Mixed Feelings Scotland

Two topics today.  One, the attempt by a journalist at  the National to make independence a class war and two, the unthinking accusations of xenophobia related to Teresa May’s Brexit speech.

 

A possible third is Ruth Davidson’s objections to grammar schools in Scotland, because she went to a comprehensive in Buckhaven and turned out OK.  Good for Ruth.  She is actually from Largo, which has some of the most expensive undersized property I have seen on my travels in search of a house around Scotland.  Ruth’s upbringing was far from deprived.

 

Neither was mine, but unlike my siblings I also attended a comprehensive school in Glasgow.  Within the first two weeks, I had been identified and targetted as a ‘snob’ by the kids from the estate, which is notorious but basically just a bit odd in its defensive class-based self supression.  One of the exs, a builder who was earning at least seven hundred pounds a week, claimed that I came from a ‘big, posh house’ and was to be treated like shit  because ‘he had no capital and needed a council hoose.’  This is not an unusual attitude from his neck of the woods, but like me, he was considered an outsider because he had actually achieved something and so we ended up in the same rejected social circle.

 

Making independence a class issue is, as I have said before a really big mistake.  That means making aspiration a bad thing, and we know from experience that killing aspiration kills the country.  Having been at the mercy of inverse snobbery for my entire life, between school and searching for the work I actually studied for in Glasgow, I can tell you that people like me have a great deal to worry about if you start making independence about class.

 

If I had got the career I studied for, I would have been able to afford the children I could not afford to have.  I would have been able to afford the pension I do not have, and if I had been able to do this in Scotland, I would have been able to support my elderly parents whilst I did that.  Instead what I and many others got was a bin bag full of rejection letters.  No I am not kidding – I actually took it to the jobcentre at one point for a back to work interview whilst claiming benefits and they told me to take it away because it was too much for them.  One DIY supermarket manager who actually took the time to interview me said he had had much the same experience as a middle class Hindu in Glasgow. Instead of the work he studied for, he eventually took a job shelf stacking and eventually became manager of the same store.

 

In case you assume that I am going to talk about ‘British jobs for British workers’ as being a xenophobic thing, I am not.  Like me, my friends struggled to find work, and either moved out of the country, stacked shelves, wasted their education working in bars and gradually gave up hope of getting anything out of their lives that they actually wanted.  Graduates don’t tend to talk about it, because it is a source of personal failure and miserable embarrassment, and nobody ever feels sorry for you or makes it part of their ‘class struggle for the worker.’  During the protests about nursery nurses many years ago, I remember tearing a strip off my super lefty friend for his protestations over £18k a year for nursery nurses, when people who study for far longer get no consideration at all.

 

So, according to Twitter today, apparently the rights of migrants are superior to the rights of people who were born here, who support their relatives here, and whose lives were constantly maligned here.  I lost count of the number of  bitches I encountered in temporary work who sneered at my ‘posh’ voice as I did their filing.

 

Thanks a lot Scotland.  For goodness sake don’t bother getting an education, or working to actually pay for anything because according to the latest ‘class struggle’ theory, anything you actually do with your life will be taken away in taxes to pay for people who more sensibly had babies at fifteen and got themselves a council house in order to sneer at the ‘snobs’ who actually wanted to work.

 

This is not what my great grandfather was fighting for when he attracted those tanks to George Square.  He would not be impressed, although, like my experience of the wider public, my father was rejected by his revolutionary communist family when he started his business as being against the interests of the masses.  This is not progressive, and it does not provide opportunity or widespread growth.  It simply encourages a friction which is good for nobody, and doesn’t get us anywhere. If you want suppressed wages, suppressed lives and a dearth of opportunity, you are welcome to carry on without further input.

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Shifting Cultural Boundaries – John Cleese gate

Shifting Cultural boundaries – John CleeseGate

It has been a very hard week.  I have finally finished this piece:

 

 

I think the Misery Mandala went rather well.  It is not cheap, but nothing worthwhile is.  I refuse to undercharge as I would rather wait than work for no money.  Besides which, I have to look on any work that sells as working capital.

