A matter of (dis)respect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Conservatives are gunning for our human rights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s no delusion like Tory self-delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

British politics, a consensus of delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brexit : Three years on, lies, deceit and delusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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EU membership for Scotland, let’s do it the right way

The SNP constitution secretary Angus Robertson has suggested that a vote for Scottish independence should also count as a vote for Scotland to rejoin the European Union and that a second vote on EU membership would therefore not be required. He said that in a future vote the independence case would be “for Scottish independence within the European Union as a member state.”

This is, to put it bluntly, a terrible idea. For starters it’s a bad idea because the European Union has until now preferred to accept new members after the people of that country have clearly and unequivocally voted in favour of EU membership in a referendum which is specifically and unambiguously about joining the EU. That said, there is no absolute requirement for a referendum. Neither Bulgaria or Cyprus held an EU membership referendum, they applied to join the EU after general elections won by parties campaigning for EU membership. However it is certainly considered to be good democratic practice for countries to hold a referendum on EU membership.

By linking EU membership to an entirely separate issue, that of Scottish independence, the will of the people of Scotland to be a part of the European Union would remain open to question. The EU has already had its fingers burned with Brexit, it’s going to look with great suspicion on a former part of a state which left the EU seeking to rejoin when there remains any room for argument about whether its people clearly and without the slightest doubt wish to be a part of the European project. Bulgaria and Cyprus were both already independent countries. No country has ever sought independence on the basis of linking it to EU membership.

Scotland, as we learned during the first independence referendum campaign, found itself subject to a massive amount of scaremongering from opponents of independence who were eager to tell us that Scotland would not be allowed to join the EU. We were told that Spain or Belgium would veto Scottish membership, that Scotland was too poor, and despite the fact that none of these scare stories were true they gained massive traction in a British media which is overwhelmingly opposed to Scottish independence, their rebuttals struggled to get an airing.

We will see the exact same thing the second time around so it is therefore a huge tactical error to insist that Scotland could join the EU through an entirely novel and unprecedented process. It presents an enormous open goal for opponents of independence on a par with the sterling currency union the first time round, and the British nationalists and their allies will be queueing up to rubbish it. Indeed they have already started. Scotland in Union’s Pamela Nash has been quick to give some dismissive quotes to the Herald.

Indeed the proposal smacks of British exceptionalism, the very thing that Scottish independence seeks to escape from. Proposing that Scotland could have a unique and special route to EU membership is unlikely to endear the cause of Scottish independence to other European countries, the very countries whose support Scotland is going to need in order to put pressure on Westminster to negotiate independence following a victory for independence at the ballot box.

Personally I am keen for an independent Scotland to be a part of the EU, like millions of others in Scotland my European citizenship was stripped away without our consent or consultation by right wing English nationalists and I want it back. Most polls show that a clear majority of voters in Scotland support EU membership and believe that Brexit was a mistake. Incidentally, Scottish independence will categorically not strip British citizenship from those Scots who currently possess it and who wish to retain it. It is a false equivalence to equate Scottish independence with Brexit for this and for many other reasons.

However there are other things that I’d also like to see in an independent Scotland, for example I’d like an independent Scotland to divest itself of the anachronistic and anti-democratic clown show that is the Windsor dynasty and become a republic. But like membership of the EU, this is a question to be debated and decided by the people of Scotland once the fact of Scottish independence and an independent Scottish state has been established. Otherwise we run the risk of alienating voters who are open to the idea of Scottish independence but who quite like the idea of a Scottish monarch – after all Scotland was a monarchy throughout its centuries long existence as an independent state – or those who would prefer an independent Scotland to remain outwith the European Union but perhaps with a closer trading relationship than that offered by the Brextremist zealots of the Conservative party of Keir Starmer’s Labour.

Such voters could well be put off from voting in favour of independence if they thought that their vote for independence was also going to be tied to something that they opposed. Although recent polls point to a pro-independence majority they do not suggest that there is a large enough margin of support for independence that we can afford to do without any pro-independence constituency, no matter how small it may be. Frankly it is sheer idiocy not to try and maximise the pro-independence vote, Angus Robertson’s proposal makes a vote for independence simultaneously a vote for something else entirely. This not only risks paring away potential independence supporters, it also prevents Scotland from having a clear and unambiguous debate about joining the European Union, something which is vital in the interests of democracy.

