WHAT IS THIS WOMAN SAYING DOUGLAS; CAN YOU TRANSLATE?

Post by Yvonne Hay.

Give this time to load up.

Then it doesn't actually get going for a while, but watch on because, this is Ed, on his sojourn to change Scottish Labour voters' minds and get them to vote for him continuing in his job adn the vague chance of him being the next PM of the glorious empire that is Britian.

Don't forget that whatever the result next Thursday, there will be blame and praise awarded in equal measure. 

There are so many in Labour who have done their bit, Darling, Brown, Murphy, Alexander, Lamont, Maggie, etc. If it goes their way they will be expecting to reap the rewards. Brown will doubtless claim that having saved the world, he will have saved the union having taken days and days out of his busy money making schedule to talk to invited audiences in Scotland for nothing more than expenses from his Tory millionaire backers.

If it goes our way, these people will emulate Jim Murphy with egg all over their faces. 

It's been suggested that a Tory party, already dissatisfied with Cameron, will want a new leader, and with Boris the Haystack just about to return to parliament, it's a dodgy time for him. 

Likewise, at a time when Labour should be riding high in the polls, they are a few points ahead of the unpopular Conservatives, and who's getting the blame? 

Weird Ed, of course! 

I wonder if he will survive a YES vote.

So the second part of this video is two ordinary people confronting Miliband on a variety of topics that are of interest to them.

Ed looks drunk. He seems unable to understand what ordinary people are saying, and has to have his questions answered by Dougie, who makes up some figures about child poverty and, protecting his dear friends in the Tory party, never mentions that this poverty has increased everywhere in the UK, as a result of Westminster's policies and not Edinburgh's.

Then Lamont charges in with her stock phrase... "It was an independent expert what told us and then he runned away..."

Whenever Jola doesn't understand something she's questioned about, out comes her "independent" expert. "Don't ask me. I don't understand all that stuff, but we have an independent expert. Now eat your cereal."

I imagine that the "independent" expert will be Darling or Brown or some Neo-Liberal, paid for by the Tory millionaire backers of BT. And we know how good they are with matters economic!

So, Ed, leader of the working man's party, red balloons everywhere,
what about the poor man trying to make some money
playing his flute? Not important? Probably won't vote?
Anyway, you look more at home with the rich suits.

In the end Ed, clearly fed up with the native droning on about poor people things and nuclear weapons when she "cannae get a hoose",  just walks away without a by your leave, followed by Dougie who appears to be physically attached to him, and then Johann, who clearly doesn't want to waste time on this when she could be sorting out her seat in the Lords with Ed. 

Fail, all three of you. Politicians of the people? What a laugh. 

But, erm, some credit to Ed for at least getting out of his limo in the streets instead of being driven in convoy into a corporate office compound owned by hard right wingers and with with staff on strict instructions to defer to their honoured guest. He may have ignored the ordinary people, or looked at them in a confused way (what are these people saying?), but at least he dained to breathe the same air as them.

WHAT CAN THE SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT AND LABOUR DO ABOUT THE BEDROOM TAX?

I welcomed, a couple of days ago, the news that the Scottish government was working with Labour to see if they could find ways to help people affected, through no fault of their own, by the bedroom tax.

DougtheDug replied to my post with information (as usual in his posts) based on his knowledge of the regulations. I was concerned that (as the original article was a few days ago) people would miss Doug's piece, so I have repeated it here.

Doug wrote:

Not just a spare bedroom, but a spare HOUSE

Hi Tris, a bit of background on why we can't mitigate the effects of the Bedroom Tax in Scotland.

Under Schedule 5, Section F1 of the 1998 Scotland Act the Scottish Government is not allowed to get involved in benefits as that is a reserved power. Housing benefit is actually named specifically as a reserved benefit.

How then, you ask, did John Swinney give £20 Million to the councils to help mitigate the bedroom tax. I'll come to that.

Housing benefit is distributed by the local authorities in Scotland as the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) which is the benefit the Bedroom Tax affects. The rules on how much LHA the councils can pay each claimant are set by strict guidelines from Westminster as benefits are a reserved power.

The councils have another fund called Discretionary Housing Payments (DHP) which they can use as they wish to help those in need of housing assistance and this is the fund they are using to help those affected by the Bedroom Tax. The councils can decided who gets help and how much. This is also funded from Westminster by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) and they gave £13.5 Million in total across all Scottish local authorities this year. Under the DWP rules the councils can add another 150% to the DHP from their own funds. Can you start to see where the £20 Million figure came from?

