THIS AND THAT

'SCOTTISH Secretary Alistair Carmichael has said maintaining a strong UK Government presence north of the Border in the event of a No vote in September would mean the independence question would never be put again and the issue of Scotland's future would be settled "once and for all".

'Mr Carmichael said Whitehall had allowed the Nationalists to "hollow out" the UK Government's presence north of the Border and the lesson of the referendum campaign was that this could never be allowed to happen again.'

So unless I'm mistake from this small quote (the rest of the article is behind a paywall), if we vote NO, the Scottish government will, in future, be kept in line by the central power in London. 

This British (read English) power will never been allowed to be "hollowed out", whatever that means, by the Scottish government, elected by the Scottish people, under a part proportional voting system.

Be warned: If we vote NO Alistair Carmichael promises that we will be kept under the thumb of the British Empire and the question of freedom will never be allowed to rise again.

And that's not any old somebody saying that. It's David Cameron's man in Scotland. The representative of London in our midst. 

Heaven knows what they intend to do... send their troops to make sure that the Scottish parliament doesn't do anything the London parliament disapproves of? 

Bug the first ministers private offices and those of his cabinet?

Insist, as some including Mrs Thatcher's living representative on Earth, Michael Forsyth have suggested, that the unelected House of Lords be allowed a function in Scottish governance and the rights to veto legislation? 

Send one of the royals to live in Holyrood House to oversee our government?

Maybe even Godzilla himself will take over the palace to keep Alex Salmond, or (snigger) Johann Lamont in their place...ie Provosts of a regional council? 

So much for respect and "more powers". 

We will be watched carefully and regardless of what we vote for in the future we will NEVER be allowed our freedom.

OK Carmichael. Thanks for the warning. 

Another game changer? 

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What IS she doing? Levitating?

Anyway, the good news, apart from the slightly weird old lady trying to fly,  is that the poll appears to show a swing of 4% will deliver victory.

We can do this.

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The Red White and Blue Arrows appear to have been privatised by the Ultra Right Wing Nut Case at the Ministry of War (who didn't call the woman 'a slut' at all... he said she was a 'slattern', so that's alright, even if the two words mean exactly the same thing). They seem to have taken on a job for Eire welcoming the Queen and flown a bit lower than usual ... 

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The Biased Broadcasting Corporation has been taking lessons in crowd counting from the pre infants classes  or "Better Together No Thanks U Kok". 

The organisers of the protest at Pacific Quay, anticipating a bit of jiggery pokery with numbers, handed all protesters a numbered piece of paper. There were 1,207 pieces of paper given out. It is possible that there were more people there, but impossible that there were fewer.

And yet the BBC estimated 400 people.

You pay £140+ a year for a pile of lies.

I've just seen this. It surely has to be a spoof. Their reporting of the Palestine situation has been Israeli biased, but for goodness sake, even the BBC wouldn't have done this?

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The thing that I resent most is that they wasted the once in a lifetime opportunity of oil. Norway's Sovereign Fund now makes more in interest than their oil production makes. In short, if their oil dried up tomorrow, which it won't do, they would still be an incredibly rich country.

The immense wealth that they have created, on top of this, has all pensions covered in Norway, state employees and retirement.

On the other hand, in order to stay at the top table and wield this much vaunted clout (about which we hear a lot but see little) the Uk has frittered the money away on fighting wars it could never win, causing ill feeling around the world, buying weapons that it doesn't own and/or can't use and/or don't work, having embassies and consulates in places it doesn't need them, and generally continuing to act like some Imperial power from the 19th century. 

The result is that the external debt is £1.3 trillion and rising; no retirement pension is funded and a large number of public service pensions are not funded, meaning that taxes will have to be paid in future to fund them. This is an additional inestimable amount (depending as it does on life length). On top of that there is a massive personal debt as people take on loans for housing, education, and credit/store cards.

What a bloody mess of a country.

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Don't forget. If you haven't yet bought "Caledonia", you might like to think about it. Food banks need our money.

RICH ENGLISH TORIES SHORING UP BITTER TOGETHER...SO DO YOU HONESTLY THINK THEY GIVE A STUFF ABOUT YOU?

It’s difficult to know just what the actual figures for the No Campaign’s income are. 

Scotland on Sunday says that they have been given £1.6 million, while The Sunday Herald headlines says £1.3 million.

I wouldn’t know whether that is down to the fact that BT can’t count, or that the standard of Scottish journalism is dismally low.

I think it may be the former, as I read that Mr McDougall is said to be humbled by the amount of money that his supporters (almost invariably English Tories) have stumped up. But he goes on to point out that it is a great deal less than the “almost limitless” amounts that Alex Salmond can spend.

Now, I’m not aware of Alex Salmond having any say over the amount of spending that the YES campaign can make available to fight their side of the argument. No more, I would have thought than Ms Lamont can dictate how much the No campaign can spend.  Neither is strictly involved in the admin of these things, as Blair probably knows, even if he doesn’t understand it.

But Bair goes on to quantify this amount that Alex is spending as being “hundreds of thousands”.  Call me old fashioned but when I was at school, hundreds of thousands was probably a lot less than £1.6 million, or even £1.3 million. 

