JUST FOR A LAUGH

Three guys died and when St. Peter met them at the pearly gates, he said, "I know that you guys are forgiven because you're here. Before I let you into Heaven, I have to ask you something. You have to have a car in Heaven because Heaven is so big. What kind of car you get will depend on your answer." 

The first guy walked up and St. Peter asked him, "How long were you married?" He answered, "24 years." "Did you ever cheat on your wife?", St. Peter asked. The guy said, "Yeah, 7 times ... but you said I was forgiven." St. Peter said, "Yeah, but that's not too good. Here's a Pinto to drive." 

The second guy walked up and got the same question from St. Peter. He answered, "I was married for 41 years and cheated on her once, but that was our first year and we really worked it out." St. Peter said, "I'm pleased to hear that. Here's a Lincoln." 

The third guy walked up and said, "St. Peter, I know what you're going to ask. I was married for 63 years and didn't even look at another woman! I treated my wife like a queen!" St. Peter said, "That's what I like to hear. Here's a Jaguar!" 

A few days later, the two guys with the Lincoln and the Pinto saw the guy with the Jaguar, crying. When they asked him what was wrong, he said, "I just saw my wife. She was on a skateboard!"

ALAN BISSETT SAID THIS IN NOVEMBER 2013

Pretty neat, don't you think, except for the last few words. 

We HAD a chance to change this.

TAKE A LOOK, MR HUNT

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!

SOPPY SUNDAY

1: Doodlebug, an orphaned kangaroo won't
be separated from his teddy.

2: Dudhope Castle, Dundee.

3: Ice Canyon, Greenland.

4: Haven't forgotten you, PP.

5:Loch Creran, Argyll, (courtesy of Frank).

6: Never seen a robin catch a fish?

7: Bathtime for the babies.

8: Switzerland. Well, where else would it be?

9: Orphaned baby elephant.

10: What an amazing outlook.

11: Lake Bled, Slovenia.

12: Il n'y a rien d'aussi beau, qu'une vallée à l'abri du temps, où les oiseaux font leurs nids dans les cœurs des arbres géants.
(There's nothing so beautiful as a valley shaded from time, where birds make their nests in the hearts of giant trees.)
Sweet Swiss Valley. Il fait bon vivre chez toi!

13: More?

14: Morning...

15: What's this then?

16: Another poor orphan who just needs a cuddle.

17: Ahhhhchoooo!!

18 : Iceland.

19: Got a worm?

20: Nuts!

LABOUR MSP LIST LEAKED

Hilarious. 

For the full list of fresh new talent, which looks uncannily like the full list of stale second rate numpties, see Stuart's hilarious piece on the leaked list.

MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED TO VOTE

https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote

YOU HAVE TO HAND IT TO HIM...

This programme seems reasonable.

Looking at his proposals individually...

Why would you call a wage you can't live on a "living wage"? And why should the taxpayer subsidise employers who refuse to pay enough to live on? Corporate welfare, while they tear welfare away from the sick and the poor.

Why do big companies get away with not paying tax? So that government ministers can secure lucrative directorships after they get their seat in the Lords? If not ...why else?

Austerity takes money out of the system. Usually money that would have been spent, not stashed away in a Jersey bank account or a British Virgin Islands trust fund. It doesn't work. In any case it's only austerity for some. I don't see Charlie Windsor Saxe Coberg on the bus! His income has gone up, as has his mother's. 

Investing in infrastructure has many advantages. Firstly you are improving the infrastructure... (and heaven knows, it needs it). You're building new bridges, better roads, faster communications, 21st century railways (fuelled by electricity, not diesel), less congestion, better internet speeds... 

And then it provides jobs. These things don't just happen. People have to design them, build them, conveyance the contracts, sell the workers tea and bacon rolls... These people earn money; mostly they spend that money and create other jobs which in turn...well you know. And all the material has to come from somewhere, be shipped and transported. That's all work.

It's a joke that some parts of the UK the average wage does not cover the cost of renting a modest home. Why are we paying out benefits to landlords for excessive rents, sometimes from slum properties? More corporate welfare. But then, ask yourself how many MPs and Lords are landlords.

I'm not advocating taxing people who are making a modest but decent salary. Most of them, in Britain, have student debt and mortgage debt not to mention credit card debt already and struggle. 

But when people earn really high salaries I see no reason why, on that part of their salary that is over around 6 times the national wage, they should not pay 50% of it in tax. That won't make them poor. Their kids won't go without. In any case many will just give themselves another pay rise.

Some organisations can be run by private companies, but essentials should be owned by the people. Utter necessities must be under the control of the elected government, even if private companies have minority shares in them. 

Water, Electricity, Gas for starters. Then let's look at the Post Office, telecommunications, the railways. And there should be no private ownership of the health service or for the services of the Department of Work and Pensions. It's madness.

We're not endorsing the Labour Party here. At least we would NEVER endorse the the bunch of numpties they have in Scotland. But Corbyn's people have some good ideas for the 90% to take back the country from the 10%.

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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RANDOM THOUGHTS

Not much news to comment on, but there are always Tories to talk about.