So how did John Swinney give the councils £20 Million for DHP if the Scottish Parliament is not allowed to get involved in benefits? The way round it was to give it to the councils as part of their general grant with no ring fencing. It's not defined as for benefits and the councils have no legal obligation to hand it out as DHP so it's "nod and a wink" stuff between the Scottish Parliament and the Councils.

So here's the two problems that Labour are unable to suggest a way round even though they bang on and on an on about how the SNP could help more.

The Scottish Government is forbidden from getting involved in benefits. It cannot hand out money directly to benefit claimants.

Ah, you think, but John Swinney has already handed out £20 Million to the councils as part of their general grant why can't he hand out another £30 million to the councils (assuming of course that he can find the money from his limited Westminster block grant) and they can distribute it for him.

Well he could but there would be no point. Remember the councils got £13.5 Million from the DWP and they can add another 150% to that which they got from John Swinney. That means they are at the limit of the £33.5 Million total that the DWP allows them to hand out as DHP's.

The councils are at the limit of what they are allowed to hand out and it doesn't matter how much more money John Swinney gives them they can't pass it on to those affected by the Bedroom Tax.

So now you see the problem. Unless the Labour party can find a legal way round Schedule 5 in the 1998 Scotland Act or the £33.5 Million limit the Department of Work and Pensions has placed on the Discretionary Housing Payments from the councils they are just blowing hot air from their nether regions when they bang on about how the Scottish Parliament has the power to alleviate the Bedroom Tax.

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Douglas Alexander

I was wondering if there is anything more hilarious than an middle aged politician writing in a newspaper about what teenage kids think, and getting most of it horribly and hilariously wrong. Then I remembered that there's always a pantomime act talking about "nostalgia and nonsense", wearing a tartan jacket (has anyone seen anyone wear a tartan jacket in the last 20 years?) and cracking pantomime jokes about the first minister being either a chieftain of the pudding race or a pudding of the chieftain race. Laugh? I nearly did. Well, no, I didn't, really.

Then, of course, I remembered that the politician has a vested interest in persuading people to vote for the continuance of his well-paid safe-seat-for-life job in London, and his almost-undoubted future as an aristocrat in the British political equivalent of an old people's home (but where they pay you, rather than you pay them).

John Barrowman

The Brit-American pantomime dame may well feel, as a relatively highly-paid tv, broadway and recording star, that life under the Tories' low-tax-for-rich-people regime is a desirable political outcome, and hell mend the poor and the sick. I wonder though, why he feels that it is reasonable for him to have the nationality rights in two separate states which he would deny to Scottish people! I'm alright, Jack?
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WELL, HOW DID THAT WORK OUT?

• Glasgow businessman Brian Dempsey has been a lifelong supporter and substantial donor to Scottish Labour. He wrote this piece for the Scotsman back in 2011, after the SNP's record breaking win. I have not provided a link because I've no wish to add to their traffic. I assure you it is there.

I found it in my bookmarks, and I thought it was an appropriate time to examine what he said, and how much of it was taken on board by Labour. It's a decent piece from a guy who was not afraid to admit that Labour was in a mess and that their opponent was formidable. A man who faces facts rather than saying what people want to hear. I don't agree with some of what he says (as noted), but I'd welcome your opinions. 

It's probably worth noting that Mr Dempsey now lives in the Caymen Islands, having gone bankrupt in 2011 with debts of over £10 million, but I doubt that fact affects his analysis of the Labour Party's problems.

Sorry it is a bit long, but it's worth a read. The illustrations are mine and I have corrected some typo errors in the Scotsman's original.

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If the party in Scotland is to recover, it needs to split from London and select a new leader - preferably Douglas Alexander or Jim Murphy.

AMBITION is the fuel that drives any successful politician. But there comes a time when personal ambition must be set aside for a greater good. As regards the leadership of the Scottish Labour Party, that time is now. For the facts are simple: the party is in crisis and faces the prospect of electoral extinction at the local government elections next May.

Labour's victory at Inverclyde raises false hope. The Scottish electorate may have demonstrated that, on a national level, they still favour Labour in what was once their party's heartland. But on a Scottish level they voted SNP. And what are the local government elections but Scotland in micro-miniature?

In the wake of Labour's crushing election defeat in Scotland, the worst in its long and illustrious history, I listened with incredulity to party spin doctors insisting that Labour's core vote had held up. I had knocked on enough doors during the campaign to realise that this was not true: too many Labour voters told me they had turned yellow, so to be speak.

So it was fascinating to read the results of the Scottish Election Study which showed how deeply the SNP had penetrated into Labour's traditional core vote, for they won the majority of Catholic voters, winning over both working and middle class voters.

