Chaos in Scotland.

[4mastacker]

Wow!! According to Guido, the SNP's auditors resigned six months ago - not last week as many believed - and the search is on to find a another firm to take the job on. The new leader claims he didn't know about it.

Could be interesting if the accounts aren't filed by the due date - wonder what a Toarrry Government appointed auditor will find.

Humsa Yousaf claims he didn't know the SNP's auditors had resigned.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

All a bit "The Loch Ness Monster ate my homework" really.

[Woody]

Haggisgate the plot thickens

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Amazing how the SNP runs.
We're assured everything's under control, but no one knows what's going on.

Perhaps it's magic......

Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Somehow I don't think the hurley-burley's done yet.

And maybe it's bad luck to name it.
Perhaps we should just call it "The Scottish -Gate"?

[FD2]

Imagine, if you can, an honest politician. He sits through many boring cabinet meetings - he is a minister after all - in the presence of the High Heid Yin herself. Being keen he resists the temptation to nod off so has a clear grasp of all that was discussed over the last six months or so and no doubt it was all carefully minuted and copies distributed. When he unexpectedly wins the top job he finds that the auditors who should be keeping an eye on the finances of his political party resigned six months before he got the job. As they used to say in the Services when audits were conducted on minor accounts like wine funds, "they are done to reassure the honest treasurer that all is well with his fund".

Assuming his memory is not at fault, why would it not be thought important enough to mention at a Cabinet meeting of the good SNP folk who run Scotland that their auditors had fled into the night? Disclosure might be subject to public scrutiny at some point and there might be someone in the Cabinet with courage enough to ask the awkward questions about why the auditors have left and why it has taken so long to appoint new ones. Far better to keep sweeping the dirt under the carpet and let someone else take the blame? Let's see if the plods can finally get their thumbs out of their backsides and find out what has been going on, and not just for the last 6 months!

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Imagine, if you can, an honest politician.

I'm really, REALLY trying...




...Nope.

Unicorns, ghosts, alien spaceships, sorting hats; no problem.
I'm even prepared to believe pigs can fly, and there's a funny left-wing joke.
But a man's gotta know his limitations....

Actually, I have known for several years two British MPs who I thought were quite decent. One Conservative, one Lib Dem.
Both of them finally achieved a Junior Ministerial post.
Both resigned within three months, and indeed resigned from politics entirely.
I can't imagine what they discovered to cause them to do this

[FD2]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... hs-skyline


The Edinburgh Council has left its mark on the magnificent city skyline after the redevelopment of the St James Centre. Admittedly it was due a revamp as, like many other shopping centres, it was descending into pound shops but the favourite John Lewis had stuck it out until their new shop was built. As the city has no where near enough hotels for the hordes of visitors who descend like locusts staring at their smart phones and not looking at the magnificence around them, there had to be another hotel - right in the middle of the new St James Centre. This is what the architects came up with and the council planners approved:

Turd Hotel.png (283.04 KiB) Viewed 710 times

The Edinburgh skyline at sunset featuring the Turd Hotel, as seen from Calton Hill.

https://www.insider.com/posh-new-hotel- ... oji-2021-7

Two Turds.png (210.93 KiB) Viewed 710 times

[barkingmad]

If the GRC battle was a contributory factor in the downfall of Wee Krankie, then how well do we expect her successor to triumph in the same fight over the same issue?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-65245327

Strange that a devout Muslim should be getting tangled up in such a cause, though there were rumours that he managed to avoid voting on the measure on it’s initiation?

But presumably he’s done his homework and is better able to define a ‘woman’ than Sir Steer Calmer, our future PM south of the Border?

Talking of borders, when Scotland finally gains ‘independence’ tucked safely in the arms of Ursula Fond Of Lying or her successor, will they still be arguing over some form of “Protocol” for trade etc, across the newly formed land border, as per NornIron and long after we’ve departed this mortal coil?

FD2, many thanks for that picture of the Turd building which sums up the (cess)pit into which that lovely country is descending.

[barkingmad]

Humza Youseless has just posted the next SNP suicide note;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-65249431

I trust the good burghers in Jockland are overjoyed about the legal costs, unless they borrow the fees out of the missing £600K?

[CharlieOneSix]

Humza Youseless has just posted the next SNP suicide note;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland- ... s-65249431

I trust the good burghers in Jockland are overjoyed about the legal costs, unless they borrow the fees out of the missing £600K?

'Humza Yousaf said the ‘democratic will of the Scottish Parliament is under attack’....

....but probably not the democratic will of the Scottish people. More of my tax down the drain as the case is doomed to failure. A hell of a cost just to keep the wretched 7 Green MSPs on side so the SNP have a majority at Holyrood.

First Prestwick airport....from the Glasgow Times.....

The losses relate to the £43.8m of public money loan support given to the airport which auditors now say are valued at just £11.6m. Loan interest was valued at £7.4m but that has been valued at 'nil'.

then the ferry fiasco...

