Chaos in Scotland.

[ian16th]

Couldn't we have a referendum in England and just ask the inhabitants if they still wanted the Scots in the Union?

+1

[Pontius Navigator]

Couldn't we have a referendum in England and just ask the inhabitants if they still wanted the Scots in the Union?

As I said before, unlike Brexit, I think the politicos know they would not get the answer they want.

If Scotland is such a wonderful place to live, why do so many Scots live elsewhere? I enjoyed my 9 years there, the wonderful summer evenings in the beach at 11 at night, the skiing in winter and the milder climate; I did my planting from mid February. I had a secure job.

[larsssnowpharter]

I also have fond memories: learning to sail in Findhorn Bay in the 60s, diving in the sea lochs and feasting on freshly caught scallops and boiled new potatoes, playing golf late at night. But skiing. In Scotland? You're joking. Miserable wet snow, short pistes with rocks sticking through!

One actually married a bonnie lass from Dundee (she would kill me for that. She was from Brought Ferry. It's a bit like Brighton and Hove actually). I believe she has gone back there

[Boac]

Ah! The 'Ferry' - yes, definitely up-market from the city of balanced personalities.

Skiing in Scotland - spent a night in my car at Glenshee in the 80s with Mrs and 2 kids - really enjoyed that....

[4mastacker]

Couldn't we have a referendum in England and just ask the inhabitants if they still wanted the Scots in the Union?

+2

[ian16th]

All England needs from them is a deal like the Cypriot SBA's, around a couple of military establishments and then wave Bye!

[prospector]

https://www.msn.com/en-nz/news/world/ri ... sed-covid-

Something not right, and will not delete.

[FD2]

Here is why Nicola Sturgeon's sums do not add up - Brian Monteith
Hooray for Holyrood! If there was an Oscar for Best Actress in the Scottish Parliament elections I would have to nominate Nicola Sturgeon.
By Brian Monteith
Monday, 5th April 2021, 7:00 am https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/c ... e=hs_email

She can take a script of utter fantasy and make her audience believe it is actual reality. Alice Through the Looking Glass would be an ideal movie for her – with a starring role as the Red Queen, allowing her to shout “off with their heads” at former close friends whom she now has no use of.

In the first full week of campaigning we saw Nicola rattling out promises like a nuclear-powered Gatling Gun she can have no possible idea how to keep. Electoral bribe after electoral bribe was fired in every direction to make sure she hit a target somewhere – but who’s paying for the ammo? The election give-aways might be costed but how they will be afforded is beyond her ken.

Fortunately some people are able to work these things out and Sturgeon has been found out – and by an unimpeachable source. Not by what passes for the spoilsport opposition (who would say critical things, wouldn’t they) but by Hall of Fame inductees and all-time Oscar winners for public finance analysis – the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

In a seminal deconstruction of Scottish Government spending the IFS has spoken and the great oracle should have had the effect of a bromide – but I fear the Scottish electorate is in no mood to hear the truth. After a year of counter-productive lockdowns and tiers for fears that did not prevent the spread of Covid-19 but only delayed it, people want to hear good news, like going to the Ziegfeld Follies at the time of the Great Depression.

So the fact the IFS confirmed Scots have some thirty per cent more spent on them than the average UK person – thanks to taxpayers outside Scotland – has most likely washed over most people’s heads and was certainly no deterrent to Sturgeon announcing the spending yet more money she does not have.

The photograph of the week that summed up the falsity of the First Spender’s pitch was a side-on view of her being interviewed showing her standing on a green plastic crate. Promises from the SNP leader are literally not what they seem – while the view from the lens showed Sturgeon’s coiffured bobbing head, without the prop she would not have been visible at all. A metaphor for our times no less. Without the support of Boris Johnson and his UK Treasury, Scottish Government spending and all those freebies being offered would not be seen either.

But a star actor is only as good as her next show and Sturgeon has to keep delivering or she will fall over. So now – according to those chaps at the IFS – Sturgeon is making long term spending commitments on ephemeral here-today-but-not-tomorrow additional UK funding designed to help people and businesses cope with Covid. So not only is her government creaming-off funds meant to help people in distress to attract more votes to go her way she is making commitments that cannot be sustained when that Westminster tap is turned off. The Sturgeon plot line is to give out false promises like Imelda Marcos collects shoes.

But the obvious plot hole is that in time this approach just makes secession from Britain even more unaffordable than it was last week – but does Sturgeon care? Why should she if she regains power but is not allowed to have a legal referendum anyway? Referendums are not her purview.

What we are seeing is a complete disconnect between a politician and real life lived by real people.

Let us recall the landscape we live in; the worst level of drug deaths in not just the UK but the whole of Europe. That’s right, the continent of Europe.

Scotland, a country where if you are homeless you are three times more likely to die than if you live in the rest of the UK. Scotland, a country where rising life expectancy across the rest of the UK becomes a fall in 40 per cent of our local authority areas.

