Monday 10 June 2013

IN WHICH DAVID CAMERON FAILS TO SEE THAT HE IS TALKING BLETHERS, LEARNS THE EXPRESSION "RED HERRING" AND OVERUSES IT

David Cameron has again ruled out a head-to-head TV debate with Alex Salmond ahead of the independence referendum.

Cameron said the idea was a ‘complete red herring’. (Why is it a red herring for the head of the UK government, which wants to keep Scotland and its vast resources for the good of the UK,  and the head of the Scottish Government which wishes to be independent of the UK and to be able to use the aforesaid resources for the good of Scotland, to debate? red herring my butt!)

He challenged Mr Salmond to debate with Scottish politicians such as former Chancellor Alistair Darling – who is leading the anti-independence Better Together campaign. (To which the answer is that the only position Mr Darling holds, other than being an ordinary back bench MP, is that of Better Together Campaign leader, and his opposite number is Blair Jenkins the head of the YES campaign. They should surely debate, otherwise  with whom would Mr Jenkins debate?)

He said: "This is a debate between people in Scotland, some of whom want to separate from the United Kingdom, but the majority of whom want to stay in the United Kingdom. The TV and radio debates should be between Scottish politicians with differing views." (Well David, if that is the case why are you giving an interview to the Scottish press on the subject? Why did it form the main part of your speech to the party conference? Why not leave that to Ruth, who is supposedly the Scottish Party leader and is certainly a Scottish politicians, therefore exactly the kind of person who, in your opinion, should be addressing it?)

"I seem to remember Alex Salmond said he wanted this referendum made in Scotland – well now that he’s made a bit of a mess of it, he wants to make it somewhere else." (Recent figures show that more people want to change the constitutional settlement than leave it alone. Support for independence, trumpeted by the No campaign only a few months ago at 23% has risen, by the same measures from the same polling company, to 35% in less than 6 months. Not my idea of a mess, Dave. You want a mess, go look at your hospitals, or trains, or schools. They ARE a mess.) 

"Let Better Together debate with Alex Salmond and the Nationalists. This is a complete red herring and I'm absolutely not falling for it." (Either you are very stupid and have failed to grasp the point [in which case, better shut up now, in fact resign now, because this is really simple compared with some stuff a first/prime minister should have to deal with], or you are being deliberately obtuse. 

Let me try to make it simple for you:

Better Together should debate with Yes Scotland.

Politicians should debate with politicians.

That might mean first ministers with first ministers; finance ministers with finance ministers; deputy first ministers with deputy first ministers; environment ministers with environment minister. By now, presumably  even you will have caught onto the system)

Please note for this exercise I have conflated "first" and "prime"... They mean approximately same thing.


It seems to me that the real reasons that David Cameron will not debate with Alex Salmond are as follows:

He feels that as Prime minister of the United Kingdom, he is better suited in the company of presidents and kings. A mere Scottish MSP is beneath his Eton and Oxford dignity.

Or, David Cameron knows that he would be a complete turn off to around 90% of the Scottish population and throw them running to the arms of the horrid separatists, because let's face it anything has to be better than this tosser.

Or finally, because he is feart (his word) of the intellectual rigour of the debate from a man who would wipe the floor with his silly arguments of "greatness" and "power" and "place in the world" and show him that Scots, by and large, care a great deal more about the fact that there are people in our country eating out of rubbish dumps and food banks, than the fact that we could blow a southern suburb of Moscow off the face of the Earth if the American gave us the co-ordinates.

14 comments:

  1. Tory herrings, UKippers and Labour flounders at the hands of salmon and sturgeon. :-)

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  2. Tris

    I think there is probably a lot of fear in all of them debating with Alec Salmond. Their arguments are crap and someone like Salmond would rip them apart piece by piece. However, as the debate moves on we will see debates and Cameron might find that he is forced to get involved as AC kicks everyones arse, he has a big enough ego to think I'll save the day. They will resist it though, they will fight to not have them as we saw when Sturgeon mauled Moore, but I just think as the polls get closer they are going to have to.

    bruce

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    1. Interesting thought Bruce.

      I find it hard to believe that anyone could think he was a big hitter in debate. He's ok when he knows the question, has had someone write answers for him and no one argues back. But when he is on the ropes he is Nasty Flashman. And if that goes down badly in England, what the hell is going to happen with it here?

      I hope you're right through, Bruce, and that he'll come here and do a tv debate thinking that he is the great saviour of the island race... pfffff....

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  3. Having finished my last commission I am free to pollute your blog with nonsense and have even got round to replying those who were kind enough to comment on my blog. Expect more nonsense soon.

    Impressed by Niko's latest blog offering!

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  4. Tris,

    I think you are right about Cameron and why on earth would Salmond debate with a failed politician like Darling who is not even considered worthy of a place in the pathetic shadow cabinet. I know that he said previously that he was going to take a back seat but that was only for a year so no invitation was forth-coming. Surely the better together mob could have found a better representative to hold the poison chalice?

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    1. Well, that's always good news, John. Yes. I agreed with Niko's post.

      I feel really sorry for anyone who has had their lifelong party taken away from them but a group of chancing careerist politicians with their eye on the main chance.

      People like Blair, Mandelson and Brown are a disgrace to the Labour movement.

      I was never a Labour party person, so it doesn't affect me as it would do Niko, or you...but my politics are certainly left of centre and I find the latest sets of pronouncements from Labour utterly sickening.

      What is even more pathetic is the fact that some of the unions are so strongly behind them. I just can't understand it. They have brought a whole new meaning to "up the workers".

      I don't think BT should have had a politician as its head. Much more sensible to have someone independent...an academic, journalist, writer...

      BT was supposed t be Darling, Goldie and Kennedy.

      We've seen nothing of Kennedy and the only time we saw Goldie was when she introduced Darling at the Tory Party conference.

      Mixing the three parties together was madness. They try to tell us they are united over this matter, but that they disagree over everything else. They don't of course. The two main ones are like peas in a pod. The third one is now an irrelevance.

      Darling still comments on British affairs...for example, describing Osborne's economic policy as utter madness, and then telling us we are better together with this madness than going alone, at the same time as saying that he respects Scotland and Scots and believes that they are perfectly capable of going it alone.

      Lordy... that's tying yourself in knots.

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  5. "we could blow a southern suburb of Moscow off the face of the Earth if the American gave us the co-ordinates."
    And. of course, the launch codes.

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    1. Yes, Anon...and of course, permission.

      I seem to remember that the last time Britain in partnership with France decided to take world affairs into their own hands, they were rudely slapped down and put back in their box. That would be about 60 years ago I suspect, and the situation hasn't changed since.

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  6. I'd like to see such a debate.

    It may help improve how informed I am. The tone of the national discussion between both sides has been ... confusing, manipulative and deliberately confusing.

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    1. Answering your questions about an independent Scotland

      If you have any other questions about our country's future we'd be happy to answer them. Just fill in the form at the bottom of this page and we'll post the answers on this site.

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    2. Cheers Cynical, I may just use that facility. I wonder, does the 'No' camp also have such a device on their website?

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    3. Dean... I looked.

      http://bettertogether.net/pages/the-ve-case

      It's supposed to be "the +ve case, but it comes out on the heading as "the-ve-case", which I found vaguely amusing.

      There doesn't seem to be a question facility though.

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