RANDOM THOUGHTS

So, let’s see…

That’s nearly a week since the referendum and so far:

The vow or pledge or whatever it was, has been put on hold by Labour because they have discovered that the poor are poor and they need to do something about that all over the UK. 

The Tories have said that they stick by the promise, but they have to include England, Wales and NI in the devo plans, however, don't worry, they will stick to the timetable of it being ready for the General Election in the UK in May next year. So clearly they think it's going to be a fairly easy job.

Massive Fail. Again.
Just as well he's incredibly rich and doesn't need the job

No one cares what Nick Clegg thinks because Willie Hague has been given his job...and in any case, he is insignificant.

Labour has announced a raft of policies, like increasing the already pathetically low and utterly unlikeable minimum wage by 25p a year, freezing child benefit, taking away the pensions’ winter payments and coming down like several tonnes of bricks on the sick, the skivers and the dispossessed so that they will learn to think back to Iain Duncan Smith and the McVile creature as some sort of very ugly fairy god mothers.

YES

They seem to have no comment on the fact that the retirement pension is the lowest (bar Mexico's) in the developed world, and a good £80 a week less than that in Eire, Guernsey or Jersey.

The Tories, for their part, have promised England that they will reduce the amount of money that Scotland gets under the Barnet Formula, leaving out that that is what they have been doing year on year.

Someone found a massive amount of oil in Scottish waters and oil is going to last a lot longer than 2017 as Alistair Darling once suggested.. 

Ah, that makes it all clear then

We are about to go to war in Iraq for no particular reason. In these matters it is always a good idea to read Craig Murray. I suspect there is always money to be made from wars when your biggest export is weapons, and you sell them to everyone.

The Bank of England says that it is likely that interest rates will have to go up rather sooner than they had thought, so the more expensive mortgages that they warned you would come in an independent Scotland, are on the way in the UK.

I'm hearing that the prime minister has been forced to apologise to the queen for breaking the convention that their conversations are private, and for showing that she did hold a political view on the future of Scotland. 

You tell her, Dave....

I understand too that the queen has issued a statement saying that she hopes that Scotland will come together again. I would respectfully suggest that the queen sends for his bunch of vowers and tells them that when they make a promise they bloody well keep it.

Nothing to worry about. We're in good hands

And Ineos has secured a licence to frack Scotland. Comforting to know that they are such a well managed and responsible company.

Norman Smith, BBC: Sources say new powers for Scottish parliament will be "an extension of existing responsibilities" - not Devo Max

 We'd have thought that having said that Bob, you'd have had
the sense to keep your gob shut.

One of the drawbacks about winning a referendum campaign in which you have made promises and signed pledges, is that it comes with some sort of obligations. 

Politicians don't perhaps realise this, because election after election they produce manifestos containing promises which are as swiftly broken as Katie Price's marriage vows.

Dave does a lot of pointing, doesn't he?
Maybe they teach it at posh schools
to save you having to remember plebs' names.

But as Cameron was quick to point out in a condescending speech to Scots a couple of weeks ago ("let's say F'ing; it will sound passionate, and I'm told the savages use it 3 times in every sentence, not that I speak to them as a rule"), this was not an election, and we can't boot the F'ing Brits out in 5 years.

Of course a great deal of the No's campaign was based on threats rather than promises. You won't use the pound; you won't be in the EU, you won't be in Nato; you won't have clout; you won't be able to visit your granny in Carlisle without a visa, food prices will spiral and you'll starve, mortgages will be unobtainable and you'll live in a tent, cyber attacks from space will knock out all your computers and you'll need to get an abacus, you'll lose your state pension, you'll be small insignificant and oil rich broke, etc, ad infinitum.

Most of the threats were demonstrably rubbish, and a decent and free press or state broadcaster would have pointed that out. But then we don't appear to have these, so that knocks that on the head.

Promises are, however, another kettle of fish.

Should have consulted him for the pledges and vows

Vague promises are best in these situations, and always peppered with words and phrases which will provide a strategic get out. "Consultations", "in conjunction with the countries of the UK", "in as far as is possible under legislation", "within a framework of regulations set by the European Union" make the job of unpicking what has REALLY been promised, and can be delivered, almost impossible.

The campaign started off with an absolute from Cameron. There will be no devo-max. It will not be on the ballot paper. His Scottish deputy, David son, went so far as to tell us that a line had been drawn in the sand. 

However, as the song goes, "la mer efface sur le sable, les pas des amis desunis"! and it wasn't long before the exigencies of the campaign meant that the line in the sand had followed the steps of the lovers and been wiped out, as vague indications of possible new powers were made.

Polling showed the campaign to be much closer than the final result, and so, with apparently not a trace of irony, a couple of weeks ago the two main UK parties joined with Nick Clegg... yes Nick Clegg, to sign a pledge... yes a pledge... to giving new powers to Scotland.  

Yep, Nick, we know poppet.

And then, with only 2 days to go with polls looking even more gloomy for unionists, a set of Vows were agreed to by the three English based parties, and published on the front page of one of Scotland's best selling downmarket organs, The Daily Record, (Scottish version of the Daily Mirror, and Labour's messenger to the Scottish working classes). Gordon Brown's fingerprints were all over this, but it was a promise from the two main UK parties and the Liberals. 

With immediate effect a process would be put in place, they swore. Better Together went further and actually annotated this process with date deadlines. This was a process that they would be obliged to leave to a Tory government with no electoral interest in Scotland, in a run up to a general election. 

Well duh! Saw ya comin', Brown.