 

I am working on three design concept strands at the moment, so I should bring out a catalogue of sorts towards the spring of next year.  It is a lot of work, but I think it is a worthwhile idea to bring out an interior design concept to distribute to people who may be confused by my lack of compromise in terms of interior fashions.  I cannot stand lightbulbs in fishbowls, for example, so I am unlikely to be the next Kelly Hoppen.

 

I was attacked by two Scottish Nationalists last week for my comments on the quick way of building our economy to withstand the demands of remaining in Europe.  As someone who has a keen interest in Cultural Economics, I think grumpy old men should stop looking at their wrinkles and assuming that they know better, because a steady ‘diet’ of BBC and mutual backstabbing is unlikely to broaden their minds.  Talking of which, I would like to advise that you be very gentle with John Cleese, who rather stuck his foot in it with his complaints about Scottish journalists this week.

 

John Cleese has lived through a period where the British Empire died, where Scottish people were considered cannon fodder, and then whingers who were to be starved of income for political purposes, and he has benefitted enormously from Britain just the way it was.  He cannot be expected to evolve, because he is in the downward spiral phase of his life.

 

Yet that empire phase was considered charming by many Scots as well as English.  Only a week or two ago my mother suddenly chastised me for my lack of conservatism, since she was brought up in a militarist, monarchist, conservative family who struggled to feed themselves and the poor down the hall for decades via extremely hard work. Her father died very young thanks to damage sustained in WW1.  Her brother did very well during WW2 and like many of their generation, they remember the war as being a paradoxically happy period in British life, when everyone worked together.

 

What we are seeing at the moment, is a massive cultural shift, not to the left or to the right, but to a consideration of what is best for the future.  Cleese would like to see a return to the past, like many Englishmen and Brexit voters.  This is unlikely, but a stronger sense of English nationalism is not something that as Scottish people, we should misunderstand and call racism.  They want to have some national pride.  So would we.

 

It is a nonsense to suggest that nobody should express feelings of nationalism when we as Scottish nationalists are doing that when we express our wish for independence.  As I was saying this morning, to suggest that curtailing free movement in Europe limits graduates is also a nonsense when Scottish graduates have to move to England to get work experience, frequently stay and run newspapers, (and indeed the whole UK in the case of Scottish politicians) and only after acquiring experience in English supported businesses come back to work at home.  English rule made sure that was the case by the simple method of destroying our industrial economy.

 

The whole point of independence is that we can change that, create a real economy based on the principle that Scottish, not English, culture is superior when in Scotland.

 

We need to regain our sense  of Scottish pride and encourage greatness at home.  Taking the piss out of each other, expressing whining outrage at the rantings of a grumpy old man like Cleese, or rising to the bait when media figures choose to be offensive is not helpful.

 

I was extremely irritated by the two nats that had a go at me for making some very pertinent points last week and I actually considered leaving the SNP as being a tiresome, parochial and small minded party, until I considered that both of the men trying to discourage me were from the old school, tartan trouser and folk music generation that we as a country need to grow out of, in stature and mentality.

 

So, I implore you, think bigger and educate the boors, rather than simply labelling them and moving on.  If you find yourself getting annoyed, take a step back and look at the situation again. You are right, and they are wrong.  Be patient. be broad minded and stay sharp.  It is going to be a hard two years.

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Talking about Indy again

Ok I see some people have missed the point of what I have been saying in the last few posts about voter psychology.

 

For the benefit of the people who do not understand what I am saying, here it is again:

People saying no to independence, do so on the basis that any problem is somebody else’s responsibility.  This is why they like to talk about how much they hate Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.
They are choosing who to complain about when they vote.  Politics is like a spectator sport for most people, and they have no conception of how to make or visualise economic decision making, far less have any notion of how economic strategies are created and carried out.  I do, hence the rather conservative looking post yesterday.  The fact is, that the conservatives used to have a clue how to grow the economy.  They are going through a particularly sleazy patch at the moment, which is what happens every time they feel safe.
Therefore it is pointless to say independence will be great, we get to administer our own money, because any question that mistakes are their fault makes the entire idea utterly ghastly.