Yet the offer is not to fix what’s wrong but to offer more promises and she will deliver on them. Like those previous promises of abolishing the Council Tax, ending student debt and delivering class sizes of 18 pupils. There was a cracker this week when Sturgeon promised three new cancer centres to deal with her lockdown-inspired treatment backlog, ignoring that last year she promised two such centres by this Spring and they do not yet exist.

We are asked to trust Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP. Trust? To borrow from the legendary advertising campaign, If Carlsberg did scandals… then the SNP would be the worthy example for filming.

[Pontius Navigator]

Not to rubbish Brian's article, for instance promising two cancer centres last year (and delivery now) and promising three centres now, is not unique.

Politicians of all flavours have always done this double counting. A promise of £5m yesterday can be £15m tomorrow but in reality is only £10m more, 15 just sounds better.

Pay rises used to be another: Forces get 7% pay rise becomes 3% later on in year 1 and the balance next year.

This from 1981

Since May 1979 the average pay of the armed forces has increased by 37 per cent. This figure includes the increase of 8·3 per cent. originally due to be paid on 1st April 1980 as the second stage of the 1979 pay award, but which this Government met immediately upon taking office and backdated to 1st April 1979. We estimate that over the same period the index of retail prices has risen by about 36 per cent.

Shall we say 1% in real terms?

[Magnus]

We should be reminding wee Krankie that if she had her way and insisted on joining the EU procurement policy on vaccines, she'd be responsible for the death of many of her cannon-fodder supporters.

[FD2]

What a worm.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/0 ... l-condemn/

Why aren't Scottish voters appalled by Salmond's cowardly refusal to condemn Russian terrorism?

To some Scottish nationalists, Salisbury - or indeed anywhere South of the border - is just a very long way away

Tom Harris

In my youth, a friend told me that the IRA had a policy of not attacking targets in Scotland. Since I had little interest in politics at the time, I thought nothing more of it because I didn’t understand the point my friend was trying to make.

It was only when, many years later, I discovered he was a lifelong Scottish nationalist and was planning to vote Yes in the 2014 independence referendum that I recalled the ancient conversation; had he been suggesting that the Provos had looked more kindly on Scotland, saw it, like Ireland itself, as a victim of English imperialism?

And so what if they did? I was as outraged by terrorist attacks in Hyde Park and on the Brighton Grand Hotel as I would have been had they occurred in Glasgow or Edinburgh. Why bother even making the observation about the apparent lack of Scottish targets unless this “policy” – if policy it was – was something to be welcomed, even praised?

This seems ever so slightly more relevant today as Alex Salmond’s prevarications over Russian perfidy make the headlines. Since he lost his seat in the Commons in 2017, the former first minister and SNP leader has made a living from the Kremlin-backed Russia Today (RT) broadcaster. Now, as he campaigns for his new Alba party in the Scottish Parliament elections next month, he finds himself subject to the occasional media inquiry which can’t be dealt with using his customary bluff and bluster. When asked by a reporter whether Russia was responsible for the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018, he refused three times to pin the blame on his former paymasters

[FD2]

https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/ ... e=hs_email

Analysis: Nicola Sturgeon's worst nightmare as Alex Salmond scuppers majority hopes
Nicola Sturgeon’s worst fear of missing out on an overall majority at this election due to the actions of her former mentor could be realised following the latest Savanta ComRes poll for The Scotsman.

Should the votes on May 6 be the same as this poll, not only will the SNP miss out on an overall majority, but the voices hoping to push the merits and strength of an ill-defined ‘supermajority’ in a pro-independence Holyrood will also be excluded.

It is only one poll and therefore caution should be applied, but given three polls have put Alba’s support at three per cent, it is likely the party’s ceiling of support – as it stands – is around five per cent, but there are many weeks of the campaign still to go.

Fingers crossed then.

[Undried Plum]

When asked by a reporter whether Russia was responsible for the Novichok poisonings in Salisbury in 2018, he refused three times to pin the blame on his former paymasters

I've never been on the payroll of any Russian entity, but if you were to ask me three times, or thirty times, to say that Mr Scripal was [nearly] murdered by Russian secret squirrels using military grade nerve agent I'd say that it is the UK government's story which is *****.

Look again at the timeline of HMG's fairy story. It is totally non-credible.

Getting back to how **** up Scotland is ....

[FD2]

So Salmond bears no blame for how **** up Scotland is today? The two GRU boys were just tourists wanting to see Salisbury Cathedral? It's OK to send assassins to another country to kill defectors because they are 'traitors' as Putin would say? Skripal was 'nearly' murdered because he only got a mild dose of the 'medicine' but the woman who thought it was perfume was just unlucky - I expect the SS or SIS screwed up by leaving the bottle in a public place in their haste to get back to London.

RT is a Russian propaganda organisation employing useful fools, so it's no wonder Smart Alec wouldn't question the overwhelming evidence in the Skripal case - conspiracy fans think it was all a UK/US set up anyway.

