STOP THE WAR

I watched both Jeremy Corbyn and Stewart Hosie on the Marr show today. I thought both of them made perfect sense.

If the United Nations means to tell countries that they can bomb Syria, then they should leave them in no doubt that that is the resolution of organisation's aim.

There was the same sort of situation over the Iraq war with the English Attorney General telling Blair first that the resolution passed DID NOT and then, two days later, DID authorise military action. 

It was never totally clear but with the passage of time it seems to have been agreed that the war was illegal.

If there is no doubt about the intention this time, let us have confirmation in a proper resolution authorising war.

Fallon, on the same programme, gave a performance that was described here by Craig Murray. His interview was a tissue of lies, start to finish and far less plausible than either of the two opposition parties.

The ex-Ambassador to Syria has also rubbished the claims of the government.

War should never be contemplated until every other possibility has been explored and attempted. And even then, it should be remembered that it comes with consequences, and massive expense in terms on people's lives and of course money, which we are told we don't have. Involvement will surely bring retaliation...and why wouldn't it?

As Stewart suggested, why don't we follow the money, and the oil; cut the supply chain, which I would bet we are a part of (we export billions of pounds worth of weapons to Saudi every year, and have done so for a very long time. Until they started slaughtering the population of Yemen recently they seem not have used the weapons...)

Isil doesn't manufacture sophisticated weaponry...what would they do if they couldn't get any more guns; any more ammunition?

War, any war, is indescribably terrible and will always have repercussions. It must be the very very last resort. 

Don't read any further if you have a weak stomach. A couple of these photographs are pretty graphic. But this is what war does.

There are some very big business names that will do nicely from another war.

Send Cameron to fight one to one with the head of Isil?

Amazingly, there are members of the shadow cabinet who want to use this situation to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn.

Who supplies ISIL?
Who's regime is closest to Isil's?
And who supplies them with arms?

It's not unfair or unreasonable that those who want war should go fight it.
Same here. They can line up behind  Cameron.

Of course, few in the PLP give a stuff about what conference for the membership think. That's why they are so angry with Corbyn for asking them.

The ridiculous claims that no civilians would be injured are farcical and insult our intelligence. Have they forgotten that we read Twitter and Facebook?

And what about the refugees we will create as we bomb cities to the ground?

Fallon, Cameron and Benn may not mind having this on their consciences. I do.

You must be ashamed to Hilary, Tony

Even Tory Matthew Parris agrees.

MICHAEL FALLON SINKS EVER LOWER

I’m not fan of Ed Miliband.

I think he’ll be a poor prime minister, but I hope he is the next prime minister, because no matter how bad he could be, he’s unlikely to be more detached and third rate than Cameron.

I can see that why he announced today that he won’t work with the SNP. He may well think that some folk are terrified enough of a Cameron government to be scared by this into voting Labour once again even if they prefer the SNP's policies.

As it goes I doubt very much that he will be able to stick to that promise. It's a fact that he can’t stop the SNP voting down a Tory government, and supporting a Labour queen’s speech, which would effectively mean that he was in government due to Scottish/Welsh/Green support. 

He also has to take into consideration what his core vote in England, Wales and Scotland will think of him, and Labour, if he refuses some sort of deal with left of centre, progressive parties, and in doing so, allows the Tories back in for 5 years of incompetent mayhem.

As for saying that he won’t allow another referendum, well, that’s just silly.

Nicola has already said that it is not a priority for her; she also has the humility to agree that it is not up to her whether there will be another referendum or not and when it might be. 

Nor is it up to Ed Miliband, or David Cameron.

It’s up to Scots to decide.

However, that’s not what prompted this post.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t like Miliband, but sometimes you ahve to stand up for human decency.

What Tory minister, Fallon, said about him today was beyond the pale.  It was despicable and I’m astounded that even as semi-detached as David Cameron is, he couldn't and didn't see that, and condemn it out of hand.

Ed Miliband did not stab his brother in the back. He went into a leadership contest against David Miliband and several other people, including Ed Balls. He came out the winner. You don’t stab someone in the back when you go into a fair competition and win. I thought that was what English ‘fair play’ was all about.

And if he goes into some sort of agreement with the SNP and other progressive parties after the election he won’t be stabbing British in the back as Fallon suggested. 

We in Scotland and in Wales, and people who vote green, are part of Britain, and if we vote SNP/Plaid and Green we will still be part of Britain and deserve a voice in it.