What people are failing to understand is that the half of the population who do not want independence see it as a threat.  A threat to their lives, their properties, the nature of Scotland, and most importantly their status.  You are not dealing with forward or outward looking people, you are dealing with people who want everything to stay the same.

 

As someone very familiar with people who are terrified of change, they will do anything to discredit you, your views, any question that you might be right will be rejected until it is far too late.  We need to burst that bubble.

 

So, my suggestion, as per my post yesterday, is a pre-prepared vision of how independence will work based on harsh reality, and based on the idea that these people will not in fact lose their houses, pensions, summer holiday, naff car, or tasteless furniture.  A brutal yet soporific vision of a realistic approach to economic growth which enables the disenfranchised poor, and does not empty the pockets of the workers, savers, property holders so that they do not fear change.

 

By far the biggest hurdle is assuring them that they will maintain their status.  Many people who have had more comfortable lives fear losing that more than anything, so I would suggest concentrating on the several thousand civil service jobs that will be created rather than simply saying we can grow the economy would be in order.  More money in circulation means more nice restaurants for them to eat at, and inflated property prices.  Try taking that tack, because the very nature of their resistance to change, is that they only understand the world as it applies to them.

 

If you still don’t understand that, I cannot help you. Sigh.

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Realities of Independence

I was avoiding writing this, because it is a complicated economic post, and it may dissuade some SNP members from their enthusiasm, but since I am a bit fed up today, I think I will write it now.

 

As my Slovenian friend tells me, it is likely that the Uk will say anything to stop Scotland from voting for independence, and there is a huge chunk of the population who find it much easier to simply do as they are told in order to avoid the unexpected.  The SNP have always been extremely good at avoiding being left or right, but some of the ice cream policies I mentioned yesterday indicate that they are leaning to the left.

 

There is nothing at all wrong with leaning to the left, but it is not what you require when you are building a country.  Many of the policies they are pursuing today are anti-austerity with good reason – independence is a good idea and they would like you to vote for it.

 

Having said this, there has to be a firm system of priorities in order to get Scotland to pay for itself in a short period of time.  Priorities which are not at all attractive, cuddly or pleasant.

 

In order to attract investment and create jobs, for example, particularly unskilled jobs, since we lost so many of those after the smoking ban and after the deprioritisation of manufacturing and industry during the Thatcher era, several harsh and ugly decisions have to be made, including:

not being particularly fussy about what gets built on brownfield sites, and reclassifying some greenfield sites to accommodate companies willing to employ people. Objections to developments such as the Pink Flamingo development at Balloch would have to be ignored, and many sleepy beauty spots would have to be developed. Removal of the EU VAT imposition on the refurbishment of often historic property would at least preserve some quality buildings.
welcoming low paid jobs – I have never been a fan of the minimum wage, since I started work without it and out-earned my employer within a fortnight.  People have to get on the employment ladder somehow, however for this to work properly it has to be implemented alongside:
radical housing benefit changes, with landlords given incentives for developing their properties in the form of a tie-in between property value and rents.  This would also greatly ease the hardship we are about to face in the form of the massive homelessness problem from November, when housing benefit for families is to be capped, and in some cases removed entirely, some estimates are predicting half a million homeless children from November onwards under the Tories. This would also send families out of the city to larger, cheaper properties in areas which need children to keep schools and medical centres going.
awareness of the over-education of the Scottish workforce.  As someone who has a very good degree, which I was repeatedly told made me over-qualified in Scotland, and whose friends went to England for their initial post qualifying jobs or stacked shelves, I am all too aware of the number of people in Scotland who have never got to actually use their education.  It is all very well becoming a mecca for students but they need to have something to do after they qualify other than gnash their teeth over the welcoming and funding of overseas graduates to encourage them to stay in Scotland when so many of us get nothing out of our pile of debt.
As I have said before, Scotland needs at least one generation of factories in order to beget the second or third generation of supporting services to be able to afford nice policies like the extension of childcare and free prescriptions.
Scotland being welcoming to all – unless you provide a clear plan of how you are going to double the number of jobs and encourage the small to medium size business sector, this will not last long.
Certain sectors, such as engineering and shipbuilding, are greatly aided by coastal commerce, which has been largely destroyed by the EU agreement to disallow Scottish fishing or place it under quota.  We have already lost a great deal of the skills we formerly had because of this, and this needs to be rectified.
IT and games manufacture is a good, skill rich area to concentrate on, as is financial services, since the banks in England are looking elsewhere.  These are east coast industries at present, and it would be wise to continue with what works.

