WHERE ON EARTH DID THEY FIND HIM II?

Oh please, please, put him back!

RANDOM THOUGHTS

So, to add to the list of broken promises from Better Together, we now find that the fleet of global combat frigates promised by Cameron to the Clyde shipbuilders is to be put on hold, because of a mixture of technical and financial problems, putting the jobs to thousands of the Clyde's shipbuilders at risk.

No one seem to know when they will be built, if at all. The number promised by Cameron was 13. This was already reduced to eight. No the immediate plan is for none to be built. 

Fortunately for Scotland the 50,000 jobs (sorry, my mistake; it's only 500) involved in maintaining nuclear subs on the Clyde was secured by the right wing parties in England yesterday, so at least Tory (sorry, keep getting mixed up here) erm, socialist, Jackie Baillie can sleep in peace tonight. (Echos of manic laughter echo around Munguin Towers.)
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 American politics is every bit as crazy as UK politics at the moment, and clearly their politicians like to treat the public with as much contempt as the British ones. But seriously, just how half witted would you have to be to believe this crap?

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Of course the Labour Party in the UK is in the most horrific mess too, and is treating, not just members of the public, but their own supporters and members too,  as if they were morons.

Their desperate attempts to keep Corbyn, a man chosen as leader by 59.5% of the electors, off the ballot paper in a challenge to his leadership would have been astounding in any party, but for heaven's sake, in the party set up to support the ordinary person against the British Establishment, it was breath taking.

When they were forced to allow him to defend his place, they tried to put all kinds of barriers in the way of potential support. They ramped up the minimum membership to £25 and allowed a small window of time for joining. That's a hell of a lot for someone on minimum wage (remember Labour, that's the people you're supposed to be there for), or the unwaged. Then they had a website, set up to raise money to help less well off people to pay this exorbitant fee, shut down. No charity in the Labour movement. Despite this, and hell mend them, 183,541 people joined.

They also shut down Labour Party branch meetings, presumably in order to try to stop angry members deselect their right wing and hard right wing MPs. Stalin and Pinochet both would have been proud of them.

Frankly I'm beginning to wonder if there will be a single British Labour Party by the end of the year. They surely have to split and let the Blairites follow their dreams or being American puppets, while allowing Corbynites to work for ordinary people, just as the Labour Party was intended to do.

(The illustration above was taken from Twitter.)
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Finally, I loved this!

THE BEST SPEECH FROM TRIDENT DEBATE

TODAY THE LONDON PARLIAMENT WILL DEBATE SPENDING £210+ BILLION ON TRIDENT REPLACEMENT

WHILE CHILDREN GO HUNGRY, THE SICK GO UNTREATED AND PENSIONERS GO COLD...

BUT....

FOTOS ON FRIDAY

That's right, bow before your new monarch, while he looks bored, and in the opposite direction. What a prat!

Lower, you commoner. Another monarch you serve, Cameron.

Sorry readers. It wasn't our  intention for you to choke with laughter.

Gideon promises to pay down the deficit by 3020, or 4020 or something...

Ah yes. There are numerous women in various different part of the country, who are lookalikes for this one. But it's OK, they aren't the same, because they have different names. What they have in common is that they all used to be Labour supporters, but now they are supporting the Ruth Davidson Party because Ruth is the only party utterly committed to the union.

Nice company to keep. Add the Ruth Davidson party.

Well, it wasn't them, was it?

Ah, the intelligentsia has arrived.

Has to be one or the other.

Better Together, huh?

...and Munguin's Republic.

Not gonna disagree with that!

Aye Jackie....

What's that you say Jackie? 13,000? Sure...

Well, you had to grow something for the poor, Dave.

You'd have thought they would have considered that before the belly ached about the one party state, or not?

Don't worry Dave. No one will ever say you were a great man.
We can imagine what they WILL say, but Munguin's granny reads this so... Mum's the word...

Aye, that's Jim, the shortest ever holder of the labour leadership..
And that's saying something!

Well, you never know Frankie, it's best to be prepared... and then there are these 13,000 520 jobs or whatever you believe... the MoD or Jackonomics.

NICOLA IN LONDON

POOOOOOR ELAINE. HOW WILL SHE COPE?

I can't remember how much MSPs get as a wage, but I'm sure that Ms Smith would have been able to find money for bagpipe tuition had it not been provided by the state.