It is absolutely not a terrible idea for the Scottish Government to state that one of the primary purposes of independence is to reopen the possibility of EU membership for Scotland, that door into a real union is firmly closed as long as Scotland remains a part of this British lie-union. But the decision that the people of Scotland are going to make cannot be preempted. The first General Election following Scottish independence can be fought on the basis of giving the Scottish government a mandate to open accession negotiations with Brussels, and in that vote I will strongly advocate EU membership because in my view it is unquestionably the right thing for Scotland. However there is no need to jump the gun and in the process potentially damage our chances of securing independence, without which we will never be able to rejoin the EU.

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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.

Holyrood’s death by a thousand Tory cuts

In a recent interview with the News Agents podcast, the First Minister said that she is no longer 100% certain that the Conservatives would not attempt to abolish the Scottish Parliament. Even a few months ago this would have been an unthinkable possibility, but given the blatantly anti-democratic behaviour of the Conservatives over recent months with concerted attempts by the Conservatives both at Westminster and at Holyrood to delegitimise and undermine the Scottish Parliament, it now seems clear that the Conservatives would abolish the devolution settlement if they thought that they could get away with it. Combined with a Labour party which pays only lip service to challenging the Conservatives’ attacks on the powers of Holyrood, we are perilously close to the political situation where the Conservatives might think that the political damage caused to them by the abolition of the devolution settlement is outweighed by the advantages of concentrating all power at Westminster, which in practical terms means in the hands of whoever happens to occupy Ten Downing Street.

The only thing preventing the Conservatives from a head on assault on Holyrood, and the devolution settlement in general is their fear of the political consequences in England. They have given up on Scotland, even though they cannot admit it, but they know that there are few votes to be had for them in Scotland, certainly not enough to help them to victory at the next General Election. What they are afraid of is Labour weaponising a Conservative attempt to abolish the devolution settlement in order to portray the Conservatives as a danger to British unity and to the national interest.

However, perhaps even more salient in their thinking is that they are also afraid that an overt attempt on their part to abolish the devolution settlement without any mandate to do so from Scotland or Wales would put turbo boosters under the demand for independence, something that they cannot afford to risk as long as Scottish independence and the possibility of another independence referendum remain live electoral issues. Even BBC Scotland would have a hard time explaining away or minimising the impact of a return to the direct Conservative rule of the 1980s and 1990s. If Scotland is foolish enough to vote against independence in another independence referendum, then the Conservatives would not hesitate to abolish Holyrood or at least to introduce measures to turn it into a toothless talking shop, because under those circumstances they could do so with limited political damage to themselves.

To be clear, the First Minister still does not believe that the Conservatives would go so far as to abolish the devolution settlement outright. The reality is that they can achieve their Anglo-British nationalist centralising goals by other, less direct means. You don’t pick a fight that is going to cause you significant harm even if you know you are going to win in the end if you also know that you can achieve all or most of the same goals by other less overt and more underhand means which do no come with the same cost to you.

The Conservatives are venal, politically short-sighted, and deeply hypocritical, but they are not entirely stupid, at least not all of them, and they know that they can achieve most of their aims by less overt means which can be provided with political explanations which will not attract the attention or anger of a Scottish media which is already overwhelmingly disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Instead what is more likely to happen is that we will see further incremental attacks on the devolution settlement and a gradual chipping away of the powers of the devolved parliaments combined with more measures allowing Westminster to intervene directly on devolved matters, by-passing the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments like those we have already seen. This would give the Conservatives political cover and allow the likes of Michael Gove to assert that the Tories are really ‘augmenting’ devolution, a claim which the supine Scottish media will allow to pass unchallenged no matter how risible it really is.

