DEAR MRS MAY...

...CAN I PLEASE HAVE A JOB?

I'm not going to be getting into the rights and wrongs of an English railway company's policy in transferring responsibility for the opening and closing of doors on their trains, becasue frankly I don't know enough about how they operate to make an informed decision on safety, or on the likelihood of the guards being paid off, or having their hourly rate reduced, because of lower levels of responsibility.

But I really never thought to see a Labour man encourage the Tories to crush the unions, unless of course he thought that in highlighting the problem he could perhaps encourage some votes for Mr Corbyn to transfer to the right winger Owen Whatsit.

I wonder what McTernan does for a living these days. 

I know he was employed by Jim Murphy in the run up to, and the duration of, his extremely brief period as leader of the Scottish branch office. What happened when Murphy was, shall we say, less than successful in that role, is unclear, but McTernan seemed to be persona non grata at the court of Kez. And who could wonder at that...she didn't have 40 seats to lose. (Although even without McTernan's help she managed to lose 13!)

He now writes a column for the mad twins at the Daily Telegraph, but we suspect that that would hardly keep body and soul together. Private Eye reported that the remuneration for his ex-colleague, "Bomber" Tom Harris, doing exactly the same job, was as little as £20,000. 

He is also an "associate" of this organisation!

But who knows. Maybe McTeacake has desires to return to the front line. And why not the Tory Party? After all he can be credited with a few massive coups for them already as Scottish Labour will testify.

And... While describing himself as a "socialist", McTernan has expressed an extensive range of views inimical to traditional Labour ideology, such as advocating privatisation of the NHS and London Underground, calling for the widespread closure of libraries, opposing the Living Wage, demanding a third invasion of Iraq and opposing renationalisation of railways, despite those positions being contrary to official party policy). In 2015 the left-wing Labour MSP Neil Findlay accused McTernan of being willing to "say anything in the media for money"

And his Wikipedia page (above) shows that his soul is already theirs!

WHEN WILL THEY EVER LEARN?

SCOTTISH LABOUR TO BE GIVEN GREATER AUTONOMY, AGAIN!

Sorry, Scottish Labour, just how many times have we heard that?

I seem to remember Iain Gray being slapped down for assuming that he had some authority in Scotland. Indeed I recall that he had the temerity to suggest that he was the leader of Labour in Scotland. Gordon Brown was having none of that. HE was the leader of Labour in Scotland, and Mr Gray was the leader of the party in the Scottish parliament. Only the geographical distance between the two saved poor hapless Gray for a Nokia round the lughole!

Then Johann Lamont was to be given real power to steer Scottish Labour in a direction more in line with Scottish sentiment, only to resign after the referendum, complaining that she was kept out of the loop by London, that her staff were sacked without her knowledge, and that she sometimes had to wait weeks for a decision from London on the stance she should take on given situations (by which time they had passed). She said, in short, that it was impossible to run the organisation as a branch office.

Next came the short-lived Jim Murphy, who told anyone who would listen (the BBC probably) that he was his own man and nobody would tell him what to do. Except that they did, and very publicly too! And then Jim lost all but one of Scotland's 41 Labour seats in the UK parliament, most of which had been in their hands for near on 100 years.

Now Kezia Dugdale is to have much more autonomy. Heavens, if each of these leaders got progressively more autonomy, surely Kez must, by now, have more power than the President of China. And Hillary Clinton thinks she's going to be the most powerful woman in the world? Think again, sweetie!

You know, back in the early days of Holyrood there were those who simply assumed that Labour would always form the major part of the government of Scotland. Then over the past few years, that they would always form the main opposition to the government of Scotland. 

Now the notion that they will always manage to be the third party is beginning to be in doubt. 

I've been known to disagree with the views of Henry McLeish, but on this one why on Earth don't they listen to him. It's the only way forward.

Thanks to Oor Jim on Twitter for the artwork!

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.

LABOUR DOWNSIZING ...

WELL, IN THESE HARD ECONOMIC TIMES "WE ARE ALL IN IT TOGETHER..."

There has been a slight delay with Abu's article, which is entirely down to my incompetence, I might add! (Munguin has cancelled my holiday!)

In the meantime I thought you (even Niko) might enjoy seeing SLab's new Battle Bus. And the fact that they've had to ask their ex-ex-leader to lend a hand. 

But why are they are not asking Jimbo? After all, his record on not loosing one seat to the SNP is unmatched, ever, in all history.

I guess he must be off conflict solving! A splendid job for someone who could cause a rammy in an empty room and was part of a government that helped cause conflict all over the world. 

While we are on the subject of Labour chapping doors, can I just stress that it is NOT ILLEGAL (as some canvassers have allegedly been suggesting) to give your constituency and list votes to the same party.