But aside of that, Ms Smith raises a good point. And to be fair Labour has been consistent in their complaining about this sort of thing over a concerted period. They have pointed out over and over that there are fewer courses being run by colleges or funded by the Scottish government at school. 

Possibly bagpipe tuition is among those to go. I understand that there are fewer courses on home crafts and flower arranging, basket weaving, conversational Portuguese, Latin for beginners, and other such things. .

No one wants to see these courses go. But year on year since the 2007 election when Labour ceased to be the senior party in a coalition that ran Scotland but remained in charge of finances in London, there has been a reduction in the Scottish budget. The Scottish government has received less and less money to provide services

And we've been lumbered with an assortment of costs trying to alleviate the worst effects of Mr Osborne's crazy drive to save money that should be spent on ordinary people. 

Not that Scotland has particularly been earmarked for punishment. It hasn't. All of Britain is broke. We are all in this together. Everyone is suffering...well, when I say everyone, I don't exactly mean EVERYONE.

At the time of the crash Britain's economy was in a catastrophic state. Of course it wasn't alone. The USA, Iceland, Ireland and to a lesser extent continental Europe, all suffered, with knock on problems for others. 

The banks were broke and, having made massive profits as privatised companies, were now seeking to socialise their monumental losses (and were allowed to by Brown and Darling).

Personal credit had been allowed to run riot and people owed astounding amounts on a variety of credit and charge cards, paying exorbitant interest rates into the black hole of bank insolvency. 

The price of houses had reached the stage where only prince Charles could afford to buy one (despite him living in subsidised state housing), so mortgages were a gigantic debt, made all the worse that they had been a spate of remortgaging so that people could live the high life on borrowed money, with the sure and certain knowledge that house prices would continue to rise until a one-roomed flat cost a cool billion!!!

Then CRASH. It all fell down. What a surprise! And although, as I say, it wasn't all Britain's fault, and it wasn't all Labour's fault, some of it, a fair bit, was.

That was when, if I remember rightly, that it was decided by the powers that be, that we were all in it together. We all had to show Dunkirk spirit and fight to save our country. Well, some of us did anyway. 

Bankers of course did not lose out in this Dunkirkian effort. Nor did the politicians or officials who had overseen (or rather failed to oversee) the chaos.
And royals and lords continued to live just as they had done before. Indeed over the period from then till now MPs have received a massive pay increase. The Queen and her heir have had large rises in their various sources of income. The prime minister has got himself a private jet and prince William now has a helicopter. All in it together, Aye!!

But the ones who ARE all in it together have found that there is less money for social security, police, schools, courts, health, roads, transport, colleges, universities, etc, etc. And of course for the smaller countries of "our united kingdom", as Cameron keeps on irritatingly referring to it, we get less money in block grant from Big Brother.

Erm.... what?

For all we are a broke little country, however, there has been no dismantling of that status symbol of big rich countries, the independent nuclear deterrent, which of course, as we have discussed before, is neither independent nor a deterrent. (Well the USA didn't find it much of a deterrent when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were bombed; France didn't find it much help back in November, and 7/7 came and went despite the presence of nukes only 500 miles away. And it's not independent because the idea that the UK would [even if it could] use it without permission from America, is completely laughable.)

Nope, it's sole purpose as far as most of us (except Jackie Baillie) can see, is it makes the British government look very big and important in the world. Jackie seems to think that it provides thousands and thousands of jobs for her constituents, but she lives in a fantasy world.

Austerity isn't for rich people.  It doesn't become them. Elaine Smith might have to pay for her son's bagpipe tuition, but she'll cope.  Austerity is for people on the dole; on low wages; on zero hour contracts. 

And austerity hasn't worked, no matter what Osborne tells you. All it's done is smack the already disadvantaged in the face... We know because you can hardly help but know, that there are people who have had their benefits stopped because it was reckoned they were skivers... just as their lives were ending in a hospital bed. And people with too many rooms in their council flat becasue someone went to uni, or died have had to fork out (although not in Scotland) or be evicted despite there being nowhere else to go. People have committed suicide becasue of the misery and shame of living as part of Cameron's underclass.

The stories are too many to retell here. But we can find them all on the net.

And Labour's answer is to this austerity isn't to stop interfering in wars in the Middle East; it isn't to get rid of the WMDs; it's not to demand that companies like Google pay some taxes or that royals live in ONE palace instead of six.

