A completely crushing blow has hit the first minister. No, not two of his MSPs resigning the whip; no, not being called a bare faced liar by, erm Labour (no, stop laughing, it's not funny)*. No no no, it's worse. Get a load of this!
Some bloke in Kelso with, it seems to me, too much time on his hands, has decided that Mr Salmond calling the Tory government "this bunch of incompetent Lord Snootys" was "an attack on people, identifiable to me as English, solely on the grounds of race", and as such showed anti-English prejudice.
Colin Shaughnessy has written to Lothian and Borders police to make a complaint (although, as Mr Salmond made the statement at the conference, and the conference was held in Perth, it should probably be Tayside Police that he complains to). The sooner we have one police force, the easier it will be for dullards to know whom to write to with their complaints.
The best of it is that Shaughnessy is a lawyer! No, seriously, he is. (Tris checks calendar and notes that it is not April 1.)
But I want to put poor Alex's mind at rest.
You see, first of all, it seems to me that the comment was nothing to do with race and everything to do with the fact that the London cabinet consists overwhelmingly of very rich, privately educated chaps, many of them with aristocratic connections and all of them with absolutely no idea of what life in Britain is like.
But the aristocracy in the UK is not exclusively English, and nor is the Cabinet. Indeed the most senior of the Lord Snootys to which the first minister referred, the leader of the House of Lords, is indeed The Lord Strathclyde, Thomas Galloway Dunlop du Roy de Blicquy Galbraith, 2nd Baron Strathclyde, PC, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who from his title (Strathclyde), you might guess, and you would be correct in that guess, is Scottish.
Now, how anti-English is that?
Secondly, the name "Lord Snooty" originates in a comic strip from a Scottish (and very loyal Tory) publishing house, D C Thomson. The strip first appeared in the 'Beano's' first edition in July 1938, so not new then, and to the best of my knowledge it has never caused anyone any offense.
Furthermore, 'Private Eye' has recently been publishing a parody comic strip called "Dave Snooty and his Pals" which takes the Mick (oh sorry was that identifiably Irish) out of Dave and George, and yes, probably from time to time dear old Tom Strathclyde.
I wish Shaughnessy joy taking D C Thomson, Private Eye and the First Minister, oh, and the Daily Telegraph for this, to court. Maybe they will run a counter charge that it's anti-Scottish to imply that the Second Baron Strathclyde is an Englishman (English Gentleman, please).
And i thought I was sad writing a blog. Honestly, some people REALLY need to get a life.
* Off topic, but did anyone see FMQ? Had wee Ruthie been on the wacky backy or the electric soup or something? I thought someone was gonna have to send for a straight jacket!
The Tories have promised to get people off Incapacity Benefit and JSA and into jobs.
They have also promised to drastically reduce the size of the civil service, presumably by sacking staff, and to increase the age at which men and women can retire.
This is a subject I’ve visited before on the blog, and I do so again because according to the Dundee Courier a new study by the GMB union shows that there are 650,600 people of working age in Scotland who are economically inactive and 175,200 people registered unemployed. But, as of this week, there are just 21,700 notified job vacancies across Scotland.
The Tory’s policies will increase unemployment by large numbers. Each year a certain number of people retire to be replaced by school or university leavers on the job market, but with the age for female retirement rising from 60 to 61, then 62 and by stages to 65 to make them at long last truly equal with men, there will be fewer people retiring and fewer vacancies to fill.
Then there are the civil service cuts that the Tories have promised. They will be swingeing; vast numbers of staff can be expected to go and in addition there will be the people who depended on these civil service personnel to spend their money in their shops, restaurants, gyms, hotels....etc. They will downsize too. And so the miserable cycle of unemployment will begin.
The Tories say that the private sector will supply the ne
w jobs, but exactly how that is going to happen I’m not sure. Mrs Thatcher managed to created quite a number of jobs in finance and insurance, but ...well, the bottom has kinda fallen out of that market here, and in any case most of the existing or soon to be unemployed would, had they been capable, have taken that kind of job with big fat bonuses when they were in supply.
Where are the jobs going to be for the people who actually live in the country and aren’t some fairy tale dream that the politicians have created? You know, the ones that find reading and writing hard; the ones that can’t spell too well; the ones that speak with heavy regional accents and bad grammar; the ones that swear lots and punctuate with F***s rather than commas and semi-colons?
Currently in Dundee 5100 people were chasing 797 jobs and 20,300 people of working age were recorded as economically inactive. That’s around 25,000 people chasing 800 jobs (31 people for every job) and that’s before all the redundancies from councils and civil service.
And one of Dundee’s biggest private sector employers D C Thomson, the Courier’s publisher announced over 300 redundancies today.
So who will create these jobs? We might need around 800,000 of them across Scotland.
I’ve worked in the employment business for 10 years and more now and I can’t see foreign companies bringing manufacturing jobs here unless we bribe them with all manner of costly concessions, and allow them to employ eastern Europeans. For the life of me I can’t.