You cannot simply make popular and worthy sounding policies without paying for them, and indicating to no voters, who are often worried homeowners and forelock tugging employees, that you plan to do this by making their lives more difficult is not likely to make independence a popular option.  A clear decisive way of making Scotland pay for itself without oil is something that you should have a team of economists working on plans for NOW rather than later.  This is exactly what I mean by ‘ice-cream’ policies – policies that sound worthy, but it is unclear how you envisage this working for the Scottish taxpayer unless there are a lot more of them.

 

Under Labour, local councils have made polices which mean you are penalised for having savings or owning your house as it is.  It is stretching credulity to suppose that Tory leaning No voters are looking fondly at expensive but popular options at this point.  It might be wise to provide some reassurance.

 

 

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Scottish Economic Misunderstandings

OK let me first say that the news from Alex Salmond that there is a provisional date of Autumn 2018 for another referendum in Scotland is extremely welcome. I am happy to see that the SNP, unlike the Conservative party, are paying attention to the clock.

 

There is a rumour going around on Twitter today that some unnamed ‘energy tycoon’ saying that an independent Scotland would need to be fracked.  This is frankly nonsense, spouted by someone who is about as far from independent as you can get.

 

Fracking affects the water table.  Fracking a country with a long established and unique whisky industry, and limited crop growing potential would be suicidal.  I have yet to see an actual commitment from the SNP against fracking, TTIP or CETA.  Quite the reverse, the emails I receive from the rather corporate looking Alyn Smith indicate that they are firmly on the fence on these issues. There is still time for a Scottish Independence Party to be formed with a proper commitment to the protection of Scotland, and I am wondering whether it is something to be considered.

 

Why is everybody ignoring the freely available information on this?  Because there is money involved.

 

Historically speaking, Scotland’s main economic issue has always been one of cashflow.  In fact, the union was only able to be wangled due to one of our poor cashflow periods.  At the moment, there is a deficit, which somehow sits alongside the underspend of half a billion we also hear about.  This is not unusual. If you compare the proportion of our deficit with that of the UK, you can see that we are not doing badly at all.  This deficit is something we would have to focus on if we finally get our country back.

 

What everybody, on either side seems to be missing is the matter of administration and management.  The whole point of independence, after all, is that in order to get control over our own affairs, we need to split up with our warmongering, heavily spending and messy English boyfriend, who at the moment seems to be arsing about and arguing over who gets what chair, in an effort to distract each other from ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING CONSTRUCTIVE.

 

Given that the Conservatives are likely to have a great deal of individual money tied up in deals which depend on TTIP, TISA and CETA, especially our Prime Minister, we cannot afford to sit and wait to see what these idiots are going to do next.  We need to persuade the golfers, the cricketers, the new-build buying status freaks, who have historically done what they are told whilst voting Tory or New Labour, that it is time to cut Westminster loose.  So, ask yourselves and then ask them:

Do you like living next to England’s nuclear deterrent?  This affects almost 900,000 people, or 80% of the population, depending on how you view the kill zone on the map.
Do you want your water supply polluted, your house values to plummet, and the whisky industry destroyed by fracking?
Do you want to sit and wait to see what England is doing about Brexit, or do you want to make a firm decision about your future?  There is money to be made, whether you believe in Europe, or Scexit.
Are you capable of imagining a country which has access to all the taxes raised here, which could be used to reconstitute ailing areas such as Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Argyll? If we are prepared to pitch in and get these areas moving into industry and manufacturing again, we have far less to worry about in terms of affordability.
Do you particularly want to store the nuclear waste for Hinkley, since no doubt we will be doing it at some point? They are cutting off support for renewables to force dependency on nuclear power that they have personally invested in, in the case of the Conservatives.
Do you understand that England has already cut off any international routes from Scotland’s ports, and that they have actually been at war with us for decades?
Do you want to witness the slow death of the tourist trade, as England seeks to foster even more bad relations than they are mustering already?
As we can see from the new labelling of food in Tesco, Morrisons and Marks and Spencers, they are now seeking to make the Saltire a symbol of rebellion.  This is classic cultural warfare, and we need to take a firm stance on this behaviour. Exactly the same tactics they used in India.