That, Fallon, was the deal. Remember the vow; the deal you people made and then broke in the first 20 minutes.

And if you are THAT desperate to have nuclear weapons, then have them, but don't expect our kids to starve and our sick to die in poverty so that you can afford them and don't expect us to house them 20 miles away from the centre of Glasgow. You have them in your back yard and YOU pay for them.

The nonsense that we can only be safe if we have £100 billion of nukes, is laughable. If that's the case, every country needs them. So we should be allowing Iran to have them, and 

For the record Fallon is, according to his Wiki page, far from perfect.

According to the Daily Telegraph, Fallon, Deputy Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, claimed for mortgage repayments on his Westminster flat in their entirety. MPs are only allowed to claim for interest charges.

Between 2002 and 2004, Fallon regularly claimed £1,255 per month in capital repayments and interest, rather than the £700-£800 for the interest component alone.

After his error was noticed by staff at the Commons Fees Office in September 2004, he asked: "Why has no one brought this to my attention before?" (You might be entitled to expect that someone in his position should have known the rules and not left it to the very few staff in the office to check that he wasn't cheating. He signed them; he should have checked them.)

He repaid £2,200 of this over-claim, but was allowed to offset the remaining £6,100 against his allowance.

But it’s not the first time that Fallon has been in trouble:

From The Guardian, News in Brief, 5 July 1983:

"Mr Michael Fallon Tory MP for Darlington, was banned from driving for 18 months yesterday after admitting a drink driving offence during the general election campaign.

"Mr Fallon, aged 31, had more than twice the legal amount of alcohol in his breath when his car hit a lamppost near his home in Darlington in the early hours of May 16, the day after his birthday."

Drunk and expense fiddler. Nice man to be a Rt Hon...

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.

WHERE WAS THE GOVERNMENT WHEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT?

We are informed by the National Grid that, in order to stopthe lights going out all over the UK next winter, shops and offices and the oneor two factories left in the country will be asked to ration electricity use inthe afternoon and evening.

The problem is that the UK government has done more or less nothing to ensure that their old power stations, which are declining, are renewed. Clearly this was not important enough for them to put any effort into and I can only assume that anyone who matters has a private generator and will not be cold if, or rather when, the lights (and fires) do go off.

Not only, it would seem, do we have the most expensive fuel in Europe, we also have the least efficient generators.

The problem seems to stem from England where, I am informed by a correspondent in the Independent (Peter Thomson), they import 11% of their base load and 15% peak load from us, from Scotland, on a daily basis.

Additionally, to keep London running the French High Voltage Direct Current is going full blast. Eire is building an HVDC line to Holyhead to export reusables to England while the Dutch HVDC link is stalled off the Essex coast because of objections to its landing point by environmentalists. Further lines are proposed from Iceland to Scotland and Norway to England. 

Apparently in 2008 one Scottish base load generator failed to come on line in time, causing blackouts across London and the Home Counties.  According to the correspondent, this is not a UK problem, nor even an English problem; it is a London problem… and it is a failure of successive UK Governments to create a strategy to secure the energy needs of London.

Scotland has sufficient energy for itself and enough to export considerable amounts to England, as it is obliged to by virtue of the national grid.

We are told that fracking is the answer. Fracking will save the English government. But how safe is it? How will it affect the water table, the aquifers? Some places in America have found that the water is poisoned and the crops will not grow in areas where fracking is employed.

How will it affect the geological stability of the area? It has already been blamed for earthquakes in tests in North West England.

I've encountered situations where the supply of electricity was not completely reliable but never in a first world, European country, and never in a big city. In a small town in Morocco or in Sierra Leone, it may be expected. In Edinburgh it is not.

It seems that selling off the power companies lock stock and barrel and putting in place a toothless watchdog, Ofcom Offgen (thanks Arbroath) in this case, to keep them in line wasn't the best of ideas.

Michael Fallon: He's in charge of keeping the lights on, so get your torch and some candles. It's going to be a long dark winter.

The English Energy Minister Michael Fallon has told us all not to panic. The power will not go off says the minister. But then, who in their right mind would believe anything he said? He doesn't in all honestly look overwhelmingly or reassuringly bright.

Of course, if successive Westminster governments hadn't spent so much of their energies and a great deal of our money playing at being big shots, striding the world stage like...erm whatever the opposite is of colossus, they might have found time to run the country, the job we pay them generously to do.