It is rather, that the poor and 'just getting by' pay extra tax, and that the very well off pay 5p extra on earnings over £150,000. It comes with the promise that they will arrange a possibly illegal, and in any case horrifically expensive and complex, system of repayments to the very poor, for which, I add, they will have to fill in forms and present confirmation that they are indeed poor, then lose tax credit and pay tax on their tax rebate (that isn't a tax rebate, honest Mr O)

As Stuart has pointed out, this tax rise won't even cover the costs of the improvements they wish to make to education (which I thought they were going to fund by not reducing airport tax [and thereby creating 2000 jobs]). 

What WOULD cover the costs of the education improvements, however, including Ms Smith's laddies' bagpipe lessons, would be scrapping bloody Trident.

Finally, could someone close to her please  see if they can talk Baillie into realising that really there are very few jobs in Trident. 

I don't know about you, but I'd rather not live next to weapons that Portsmouth thought too dangerous to site in their back yard, and if we got rid of it, I'm sure that in the millions we would save every year there would be sufficient to revitalise the area!

A PENNY FOR SCOTLAND MARK II

At Munguin's Republic, we're very much for increasing public spending to the point where our services operate efficiently and provide safety and security for all Scots.

We are wary of raising taxes to do this, but agree that sometimes it is the only way to provide the wherewithal, especially in a country where the state assets have already been stripped to the bone and sold off cheap. Anybody ever wonder what Harold Macmillan would have thought of the fact that we are now down to selling off the family's clothes, never mind silver?

Anyway, clearly we'd like to see education better resourced, along with more generous funding for healthcare, social care, policing and law and order in general, roads, transport, decent pensions and benefits, getting rid of the need for food banks, etc..

Saving money on unneeded expenditure is clearly a much better way of providing funds for necessities than taking more money from individuals, so before taxes are raised, every possible way of saving money should be explored.

We'd like to see less waste and less money spent on things we really don't need. From big things costing the earth, to little things that add together to make big sums.

'So what would you save money on, Munguin', we hear you ask, and 'isn't that exactly what Westminster is doing?'  Well, in a way, but Westminster has got it all wrong. It's trying to save money by destroying the very public services that we would raise money for. We would do it differently! Trident might be a good starting place. What on earth is it for? What would happen to us if we didn't have it? 

We reckon it is there to make Britain look like it is still an important world power which we really don't think it is. It's there to guarantee Britain's place as a permanent member of the UN Security Council (itself an outdated body representing the world as it was in 1945, not as it is 71 years later.) It has no place there. Britain can't afford it. it has £1.6 trillion of debt.

Along with that there is a vast amount of money that could be saved in the MoD in general. Planes without ships; ships without planes; 260 captains for 19 ships;  more admirals than ships; equipment that is useless before it's done a day's work; light bulbs in the MoD at £22 a shout, more admin staff than soldiers.... and on and on.

But there is so much else that is wasteful. £7 billion and rising to do up Westminster has got to be near the top of the list, and don't get us started on one über-rich family living in 6 palaces in the London region and one in Edinburgh. 

That's only a couple of departments, and there are many more.

But if taxes must rise, then they must. The trouble is that to make tax rises fair a government have have control of a wide range of them. It's not much of an asset to simply be able to vary income tax, without balancing that with other large yield taxes like duty or VAT. That is the Scottish government's problem, and always has been.

That said, in the early days of Scottish devolution, the SNP proposed "a penny for Scotland". It went down like the Titanic, with Labour being its chief critic. Strange then that they appear to have had the same idea, using powers which the Scottish government does not yet have... and indeed may never have. 

Many questions remain to be answered about Labour's "Penny for Scotland", not least how they would make a rebate to people earning under £20,000, when they have no powers to do so, either under tax or social security powers (yet to be granted to them) and whether their proposal of a £100 rebate paid by local councils (which have no information on which to base their calculations) would itself attract tax, whether at 20% UK rate or 21% Scottish rate, or indeed a reduction in any in-work benefits paid to them. And who would pay for the admin?

There will be a great deal of analysis done over the next few weeks, I'm sure, but at the moment it doesn't sound like its a practical proposal and it already seems to be unravelling.

And Niko, before you say it, yes, I know they are proposing to put up the tax on those earning over £150,000 and I think that that is a very good idea, but people are already saying that they can simply change their taxable addresses to England or Wales to avoid it. Remember when the French put up their top level of tax, didn't Mr Cameron offer an open invitation to rich French folk to go live in London? Won't he just do that with Scots?
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If you've got a few bob spare, you might like to consider this crowd funder from our friend and blog roll member, The North British News. Shaun is a seriously nice and funny guy, and his satire is biting.