These points alone should raise some eyebrows, rather than getting you annoyed trying to talk to a stupid person who does not want to understand, because they fear change.  They fear change, because they fear losing their status, in many cases.

 

The key to the independence debate is accounting – Scotland’s cashflow issue does not mean we need vastly more money to get started on rebuilding our destroyed economy.  It means we have to be a lot smarter, and a lot more generous towards areas which have been starved of investment for decades.  It means we revive the coast, we revive towns like Kilmarnock, we make it extremely attractive for people to come here and invest.  These are economic decisions, not things we are incapable of doing.  We do not need fracking.  We do not want fracking.  We want our place in the world, and we want to stop listening to people who are only filling their own pockets at our expense.

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EU VAT and Scotland

Here are some interesting articles which you should be aware of in relation to Europe and the UK.  I was, I thought, reliably informed by a Chartered Accountant, no less, that Brexiteers were saving poor people from having to pay 5 percent extra for their food because the monsters at the EU were going to take away zero ratings for VAT across Europe.  This story is fairly long, so bear with me, and open the links as you go for later perusal.
EU threatens to abolish zero VAT regime 2005 (Ireland)  This link will tell you that the EU planned to remove zero ratings for children’s clothing, but not foodstuffs.
Wikipedia EU value added Tax See the section ‘zero rate derogation’

2016 EU VAT rates

The above will take you to rates paid across Europe.  You will find the United Kingdom at the bottom.  In fact under EU law, Ireland and the UK were allowed zero rated VAT on food back in 1991, and there are no official plans to remove the zero rating.  In fact EU papers have shown that they plan to extend it for countries with other concerns.
Scaremongering from the Mail 2012
Scaremongering from the Guardian 2016
Scaremongering from AccountingWeb 2014 (requires registration with location and phone number)
Scaremongering from Telegraph 2016  Showing David Cameron as heroic protector of zero VAT on food
Research from Government 2016 with ref to law and future This shows that in 2003 the EU did indeed plan to abolish zero ratings in order to streamline the system, but as they would require our agreement to achieve a consensus, did not press ahead with it.
TMF comparison of countries actual VAT changes showing a reduction of VAT in several countries.
EU Q and A on VAT April 2016

So, as we can see, the EU had no immediate plans to implement a VAT increase on food, to the EU minimum of five percent.  They had tried to broach the subject a few times, but since they are dealing with rather a lot of countries with differing concerns, (France wanted a VAT reduction on eating out, for example) they were not rocking the boat.
What will affect you, is Scotland leaving and rejoining in the event of independence, unless an agreement similar to the 1991 agreement can be reached to allow the implementation of zero rate derogation on things like children’s clothing and food.  I would suggest, therefore, that indyref 2 should be sooner, rather than later, in order to retain the possibility of maintaining the existing agreement on zero rated goods.

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@Gazthejourno and misogyny

Today I have worked hard on the mandala, and am feeling rather easily amused.  So I see that @Gazthejourno believes Glasgow, a city famed for its incredible Victorian and post Victorian architecture, a fact we like to keep secret from the rest of the UK, is a sewer and that the SNP are Nazis.  He is a lightweight tabloid journalist that believes he can bring about a defensive erection in the jock-hating English by mentioning haggis.

 

So, I have decided to add a misleading headline of my own to this charming man’s mention in my ongoing blog.  Today’s topic is about @Gazthejourno and mysogyny.  Now Gaz can enjoy the effects of people who cannot be bothered reading the post making assumptions about him, just as they do about the SNP.