PENSIONS ARE ONLY SAFE IN "OUR" UNITED KINGDOM... OH YEAH?

But don't worry, trusty Munguin readers, as my Twitter friend @dtaylor5633 points out, Cameron and Blair McDougal's broad shoulders will have this covered.  

They told us that our pensions, state or private, would be safe in their United Kingdom. Indeed, there were people who knocked on old people's doors and told them their state pension would stop on Independence Day.

So much so that even the unionist Department of Work and Pensions were forced to issue a statement reassuring people that it was not so.

Likewise with private pensions, we were told that they wouldn't be able to cope with the financial uncertainty of an independent Scotland. That our investments would only be safe if we stayed together and pooled and shared, the UKOK way, in our good old, stable, United Kingdom.

So, the question is, were they lying about this, as they were about so much else, or are the likes of Cameron and McDonut on it?

HAPPY UNINDEPENDENCE DAY

It is thought that, had the Scottish public voted YES in September 2014, today is the day that we would have become independent.

Well, we didn't, and crying over spilt milk is as pointless as expecting George Osborne to be able to count past 10 without taking his shoes off,  Philip Hammond to get past the first sentence of a speech without everyone falling asleep, or the Tory Cabinet to come down hard on fat cat tax abusers and leave sick folk alone for a bit.

Going by the polls, on the back of a series of promises made by Better Together representatives, Scotland decided to stay in a hugely reformed United Kingdom.

Singa-longa-Gordon: God save the Queen.

Most notably Gordon Brown, on behalf of the two British political leaders who could possibly be prime minister at the time of independence, Cameron and Miliband, promised "as near federalist government as is possible in a union where 85% of the population live in one state". And, appearing on a television debate for young people alongside Ruth Davidson, speaking for the union on behalf of Better Together, George Galloway (couldn't Labour have fielded someone?) promised Devo-super-max. Whatever that was.

Its an interesting thought that neither the prime minister nor the leader of the opposition felt sufficiently confident of their popularity in Scotland to bring their promise directly to the people themselves. They were obliged to find an ex prime minister, who it was thought still had some popularity here, to do it for them. That, if you think about it, is a fairly strong indictment. In short neither possible future prime minister held much sway in Scotland.

The two of us.

Moving on, there are those who said that the YES side would never have won, were not winning at any point, could not possibly win. But if that is true why did Cameron do his famous volte face at the last moment and authorise the devo max/federal promises, having specifically ruled these out at the beginning of the debate? 

A man within sight of the winning post doesn't suddenly make concessions  that he previously specifically ruled out. Nor does he sit up all night unable to sleep, and then, when he knows the result, telephone the head of state to hear her purr (like she didn't have a radio in Buckingham palace).

Well we all know what happened...

In voting NO, by a reasonable majority, we put ourselves at the mercy of the UK government, which most people predicted would be Tory, or a Tory led coalition for some years to come.

Who said I purred?

They set up the Smith Commission with a remit to provide a report on further devolution. (The 'max' and 'federal' words had disappeared by this time, replaced by 'further' or 'enhanced' devolution.)

I remember reading that the time scale allowed to Smith was so short that the members of the commission were given a matter of minutes to read every submission and discuss it... and there were thousands, from political parties, civic Scotland, unions, employers, churches, charities and individuals, most of which must have been left unread.

So four pro independence and six anti independence representatives sat down to discuss what they hadn't read, taking orders instead from their bosses. Then the commission reported, not, as had been expected, to the people of Scotland, but to the Tory led coalition cabinet, where some of the proposals were apparently scrapped. So that was fair. Or not.

Fluffy: What he lacks in intellectual rigour, he makes up for with sleakitness. Ask Annabel Goldie.

Thence to the House of Commons in the form of a Bill, presumably overseen by David (Fluffy) Mundell or, more appropriately, Muddle, now amazingly a cabinet minister with responsibility for Scotland, where every single amendment proposed by Scottish MPs was voted down. Imagine, every single one, voted down by the Tory and Labour English MPs, while they were introducing English Votes for English Laws. You'd have thought they might have let a few minor amendments through, if only for the sake of appearance.

The Smith Commission had a policy of 'no financial detriment to Scotland', but Mundell and Osborne had ignored this and it was foreseen that the Scotland Bill would cost Scotland £7 billion in the next parliament.

Fortunately for Scotland John Swinney and his department aren't fools and the Treasury was eventually forced to make changes which ensured no detriment. The alternative would have been that the Scottish government recommend voting against the Scotland Bill.

Well, if you brag about broad shoulders and pooling and sharing, you really have to be seen to deliver.