The cost to the taxpayer of Scotland’s ferry fiasco firm is approaching a ‘scandalous’ half a billion pounds, the Herald on Sunday can reveal.

.....all from a country of 5.5 million population. How long to bankruptcy?...

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Just about every country except Norway and Switzerland is functionally bankrupt, in the sense that they have no way of honouring future pension commitments, and cannot further increase tax rates without encountering the Laffer curve reduction in actual tax revenue. Cut public expenditure and GDP reduces. Print more money and inflation increases.
Essentially, almost all governments have painted themselves into a corner.
And inevitably the smaller ones will go first, like Scotland.
And I would argue that the extra push is given by corrupt politicians taking even more out of the system.
And if you think you have a corrupt small government for 5.5 million people, can you imagine how corrupt my Provincial government for 160,000 people is?

The only possible solution is increased national income (which is not GDP, but income not including most public expenditure), which is fundamentally restricted by the cost of energy and the cost of dealing with regulation.
There's also the crime aspect - criminals don't pay much in taxes, and neither do illegal immigrants.

In short, the longer governments hang on to the Global Warming agenda, the illegal immigration, and forcing the police to chase social justice 'hate crimes' instead of gangsters, the quicker bankruptcy will happen.
There also needs to be a cull of regulation based on efficiency, and I'm not talking about 3% or 5 % either.
It doesn't matter whether any of these policies are just or not, it's simply that no nation can afford them.

Can't say I'm optimistic. Changing tack this much would mean politicians admitting that everything they had claimed was most important was wrong. And they never do that.

[barkingmad]

Fox3, a very good summary of the awful mess in which we will end the 'good' times.

I refer the honourable members to the post #122 in The Great Reset thread with Catherine Austin Fitts who's been trying to alert the World to the approaching financial apocalypse but to whom few have paid any attention.

The cataclysm is forecast to take down most countries including the USA with it's sovereign debt pensions and healthcare deficits.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

It would seem David Frost in the Torygraph today has the same opinion I do. Exactly the same points are in there.
I note this was published about 90 minutes after my post.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... est-rates/

Excerpts for educational purposes for those paywalled. My emphasis

Britain is stuck in a vicious cycle. The only route out is economic reform that changes almost everything
he Tories’ poll ratings are slowly ticking up again. Rishi Sunak’s Government seems to have a grip on things. So are we safely out of last autumn’s crisis?

I wish we were, but I fear we aren’t. It’s easy to blame those problems on mismanagement under Liz Truss, and obviously there’s an element of that, but last year’s shock was caused by real problems. The recent bank crashes show that these have not gone away.

All Western economies are now facing the consequences of two decades of fundamental economic mistakes. Interest rates are the warning sign. They are far too low for a free market economy.

Why this is a problem, and much else, is explained by the economist Bernard Connolly in his latest book, You Always Hurt the One You Love: Central Banks and the Murder of Capitalism. Yes, today it seems easier to borrow and spend. But problems are stored up for tomorrow – and unfortunately tomorrow is fast becoming today.

Interest rates matter because they are a vital price signal – the price of money. Rightly used, they can control boom and bust. When a burst of innovation comes, as with the internet in the late 1990s, you want people to invest in that today and spend the money on the fruits tomorrow. What you don’t want is super-investment today and no demand tomorrow. Raising interest rates in the boom is the way of achieving this. It makes it more worthwhile both to invest in innovating sectors than in others and to save money at decent rates of interest for consumption tomorrow.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. By the time it was clear that the economy was overheating, and central banks finally woke up, they had to push interest rates higher than otherwise necessary. But overinvestment and overspending in the boom had by now created a risk of an almighty crash as people retrenched in the bust.

No problem, said the central bankers. We’ll bring interest rates down lower than where we started. Inflation is under control anyway, and this will keep people spending instead of saving and avoid a crash. This worked at first, but it started to get our economies used to the dopamine hit of artificial stimulus – operating at interest rates that were too low.

This is where so many of our problems began. In these circumstances, zombie firms that should go bust survive, producing goods inefficiently. Investment doesn’t go to the most productive. Incentives to innovate fall, productivity slows and the economy stagnates. Worse, people begin to believe that asset price increases are real, rather than fuelled by cheap credit and fake money, and start borrowing against them – and voters and companies start to think that they will always be bailed out.

Then, when the next crisis hits, as it did in 2008, the economy is even less able to withstand normal interest rates. So they had to go lower still. And so the cycle continued. That’s why real interest rates were positive in the mid-1990s, but by the banking crash were well below zero, and fell even further after the Covid crisis – helped of course by oodles of quantitative easing.

This isn’t just a British problem. Every economy has its own difficulties, which makes the underlying malaise worse. In Britain, we have high immigration and not enough houses, hurting productivity and driving asset prices even higher. The Eurozone can’t establish conditions that suit Germany and southern Europe at the same time – one reason why the European Central Bank’s monetary policy has performed even more poorly than everyone else’s. And of course everyone’s situation can be made worse by policies like net zero that drive debt-fuelled investment in useless projects.