 

For the uninitiated, the SNP are about as far from being Nazi as you can get.  So far, in fact, that the Union Jack is now associated with racism, insular thinking and not getting the government that you actually vote for.  Instead we are ‘ruled’ by a series of appallingly disinterested politicians, toeing in many cases, a line that they barely understand. “Oh but we have to starve the poor, it is right here in the party history.  The Conservatives are the party of conserving the status quo.”  Or even more tragically “Austerity is right, it must be, the Tories have always done it, so Labour should now do it too.”

 

Wanting our country back is nothing to do with hating English people.  Whilst feelings run high amongst a population sick of being lied to and sidelined, we have a tradition of not only welcoming, but marrying and bonking ‘foreigners’ who come to our shores.  Gaz has failed to do his homework. To be fair, he probably isn’t asked to do much, at whichever rag he scribbles for.

 

Now for misogyny.  I have had lengthy relationships with many misogynists.  They are under-rated, in some respects, as they are usually tragically inadequate and actually hang around for years, in between their attempts to have a relationship with a trophy bitch.  As trophy bitches do not particularly like being interrupted, and they certainly don’t like anyone questioning their right to other people’s money, these relationships inevitably do not last long.  Any question of them lashing out in anger is laughed off and the trophy bitch simply goes hunting for a better prospect.  I used to play backgammon with a money pig that had married one of these goddesses, and despite his constant whining, he was perfectly happy.

 

I have always assumed that these things come down to ‘daddy issues.’  A man who has always failed to please daddy, assumes a more exaggerated male posture than he is really capable of, choosing to spend his time on male pursuits in an effort to placate the male gender for his failure to impress.  The trophy bitch he marries, was very spoilt by daddy, who was away working to pay for her lipstick. Therefore her spending his money on ribbons and fripperies whilst he watches football or cricket suits both of them perfectly.

 

If he calls her crazy, this is fine because she is a woman, and incapable of doing anything sensible anyway.  This gives you a lot of leeway to do really silly things, and not be blamed for them because you are a woman.  If he cheats on her, it is because he is a big man and cannot help himself.  As long as a financial arrangement is reached, the relationship then survives.

 

Likewise, he does not have to grow out of it, and neither does she.  I have lost count of the number of elderly couples like this that I have come across in the course of my life.  It is a trade-off, like many other trade-offs in life.  Their divorce rate may be marginally higher, particularly in the USA, where trading her in for a younger model is a sign of wealth, but otherwise nobody has to change anything about themselves, and all remains fine.

 

As I have said, I have had twenty year or longer relationships with dudes just like this, so I know one when I see one, and it does not phase me one bit.  Weak men are fun, it is just different fun, and at the end of the day, as long as you have a few of them, does it really matter if they stray off to try another trophy bitch?  They always come back, sooner or later, for some comforting ass kicking.

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The Cyber and Media War against Scotland

Yet more evidence of the cyber and media war being waged against the Yes movement.

 

A few months ago, a contact in alternative health warned me that posting about alternative health was likely to attract trolls.  Paid trolls, who in the case of alternative health are paid per tweet to dispute anything you say.

 

I doubted this very much.  Pharmaceutical companies make an awful lot more money than alternative health practitioners, I reasoned, and there is little reason for them to be spending money on banks of people to dispute you if you happen to enjoy a bit of acupuncture or whatever.  I was wrong.

 

One afternoon, in particular, I spent several hours chatting (not even about health) with a person with such a superficial knowledge of health that I could not understand why he was continuing to even talk about it.  Fortunately, my American friend messaged me to say that he was a known paid troll, being paid by the tweet.  I just changed the subject and earned him a few dollars, since apart from his insistence on commercial medicine, he seemed reasonably pleasant.

 

Since we have an open admission of this practice being employed by rUK, I would caution my enthusiastic friends in the SNP and Yes movement to avoid lengthy conversations with planted individuals, obvious trolls.  I got one at the referendum with no content whatsoever, who bored on about nothing for an entire day, and one more recently who wanted to exploit my apparent ‘confusion’ with the announcement of the ‘Boris Experience’ project.