Should the Conservatives successfully normalise the use of a section 35 order, which they have employed in order to veto the Gender Recognition Bill passed by a cross party majority at Holyrood, we will find that future Labour governments are just as ready as the Conservatives to employ this measure in order to ensure compliance on the part of the devolved parliaments and we will be in a position where Holyrood will self-censor and be reluctant to pass any legislation which has not met with the prior approval of the British Government or find itself under attack from Scotland’s overwhelmingly anti-independence media for ‘grievance politics’ and ‘picking fights with Westminster’. The fundamental basis of the devolution settlement will have been negated, and the Conservatives will have achieved most of their key aim with only very limited political damage to themselves.

Those independence supporters who warn that the Conservatives are poised to abolish the Scottish Parliament are missing the real Conservative strategy. The Tories do not need to abolish Holyrood when they can get away with what the First Minister calls their “concerted effort to undermine, delegitimise and remove powers from this parliament.” That is what the Conservatives have been doing since the EU referendum of 2016, and they will intensify those efforts in the months and years ahead.

Labour will not resist these gradual attacks and the incremental political erosion of the powers of the Scottish Parliament because Starmer knows that if the Conservatives are successful in getting away with them it increases his own room for manoeuvre once he gets himself into Number Ten. Spending political capital to ‘defend the Scots’ which merely damages Labour’s standing among those English nationalist Brexit supporting voters whom Labour strategists have identified as the key constituency which Starmer must win over in order to ensure a Labour victory at the next General Election.

It remains highly unlikely that short of a resounding defeat for independence in a future independence referendum – de facto or otherwise – the Conservatives will move to pass legislation to abolish the Scottish Parliament outright, instead Holyrood and the powers of the Scottish Parliament will be subjected to a long slow and lingering death by a thousand cuts.

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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.

Coronation sicken

The beginning of May would be a very good time to escape the country, if you can afford to seeing as how the energy price cap comes to an end in April and millions of households will be struggling to afford their gas and electricity bills, a Westminster created utter disgrace in a country such as Scotland which produces several times more in energy than it requires for domestic consumption.

King Charles #NotMySpaniel has displayed the Windsors’ unerring inability to read the room by refusing to settle for a pared back coronation. Not at all, this immensely vain and self regarding man wants the whole show with all the bells, whistles, equerries, brocaded trumpeters, massed ranks of ermine clad lords, RAF fly-pasts, and mounted cavalry in highly polished breast plates that public money can buy, all so he can sit on a gilded throne while an arch-bishop plonks a jewel encrusted hat on the head of a plonker, a head filled with nothing but an over-weening self-importance.

The Coronation will stretch over three days in early May with the actual jewelled hat plonking taking place on 6 May. The costs of this exercise in gilded self-indulgence will run into the many tens of millions, some estimates put the cost at as much as £100 million, and this at a time when we are told that there is not enough money to pay nurses a living wage that means they do not have to rely on food banks in order to ensure that their kids have enough to eat and public service workers across many sectors are being driven to take industrial action.

Although the Coronation celebrations are scheduled to take place over three days, they will be preceded by weeks of interminable hype on the BBC as BBC  and Sky presenters desperately seek to shoe horn coronation references into every news report, story, and light entertainment show with obligatory vox pop pieces asking random passers by how excited they are about the coronation on a scale from Wheeeeee! to wetting themselves. And of course there will be the traditional tonguing of the royal arse from the BBC’s resident monarchical oleaginst, Nicholas Witchell. After all, no royal event in the UK would be complete without switching off the telly in disgust because that insufferable man is sliming over the TV screen again.

The big coronation blow out comes less than a year after millions of pounds of public money were spent on the Queen’s four-day Platinum Jubilee, and will be just 42 days before yet another pointless show of royal pomp and circumstance for the monarch’s annual birthday parade, Trooping the Colour – Charles’s first – in June. The UK Government acknowledges that it set aside £28 million of public money to cover the cost of the Platinum Jubilee, the real cost was certainly far higher. The forecast costs of the coronation do not include the money that will have to be spent to keep Prince Andrew out of public view for the duration of the proceedings. Neither does it include the economic impact of closing down the entire country for three days in order to sing the praises of a man who doesn’t give a thought for the impact of his privilege on everyone else.