He states that this money (which Alex does, in fact, have control over) is taxpayers money which Alex has spent to answer the questions that the unionists and indeed the Electoral commission have demanded the government spend to explain their arguments. This clearly is totally different spending for the millions that the UKOK government has spent, authorised by David Cameron, getting Civil Servants in London to work on a variety of reports (then delivered in Scotland by his cabinet ministers).

I remember one showing that Scotland wouldn’t be able to defend itself against Iran, or North Korea, because no one in their right minds would want to be in a Scottish army, standing guard in a kilt, at Edinburgh castle and being photographed by tourists. They would, he implied, much prefer to be standing outside Buckingham Palace, wearing bright red uniforms and 3 foot hats, being photographed by tourists.

Another suggested that we were too stupid to have any kind of military intelligence units like MI5 or 6, because presumably anyone with brains in the Ukok was English and went to Oxford. When thought about Blair’s dodgy dossiers, I was somewhat relieved about that. I mean Scotland wouldn’t want to go to war illegally spending billions of pounds it didn’t have and killing hundreds of thousands of totally innocent people on the basis of some PhD thesis which was 10 years out of date, and full of holes.

Mr McDougal’s assertions though do prove one thing. How different life is in Scotland from in England. In England it is good to spend tax payers’ money to support a side in a argument; in Scotland that is bad. 

As a by-the-way, I was interested to see that an ex-MI6 person made a contribution to the funds, along with Sir (Goodbye Mr) Chips Keswick. Mr Keswick is:

73-years-old.

His full name is Sir John Chippendale Lindley Keswick.

He was educated at Eton College, the same as Cameron - His family business Jardine Matheson even employed Cameron for three months in an administrative post in 1997.

Sir Chips Keswick is the chief executive of investment bank Hambros, and is also a director at the Bank of England as was his father before him.

His hobbies are described as playing Bridge, and country pursuits - Shooting animals.

He is married to Lady Sarah Ramsay, daughter of the 16^th Earl of Dalhousie.

He has supported "Business for Sterling", and sat on the board of corporate donors to the Conservative Party.

Just your average Scot then, interested in preserving the average way of life in Scotland.

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On a related subject, I believe that SoS also has a story that Yes Scotland hasn’t made its appeal target. Probably designed for a good gloat, it has probably had the effect of encouraging everyone who can, to dig just that little bit deeper.

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Pass me a sick bucket...

Mr  Hammond take note...

His wrinkly old coupon looks like a baby's bum.
 Maybe he uses dirty nappy  instead of Oil of Ugly?

WARDOG AND JIM MURPHY AND FREEDOM OF SPEECH

According to Scotland on Sunday, not a phrase you’ll be used to reading in this blog, a Robert Gordon University lecturer is under investigation for using his blog to call the Secretary of State for Scotland a four letter word.

The lecturer is Wardog, one of my favourite blog authors, who has, as a result of the repercussions from the incident, decided to close his blog because of its effect on his career and family. It is now, as he pointed out in his last post, an ex blog.

It appears that he also accused Mr Murphy of pushing his way to the front in a photograph so that he could get his face on television. Now whether he actually pushed his way to the front or not, he certainly was just behind Mr Brown, which was a pretty good place for the most junior and unimportant cabinet minister of all.

The article gives Wardog’s full name, however I won’t do that here, nor will I link the SoS’s article. We knew him as Wardog and that’s fine for me and I won’t sully this blog with a link to that ‘paper’.

Murphy had also complained about what he called a “cybernat campaign” of disparaging comments about Labour’s win in the Glasgow North East by-election. I’ve read and indeed contributed to the discussions on this win, including mentioning the large number of postal votes and the fact that the number of votes for the Socialist Labour Party fell from around 4,050 to around 50, mindful of the fact that in the last election there was no “Labour” candidate, Martin standing only as The Speaker.

The rights and wrongs of these things in a democracy are surely fair game for discussion. Whilst Wardog’s choice of language would not be mine, I feel that he had every right to use it as he saw fit. After all, it’s what people are saying in one-to-one discussion, in pubs, shops, buses, wherever. In my opinion it is not in any way the same sort of thing as when Matthew Marr used the same word to describe Alex Salmond at the Herald’s Politician of the Year Awards two years ago. Marr was an employee of the Labour Party, specifically of the leader of the Labour Group in the Scottish Parliament, and as such had a certain responsibility to represent the party. Wardog is not a member of any party and was speaking for himself alone. That’s called freedom of speech.

We need to make sure that we get across the message that we do not want to live in a Scotland that in any way resembles the East Germany of 25 years ago. We must be free to say what we want, within reason, and that includes calling Cabinet Ministers by four letter words. Wardog was not asking us to rise to arms, he was not suggesting rebellion. He merely wrote his opinion of Jim Murphy. Brown may want us to have no freedoms in the United Kingdom. We must not let this happen in Scotland.

Wardog, I’ll miss your blog. It was intelligent and amusing. I hope that in the fullness of time you will return. Jim Murphy and the Labour Party will not have done themselves any good by this. Nor, I suspect will the dying Scotland on Sunday which has, needless to say, withheld the right to comment on this article. Bravo SoS!