 

To digress slightly from today’s topic – the ‘Boris Experience’ project is nothing to do with my views on Scottish independence.  I saw an unhappy person being exploited, and I didn’t like it, any more than I like seeing Scotland being exploited.  Boris may, in may respects, be a natural enemy, but it does not mean I cannot show a bit of kindness when someone has taken advantage of him.

 

I am sure many in the Yes movement will recognise this.  We do not hate the English, we do not necessarily hate the UK establishment, we hate the exploitation and misinformation. Crushing it out of us just won’t work.  We are well aware that Scotland would clearly benefit from removal from the UK.  What concerns me at this point, having had a brief flush of sympathy for a kindred observant spirit, is that the UK cannot afford to lose Scotland, and they will continue with paranoid and frankly ridiculous attacks, designed to appeal to people’s feelings of anxiety, complacency, or more general lack of confidence.

 

If you happen to be English and reading this.  Scottish people are not stupid.  We have had a steep learning curve, and we are not likely to respond well to yet more misinformation and poor treatment.

 

If Westminster is desperate to keep us, they really need to come up with a better strategy.  Even the English are starting to complain about the quality of BBC reporting, for example.  Personally, if I was the SNP, I would be seriously considering putting MPs forward in England, but then, like Boris, I have big visions.

 

I am preparing a piece of work designed to present a potential solution, in the form of the usual cute series of riddles concealed within a deceptively simple story.  It will take a little while.

 

In the meantime, try not to engage with trolls, and think about ways of reaching the No voters that do not involve argument.  We got this.

 

 

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Scotland versus Trident

Ahh, the Trident vote.  Always a time of great unity in the UK.  I have witnessed one or two of these now, and the same things come up every time.  Oddly enough, nobody wants to discuss the kill zone, which will become relevant when the UK finally annoys another country enough for them to want to knock out our nuclear deterrent, or when we have an accident causing it to go off, and disturb the variety of detritus left by our crappy English boyfriend that just won’t go away.

 

trident

 

He keeps saying that he will change, but we know he won’t.  He hates the homeless, he hates the disabled, he thinks pensions are a waste of money better spent on more weapons.  We disagree on so many things.  Sigh.

 

Meanwhile, he thinks it is perfectly OK to use our stuff, and that we will not mind living on a ramshackle island, not talking to anyone and that we see no problem in living with his collection of guns and explosives.

 

All we want to do is a bit of travelling, maybe learn a language, chat to our neighbours but no.  We are supposed to sit in a grim flat, where we live with people we apparently have nothing in common with and put up with never being mentioned unless he is complaining about us.  This relationship SUCKS. It is time we discovered our self-worth and went out and found somebody better.

 

Seriously, my great grandparents were extremely radical on right and left, my grandparents lives were ruined by WW1, as a result my father was a very serious ideological pacifist.

 

I am, unfortunately a bit of a rebel and he took great care in ensuring that my priority was free thinking.  I can see the Conservative reasoning, particularly at this delicate time.

It is a message to the rest of the world that Britain is a strong and successful country, confident enough to vote for this expense when we have just voted for Brexit.
If we are foolish enough to run around with the USA, we need to protect ourselves in the event of a country or countries wishing to take out America’s foremost ally.
It is a bit like paying tribute to ensure America’s continued good wishes.
It ensures that we are still considered a world power. Very important considering our future trading partners, provided my conservative readers are sufficiently plugged in to understand what I and others have said re the Brexit trading opportunities.
In the event that America actually go right ahead and start actually using swastikas, we need to be able to protect ourselves from them.
Those precious little workers on Tyneside need a living. One of them just suggested to me on Twitter that pensions were a waste of money in comparison with gigantic weapons.  I presume that he is very young.
Who gives a shit about 80 percent of the Scottish population anyway?

No amount of entreaties or arguments would have changed the vote.  The indoctrination continues as I write, with Kevin McGuire and Harriet whatever-her-name-is-tory ranting about anything but Scotland on Sky.  So, you can take it from this that even Murdoch has jumped on the Scotland crushing bandwagon.  It is now imperative to learn how to out-move the media, and learn extremely fast.