Just last week trains to Ayr from my local station were cancelled all morning because Charlie’s diesel guzzling private train was occupying a platform at Ayr station for several hours because he, Camilla, and their retinue of valets, toothpaste squeezers, underlings, lackeys, and fnaugh-fnaughing aristocratic hangers on were on a jolly to Dumfries House, a property funded by public money and various heritage charities (£5 million of which was contributed by the Scottish Government) which Charles treats as a private residence for himself and his huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’ friends. It’s safe to assume that the disruption and inconvenience he caused to local people did not register with him.

There were initial reports that Buckingham Palace was going to opt for a pared back coronation in order to appear sensitive to the difficulties struggling households face. But then after consultations with the Spaniel and his lackeys it was decided who cares about being sensitive to the poors. No, said the Spaniel, let’s go for the full fat flummery. That’s the message we want to send here. Apparently the coronation is seen as an invaluable opportunity to sell Britain to the world, because it seems that the world is desperately wanting to buy Ruritarian pageantry, clueless entitlement, and tone deaf symbols of privilege. This is what passes for advertising the UK these days. It raises the obvious question, if this is what they are advertising, just who do they think they are selling to?

The expensive ceremony is not a constitutional requirement. Charles is already king, He automatically became king the moment that his mother passed away on 8 September last year. The constitutional niceties were taken care of when he was officially proclaimed king on 10 September when the Accession Council , consisting of members of the Privy Council, gathered at St James’s Palace in London in order to make a formal proclamation of Charles as the new monarch. The Clerk to the council read out the Accession Proclamation and Charles swore an oath to uphold the independence of the Church of Scotland, and that was the Constitutional requirements taken care of. The Coronation is not necessary. The Nazi sympathising Edward VIII was king from 20 January 1936 until his abdication on 11 December 1936 even though he never had a coronation. This year’s coronation is merely a sop to the vast ego of an immensely privileged and entitled man. It’s Let Them Eat Coronation Chicken, or whatever other culinary monstrosity is invented in an attempt to manufacture public engagement with the event and to distract from the fact that this is coronation sicken for many many more of us than the BBC cares to acknowledge.

The majority of contemporary European monarchies today have either long since abandoned coronation ceremonies or have never had them in the first place. Only the British monarch still insists on a coronation ceremony. Yet the coronation ceremony is not even, as it is presented, a hoary centuries old tradition. Most of the modern ceremony was invented in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII, another vain and insecure adulterer who had spent decades in his mother’s shadow and who demanded all the flummery and toadying that the British state could muster in order to further inflate his already bloated ego.

It’s a ceremony which encapsulates all that is wrong with modern Britain, the deference it pays to the obscenely rich, the exceptionalism, the lack of concern for the problems of ordinary people struggling to make ends meet, the celebration of feudalism and the democratic deficit. If this is selling the UK, Scotland is certainly not buying it.

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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.

Winning a de facto referendum is within our grasp

A major new poll for The National has found that a clear majority of voters would back pro-independence parties if the next UK General Election were to be used as a de facto independence referendum. In such a scenario total of 54.4% of voters would give their votes to either the SNP, the Scottish Greens, or Alba, bringing about a reversal of the 2014 independence referendum result, described at the time by the BBC as ‘decisive’.

I do not propose to rehash the arguments for engineering an early Holyrood election versus using a UK General Election as a de facto referendum, both options have their advantages and disadvantages, as I have already detailed at some length here : https://weegingerdug.wordpress.com/2022/11/29/holyrood-election-vs-uk-general-election-as-de-facto-referendum-the-pros-and-cons/

What this poll demonstrates is that using a UK General Election as a de facto referendum could be a winning strategy. The poll does not seem to ask about voting intention in an early Holyrood election fought as a de facto referendum, so it’s not possible to pass comment on whether that would win a majority for independence. The option of engineering an early Holyrood election is not amongst those being voted upon by SNP members at the party’s special conference in March, and so it is vanishingly unlikely to happen, no matter how much its advocates might wish it were otherwise.