The actual opposition.
The one that doesn't go home early or abstain.

So, we are where we are. Today we aren't celebrating. It's just another Thursday, and the brightest thing we have to look forward to is the clocks going forward on Saturday night.

But, in the biggest ever shake up in Scottish political history, the UK election which followed the referendum by 8 months, most of our seats in parliament were won by pro independence MPs, some of whom are making a real mark on the proceedings in Westminster. 

So called Scottish Labour, under the leadership of hard right winger, Jim Irn Bru Crate Murphy, was all but removed from Westminster, losing 40 of their 41 seats. This must be the most humiliating defeat for a political "leader" anywhere, ever. 

Ena Sharples.
No wait, I'm told she was sharp tongued but  a decent soul.
So it must be Alistair Carmichael, her stunt double, in drag.

Likewise the Liberals who had always been proportionally better represented in Scotland than in the UK, were reduced to one member, losing 11 of their 12 seats, and leaving only one sad little man who had felt obliged to lie about the First Minister and the French Ambassador in an attempt to retain his seat. The Tories held on to their one seat with a vastly reduced majority.

The election for our own parliament is only weeks away, and without counting chickens, pro independence parties look set to take a majority of the seats.

We have some limited powers over income tax coming in a year's time, and we will be able to change the road signs, at least within the limits of international law. Fortunately for Labour we will be able to vary the Airport Passenger Tax. I say fortunately, because is seems that their manifesto is largely dependent on the money that this will bring in, together with a scheme to lower council tax on Band D houses, presumably because their leader lives in one.

So things are better than they were. As the wise folk say:

Slowly, slowly catchy monkey!

A far more detailed analysis of what has happened since the referendum can be found on Wings' Little Black Book.

A LITTLE LIGHT RELIEF ...

So Aubrey from Fleet, Hants, England, sums it all up for us.

I thought you might all like to go look at Jim Murphy's new website. I had fun going through it considering what he was saying about himself. 

My particular favourite was on his CV where he said he "stood down" as Labour leader in Scotland "after the 2015 election" without mentioning that he had originally had no intention of doing anything like that, and that he had been pushed into after losing 40 of their 41 seats in the country... Seats that they had held for decades, and in some cases 80 years and more. Seats in which they had had weigh-able votes and now had lost . There was no mention either, of his demotion by Ed Miliband. 

Funniest thing of all is that he calls himself the "Rt Hon" Jim Murphy. Honestly! Even monumental jokes like Blair and Cameron don't do that. 

He doesn't get any less creepy with time, does he?

Ironically, given his reputation among colleagues for being able to start a row in an empty room, his new company appears to be dedicated to conflict resolution.

Oh, they make you laugh.

I thought you might like to see how Chinese royalty were treated here, and how massively impressed they were by it. Now we know why Osborne gave away all that stuff.

Munguin just doesn't give a damn...

OK, I'll get my coat...

No seriously, I'll get it right now...

On the way out, I'll leave this Daily Mail thing with you...

...and if you were thinking of doing a bit of decorating in New York, Paris, Madrid, or mainly in Glasgow, just give these boys a shout...

BETTER TOGETHER POOLING AND SHARING JOB LOSSES

They told us that the only way to save jobs in HMRC, was to vote No. (An independent Scotland wouldn't, it seemed, have needed tax collectors???)

Cumbernauld HMRC with Jim, making sure that their jobs were safe.

Indeed, they even managed to get people from HMRC to stand outside with banners proclaiming their jobs were only safe within the pooling and sharing UKOK. Save our UK jobs! Vote NO, they pleaded with us!

You'll maybe find this a little hard to believe, but apparently they lied.

And the irony is that these job losses will be happening in a department that has just been slated by a Commons committee for gross incompetence, and customer services that would make Attila the Hun Enterprises look friendly and magnanimous. 

And why are they so inefficient? Well, because they have too much work and not enough staff.

Fifty per cent of calls to HMRC go unanswered  because there's no one to answer them, and no one seems to be available to deal with the thousands of tax dodgers' names given to them by the HSBC leaker.

You'd have thought that given Gideon is short of cash, that he has to take food our of kids' mouths, he might have though it worthwhile to get his hands on the billions that the super rich have been salting away in Switzerland.

Chris and Stewart with union representatives
outside the Dundee Office

Somewhere between one and two thousand jobs will be lost in Scotland, including the closure of the offices in, yes, you guessed it, Cumbernauld. My home town of Dundee will also suffer substantial job losses.

So maybe Jim, who in fairness lost his own job following the great Pooling and Sharing, and who is now working as a conflict resolution consultant, can pop back from wherever he's creating chaos and disharmony at the moment and explain just how these UK jobs in Cumbernauld were served best by pooling and sharing within the UK. He might try resolving the conflict that he caused by advising these staff members that voting NO would save their jobs.