OH REALLY, RUTH, GET A GRIP...

Probably the most offensive thing in this is the use of the word "decent".

THE EAGLE HAS LANDED ... A BLOW TO THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE SCOTTISH BRANCH OFFICE

Maria Eagle has asserted her authority over Scotland and said that the London parliament is in charge of defence and therefore what the Scots decided, either at the Labour Party Branch Conference, or in the Scottish Parliament doesn't matter a fig. Trident renewal will go ahead.

Clearly Ms Eagle would rather spend £167,000,000,000 on murdering people and animals indiscriminately (you can't be too choosy with a nuclear missile... 'Oh mind old Mr Smith, he's 98 and good to children and animals...") than on conventional forces which are needed by hard pressed British forces in today's world of continual war.

Ms Eagle probably dreams that one day she will be the defence secretary in England and may be invited to stand on the same platform as people as important as the American Defense Secretary or the US Secretary of State. 

The rush of blood to the head that that brings about almost probably clouds her mind as to what else could be done in this rather deprived country with so many billions of pounds.

It is particularly unfortunate, not to say embarrassing, that the put down should come so soon after Kezia Dugdale announced that she and Jeremy Corbyn had reached an agreement to give Labour autonomy in their Scottish branch. Autonomy not granted to other branch offices. 

Baillie: She appears to be saying that the Labour MSPs are not voting out of conviction, but out of loyalty top the party conference?
So who are the actual warmongers?

She told the BBC that if Scotland and England decided to follow different policies on reserved matters, then she and Jeremy would get together and work out what was to be done... come to an accommodation, as it were. 

Clearly what is to be done and the accommodation to become to is that some English shadow cabinet politician tells Slab to shut up and sit down. I wonder how Jeremy and Kez came to that accommodation...

I'm reminded of Jim Murphy when he was banging his autonomy drum ("I need to ask no one for permission") and his "there will be no more cuts in Scotland's budget under a future Labour Government", which was met with incredulity and an immediate "back in your box, Spud" put down by his London bosses, Chukka Umunna, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, desperate to show English voters that they wouldn't be subsidising Scotland.

In the same way Maria clearly wants to reassure the English voters whom she needs to encourage to leave the Tories, that Britannia will continue to rule the world, under the watchful eye of America (or is it China now?) and that the WMDs will continue to be housed safely away from important centres of population, except Glasgow which doesn't matter because it's only full of jocks.

Ms Eagle is joined in this matter by her friend Ms Baillie and everyone friend, John McTernan (ex advisor to the last Labour branch office leader).

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John McTernan ‏@johnmcternan  3h

3 hours ago

John McTernan Retweeted Pete Wishart

We will continue to provide nuclear protection to all Scots regardless of their intellect

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That's interesting McT. Are you aware that your English leader (the REAL one as opposed to the pretendy Jock one) said he won't use nukes when he is PM? So we won't be protected at all if there's a Labour government. 

We just hope Kin Jong Un missed that statement.

Or are you planning, along with the top 1%, to get rid of Jeremy somehow?

Are you also aware that your hero, Tony Hague Blair said in his biography that the nuclear deterrent was all for show?

Baillie voted with the Tories and the Liberals against the government, the Greens and her own party to save the 560 jobs at Faslane, which she seems to have exaggerated into 13,000, with the world's biggest ever job creation scheme. Has she been talking to JK Rowling and getting Harry to magic them?

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PS: Please note that although I would have been entitled, virtue of the subject matter of this post to put up another picture of Baillie, I resisted the temptation... just for you guys!

RANDOM THOUGHTS ...

Blairite, Tristram Hunt has told Cambridge student Labour supporters that they can best serve Labour by leading a campaign of dissent against leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He said to them that they were the top 1% and needed to show leadership in the party.

And there was me thinking that Labour wasn't all about what school and university you went to... but, it seems that unless you went to Cambridge, which probably means you went to a public school, you're one of the bottom 99%.

Hunt, who supported loser, fellow Blairite, Liz Kendal (remember her brief appearance in the news) in the English leadership contest, had thought about standing himself, but reputedly had difficulty getting  the 35 nominations required to put his name forward.

I can't help but wonder if Tristram isn't in the wrong party. He doesn't sound in the least like he belongs in an organisation in which 70% of the membership voted from Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
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I'm delighted, but bamboozled, by the Labour party's stance on Trident. 