The strategy being put to the SNP conference sees a three pronged attack on Westminster intransigence. Firstly to use the next UK General Election as a de facto independence referendum, should the SNP together with any other parties standing on a platform for independence win a majority of votes cast, this will be regarded as a mandate for independence and for the Scottish Government to open negotiations with Westminster to secure independence. Secondly, if the threshold of an absolute majority of votes cast is not met, but the SNP wins the election in terms of being the party with most seats and greatest vote share, this will be taken as a mandate for another independence referendum and the Scottish Government and the SNP will seek a transfer of powers to Holyrood in order to bring about the referendum. Thirdly, if Westminster continues to ignore Scottish democracy and refuses to facilitate another independence referendum, then the next scheduled Holyrood election will become a de facto independence referendum.

The significance of today’s poll is that it demonstrates that achieving a majority of votes cast for the pro independence parties at the next UK General Election may not be the insurmountable hurdle that some have feared. The poll found that the SNP alone could surpass the 50% threshold with 52% of votes cast, if replicated at a General Election this could see the SNP sweep the board.

The Conservatives poll especially badly in this poll, losing votes to both Labour and the frothing English nationalists of the Reform party and polling an embarrassing 12%. The Conservatives are looking at the very real possibility of a repeat of the UK General Election of 1997, when they were annihilated in Scotland and lost every one of their Scottish MPs. Indeed the Tories could be left to deal with even greater humiliation. In 1997 they polled 17.5% of votes cast in Scotland. This poll suggests that they will be lucky to come close to that next time round. They could be in for an electoral oblivion that would see the end of the Conservatives as a significant political force in Scotland for decades to come. It’s a punishment which would be richly deserved for a party which has treated Scotland and Scottish democracy with the utmost contempt and which has systematically trashed every promise and commitment which it made to the people of Scotland in 2014 in order to win that year’s independence referendum even as it hypocritically demands that the SNP ‘respects’ the result of the referendum, presumably by not asking the people of Scotland if they believe that the Better Together parties have fulfilled their end of the bargain that they struck with the electorate of Scotland.

It’s not democracy that the Conservatives want, it’s a permanent get out of jail free card. It’s up to all of us to ensure that they don’t get one. Although this opinion poll is very encouraging, the independence movement needs to cease its internal arguments about process, which do absolutely nothing to persuade undecided voters and soft noes why they should support democracy in Scotland. Democracy in this country can can only be secured by supporting independence.

After the SNP special conference in March the process will be clear, the focus must then be on co-ordinating efforts in order to maximise the pro-independence vote in the face of a largely hostile media. So it is welcome that senior figures in the SNP such as veteran MP Pete Wishart are calling for a cross movement and cross party Independence Convention to mobilise and co-ordinate the grass roots campaign and to establish a campaign headquarters and structure which will involve all pro independence political parties prepared to contest the General Election as a de facto independence referendum. This body, says Wishart, “Must be inclusive, consensual and community based.”

There remains a huge amount of work to do, but this is a very positive development. It would help to ensure that all pro independence parties and organisations are working toward the common goal of winning a mandate from the people of Scotland for independence even as they maintain their individual identities and points of view. If nothing else it could help bring about an end to the counter productive sniping which sees certain supposedly pro independence activists and groups devote the majority of their time and efforts to attacking others within the independence movement for ‘doing independence wrong.’  Instead we should be trying to reach out from within the confines of those who are convinced Yes voters in order to make arguments that can persuade those vital undecideds and soft No voters to support independence. The real enemies of independence are not other independence supporters, they are the Conservatives and their allies. It’s high time we took the fight to 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.

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 Twilight Zone

Alister Jack has spent the past week or so refusing to explain his reasons for blowing up the devolution settlement by making unprecedented use of a section 35 order to veto the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the Scottish Parliament after extensive debate and consultation and with cross-party support. As Shona Robison the Scottish Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government pointed out in a Letter to the Scotland Secretary : “Using the Section 35 power to impose a veto on the Bill when already passed by the Scottish Parliament, after ignoring every opportunity to raise these issues or seek changes to the Bill over several years, demonstrates complete disregard for devolution, and flies in the face of the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding between our Governments which states that these powers should be seen ‘very much as a matter of last resort’.”

