester even after his racist comments about Diane Abbott came to light tells you everything you need to know about the lack of principles of the nasty party.

With an opinion poll this week showing that Nigel Farage’s vanity vehicle Reform is snapping at the Tories’ heels and is polling just 2% behind the Conservatives, the Tories are looking at the very real prospect of meltdown. Douglas Ross won’t be the only Tory carpetbagger looking for a better bet elsewhere. The nasty party is in a nasty panic.

Hoewever that shabby story was quickly eclipsed by the shabby story that Sunak had buggered off early from the D-Day commemorations in Normandy in order to do an election interview with ITV that won’t even air until Wednesday next week. So Foreign Secretary David Cameron ended up in the world leader photos and video footage where Sunak should have been.Every normal person understood it was a day for statesmanship not politics, but not Sunak.

Much of the Tory party and the right wing media were incandescent with rage. Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie slammed Sunak saying: “I think it’s political malpractice of the highest order. It’s just not dignified. It’s not the right thing to do at a fundamental level.” And that’s a Tory saying that. Even the Daily Mail laid into Sunak. Farage will be rubbing his hands with glee, Sunak has just ensured yet more former Tory voters will desert him for Farage’s Reform party.

Sunak issued an apology saying that “on reflection” it was a mistake to leave early. But if the Prime Minister and his team managed to work out today that leaving the D-Day commemorations early was a mistake, why couldn’t they work it out yesterday?

Sunak wants 18 year olds to do a year of National Service but couldn’t even manage one afternoon of National Service himself. The Tory party has killed itself. This is Sunak’s “bigoted woman” moment. The Tories are beginning to realise that the man who lost to Liz Truss isn’t the brilliant campaigner they thought him to be.

Sunak and his miserable party deserve electoral obliteration, the real tragedy is what will replace them.

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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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Farage’s emergency announcement, an emergency for whom?

Nigel Farage is the herpes of British politics, annoying, nasty, and impossible to get rid of. After saying for weeks that he wouldn’t be contesting the general election for his Reform party vanity vehicle, and that Reform would not be doing any deals with the Tories, Farage announced on Monday morning that he and his mini-me Richard Tice would be appearing at 4pm for an “emergency general election announcement”, the emergency presumably being that apart from his besties in the panel booking team for BBC Question Time, he’s not been getting the attention that his massive ego and sense of entitlement feel he deserves.

Reform, the successor to Ukip, is a party that has caused more damage to the UK than any other. It’s party that has never won a parliamentary seat. Following May’s local elections in England It has just 10 councillors in England, and none at all in Wales or Scotland. Even the Cornish devolutionist party Mebyon Kernow has five councillors and it stands only in Cornwall. Yet Reform gets more coverage than many parties with greater support and sitting MPs. Its extreme anti-immigration scaremongering is regularly platformed by the BBC and the other broadcasters. Naturally his announcement was headline news on the BBC.

Last week Farage insisted that he still has “one more big card to play” and said that he’d stand for Westminster at some point in the future but ruled out standing this year claiming that he was “extremely disappointed by Sunak’s decision to call a General Election on July 4. Farage said said that he could not campaign both nationally for Reform and for one constituency in the six-week timeframe of the general election.

Of course what has changed since last week is that Nige’s best pal, Donald Trump, the Mango Mussolini himself, has been convicted in a New York court on 34 felony charges of falsifying business records. Farage had planned to spend October and November campaigning in the USA on behalf of an actual law breaking fascist, but following his multiple convictions Trump’s chances of taking the presidency again have felon considerably. Trump is predictably railing against the verdict claiming that the trial was “rigged” because the justice system had the temerity to prosecute him and find him guilty. What is the world coming to when you can’t even falsify business records in an attempt to swing an election any more, because of “woke”.

Farage recently received well deserved condemnation – but not from BBC Question Time – for saying during an interview on Sky News that the streets of British Cities are full of people who “undermine British values” remarks which were widely perceived as not so much a racist dog whistle as a racist fog horn. How dare some people be Muslim in public. The truth is that nobody has done more to undermine “British values” than Nigel Farage. Mind you, imperialism, racism, and the demonisation of minority groups are very much long established British political traditions.

The “emergency announcement” turned out to be Farage telling the press that he is taking over as leader of the right wing English nationalist Reform party and intends to fail to become an MP for the eighth time, which is disappointingly predictable, I had kind of hoped he was going to tell us he’s going to appear on Strictly. But then that would have led to him being judged by a black woman and an EU immigrant.

So it transpires that Farage is standing as a candidate in this election after all, and this is an “emergency”. For whom exactly?

The news is dire for the Tories, whose already tiny chances of saving their miserable behinds in this election have now plummeted even further. For all that Farage boasted about taking votes from Labour, it’s the Tories who will be seriously damaged by this development. The Tory vote will now be split in seats which they really need to win if they are to avoid their well deserved electoral oblivion. The Tories will now pivot even further to the right in an attempt to shore up their vote and minimise losses to Farage. Labour is bound to follow suit. The Ukipification of British politics is almost complete.

Farage and his English nationalist party have no chance of winning seats in Scotland, but they could reduce the Tory vote even more in the seats in which they do stand, which could be good news for the SNP.

Labour is even more of a dead cert to win this election now than it was this morning. Despite what Starmer and Sarwar claim, Labour absolutely does not need to win seats in Scotland in order to defeat the Tories. All voting Labour in Scotland will achieve will be to marginalise and sideline Scotland for five years and to empower and enable Starmer’s right wing agenda. If you vote Labour you will be voting for a party which says it can’t find the money to abolish the abhorrent two child cap on benefits, but which can find the money for four new nuclear submarines and upgrades to the Trident programme.

A poll for Sky News published on Monday found that Starmer is on course for a record Commons majority, a majority almost four times the number of Commons seats in Scotland. The result of the general election in Scotland will not even make a dent on that. Starmer wants to crush the SNP, not in order to defeat the Tories, but because he wants to neuter Scotland politically and remove the question of Scottish independence from the agenda. Voting for Labour is a vote to be ignored and to put the likes of Douglas Alexander back in the Commons.

Meanwhile the Tories are determined to weaponise the culture wars by threatening to take powers away from the Scottish Parliament, removing from Holyrood powers over gender identity. It would be the first time that Westminster has explicitly clawed back a devolved power, as opposed to by-passing Holyrood. It won’t happen, since the Tories are set to be devastated electorally at this general election, but it would set a dangerous precedent for a devolution settlement which is already under threat, both by the Tories, and by a Labour party which wants to strip powers from Holyrood in order to give them to local authorities which are more likely to be controlled by Labour, and less able to stand up against an overweening and centralising Westminster.

If we’ve learned one thing about Keir Starmer in recent years it’s that where the Tories go, he is sure to follow. British politics are becoming ever more right wing, ever more Anglo-British nationalist, and less and less tolerant of difference and minority groups, that includes Scots, the largest minority group in the UK. It’s not the SNP you are punishing if you vote for Starmer’s right wing Labour party, you’re punishing yourself.

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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. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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