We once had a lead amongst women and young people. You only had to look around the Glasgow SECC on election night to see how that has changed. Youth was on the SNP side, leaving Labour appearing to be the party of old men, and, according to the judgment of the electorate, Scotland is now no country for old men. Change must come. The question is how?

Labour is currently undertaking an internal review to which I would like to contribute my own thoughts.

The first is that the Scottish Labour Party must unchain itself from the anchor of London, and set sail as an independent party. At the moment all this debate over who should take over as leader of the Scottish Labour Party is academic, for the Scottish Labour Party already has a leader, Ed Miliband.

The fact remains that Iain Gray is leader only of Labour's MSPs. The best case scenario would be to have a new leader of Scottish Labour who would command the respect and loyalty of both MPs and MSPs, but who was not tied to the coattails of Millbank Towers.

Policies would be focused on how they could achieve the best results for Scotland, not on how they would impact on Ed Miliband's general election prospects.By creating an independent Scottish Labour Party, any new leader would be able to take a fresh look at the structure of the party. The Scottish Executive of the Labour Party is too unwieldy and requires pruning; it needs to be smaller, more disciplined and single-minded. It may seem strange to say, but it needs to be less democratic. Once the leader is in place, it will require a benign dictatorship to reinvigorate this movement.

The second point is that Scottish Labour needs to start thinking and planning for independence. In the past, to do so was viewed as somehow admitting defeat. We are way beyond that point now. We may not wish for the union to be split up, but we frequently make plans for things we do not wish to happen in our private lives, so why not do so politically?

For a long time, all we have done is repackage the clichés - and shout them out loud - about independence. Now someone is going to have to do the serious thinking, as a precautionary measure, about how to make it work.

I do not make the serious suggestion that the Scottish Labour Party should become independent from London and prepare rigorously for independence because I believe that the SNP will win the majority backing of the Scottish people or that an independent Scotland is inevitable, because I do not hold such a belief.

I do, however, think that it is prudent and sensible to prepare for the possibility of things not going according to plan. It is also, to my mind, the best way in which Scottish Labour will be able to re-build, and better galvanise its existing supporters and reach out to many more.

Alex Salmond is an impressive First Minister and an exceptional politician. His success at the Scottish elections was, I believe, partly because of the positive campaign run by the SNP.

The Scottish people will always favour the positive over the negative, preferring hope over fear. So what the Labour Party in Scotland needs to do is, on the one hand, dissect the SNP's failures in office and, with the other hand, show what they would do differently and better.

The Scottish Labour Party is in a difficult position, but it has been in difficult positions in the past and has always managed to rise above circumstance through tenacity, intelligence and hard graft.

These are the qualities that are required now. The irony is that now is the time for young people to get involved with Scottish Labour, for there is a great opportunity to help shape the party.

But I do believe that no one should underestimate the peril that the party could be in if it fails to grasp the nettle and reorganise and restructure.It is crucial that it develops a better, sharper and more focused intelligence unit, one that would have picked up the warning signs of the political tsunami that all but washed it away in May.

We now come to the question of who should lead. For too long the Scottish Labour Party has been like a tilted billiard table, with much of the talent rolling south. This is not to say that there are not talented men and women serving their communities well as MSPs. But it is fair to say that the Scottish Parliament has not seen politicians of the stature of Gordon Brown, John Reid or Alastair Darling.

Westminster has been the draw, the place for an ambitious politician to make his or her mark, with the prospect of the ministerial car and sprawling department. Yet the hour has come for senior Labour figures in Westminster to set aside their own personal ambitions and do the right thing by the party in its hour of need.

The irony is that the biggest battle that the United Kingdom will face will be fought north of the border. The very future of the United Kingdom depends on the results of a referendum that will take place north of the border.

If you believe in Scotland's place as a crucial part of the union, then surely there can be no better personal and political ambition than seeking to save our country in the manner in which a Labour politician thinks it needs to be saved. This is why I believe it is imperative that either Jim Murphy or Douglas Alexander set aside whatever personal ambitions they may have about serving in high office in the next Labour Government and take up the challenge of revitalising the Scottish Labour Party.

There is currently talk of having the incumbent Ian Gray remain in place until January. This is a bad idea. Labour needs a new leader in place by early autumn, one who will focus his attentions immediately on the local government elections next May and ensure that the SNP do no achieve their goal of seizing control of Glasgow City Council.

He must do more. He must find a way to roll back the SNP's recent victories and return Labour to its former position as Scotland's largest party. It will be a difficult task, but it can be achieved.

Now is the time for Scottish Labour to be bold and decisive. Tomorrow, I'm afraid, may be too late.