Jack insists that the person responsible for explaining how the bill supposedly impinges upon the operation of the UK Equalities Act should be the UK (in)equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch who is so far out on the right wing of the Conservative party that she makes Suella Braverman seem like one of those student activists who glues themselves to the carriageway of the M25 in order to protest about how greedy and irresponsible capitalism is destroying the planet.

Badenoch, whose concept of equality appears to begin and end with the notion that corporations should be free to exploit everyone equally, is the equalities minister who mocked LGBT rights, questioned equal marriage, and misgendered trans people in a bizarre rant recorded in 2018, a year after she was elected as an MP. Despite this, or more likely because of it, the Tories saw fit to give her a seat in the cabinet as the Equalities Minister. Of course the real reason Badenoch has been given a position of power and responsibility is because Sunak needed to shore up his support on the frothing extreme right of his increasingly fascistoid party. However there is one way in which Badenoch is entirely mainstream within the Conservative party, she doesn’t believe that the British Government needs to be held accountable for , or even explain its actions any more than Sunak or Jack do.

Entirely predictably, Badenoch has joined Jack in declining an invitation to appear before the Holyrood Human Rights and Civil Justice Committee in order to explain why the British Government believes that the Scottish GRR bill is such an egregious breach of UK Equalities legislation that it has simply vetoed it without bothering to refer it to the UK Supreme Court for a definitive legal ruling on the matter, which assuming that the British Government’s view was upheld would at least give legislators some clarity on which aspects of the bill need to be altered in order to ensure that the bill does not conflict with UK legislation and could thus pass into law.

We are now in the same impossible place with the Gender Recognition Reform bill as we already were with the democratic route to another independence referendum. The Tories insist that this remains a voluntary union but refuse to say what the democratic route to another referendum is, equally the Tories insist that the Scottish Parliament can make changes to the Gender Recognition Reform bill in order to ensure that it does not impinge upon the operation of reserved legislation, but they refuse to say what those changes might be. This is no longer about the narrow issue of the GRR bill. The Conservatives have trapped the Scottish Parliament and the devolution settlement in a bizarre Twilight Zone where Scottish democracy exists only as a shadow which has no substance.

This is highlighted by one of Jack’s stated objections to the Scottish Bill, his belief that it is impossible to have two different systems in operation in ‘one country’, yet this a contradiction of a principle which is fundamental to the very existence of devolution. If it is not possible for Scotland to implement policies and procedures which differ from those in force in the rest of the UK then not only the devolution settlement but the very existence of Scots law and Scotland itself as a nation and country are at risk of being deemed incompatible with the conception of the Anglo-British nationalists of the United Kingdom as ‘one country’ and as a unitary state.

As Shona Robison pointed out in her letter :”This unprecedented intervention represents an attack on the democratically elected Scottish Parliament and its ability to make decisions on devolved matters.” If the Conservatives will not even permit the Scottish Parliament to pass legislation relating to devolved matters, nothing that the Scottish Parliament does is safe, nothing in the devolution settlement is safe, and nothing guaranteed by the Treaty of Union itself is safe.

We have come a long long way indeed from the fine promises made by Better Together in 2014, promises which the Conservatives signed up to along with Labour and the Lib Dems. That would be the same Conservative party which screams that the SNP must respect the 2014 referendum even as it trashes all the commitments that it made in order to win that referendum for the No side. If the Conservatives had been honest in 2014 and told the people of Scotland that if Scotland voted No then the Tories would take us out of the EU and abolish freedom of movement, that they would preside over a law breaking government mired in sleaze and corruption, that they would then would veto legislation relating to devolved matters and would deny any democratic route to Scottish self-determination, the outcome of that year’s referendum is likely to have been very different.

Yet had the result indeed gone the other way, the Tories would have refused to respect the democratic verdict of the people just as they are currently refusing to accept the democratic verdict of the people in the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections when they voted for a parliament with a pro-independence majority in the full expectation that this would bring about another independence referendum. The Tories only respect democracy when it gives them a result that they are willing to accept and when it does not, they will veto it and then refuse to explain themselves.

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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.