Again that magic figure of 70% of the Scottish membership voted to get rid of it, despite known support for the weapons system from Kezia Dugdale and a rousing speech by Jackie Baillie demanding that it be maintained until all the nuclear countries agree to give their weapons up. 

Given that there is no point in spending £167 billion that you don't have and can't afford on weapons that you will never use (and her leader says he will never use them), hasn't she somewhat lost the plot?

The main plank of her argument for a weapons system that is capable of killing millions of people, is that she reckons that 13,000 jobs would go if they scrapped Trident, which is up from her last estimate of 11,000 made during the referendum campaign. MoD figures suggest that the number is nearer 600. 

But you know, for £167 billion surely we could create alternative jobs for the workers, whatever the number is: jobs that didn't involve murdering millions of innocent men, women, children and animals... and, let's face it, bringing about the end of the world as we know it. 

Maybe that's beyond Ms Baillie's imagination. It's not, however, beyond the imagination of Mr Corbyn.
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I am also delighted to hear that Labour in Scotland will restore the Tax Credits, they claimed their aristocratic colleagues had already restored when they all but caused a constitutional crisis and incurred the wrath of Gideon the Grim last week.

My take on working tax credits is that if a country cannot ensure that working full time pays enough money to afford modest accommodation, and basic costs of living...heat, light, food, clothing for you and your family... then that government must necessarily ensure that at least those with children are compensated through the tax or social security system.

It is basically corporate welfare...subsidising companies too mean to pay a living wage, and landlords too greedy to charge an affordable rent. But, wrong though it is, rather that any day than people who work all week having to go hungry, sitting in the cold, or being made homeless.

So well done to Kezia and her team for that. We realise that no one in the Scottish parliament can affect the minimum wage, so I'm happy that Scotland will do something to help those so unfairly treated by the UK.

Of course it is probably impossible to 'restore' something that Westminster has taken away. The power to do that does not exist.

However, as the bedroom tax in Scotland proved, the Scottish government can (at the moment with permission from Westminster, but by 2017 of its own volition) made substitute payments where it feels London has been wrong and unjust.

In the case of the bedroom tax, administered by local authorities (within the Scottish government's remit) it must have been relatively simple, and not too costly, to put in a system which would override the new demands from London, and substitute Scottish government money.

Tax Credits, administered by the DWP and HMCR will, I imagine, be a rather different, more complex and infinitely more expensive matter. How to pay for this will be a problem.

The SNP intend to reduce and eventually scrap Air Passenger Duty in an effort to make travelling to and from Scotland more affordable. The idea, presumably, to encourage tourism, and business, by improving communications. I imagine that John Swinney has identified how he will deal with the loss of the estimated £250 million a year that will be removed from the Scottish grant as a result of that. 

Labour intends to maintain that tax, but presumably still cut whatever it was that Mr Swinney was going to cut, in order to pay for the tax credit substitute.

I wonder if that will be enough.

I suspect, too,  that the Scottish government can look forward to a deal of awkwardness and a lack of co-operation from London. Nonetheless, if we can;t be independent of London, at least we can make every effort to have systems within the UK that suit OUR needs.
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I was in Paris in the weeks before the Iraq war. Every single person I talked to (or overheard in cafés, bars and restaurants) were totally opposed to France taking part in it and, although he was not the most popular of people, President Jacques Chirac was roundly praised when he announced to the country on French television that France would veto military action in Iraq at least until Dr Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector, was ready to report on the question of WMDs, estimated to be within the month. 

Chirac's speech was measured, clear and logical, as he set out calmly the reasons for his decision.

I remember hearing from somewhere that Mr Goldsmith, the English Attorney General, had advised the UK Cabinet, that to take military action without express UN clearance (and France had made it clear that that could not happen), would be illegal.

It was also rumoured that, having given that advice at a Cabinet Meeting, Goldsmith was pinned against the wall in the corridor outside the Cabinet room by one of Blair's enforcers and told to think again. I had no idea how much truth there was in that, but it was an amusing image.

Now it seems, it may not have been so far from the truth, according to an article in the Telegraph.

You know, maybe, just maybe, we will get to see Blair facing charges in the Hague. Just let's hope that he is accompanied by the rest of the weasels that backed him and Bush to the hilt and in doing so murdered and maimed so many people, ruined a country, opened the door to ISIS and the utter chaos of the Middle East and acted as a recruiting sergeant for militant Islam.