ICELAND: CLOSE NEIGHBOUR, GOOD FRIEND, BEAUTIFUL PLACE, SENSIBLE COUNSELLOR

A POSTCARD FROM REYKJAVIK AND A MESSAGE FROM BLAIR JENKINS

The monument dedicated to Icelandic independence in Reykjavik. They said farewell to Denmark in 1944 and went their own way. It now has one of the highest standards of living in the world. What are we waiting for?

My friend, Anya, sent this photograph from Reykjavik where she is spending a few days. The caption is hers, but I wholeheartedly endorse it. 

And, from the YES SCOTLAND campaign comes this message following George's latest statement on the economy.

Today George Osborne's spending review statement laid out in the starkest terms the bleak future that awaits Scotland for so long as Westminster remains in control of Scotland’s future.

Yet more cuts are penciled in for 2015/16. That means less money for public services.

And citizens throughout the country will suffer as a result.

Research by the Resolution Foundation shows that cuts will be even steeper in subsequent years if Mr Osborne is to meet his targets.

The No campaign cannot offer a positive alternative - because Labour Party at Westminster has already signed up to these further cuts. A Yes vote is now the only way we can choose an alternative to this further dose of austerity. Scotland is a wealthy country by international standards, and taxpayers in Scotland have contributed more per head in taxes over the past 30 years than the rest of the UK.  Our public finances are healthier than those of the UK. We can afford a better way.

A majority in Scotland believe Westminster austerity is the wrong approach for families, the economy and our public services.

Scotland returned only one Conservative MP out of 59. This Conservative driven agenda is not of our choosing. It's more urgent than ever that we put Scotland's future in Scotland's hands. 

We can choose a better way.

The illustrations in the YES Scotland message are mine.

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM ICELAND?

You'll probably remember Iceland. 

It was the NATO founder member (without nuclear weapons) that Gordon Brown described as terrorists, because his Fundamentally Supine Authority (FSA, now defunct) failed to regulate Icelandic banks in Britain. 

This is the  country of fewer than 400,000 people that Jim Murphy insulted...it was, he said backward-looking. Lord love us. Coming from someone in the London parliament the expression "backward looking" is quite astounding.

Iain Gray liked to rub Alex Salmond's nose in the fact that this little country, part of the "arc of prosperity that the First Minister had suggested that Scotland might join, were it not shackled to the dinosaur of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, had more of less broken itself. 

Well, here's what Iceland did. Instead of pouring billions of its taxpayers money into its banks and allowing its criminally negligent bankers and useless, weak, ineffectual government  to get away with their incompetence, they indicted the Prime Minister and the top bankers, and they helped the PEOPLE. 

Yeah, the people who paid the taxes were helped out. Amazing.

They went through a couple of hard years. No one would deny that. But Iceland is back. Iceland is working and Iceland is growing. No triple dip recessions for backward looking wee Iceland, Jim. The sun is shining on Iceland.

And that's because Iceland used common sense to deal with the financial crisis of 2008. It wasn't scared of its bankers leaving for New York or Mumbai  The top ones wouldn't be working in banking any more, not anywhere in the world. They were in prison in Reykjavik, and one of them in solitary.

Meanwhile in London, they took away one banker's knighthood. Another one who had been criminally negligent, and would have run his bank into the ground, financial crisis or none, offered to have his title taken away, and said that he would be prepared to only take 2/3 of his enormous pension of nearly half a million a year. Lordie, the Brits can be scarily macho.

No one can understand why the top bankers aren't in Wormwood Scrubs, or in the case of Fred the Shred, in Saughton. No one can imagine why, having created £75 billion in quantitative easing (money printing to you and me), no one is any better off...except the banks.

Iceland had all the answers, but they were terrorists, according to Brown, and presumably he never paid any heed to terrorists. It's a pity he didn't take some lessons from them.

What could we learn from Iceland? We could learn how to run the bloody country.  That's what.