Good luck with that Spud.

JIM MURPHY GOT A JOB AS A CONFLICT RESOLVER... NO REALLY! THE JOBCENTRE STAFF NEED TO GET A GRIP

Munguin has just handed me Joe Pike's book Project Fear. I look forward to sharing bits with you over the next few days.

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).

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

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

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

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?

*********

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!

SO IT WAS UNION DAY...

And they held a rally in George Square

They look so happy that they won, don't they...all 8 of them

But they were subdued by comparison to their celebrations a year ago

I read in Stuart's interview in the National (and Wings) that this was one of the things that encouraged him to fight on.

I one hundred percent with that. 

After all, it's not unreasonable to be enthusiastic and excited when you win. And I'm not suggesting that this was the way that all unionists behaved or wanted to behave. Indeed many unionists decried this behaviour. I'm sure there were elderly ladies who had been warned of barbed wire fencing, and no pensions, starvation and, for all I know,  the black plague, who were just sitting at home grateful that they could continue to receive the most niggardly pension in the developed world, and that, if they could but afford the train fare, they would be free to visit their great nephew in Carlisle without passing through Miliband's Checkpoint jock!

Ray Bradshaw @comedyray

Important to remember that those in George Square don't represent the no vote, they're just mindless scumbags who would've done it anyway.

But when I read about, and watched videos of people who had told us over and again that they were proud Scots, burning Saltires, intimidating children, and making Nazi salutes, I decided that I'd never bend the knee to that kind of filth, no matter how many decent unionists there were who felt as disgusted by this as I was.

But after all their celebrations, you have to ask what exactly it was they won. They, it seems to me, gained a little time maybe? And that's all.

No matter how you look at it, it's not really worked out well for them. SNP membership has risen to 120,000; Labour lost 97% of its seats in Scotland including that of their new leader; Liberal Dems lost 90% of their seats and the Tories who had hoped to make gains, held on by 800 votes to their one rather pathetic little MP. The Minister of State at the Scotland Office has had to be appointed from the ranks of newly minted Aristocrats. Polls show that the SNP is on target to win a majority in the Holyrood General Election in May.

Why then, after they won so handsomely?

The politicians had started reneging on the Vow within 24 hours, and they went on doing it. 

The Vow (and associated assurances made by Gordon Brown because no one would believe Cameron or Miliband and hardly anyone knew who Clegg was) had the backing from the prime minister, the deputy prime minister and the leader of the opposition. It promised the devo max that had been so clearly denied to us by Cameron at the Edinburgh Agreement talks.

Perhaps some of us Scots had imagined real powers, like they have in little Gibraltar, The Malvinas/Falklands, The Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, even tiny Sark with its 600 residents.

Fat chance.

The Smith Commission was a joke from minute one with 4 people from the Independence parties, and 6 from the Unionists. 

They weren't given time to read even 20% of the submissions from Scottish people. The listening exercise was a joke. It came down to what the panel proposed, and it seems that the Labour Party spent half their time on the phone to London getting instructions on what to think. 

Unbalanced and unacceptable.

And before it reported to the people (as was promised), it had to report to the Tory/Liberal Democrat Cabinet, who tore it to pieces and scrapped proposals that didn't accord with the whims of Theresa May and Iain Duncan Smith.

At its beginning it was a poor man's devo max, by the time it was finished it was a mess of a few extra powers, most of which were meaningless without Full Fiscal Autonomy.

Some of the powers that have been devolved are difficult if not impossible to use. 

We will have greater powers over income tax. Of course no one has dared to use the ones we already have, income tax being a sacred cow since the days of Thatcher. The only way we could ever change income tax is if we had power to alter VAT, or other big money earning taxes. But we don't!

We can't even alter one band of tax without altering another; we can't make new bands of tax; we can't alter thresholds. 

In short we can charge billionaires more if we want, but if we put up the higher rate of tax by 5%, we have to put it up 5% on the people who are half starving on minimum wage.

It's a joke.

It's an insult.

And even Gordon Brown, it's most enthusiastic supporter a year ago, says it hasn't been delivered. Despite the fact that he stood guarantor.

Westminster said what it needed to, in order to win. Then, having won, it swung the union flag in our faces and told us to sod off and Gordon with us.

Today in Freedom Square

Cameron is an idiot if he thinks that Scots take that kind of treatment lying down. But he can rest easy. We are a peaceful people (maybe one of the reasons we abhor his wars). We won't take to the streets. 

But we will win, of that he should have no doubt.

I don't know when it will be, but there will be another referendum and this time it will say YES!