 

We in Scotland are more interested in ground warfare than big threats.  We are notable worldwide for sending unusually clever soldiers who avoid wasting bullets when we can find other ways of doing things, and we produce exceptionally brave warriors. There is no reason why we cannot apply our spirit, our confidence, and our cunning to this increasingly nasty cultural warfare.

 

As for Theresa May saying she would press the button.  Yes, of course she would.  As Lord West said this afternoon, do you prefer dying knowing that someone out there is killing people, or that a ‘bastard like him’ is stopping them in their tracks? Japan, in particular has great respect for the UK as a small and extremely scary nation.  If you consider Trident from this perspective, then it looks pretty sensible.

 

If you consider the priorities of the UK however, this is not a nice country.  I used to be proud of Britain, as a fearless trader and high achiever.  Now I wonder.  It makes no sense to say you have no money for the elderly, the disabled, the people that we do not wish to employ, and then have plenty of money for killing people in other countries.  It makes no sense to irritate Scotland to the point of leaving.  It makes no sense to attempt to proclaim dominion over people who do not wish to wear an increasingly tarnished badge of honour.

 

My only hope currently, is that what is left of the UK see sense and draw up a trading agreement which does not allow CETA or TTIP, to reject fracking, since we are all aware of the massive oil strike off our coast that the UK chooses to not tell anyone about, and to be aware, that once the inevitable happens and the GMO experiments turn into chemical disasters, that we would be far better, as an island, to take some advice and revive what was once the greatest agronomy in the world, instead of blowing our money on submarines that we do not actually use.

 

 

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What fresh English Bullshit is this?

So, today Theresa May traversed the not-particularly perilous Georgian pavements of Edinburgh (they were built like that for the coaches and horses) and went for tea (but no scone, it’s Edinburgh) with Nicola Sturgeon.

 

I have a generic email from the SNP indicating that Scotland is to be included as they ‘explore the options’ for Brexit together. Nicola assures us that she is ‘exploring all options’ for Scotland to remain in the EU and, despite media rumours to the contrary, Europe is quite enthusiastic to have Scotland help pay the bailouts for Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal.

 

Theresa May was a remain supporter.  Scotland digging its heels in would make it far easier to scapegoat Scotland for not giving our charming English friends what they want. You can look forward to thousands, if not millions of English trolls, chavs and generally quite stupid people ranting about the whinging jocks getting their own way if Theresa decides to use the option of gifting Scotland the blame for not bothering to Brexit at all. Win-win, since the conservatives can then claim that it is not their fault that they cannot carry out the wishes of England and Wales.

 

It would be a lot better for Scotland if a deal can be cut to allow the UK to exit, in exchange for us going on our merry way, complete with our recovered resources.  This gives them the best of both, since the situation of our goods being shipped from England and showing up as English trade can simply be reversed.   The enormous munitions dump to the west of our coast could be cleared at the expense of the MOD, and I am sure they can enjoy the scrap value of a couple of centuries of rusting metal. We would like our sea back too, thank you very much.

 

English journalists such as Faisal Islam are already preparing articles suggesting that we are ‘further complicating’ Brexit.  At no point does anyone plan to admit that the UK cannot afford Brexit without the benefit of Scotland. Lie upon lie, as per usual.

 

I do not agree with every policy the SNP goes with.  The current strategy has gone very well. At this point it is important to be extremely careful with the immediate future.  Whilst a great many English remainers and Brexiteers will be catching on to the depth of deception in the media, you have to take decades, if not centuries of bigotry into account.  They don’t like thinking.  They like hating.  Likewise the selfish and complacent Scotland hating no-voters will do anything, and invent anything to prove their rightness, even when the truth is staring them in the face.

 

So, my thought for the day is – do not be conned by offers of short term gain.  There is only one way out of this.  Agreeing to complex soft soaped negotiations is a waste of time.  Conservatives, like most young greedy bucks, are only after one thing.  Be prudent, Nicola, and do not get suckered in to taking the blame for Cameron’s fatal error.

 

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