So now we’ve got addicted to the Kool-Aid. We can’t easily raise rates to control inflation. Indeed UK real rates of around minus 6 per cent last autumn apparently nearly collapsed UK pension and mortgage markets. The IMF warned this week that rates held near current levels might produce a financial crisis, and who knows what further horrors like Silicon Valley Bank lurk in the depths? But equally, we can’t keep pushing rates even lower and printing more money each time there’s a problem. There’s just too much inflation and debt around.

Sooner or later that crisis will come. Then Western governments, deprived of other policy tools, may have no option than to take direct control of the financial sector to avoid a crash. If that happens, we won’t live in a free market economy. Governments will direct investment. Productivity will fall further. Whether you can make a living won’t depend on your own abilities but on whether government thinks you are worthy or not.

There is one thing we could do to avoid this grim prospect. Get into a virtuous circle. Reform to drive up productivity so that we can withstand higher interest rates. Then those more normal interest rates can start to get investment and the price mechanism going again.

But we’ve left it very late. Tinkering won’t raise our productivity growth from 0.5 per cent to 3 or 4 per cent. We need to do not one thing but everything: change planning to deal with our backlog of four million homes; stop wasting money on energy companies that don’t generate energy; bring market reforms to our wasteful and expensive public so-called services; build more roads, ports and airports with private money; get spending and tax down and simplify the tax system; remove burdens on job creation; incentivise education that pays off rather than worthless degrees … the list is endless.

At the moment, any single one of these seems beyond us, and the total reform programme is well beyond the current Overton window of politics. Unless we can change that, we will slip further into genteel decline.

This week, Liz Truss rightly pointed out that the West is losing touch with the economic fundamentals that made us succeed. All in the Conservative Party can surely agree on that. If so, we can start explaining why, and how we are going to fix it, in our election manifesto. It’s not the moment to tell voters: “It will all be fine. Don’t worry, we have your back.” That won’t prepare the country for the very difficult decisions that are coming. We must tell it like it is and get a mandate for change, or be swept away by the storm.

[FD2]

A frightening prospect isn't it? A succession of politicians of all parties seemed unable to see the bigger picture and just continued with the age old habit of tinkering each Budget Day.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I don't think party affiliation matters a jot any more. They are all incompetent.
Doesn't frighten me; folks round here are a pretty self-sufficient lot. Probably the same with you.
However, people in the UK I know mostly can't face talking about it.
Locally, we vote Conservative Provincially and Liberal Federally.
The Liberal Feds send us more money, the Conservative provincials waste it more slowly than the others.
As a consequence, my Province showed a budget surplus the last couple of years, which the Cons promptly gave straight back to the populus, in cash, to buy the election we've just had.
But none of the political parties have policies that will change the fundamental problems.
I follow the situation in the USA and UK since they tend to influence Canadian politics.
I'm especially interested in Scotland because it's part of the UK, but small. I think the biggest problems will show up in smaller countries first.
Getting the view from Spain is handy. Knowing what is really going on in Italy would be very useful.

[OFSO]

I wish I knew what was going on in Spain. I wish anyone knew, especially the prime minister who is supposed to be running the country.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

As Sturgeon is currently proving, modern leaders are convinced of the following.

That they are the best person to lead the country.
That anything that goes wrong is a plot by the opposition, or caused by them being surrounded by idiots, or a completely unforeseeable random event.
That no one else could do better, and indeed, therefore, their every act is worthy of the highest praise.
That everyone else is either taking the same 'goodies' they are, or would if they had the opportunity. They deserve them.

Psychologically, they are all two-year olds.
It is not possible to reason with them. They will keep yelling until you agree with them.

[OFSO]

I see a potential male blood donor was turned away from a Scottish NHS centre after refusing to answer a question whether or not he was pregnant.

[CharlieOneSix]

A local fellow retired English pilot went for his Pneumococcal vaccine jab here in North East Scotland recently. He was asked for his ethnicity and had to choose from a list provided. The list included Scottish and other choices but English or British were not one of them. The only close choice available was Other White. He did as I would have done and refused to answer. It reminded me of my teenage years in a Roman Catholic school where having been brought up in the Church of England I was referred to as a non-Catholic. I got into a lot of trouble on many occasions when I said I was not, and would never be, a non anything.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

A further report said that the NHS had resolved the pregnancy problem by rewording the question.
The wording now reads "Are you pregnant (etc), if Not Applicable, tick No."
They will thus report upwards that everybody answered the question, whilst telling the potential donor that there is a Not Applicable category.
They are lying to both both sides of the argument.

What other response does one expect from bureaucrats?

Of course, the end result is that the few remaining people who have any faith in bureaucracy, are now fewer.
And the bureaucrats involved are now on some more people's "little list".
They'll none of them be missed.