The latest pledge, oh sorry, vow (has Nick Clegg signed a vow before?), promised that on the day after a no vote (ie the 19th September, 2014) a motion on more powers would be published in the London parliament. 

Missed the first deadline then?

It is now the 20th and flying in the face of the famous English tradition of Fair Play, no such motion has been published. 

In short they lied. 

Not the best of starts.

No one, in all this vowing and pledging, seems to have been aware that in other parts of the Uk all is constitutionally not well.

Gordon and the Mrs have grandma round for some advice
on how to grind the poor to dust.

Gordon Brown has the excuse of knowing nothing about this because he and his mrs spend most of their lives in 5 or 6 star hotel rooms, or travelling first class around the world on the back of their "charity". The Tories all went to Eton or Westminster or Harrow and "up to" Oxford, and are in their positions because of connections rather than brains, and that is their excuse for getting most things wrong. But surely there is someone somewhere who knew better?

Get rid of the 10p tax Gordon. The poor want to pay more.
Yes MA'AM.

No one seems to have thought that the English, who have always had the whip hand in this union of nations, provinces, principalities and little semi-detached islands, feel that they have been neglected since Blair's botched devolution.

Of course, they actually aren't that badly done by, but, compared with the total power they used to have it's not not quite good enough and they have been encouraged in the past by people like Boris, to feel resentment. 

It's a bit like the EU situation. If you blame as much as you can on an organisation or country, you shouldn't complain when the people turn against it. Governments and press have, for years, blamed all kinds of problems on EU regulations, to the point that a vast swathe of people loathe it and want out of it. 

Trouble is none of the political parties want that. Yes, they want you to hate it a lot so that you hate them a little less, but get out of it... Oh god no. 

Likewise, tell the English for decades that Scots are subsidy junkies, who get far more per head than good decent English taxpayers do. Encourage them to think it's their taxes that pay for our free education, and elderly care, prescriptions, etc, etc... and that most of us spend our lives staggering between the pub and the bookies and sticking pins in Englishmen... and then not wanting them to take umbrage when you appear to bribe the Jocks with more power and money lacks a certain level of perception. Duh, in fact.

Foresight isn't a quality with which the union politicians seem to be blessed. They must not teach it at Oxford on the PPP course.

So it looks like a complete constitutional rethink is going to be demanded and that's going to make mockery of BT's promises... especially with a UK election around the corner. We don't really care that you politicians have problems in England. You're problem. You promised us a real change, starting yesterday, and we want it.

Of course you have to feel for them. Well a bit. (Don't you?)

Once you start messing with the powers allotted in the London parliament, you open a whole new can of nasty poisonous worms. 

The most obvious of these are:

making Celtic MPs second class legislators; 

allowing English only MPs to vote on how much is spent on, for example, health or law and order, in the other nations, despite the other nations paying taxes;

and the most frightening and insurmountable of all, a possible situation where a potential Labour government of the day in the UK could find itself in a situation where it would not have a majority in a parliament which spends most of its working week on English only legislation.

Oh what interesting times we live in.

************

Ah. Unionist politicians and their past tenses.
Who could ask for more?
Who is he?
Apparently a minister in the NI government
who has... uhm..."went off" message

Munguin's Republic thinks there is going to be far too much fun and games in the coming months for it to take even a few days break.

I'm delighted to see that my friend James Kelly's Scot Goes Pop fund raiser is doing well, and I hope that he will raise the money to stay in the game  for at least the next 6 months. James' contribution to understanding polls and his quick wit and sense of humour make him an absolute must. 

I hope that other friends will stay on board too... too many to mention. You're all in the sidebar and I've appreciated all your contributions.

And especially (and I'm sure you other bloggers won't object to me singling him out)...

Stuart Campbell... I know you're tired. You've worked non stop with posts, broadcasts and wee blue books. You need a break. You deserve a holiday.

But please come back and help us fight. No one needs to tell you the dramatic effect you've had on the campaign. I don't mean to undervalue the efforts of anyone else, but you have made a phenomenal difference. 

Simply put. We need you. 

So have another fundraiser if you need to, but please don't go.
**********
I've just read Stuart's latest post on the BBC and its lies.

About a month ago I decided that I'd had the BBC up to here. It had been a long time in the coming. 

I felt for a long time that whilst a national funding scheme was probably quite reasonable for a tv service that was the BBC and only the BBC in the 1960s, it was already redundant by the time there were 4 channels. 

By the time I could, in theory, choose from a hundred or so channels on my Freeview, it seemed ridiculous to be paying for the BBC at the outrageous cost of £145 per year.

I've never been a tv watcher and neither of my sets was used regularly, so much so that I was at one point unaware that my aerial had been tampered with, and on another occasion when a friend asked me if he could watch something on my lounge tv, I had to admit that I didn't know how it operated. (We eventually found a switch underneath to put it on.)

The stories about decades of depravity and sexual liberty taking, known by all including amazing Esther Rantzen but reported by no one, and then finally the coverage of the referendum campaign sorted it. 

I wrote to the licensing authority (it's not an authority, it's Crapita) and they won't get another cent from me. I've spent my refund.

Like Stuart, I am not advocating illegality. (The Wings article lays down clearly the conditions under which you can use a tv and what you can watch on computers, phones and whatever else you have without breaking the law and it points to the website so you can be sure that you are not inviting the police to investigate you.)

But I urge you to ask yourselves if support of this state broadcaster, which one Pole confessed to Craig Murray, reminded him of Pravda in the days of Poland's Solidarity movement, is something that you really want to engage with.