Maybe some day, under a Freedom of Information query, the UK Government will come clean and tell us that it was all a nasty operation, along with the Americans, to discredit the nice Mr Putin...there's such a lot of terrible defamation of his character isn't there?

Now back to reality...

[Undried Plum]

It's OK to send assassins to another country to kill defectors because they are 'traitors' as Putin would say?

Offtopic, but I'm convinced that Scripal wanted to go home to his Rodina while his mother was still alive and that the "tourists" were there to assist him to do so.

If Russia had wanted to kill him, they had six years of his imprisonment to arrange a staircase accident or a prisoner stabbing or a self-hanging or whatever.

In hundreds of spy-swaps, across well over half a century, there is not a single example of either side killing one of their own swapees after a swap. Not one, not even Scripal.

[FD2]

Not completely off topic as Putin is involved, in that RT employed Salmond for years - rather dubious employer for a man of his intellect?

I think Alec Salmond is an amazing wordsmith and knocks spots off most of the useless bunch of brain addled oafs who swan around Westminster and Holyrood. He is also a keen independence supporter and as such must take his share of the blame for what is happening in Scotland today. He has gained support from some, purely because he is standing up against the Wee Nyaff but his goal is still the same.

BTW, Putin has publicly claimed that the only way to treat those who have betrayed the new Russia is death. Skripal and daughter must have been a little worried about that, so it must have been the Security Service that tried to stop them returning to Mother Russia with a dose of Novichok that they copied from somewhere else in the World?

[FD2]

Dearie Me! England's to blame yet again - of course!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... cash-days/

SNP’s flagship housing fund runs out of cash in days

SNP ministers have blamed the UK Treasury for cuts to the fund
By Georgina Hayes 9 April 2021 • 3:46pm

The Scottish Government’s flagship First Home Fund has run out of money in just eight days, in what opposition parties have branded a “spectacular misjudgement”.

The £60m fund, which lends people up to £25,000 towards their deposit, was launched on April 1 but was closed on Thursday afternoon after being inundated with applications. The initiative is now “fully committed” for 2021/22.

The news has been described as “devastating” for thousands of Scots hoping to get onto the property ladder, with the lack of availability of 95 per cent LTV mortgages making it “incredibly difficult” for first time buyers to access mortgage finance - despite “strong evidence” showing that owning a home is cheaper than renting.

Funding for the scheme was slashed by 66.5 per cent from £200m last year, with SNP ministers blaming the UK Treasury for the cuts.


I'm sorry for the first time buyers in Scotland - it's just the same here in New Zealand with rampant house price inflation putting many houses out of reach for them.

[om15]

Adam Drummond, an associate director at Opinium, revealed while there is a strong chance the SNP will win a majority in the election and most people in each UK country believe Scottish independence could happen soon, the "we want you to stay" result from the rest of the Union is plummeting.

Before the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, nearly two-thirds of people in England and Wales told the pollster that wanted Scotland to remain part of the UK.

But in the most recent poll, just a third (33 percent) opposed Scotland becoming independent.

Mr Drummond said: “With our recent Scottish polling showing a strong chance of an SNP majority, most people in each country of the UK now think it likely Scotland will vote to become independent in the near future, but there has not been the strong ‘we want you to stay’ result from the rest of the UK.

“In September 2014, just before the referendum, 63 percent of people in England and Wales told Opinium they wanted Scotland to vote to stay part of the United Kingdom.

"In April 2021 only 33 percent said they opposed Scotland becoming independent (albeit in a slightly differently structured question), but this is an indicator of how the subject being high profile for over seven years has impacted views in the rest of the United Kingdom.”

Interesting information here


https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics ... ion-latest


Meanwhile

[4mastacker]

Cheaper than Buckie and with the same effect??

[FD2]

It had to happen:


Alex Salmond 'stoking anti-English feelings with Braveheart video on breaking spines of oppressors'

Alba claims endorsement from Robert the Bruce in bizarre video which speaks of breaking "the spine of English superiority”

Alex Salmond has been accused of pandering to extreme Scottish nationalists after his new party released a campaign video which spoke of breaking "the spine of English superiority” and he claimed the support of a King who died nearly seven centuries ago.

The former First Minister’s Alba Party on Monday broadcast a supposed endorsement from Robert the Bruce, who successfully led Scotland during the first War of Independence against England in the fourteenth century.

In the clip, 'The Bruce', who actually died in 1329, predicts that Mr Salmond’s new rival party to the SNP would “unite the clans”.

The bizarre video was in fact voiced by Angus Macfadyen, an actor who played the Scottish King in the 1995 blockbuster Braveheart, and is a supporter of Mr Salmond’s party.

Apologists may claim that it is all part of the cut and thrust of political campaigning to invoke 'The Bruce' (AKA Mel Gibson the American anti-Semitic nutter). To my mind it simply gets the knuckle draggers and other low intellects worked up to violence and intimidation - a re-run of Inderef1 in fact.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/20 ... art-video/

Here is Braveheart Mark 2 minus the makeup: