Shettleston doesn’t need Reform’s racism, it needs to be part of an independent Scotland

Apr2 by weegingerdug

On Wednesday, April Fool’s Day, Reform UK unveiled its racist and scaremongering advert for the Scottish election next month. It was appropriate that they did so on April Fool’s Day because they are taking the electorate for mugs. The consists of image showing apparent migrants crowded onto a small inflatable dinghy with text reading “Scotland is at breaking point”.

The number of migrants who arrive in Scotland on small inflatable dinghies is known precisely. It’s zero. The only unwelcome migrants who come to Scottish shores by sea are flute band afficionados who cross from Northern Ireland on the ferry to Cairnryan in July. That however, does not stop Reform’s revolting racist shit-stirring. There is no barrel which Farage’s fascoids will not scrape through the bottom of. Farage has form for this kind of racist bollocks. Remember the advert published by his leave campaign close to the EU referendum which showed a long line of Syrian refugees on the Croatian/Slovenian border in 2015 with the captions “breaking point” and “the EU has failed us all”? The similarities with Reform’s Scottish campaign advert are obvious. The advert was disgusting then, and it’s disgusting now.

Reform used this advert in 2016 and again in Scotland ten years later in order to present a racialised image of immigrants as dangerous invading others. This is also apparent with the language the far right uses to describe migrants and asylum seekers, who are referred to as “fighting age men”, a phrase which implies that migrants and asylum seekers pose a threat of violence. “Working age men” would be just as accurate and carries the implication that migrants and asylum seekers could make a positive contribution to society, which in fact the vast majority of them do. When have you ever heard Farage and his minions acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of immigrants arrive in the UK legally – even applying for asylum is perfectly legal – are law abiding, industrious, peacefully raise families, pay taxes, and enrich society? Never, but that’s the norm for immigrants to Scotland.

It is particularly cynical of Reform to unveil their race-baiting advert in Shettleston in Glasgow. I know the area well, being brought up nearby. It one of the city’s most deprived districts, but not an area which has a large migrant population. Reform seeks to reinforce the false association between the multi-generational poverty and deprivation which blights communities like Shettleston and immigration in order to distract from the real causes of that poverty – the untrammelled greed of the multi-millionaires who bankroll Reform UK and a rapacious Westminster which siphons off Scotland’s natural resources and its educated young people in order to service the economy of London and the South East of England.

I remember Shettleston in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the poverty and deprivation in the area then was if anything even worse and more brutal than it is now. It was not uncommon for kids to try and keep warm at night by huddling under coats piled up on their bed in the winter while the condensation in their damp and draughty homes froze into crystalline patterns on the inside of the window. Then as now, many people attempted to cope with depression and despair by self-medicating with drugs or alcohol. All this was happening as Scotland’s immense oil wealth was piped south to fuel the greed of Westminster and the financial backers of the Conservatives in the City of London.

Shettleston’s poverty in the early 1980s was one of the most important reasons that I became convinced of the necessity for Scottish independence. When I was 18 I went outwith the UK and Ireland for the very first time. I visited the Netherlands and did what all 18 year olds visiting the Netherlands for the first time did, I sat in a park in the summer sun and enjoyed smoking a joint. I sat there enjoying the sun and the pleasant buzz from the joint, at peace with the world. I got to thinking how nice it was in Rotterdam, clean streets, well dressed people, houses that appeared well cared for. I fell into conversation with a Dutch guy about my own age and we sat together chatting for fifteen minutes or so. As he got up to leave, he remarked: “Nice talking to you. Take care of yourself, this is a really bad area.”

It was only at that moment that it struck me that the poverty and deprivation I had seen all through my childhood in the East End of Glasgow was not normal and was not acceptable. It made me angry, I felt that all my life I had been deceived by a political system that constantly boasted that the UK was one of the richest and most powerful states in the world yet kept Scotland in poverty and told us to be grateful even as it robbed Shettleston and the rest of Scotland of natural wealth and resources which rightfully belong to everyone in Scotland and which could be transformative for Scotland’s working class communities. Westminster teaches us that misery and deprivation are normal and to tug our forelocks in gratitude for the few crumbs tossed our way. It teaches us that the very best we can aspire to is for things to be just a little less shitty.

What there wasn’t back then was any significant migrant communities in Shettleston, yet the poverty, grime and desperation was even worse. So it is cynical in the extreme for Reform UK to attempt to lay the blame for Shettleston’s problems with poverty and deprivation in the 21st century on migrants. It’s even more cynical when Reform’s policies will intensify the root causes of poverty in working class communities, not just in Shettleston but across Scotland and the rest of the UK. I was angry at Westminster in that park in Rotterdam at the start of the long dark night of Thatcher’s rule, I am angry still.

I am incandescent at the lies, deceit, racism, bigotry and hatred fomented by Reform UK which it falsely presents as a solution to very real issues of poverty, inequality and social exclusion which still blight working class communities. Reform practices the politics of hateful “Look over there!” Holyrood has no control over immigration policy, Reform knows that but still peddles its message of hate. Reform piles blame on a marginalised, demonised, and powerless minority as a distraction from the real minority at the root of so many of the problems which assail society today, that minority is the super rich and their unfettered greed. That minority funnels millions of pounds into the Tory dregs of Reform, spreading its message of hate and division. The racist lies of Reform will only make the poverty of Shettleston worse.

Only a break from Westminster can give Scotland, and Shettleston, the fresh start we all need. Only then can we hope to achieve a politics in which political parties are not bought by the super-rich. Only then can Scotland take control of this country’s vast natural wealth and harness it for the benefit of the people of Scotland. Scotland doesn’t need Reform UK’s hatred and division. Scotland needs independence.

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It’s not just independence which is at stake in this election

Mar31 by weegingerdug

The weekend kicked off the election campaign with a well attended march and rally for independence held in Edinburgh on Saturday. I’m sure you all followed the reports about it on BBC Scotland, oh, right. It was far too busy talking about the ferries again wasn’t it.

Every political party talks up its chances during an election campaign, but the insistence of Labour’s Scottish branch manager Anas Sarwar at the launch of his election campaign last week that he’ll be the first minister after May’s election is the kind of fantastic and self-important delusion that you normally only find amongst patients of a secure mental health facility. Mind you most such patients don’t have a state broadcaster to validate their delusional beliefs.

On Tuesday, an opinion poll was published which showed, yet again, that Labour is trailing Reform UK in voting intention for May’s election. As previously detailed in this blog, Reform typically performs more poorly in real elections than it does in polling, and there’s reason to believe this pattern will be repeated in Scotland on 7 May. Traditional polling does not take into account the willingness of voters to vote tactically in order to keep out a party they dislike, and while Reform UK has its core of support, a support base which disproportionately infests the comments section of the Herald newspaper – a dreary publication dedicated to telling its readers how awful everything in Scotland is while giving Westminster a free pass – there are many more people in Scotland who loathe Farage and his party than those who would consider voting for them.

Tactical anti-SNP voting was a significant factor in the Holyrood election of 2021, tactical anti-Reform voting may prove to be a significant factor in this year’s Scottish election. A recent polling analysis by Stonehaven of an MRP poll found that one in four Labour voters in Scotland are willing to vote for the SNP in order to block Reform. The anti-SNP tactical voting which was a feature of the 2021 Scottish election is more difficult for opponents of independence this time round as the anti-independence vote is more fractured by the media and dark money assisted surge of Reform UK over recent months. Meanwhile the pro-independence vote has coalesced around the SNP and the Scottish Greens with the implosion of Alba and the failure of Corbyn’s Your Party to get off the ground in time for May’s election. The attempt of the minor pro-independence parties to cobble together an alliance to Liberate Scotland or ATLAS, which hopes to occupy the space left by the demise of Alba has run into difficulties with the departure of one of its founding parties, the Independence for Scotland Party (ISP) and arguments over the selection of Craig Murray as a candidate. Additionally, one of the parties in the Alliance, Sovereignty, has been accused of being far right. It promotes an ethnic based definition of Scottish, seeks to ban abortion from conception, and talks about establishing Scotland as a ‘Christian’ nation.

One of the founding members of the alliance very publicly resigned due to his opposition to Craig Murray’s candidacy as the former ambassador and Alba member does not share his vehement opposition to trans people. This in an alliance which claims that it is defined by “independence, nothing more, nothing less,” but not apparently where a refusal to join in the current demonisation of the trans community is concerned.

An opinion poll by Find Out Now published on Tuesday suggests that Craig Murray may be in a position to take a list seat in Lothian while former Scottish Socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan, who is standing for ATLAS in the Glasgow region, may take a list seat there. It remains to be seen whether this will be replicated by other polling companies. However, this poll wil be dismissed by serious polling analysts as a push poll as it specifically asked voters in the Glasgow Region, the Lothians East Region and across Scotland if they would consider voting for the new Scottish independence party at May’s election.

A similar push polling exercise on behalf of Rupert Lowe of the far right Restore Britain party, also by Find Out Now, claimed to find that the extreme right party would take 8% of the votes in a Westminster general election. This finding has not been replicated by any other polling company.

Although respondents were not specifically prompted in the same way as they were in these Find Out Now polls, remember that Panelbase regularly placed Alba in a position to take list seats in 2021 and to pick up council seats in the Scottish local elections of 2022, but in the event Alba never came close to winning any seats. Push polling must be viewed with great suspicion as it invariably produces distorted results which are not borne out in real elections. Realistically, none of the minor pro-independence parties is in any position to win seats in May, those which are choosing to stand candidates in constituency seats risk splitting the pro-independence vote and allowing an anti-independence candidate to win. While none of them are likely to garner more than a few hundred votes, this could make a difference in a tightly fought contest.

If you really believe in independence, nothing more, nothing less,” you would not be standing in a constituency election. You might not like the SNP’s policies on certain issues, but the SNP remains the only pro-independence party which can credibly win in constituency elections.

Meanwhile the anti independence press is speculating that Anas Sarwar still has a chance of becoming the next first minister if he does a deal with Reform. They sre just as delusional as Sarwar is with his protestations that the Labour branch office is aiming to win the election in May.
The Scotsman newspaper has reported on Anas Sarwar’s slim hopes of becoming first minister. The paper spoke with a senior source in the Labour party in Scotland who told it that the party’s election strategy is based on the expectation that Labour could be the only party capable of forming a government, potentially with support from Nigel Farage’s party. Party insiders told the rabidly anti-independence paper that they believe they can flip around a dozen constituencies from the SNP, particularly across the central belt, while benefiting from a strong Reform UK performance on the regional list. Their theory is that this would fracture the electoral arithmetic, potentially allowing Labour to form a minority government and install Sarwar in Bute House with the support of the likes of Reform and the other Unionist parties. Oh Anas, a hay farmer has called, he has some straws for you to clutch.

Sarwar has angrily denied he’d do any deals with Reform, but Labour also ruled out doing any deals with the Tories in order to prevent the SNP forming administrations in local authorities. They did deals with the Tories anyway.

Back on planet Earth polling has consistently placed the SNP well in front in voting intention and it should end up either with a narrow majority of seats in the Scottish Parliament or just short of an outright majority. Most polls suggest that the most likely outcome in May is a pro-independence majority in Holyrood composed of the SNP and the Scottish Greens. Polling also consistently suggests that the Labour party will do well to cling on to third place, with some polls putting it in fourth place behind Reform.

The fact remains, the SNP is best placed to prevent Reform winning in the constituency ballots, Labour voters need to ask themselves whether they are opposed to Scottish independence more than the are opposed to fascism. It’s not just independence which is at stake in this election.

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The rapid implosion of Reform’s Scottish campaign

Mar26 by weegingerdug

As the saying goes, you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh. Within just a few days of Reform UK launching its Scottish election campaign to much fanfare and racist ‘jokes’ about tartan burqas, the wheels are already coming off Farage’s septic tank pumper wagon. The party has already lost no less than four of its allegedly rigorously vetted candidates, while its so-called leader, Malkie the Messenger Boy Offord has got himself in a spot of bother over a revoltingly homophobic ‘joke’ he made at a rugby club dinner which was too much even for the rugby club boys. What is it with Reform UK and unfunny and abusive jokes. Disguising your racism or bigotry as a ‘joke’ is a way of turning criticism back on those who call you out for your racism or bigotry. “The woke brigade are just humourless and can’t take a joke, it’s an attack on my freedom of speech.” We’ve seen that playbook being deployed so many times.

Over on the fascist cess pit that is Twitter, Reform’s support bots were claiming that the SNP has no right to criticise Offord because the SNP did not leap to condemn comments made by the late comedian Janey Godley. There’s a wee bit of a difference there. Janey Godley was not a member of the SNP, far less was she the leader of a political party contesting the Scottish election with pretensions to becoming the next first minister. She was never in a position to make laws or influence public policy, which is precisely what Offord seeks to do. So his making abusive statements about a minority group is far more relevant and concerning than anything Janey Godley ever said. Many others denied that Offord’s homophobia was indeed homophobic. The National printed it, and if you don’t think it was homophobic, that can only be because you’re a homophobe too. I’m not going to repeat the disgusting comments here but suffice to say it was homophobic because it relied on the old trope of reducing gay men to nothing more than an obsession with anal sex and additionally mocked the grief of George Michael’s bereaved partner.

It speaks volumes about Offord’s real beliefs that he thought such a comment was suitable to make in public. He has tried to weasel out of it by claiming he had had a few drinks, but the comment was made as part of a speech which Offord had prepared when he was very much sober.

Of course pointing out the vile bigotry that Reform UK scarcely bothers to hide will not deter vile bigots from voting for it. Farage himself claimed that the revelations about his schoolboy penchant for gross antisemitism and singing songs to his Jewish classmates about gassing Jews were only going to help his party at the polls. Reform has positioned itself as the party which says the quiet part out loud and as such provides a political home for racists, homophobes, and bigots of all types. But while pointing out and condemning Reform UK’s nasty underbelly won’t stop the prejudiced from voting for it, it does make it more likely that the decent majority who are repulsed by such sentiments will vote tactically in order to prevent Reform winning. The willingness of the electorate to vote tactically against Reform UK is not picked up in most opinion polling but it is certainly a factor in explaining why the party consistently under-performs compared to its polling figures in real elections.

This under-performance was seen in the recent Gorton and Denton by election which polling had forecast as a three way contest between Labour, Reform and the Greens which was too close to call. Even after polling closed Reform was still telling Sky News they expected to win by a narrow margin. In the event the Greens won by a landslide. It wasn’t even close. Reform did not take it well. In Caerphilly, the polls had shown Reform was in the lead but come the result, Plaid Cymru won handsomely. It was a similar story in the Westminster by election which Reform actually won. Reform’s candidate, the odious Sarah Pochin – she of the tartan burqa joke – scraped to the narrowest of victories, taking the seat by just six votes. Polling prior to the by election polling had given Reform a commanding lead and they were expected to win comfortably.

I suspect and hope that Reform will also under perform in the Scottish and Welsh elections in six weeks time and will take fewer seats in Holyrood and the Senedd than current polling predicts. It only goes to prove that being showered in cash from billionaires does not automatically lead to a credible political party.

People just don’t like Reform UK and particularly loathe Nigel Farage. Tactical voting will be a significant factor in the Holyrood election in six weeks time. During the 2021 Holyrood election there was a concerted campaign by those opposed to independence to organise tactical voting against the SNP, this time round tactical voting against Reform UK will be much more to the fore.

Having already lost three candidates, that vetting was terribly thorough. On Thursday, Reform lost a fourth, former Fife Tory councillor Linda Holt. Holt had supported George Galloway’s Unionist zoomers’ All for Unity vanity vehicle in the 2021 election, after being announced as a Reform candidate, Holt came under fire for racist tweets she’d made about former first minister Humza Yousaf. On Thursday she resigned her candidacy, complaining about the lack of support she’d received from Reform, but to be fair, Malcolm Offord was far too busy trying to save himself from the consequences of his own bigotry to worry about saving Holt from the consequences of hers.

Meanwhile the party’s Scottish manifesto has been trashed by the Institute for Financial Studies, which called Reform’s tax cutting proposals “unserious”. The party’s plans to cut the number of MSPs, to align Holyrood constituencies with Westminster constituencies and to ‘review’ the powers of Holyrood every ten years have been branded as a naked assault on the devolution settlement and a cover for a Westminster power grab. Offord has openly spoken about removing control of planning permission from Holyrood as a means of forcing new nuclear power plants on Scotland.

Reform will certainly get some MSPs at this election, but I strongly suspect not as many as polling currently suggests. If their shambolic and unconvincing campaign continues to implode at the rate it’s going, they’ll be lucky to make it to May. We can but hope.

I won’t be posting again until Monday, it’s my other half’s 50th birthday and friends are coming from America, England, and Belgium to help us celebrate.

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James Dornan MSP looks back on his career

Mar24 by weegingerdug

A guest post by James Dornan MSP

Today veteran SNP MSP James Dornan makes his last speech in the Scottish Parliament, and steps down to retirement and to give way to a new generation. To mark the occasion, he has very kindly written a guest post for this blog in which he looks back over his time in the Scottish Parliament and talks about his hopes for the future. James is one of the good guys, his contribution to Holyrood will be much missed.

5th May 2011 was the proudest day in my life outside family occasions. For a guy who left school at 15, had a family by the age of 17, lived through the ravages of Thatcher’s Britain and had, like so many others, during that period and since, to deal with the impact of her poisonous policies on my family, my community and my physical and mental health, I was immensely proud and honoured to get the opportunity to represent the people I had grown up alongside and the constituency I had known since I was 3 years old, 70 years ago. I will never forget that day, nor the SNP for giving me the opportunity to represent them, and the cause of Independence and am forever grateful.

This Parliament has achieved many things despite being hampered by the restrictions put on us by, initially Blair’s Labour Party at its inception, ‘Parish Council’ anyone, and then the numerous Tory governments since then, up to and including the latest one led by Sir Keir. It’s my honest belief that given the full powers of an independent country we would quickly be able to reach greater and fairer heights than the moribund, class ridden UK. And I don’t just mean under an SNP government. I believe there are enough decent people in the other parties who would secretly welcome having the shackles of Westminster cast off to allow them, and their party, to show what they are really capable of achieving, We saw a little of that when the LibLab pact was in power and we’ve also seen it on the too rare occasions when the opposition has been able to ignore their particular version of the Bain Principle to work on a cross party basis. However, for many, and too often, the chain that ties them to the Union is too strong to break and party loyalty trumps national benefit.

I’m not blind, I know we in the SNP can be guilty of that type of loyalty, the only thing I would say in our favour is that whatever reason we are doing it for it is not at the behest of a party or politicians headquartered in a different parliament or country.

When I leave I will have been an MSP for 15 years and clearly I’ve seen huge changes in the Parliament, I’ve seen real giants come and then go, and that is the nature of politics. But I’d be lying if I said I’ve found the changes in the Parliament were for the better.

Now I don’t mean the practical changes, around creches, staff protection, structure of committees etc, they are all welcome. What I mean is the change in the behaviour of politicians and parties. I worked for an MSP between 2003/08 until I became Leader of the SNP Group in Glasgow City Council and in most, if not all, of the parties there appeared to be a real commitment to making the parliament a success. This may have been partly due to the utter nonsense they had to go through together after the opening of the parliament around cost etc, they’ll spend billions on Westminster without a second thought but up here in Jockland we should be aware of every pennyand just have the meeting in a church hall, pretty much what we did until this beautiful building was opened in 2004 to be fair.

And when I was elected in 2011 I think there was still a bit of that ‘we’re all in it together’ spirit going on. It never interfered with the ferocious business of party politics and that’s how it should be. But things changed after the referendum, the unionist parties started to believe, or be instructed, that their principle role was to protect the union, at all costs. No joint working if possible and try to make the business of parliament as difficult as you can. I saw it steadily get worse and each intake of Tory and Labour politicians simply reinforced that position.

Now I know there are a number of good MSPs in all the political parties, and I also know they are often uncomfortable with the positions they’ve had to take, and I understand why they followed orders, we have all done that at one stage or another. But the BIG difference since 2016 is it has become clear that many of those opposition MSPs,and certainly their leadership,would happily see this place close, or if it had to stay open then with even fewer and less significant powers than the already limited ones we have. That is why the place has become steadily more toxic over the last decade. Politicians in this place doing the bidding of politicians in another place because of fear of losing their union.

Never mind what’s good for the people, thinkabout your careers. Never mind what’s good for yourcountry, think of the ermine. I am proud and extremely lucky to have served in a party that has been blessed with strong and politically principled leaders, and I would pit ANY of them against the quality of leaders from any of the opposing parties since my election in 2011. Now Labour had Donald Dewar, they then had Henry MCleish, a man hounded out of office for something that would now be considered not worth mentioning, well unless you were an SNP Minister of course, compare them to the most recent political pygmies leading Labour in the ScottishParliament.

The Tories had Annabelle Goldie and DavidMcCletchie, both giants compared to what they have had in recent years in this place, and that is why people have little confidence in politicians. They tune in on aThursday, well those few that do, to very often hear two ‘leaders’ bring up trivia or sometimes even a serious issue, but without fail it’ll be issues they know are outwith Scottish Government control, whilst at the same time knowing that their own parties are doing the exact same thing or even worse in the places they hold power.They stink of rank political opportunism and hypocrisy, and if it wasn’t for the subservient unionist media they would be laughed out of town. We have politicians in here, we all know who they are, who could easily standup, argue black was white and not blush at all. Theyhen win Politician of the Year for ‘holding the government to account’. No wonder I fear for the future of politics.
I have loved my time as a parliamentarian, although I cant deny this last session has not been what I had hoped it would be due to health and caring issues, but I’m glad I’m retiring from parliamentary politics, I’ll be 73 and think its time for a break. I had great faith in this institution and still believe it to be, by some considerable distance, a superior model of a modern parliament than that living museum down south but, as I’ve just outlined, I fear for the direction of travel of the parliament, the motives of some of those that get elected to this place and the commitment of some of the parties in this placeto this place. There are two things I will regret about not being here for next term though, the first is that once we elect an independence supporting majority parliament Iwon’t be here to vote for that second referendum that we must hold for both the sake of democracy and the future of the people of Scotland. The other is I won’t be here to hold to account the racists and wannabe fascists of Reform that opinion polls suggest will be disgracing this parliament next term. Still I’m sure that even those who hate the idea of Scotland having its own voice must hate these racists and fascists even more, well when I sayI’m sure what I really mean is I hope.
So to those who have supported me over the last 15 years I say from the bottom of my heart a huge THANK YOU. For those who blindly hate what we stand for and decide to vote for Reform or one of the other, slightly less toxic, parties run from afar, I say be careful what you wish for. You stay in Scotland, you benefit from the myriad mitigating policies we’ve put in place to try to make Scotland a better place to live in. Don’t risk your children missing out because you don’t like a leader, or a policy, or love the King or whatever reason you give yourself to vote against your own best interests.

However, I recognise that democracy is democracy and you have the right to make your own decisions. Please make the right ones for you and your family.
Alba gu Brath

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Reform’s chaotic launch and the implications of the Iran war for May’s election

Mar20 by weegingerdug

Nigel Farage came to Scotland on Thursday to launch his party’s manifesto for the Scottish elections on 7 May and to introduce Reform UK’s almost half former Tory slate of totally well vetted candidates. Reform UK there, promising to fix Broken Britain with a slew of the former Conservatives who were responsible for breaking it in the first place. But in less than twenty four hours their candidates were already mired in controversy after one was found to be an avid fan of the far right racist criminal Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, AKA “Tommeh Robinson,” who loves Britain so much he spends most of his time on sun beds by the Mediterranean on his Irish passport where doesn’t learn the language or attempt to integrate with the local community. Tommeh is an expat not a migrant you see, because he’s white, well his skin anyway, if not his cold putrid heart.

Another charmer spent her spare time being racist on social media about former first minister Humza Yousaf, for which she was censured when she was a Conservative councillor. A third was suspended as a candidate when it transpired that he was subject to serious allegations about his financial affairs, and a fourth was found to have forced a men’s mental health charity out of a property he owns by hiking the rent so they could no longer afford to stay. It’s all going terribly well, and it hasn’t even been twenty four hours.

Still, the car crash that is Reform UK’s list of Scottish candidates must be a welcome distraction for Farage from the even worse car crash that is his party’s manifesto, which looks like it was scrawled in crayon on the back of one of Nigel’s fag packets in the smoky back room of a golf club overlooked by a nicotine stained portrait of Enoch Powell.

The Institute of Fiscal Studies – not exactly a bunch of socialists – looked at the manifesto, which has the fingerprints of self-declared financial experts Richard Tice and Malkie Messenger Boy Offord all over it, and once they had stopped scoffing said that Reform’s plan to reduce the current six Scottish income tax bands to three and to peg these 1p below the UK income tax bands was “unserious” and “lacking in fiscal credibility.”

The IFS concludes : “Scotland can have lower taxes if it chooses to – but that would require a reduction in the range and scope of public services and social security benefits provided to residents.” That last part is what Reform isn’t saying. They would bring about austerity on steroids.

On devolution, Reform wants to cut the number of constituency MSPs from the current 73 to 57 and align the boundaries of Holyrood constituencies with Westminster constituencies, a move which not only makes MSPs less representative of their local areas but also sends a message that Holyrood is subservient to Westminster.

Even worse, Reform will conduct a “review” of the powers of the Scottish Parliament every ten years. In an interview with the BBC, Offord said Reform wanted to look at Holyrood’s powers which impinge on those of Westminster. The specific example which was raised was Westminster’s control of energy policy and the wish of both Labour and Reform to develop new nuclear energy plants which is stymied in Scotland where the Scottish Government opposes new nuclear energy and can block it due to its control of planning consent. Offord said that this was the kind of thing his party was interested in addressing and a Reform government would remove Holyrood’s ability to use planning consent to block new nuclear projects in Scotland.

So we already know that this so-called ‘review’ is nothing more than a mechanism for further undermining the devolution settlement and removing the ability of Scotland and Wales to do things differently from Westminster, thus striking at the very raison d’etre of devolution which was sold to Scotland as an alternative to independence. That supposed alternative has now been killed off by the fetishists of the absolute sovereignty of Westminster. All that is left for anyone who wants decisions about Scotland to be made in Scotland is independence.

Reform knows that Malkie the messenger boy is highly unlikely to become the next First Minister, neither is his counterpart in Wales, another former Tory, Dan Thomas who was hurriedly appointed to replace Nathan Gill, imprisoned for corruption, taking cash to make Putin friendly interventions in the European Parliament. What Farage seeks is to build momentum for the next Westminster general election and to win a powerful platform in the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments from which to spout his party’s toxic brand of culture wars bollocks, anti-immigrant shit-stirring, and climate change denialism, all in the service of Reform’s millionaire backers.

With the war in Iran as popular amongst the public as the Melania film amongst movie goers, Farage is currently hurriedly trying to distance himself from his former bestie, the geriatric and dementia ridden Donald Trump and hoping that we all forget that just two weeks ago he was so far up the Donald’s rectum that he could lick the boots of JD Vance. This is unlikely to have much success outwith that minority of the population which has already drunk deep of the Farage Kool-Aid. Two weeks ago he was demanding the UK’s military get fully involved in the American and Israeli war on Iran, now he’s saying “let’s not get involved in another foreign war” and “it’s no to boots on the ground.”

Farage has been studying at the Keir Starmer school of political U turns. Both Farage and Starmer would like us to forget that the only country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons is Israel, and both would like to conflate opposition to the war with support for the murderous clerical fascists of the Iranian regime. But most of us are grown up enough to understand that just because you are opposed to American and Israeli imperialism, that doesn’t automatically make you one of the good guys. The main beneficiary of this war so far is Putin, the classic example of someone opposed to American imperialism who is very far from being one of the good guys.

The Iran war is already bringing death and destruction across the Middle East, a major global energy crisis is underway and there is no sign of an off-ramp. This war is already being compared to Vietnam, the difference being that Trump had a plan to get out of Vietnam. Energy and food bills are set to soar, interest rates will probably rise, hitting mortgage payers and having a knock on effect on the rental market.

This war is unlikely to be over by the time Scotland goes to the polls and it will cast its baleful shadow over the Scottish elections. It is making the arguments for independence stronger and starker. With independence Scotland could avoid being drawn into Trump’s Operation Epic Futility, with independence Scotland could use its immense energy wealth to protect itself from the global shocks to the energy market. With independence Scotland could add its weight to those seeking peace. Vote Labour, Reform, or Tory for the forever war and the continuing diminishing of the ability of the Scottish Government to fulfill the mandate given to it by the people of Scotland. Vote for pro-independence parties which can get elected. Vote SNP in the constituency and SNP or Green in the regional list for a peaceful and energy secure Scotland in which decisions affecting Scotland are made in Scotland.

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Thoughts on the failure of the assisted dying bill

Mar18 by weegingerdug

Back in 1998, after we had moved to Spain, my late husband Andy and I became very close friends with our new neighbour, a Norwegian woman called Ellie who had moved to Spain after retiring from a career on the Norwegian oil rigs in the North Sea. She was looking forward to spending her final years in the warmth of the Mediterranean sun, and had great plans for everything she wanted to do in her new home, she wanted to take up painting, learn Spanish, perhaps even find herself a new partner with whom she could share her life. She was an elegant, vivacious, and capable woman who took life by the balls and lived it to the full. She and Andy enjoyed spending the evenings together, sitting in the garden, sipping G&Ts.

About nine months after settling into her new house, Ellie began to develop a persistent pain in her lower back and found herself constantly fatigued. At first she put the back pain down to straining a muscle when she was decorating her house and rearranging furniture, but the pain only grew worse and the fatigue more debilitating.

A round of doctors appointments followed, tests and scans, pokings, proddings, blood, urine and stool samples. The outcome was the worst news anyone could have feared. It was pancreatic cancer, a particularly cruel cancer which by the time it starts to show symptoms is already incurable. It only ends one way, and that often within a few months. Ellie received her diagnosis in August 1999. She was brave and determined, still hopeful that she could beat the odds and prove all the doctors wrong.

The doctors offered her a course of highly aggressive chemotherapy which she leapt at. They told her it wouldn’t cure her but it might buy her more time. The chemo was brutal, leaving her nauseous and even more fatigued, all her hair fell out in clumps and she rapidly lost weight. Her clothes no longer fitted. She remarked that she looked like one of the prisoners in a concentration camp she had seen and been terrified by when she was a little girl in Nazi occupied Norway, but she said even that was bearable as she still clung to the hope that the treatment would buy her a couple more years at least.

All of Ellie’s family were in Norway, and it fell to Andy and me to look after her, clean and cook for her, take her to her medical appointments and give her the company she needed in the dark lonely nights when the fear stalked her and the pain prevented her from resting.

Within a couple of months of her diagnosis she was in severe pain. The morphine tablets she was originally prescribed were no longer doing much to control her pain. In Spain, patients with a terminal condition which causes great pain were prescribed injections of morphine which their carer could administer at home. That became my job. My partner Andy, former policeman and Royal Marine that he was, was always squeamish with needles.

Getting a prescription of injectable morphine required a special presciption which only certain farmacias (Spanish chemists stores) could fill. If she ran low on a Sunday or a public holiday we had a mad dash around, driving miles in order to find an open farmacia which was authorised to dispense injectable morphine, all the while knowing that Ellie was at home writhing in agony.

As Ellie was requiring injections more and more frequently, I asked the doctor how much morphine to give her, I was afraid of giving her an overdose. “Give her whatever she asks for,” he said, “She’s addicted now but that’s the least of her worries.”

By this time the doctors had decided to stop the chemotherapy. It was not having the desired effect, her cancer was spreading aggressively and it had become a matter of giving Ellie the best possible quality of life in the time she had left. Ellie’s daughter came over from Norway to stay, by this time her mother needed help washing and dressing, Andy and I did a lot of that, but it made a big difference to have one of Ellie’s female relatives to help.

Ellie continued to deteriorate. She was determined to see in the millennium but by early December 1999 she was alternating between excruciating pain, bouts of severe vomiting, and morphine induced hallucinations. That is the reality of palliative care with an extremely painful terminal illness.

She made it to the millennium, but by this time she was scarcely aware of her surroundings, when the morphine began to wear off she surfaced in a sea of pain and begged for relief. The proud, elegant, and confident woman of only a few months previously was haggard, pain ridden and a shadow of her former self. By this time she required an injection of morphine every few hours or she came round, screaming in pain.

On the 7th of January I gave her her injection at 9pm, but at 3 am her daughter came to our door, Ellie had woken up in severe pain, and she wanted another injection. I gave it to her, and she thanked me, “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, but deep down I knew I wouldn’t.

Ellie passed away that night. Her daughter found her dead in bed the next morning. I’ve always been left with the knowledge that it was probably that final injection which had killed her. I tell myself it was the cancer which took her, that all I had done was what she had asked me to do, but it still weighs heavily on me all these years later. It weighs even heavier on her daughter, who had asked me to give her mother that final pain killing injection.

This is why I support assisted dying, and was deeply disappointed that MSPs chose to reject the assisted dying bill. Had assisted dying been an option in Spain in 1999, Ellie’s daughter and I would not have the additional burden of feeling as though we had taken an action which ended the life of a remarkable and doughty woman when all we wanted to do was to ease the terrible pain she was in and even though we were acting in accordance with the advice from her doctor.

There are limits to what palliative care can do. I saw that with Ellie. I saw it with Andy, who fourteen years later ended his life stripped of his dignity, his personality, his memories, his very sense of self. I saw it with my mother whose cancer spread to her brain causing a brain haemorrhage. She spent her last weeks heavily sedated, with food and fluids withdrawn. She literally died of thirst over two long agonising weeks, kept under with sedatives, twitching and grimacing. God alone knows what if anything was going through her mind. My last memories of my mother are of a shrivelled, diminished and unconscious woman, deprived of the drive and purpose which defined her life. I’ll forever be haunted by the fear that some part of her was aware, that she spent those dreadful last two weeks locked in a horrific nightmare.

I have no time for the god-botherers who insist that their faith tells them that assisted dying is wrong. Fine, don’t have an assisted death then, no one is going to force it on you, but your beliefs do not give you the right to strip me or others of our bodily autonomy.

Yes, I absolutely understand that safeguards must be put in place to prevent greedy and unscrupulous families coercing a relative into an assisted death. As a disabled person myself I also understand why some disabled people might fear assisted dying becoming legal. Personally I do not feel it in any way diminishes the value of my life or anyone else’s life. Quite the contrary it enhances the value of life because it puts the most important decision about a person’s life – when to end that life – in that person’s own hands.

Life is precious. It is to be savoured, to be lived, to be fulfilling and filled with love. But death comes to us all. One day all of us will run out of road and it will be time to leave this crazy and beautiful world. It’s humane and decent to allow each of us to do so in peace and dignity and at a time of our choosing. One day perhaps, Scotland will allow us to do so. Today is not that day.

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Scotland: Too wee?

Mar17 by weegingerdug

Is it time to look again at the long-debated theory that Scotland is ‘too wee’ to be a successful independent country?

With the yes voters taking a lead in recent polls, do the facts support this or is it just the final death throes of a coloniser losing its grip?

Scotland

In 2026, Scotland has so much to offer. We have a huge tourism industry, our exports include whisky, gin and seafood and we have one of the most efficient ferry services in the world, contrary to what you might hear from pro-Union MSM. Scotland produces an excess of renewable energy, utilising wind, solar and hydro/wave technology. We have a publicly owned rail service (ScotRail), and in 2013 the Scottish Government acquired Prestwick Airport for £1 to prevent its closure. It has now reported profits for the last six years. That isn’t even mentioning oil and gas, the gaming industry, and the space industry. Scotland produces more small satellites than anywhere else in Europe.

I could continue to list positive stories about Scotland’s economy. I could also direct you to many other links that will focus on less favourable analyses. Let us not pretend that Scotland is perfect or that the current Scottish Government is infallible. The biggest stumbling block we face in the fight for self-determination, is a severe lack of self-confidence. After years of being told we aren’t good enough, we have started to believe it, and we underestimate ourselves. If we believe that Scotland is too wee to survive on her own, then maybe she is. Maybe “too wee” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Other small countries

People frequently draw comparisons between Scotland and Norway. With a population of approximately 5.6 million, Norway’s economy has grown stronger thanks to the oil and gas industry. Norway has shrewdly invested their natural resources in a sovereign wealth fund to ensure it works for future generations. Norway’s nominal GDP for 2024 was around $484bn, and estimates for 2025 are shown to be between $506bn-$517bn.

If we look at a country that is maybe a little closer to home, then Ireland would fit the bill. Ireland became fully independent in 1937 and now has a population of around 5.4 million. In 2024 the nominal GDP of Ireland was $577 billion and that is without the natural resources shared by Scotland and Norway. It is instead, driven by international trade. In 2023 Irelands total merchandise exports included manufactured products (89.9%), food (8.5%) and mineral fuels (0.5%) while total merchandise imports included manufactured products (82.4%), food (8.6%) and mineral fuels (7.2%). Total exports were worth $356bn in 2024, while total imports were $165bn

Sceptics

Malta became independent from the UK in 1964 but remained part of the commonwealth until 1974 when they declared themselves a republic. Prior to this there were many sceptics that said Malta could not survive on its own. It was reported that the economy would not survive without the UK. However, Malta has enjoyed a sustained growth in its GDP since its independence.

Unfulfilled promises within the Union

The current UK Government promised Scotland that they would save Grangemouth Refinery; they promised WASPI women that they would review their stance on compensation; and they promised that there would be no rise in National Insurance payments. In a TV debate, Labour’s Anas Sarwar told SNP’s John Swinney that there would be “no austerity under Labour”. None of these promises have come to fruition.

This ‘equal’ union, as it stands, seems to work only in favour of the UK Government and they can overrule Scotland whenever they want on both reserved and devolved issues. They have already dragged Scotland out of the European Union, but it is highly possible that worse is on the way.

A future in this unequal union could very well include the reintroduction of fracking, bridge tolls, hospital parking fees, university fees, and water meters to bring us in line with England. They could enforce more nuclear waste upon us and more warheads, nuclear power stations, digital IDs, and private healthcare . If the UK leaves the ECHR, it will remove our right of free speech, sick pay, paid holidays, religious freedom, and the right not to be tortured.

Most of the political parties want to reform the state pension – this already includes increasing the age of entitlement and potentially removing the triple lock which allows it to rise with inflation, thus forcing people to live in poverty or work until they die. These are not exaggerations; these are promises being made by some current English political parties.

If Scotland doesn’t pull its financial weight as part of the Union, then why does the UK Government go to such lengths to stop us leaving, or refuse to grant a second referendum? Surely it would be better for the UK Government to cut us loose and watch us fail?

Independence

We can continue to speculate what an independent Scotland would look like, but the truth is, we won’t know that until we are independent. If sticking around continues along the current trend, then the risk will be worth it.

In the past, the status quo may have been considered a safer option, but that is no longer the case.

After independence, new political parties will emerge, and they will all be based and registered in Scotland. Every single one of those parties will be fighting for your vote and they will all be advocating for a better Scotland.

None of the 65 countries who gained independence from the British Empire, have sought to give up their sovereignty or rejoin it. Just to be clear, that is a 100% success rate, and as the odd’s go, that is definitive.

The only sure way that independence will not work is if we don’t try it at all. Scotland is big enough, rich enough and wise enough. We just need to stop doubting ourselves. Independence is not something that is given, it is something that is taken.

This piece was first published on Bylines Scotland and is republished here with permission

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Lessons from 2014 for next time round

Mar14 by weegingerdug

An important new academic book looking at the 2014 Scottish independence referendum has just been published. The snappily titled “Discourse, Voice, and the Politics of Participation in the Scottish Independence Referendum” by Dr Maike Dinger, a Lecturer in Communications, Media and Culture at the University of Stirling is available on Amazon for £104.99 hardback or £99.74 for the kindle edition so I doubt that there is going to be a stampede to the bookshops for it any time soon.

The high price of the book is a great pity, although such high prices are not unusual for academic books expected to have a limited readership, as it is hugely valuable for the broader independence movement to look at what lessons can be learned from 2014 in order to better our chances when the independence question is revisited, as it most assuredly will be sooner or later. Those who do not learn the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat them, as the USA and Western governments are finding out with Trump’s ill-conceived war against Iran.

One issue clearly identified in Dr Dinger’s book is the one-dimensional portrayal of the referendum campaign by the media. The media almost entirely confined itself to a top down framing of the referendum, reflecting it through the lens of political party leaders and paying little attention to the burgeoning grassroots movement which blossomed across Scotland at the time.

Speaking to The National newspaper, Dr Dinger said it was “striking” how traditional media struggled to engage with grassroot organisers and “deferred to elite commentary” from politicians and experts.

She added: “Ordinary people and their thoughts and concerns hardly featured throughout much of the campaign. This is surprising as much of the official campaign focus was on the public from the very beginning. But the media focus only shifted during later phases of the campaign.”

I would suggest that this was very much a symptom of the political bias of the media in Scotland, above all the BBC. The Better Together campaign very clearly took the decision to frame the referendum in party political terms. We often heard the phrase “Alex Salmond’s referendum” which was a part of Better Together’s attempt to paint the referendum as an SNP referendum, not as a Scottish independence referendum. This was a very successful tactic for the Better Together campaign as it alienated a significant segment of the Scottish electorate from engaging with the arguments for independence due to their antipathy to the SNP as a political party. The message that an independent Scotland would be a democracy in which parties other than the SNP could form the government scarcely registered with such voters due to constant media framing of the referendum as an SNP event.

In this the media and the Better Together campaign were assisted by Alex Salmond’s then unchallenged dominance over the SNP and his strong, forceful, and polarising character.

This is a tactic which the anti-independence parties and the British media in Scotland have continued to employ in the years since the referendum. They still frame independence as an SNP issue while in a travesty of democracy votes for other pro-independence parties are not held to count. This was seen most clearly following the Scottish elections of 2021 when the SNP and the Scottish Greens won a substantial majority of Holyrood seats in an election which was dominated by the issue of a second independence referendum only for the anti-independence parties which lost that election to insist that the Scottish Parliament did not in fact have a mandate for a second independence referendum. Their gaslighting was enabled by a Scottish media which to its eternal shame failed in its basic duty to defend democracy and paid mere lip service to asking the Labour and Conservatives to specify the democratic route to another referendum.

The tactic of framing indyref 2 as an “SNP referendum” will still be very much to the fore the second time around. This time however, the recent decoupling of support for independence from support for the SNP can very much play to our advantage as can the absence from the SNP leadership of a dominant marmite love him or loathe him leader like Alex Salmond.

Also, next time round we will be under no illusions about the bias of the BBC. We will go into the referendum campaign braced for anti-independence bias from the BBC and can shape our campaign accordingly.

The first indyref campaign was marked by a couple of unforced errors by Alex Salmond which still dog us today. The first of these was his policy of a currency union with the rest of the UK following independence. This policy effectively handed the Better Together campaign a veto over a key part of the economic prospectus for an independent Scotland, a veto which they enthusiastically employed, leading to ludicrous scare stories that on day one after a yes vote, Scotland would have no usable currency at all. It also left us with the “What currency will you use?” trope which still hangs around to this day. Next time round the independence campaign needs a clear, simple, and plausible answer to this question which does not allow any room for a Westminster veto. My own preference is to unilaterally continue to use Sterling as a transitional currency before introducing a new Scottish currency as quickly as possible.

The other error only became apparent after the vote was lost, that was the “once in a generation” rhetoric which has hung like a millstone around our necks ever since 2014. It’s not entirely fair to blame Alex Salmond for this, as it was a slogan designed to boost participation in a vote which he entirely expected to win. You can’t really blame him for not preparing to fail. But fail he did and we are left to pick up the pieces. That slogan was abused by the anti-independence parties after they won as a get out of jail free card which prevented them being held to account for all the many broken promises of their own.

The other key questions to which we need clear answers are pensions and the border. These answers must be simple and able to be communicated in easy to remember sound bites. The border question is more salient now that the UK is out of the EU and Scotland will seek at a minimum to join EFTA if not rejoin the EU.

The biggest difference next time round however will be the inability of Better Together Mk II to make any promises about what Scotland will be offered by Westminster in return for a No vote. Their credibility has been well and truly shot by their lies and betrayals from 2014. There will be no promises of federalism in three years or Devo Max. This means that we will be in for a barrage of hysterical and over the top scare stories unleavened by any bribes. We need to be prepared for that.

However the biggest difference between 2014 and the next time is that we are going into the campaign with a majority for independence already. Support for independence was far behind in polling when the campaign kicked off in 2013. Next time the advantage is ours and we will be facing an anti-independence campaign which has hamstrung itself by depriving itself of the ability to mount a positive campaign. That’s why next time round we are going to win.

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So-called muscular unionism is a sign of Westminster’s fragility

Mar12 by weegingerdug

The Labour party has responded to the leak of a memo from Starmer to cabinet ministers in which he tells them not to be “deferential” to the devolved governments and not to hesitate to override them even on devolved matters. Starmer was questioned about the memo by SNP MP Stephen Gethins at Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons on Wednesday, to which Starmer gave his usual snide non-answer, treating the question as an opportunity to get in one of his dubious digs at the Scottish Government and completely dodging the substance of the issue.

The Scottish branch office also gave a response, although not from the branch manager himself, who was still in hiding in case anyone asked him about his “old friend” Peter Mandelson. It was left to Labour’s constitution spokesman, the hapless Neil Bibby, to claim, unconvincingly, that the SNP’s suggestion that his party was overruling devolution was “bizarre” and “desperate”. So we didn’t really read in that memo what we did in fact read, thanks for clearing that up Neil. Like his big boss in London, Neil did not address the substance of the issue, how could he, when it was explicitly spelled out in black and white from Starmer himself that he expects his ministers to overrule the Scottish and Welsh Governments. Instead he treated us to a rehash of one of the branch office’s usual tropes, boasting about how much cash Westminster has “given” to Scotland. You know, out of the goodness of its heart.

BBC Scotland was also doing its level best to ignore the story, which has the potential to be very damaging to the political darlings of Pacific Quay in May’s Scottish election. While the story was prominently covered by BBC Wales, BBC Scotland buried it away deep down in the bowels of its digital news site where readers had to search to find it. If it was covered on BBC Scotland’s broadcast news on TV, it must have been one of those blink and you’d miss it affairs, because I don’t recall seeing it. Pacific Quay must have been thrilled that a Glasgow vape shop went on fire, burning down a historic and much loved building in the heart of the city, closed down the adjacent Glasgow Central Station, the largest and busiest train station in the country, and threw transport links throughout the west of Scotland and beyond into chaos. It was all a very convenient distraction from a story which is deeply embarrassing to the Labour party and which would otherwise have enjoyed much greater prominence.

Labour’s enthusiastic adoption of the so-called “muscular unionism” must become a central issue in the Scottish elections in May. “Muscular unionism” is simply a polite euphemism for the practice of undemocratically squashing decisions of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments which Westminster doesn’t like. When the people of Scotland and Wales go to the polls to elect their devolved parliaments, they do so on the understanding that those parliaments will have free rein to make and implement their own policies and spending decisions on devolved matters, not that the Scottish Government is only allowed to make decisions on devolved matters if the Westminster government consents to them. Yet that is where we effectively are with this so-called “muscular unionism”. Despite what Neil Bibby had to say, Labour is very much overruling and undermining the devolution settlement. Bibby hopes that we won’t remember that the devolution which Labour sold to Scotland following the devolution referendum of 1997 was very much on the basis that it would give the devolved parliaments the power to make their own decisions in devolved matters, crucially including decisions which the party in power in Westminster didn’t like. Devolution wasn’t supposed to mean “the Scottish Parliament will be free to make its own decisions on devolved matters as long as those decisions are OK with the Labour party”.

None of the major anti-independence parties can now be trusted to respect the devolution settlement as it currently stands, far less to implement the ever increasing range and depth of devolved powers which were promised during the 2014 independence referendum campaign as part of Better Together’s mendacious bid to prevent Scotland voting for independence. It seems that devolution was an event after all, and not a process. The Tories and Reform UK are hostile to the very idea of devolution and given half a chance would double down on the neutering of Holyrood and the Senedd if not abolish them entirely.

Westminster and the British media are sleepwalking into a constitutional crisis for which they are as utterly unprepared as they were for Brexit. It is highly likely that following May’s elections, all three of the devolved governments will be in the hands of parties seeking to end Westminster rule, while after next year’s Northern Irish election a Sinn Féin victory will increase the pressure for a referendum on Irish reunification, a referendum which could prove to be the first snag leading to the rapid unravelling of a Westminster rule which is under pressure from three directions all while far right English nationalists look poised to sweep to power in Westminster following the next UK general election. This election could also witness the rise of an entirely new factor in British politics. The English and Welsh Greens could make an electoral breakthrough meaning for the first time ever one of the main British political parties would be in favour of Scottish and Welsh independence.

The muscular unionism of Labour and the Tories before them is not a sign of a strong and confident British state, it’s a sign that devolution is dead and a symptom of a state which is trying to compensate for its own fragility. Westminster is much weaker than it appears. Only independence can offer the people of Scotland and Wales a constitutional framework in which their democratic choices are respected.

Meanwhile Independent Voices on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/indyvoices.bsky.social has carried out a valuable analysis of the reliability of the different polling companies on the subject of Scottish independence. You can read his analysis here

https://indyvoices.info/rating-the-pollsters

To summarise, he ranked the polling companies on three metrics, Demographics: how well does their sample compare to the age profile of Scotland? Turnout weighting: to what extent does their approach to turnout mirror the reality of the last referendum? And finally use of 2014 weighting: whether or not the samples were weighted to reflect the near 12-year-old Independence Referendum.

These metrics enabled him to create a league table of pollster reliability on the Scottish independence issue. The least reliable are YouGov, Opinium, and More in Common. When we remove these three companies from independence polling, there has not been a poll showing a lead for No for almost a year. Scotland is well on its way into independence being the settled will of the people, just as we head into a constitutional crisis of legitimacy for Westminster rule.

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Devolution has run out of road

Mar10 by weegingerdug

This always happens, every time I decide to take a bit of time off, a big news story breaks and it’s back to the keyboard. On Tuesday, a Labour government memo was leaked which proves that Keir Starmer is hell bent on undermining the devolution settlement. In the memo, sent to all members of the cabinet, Starmer tells his minions: “We should be confident in our ability to deliver in those nations including through direct spending even when devolved governments may oppose this.”

In other words Labour the [checks notes] party of devolution, is quite happy to override the wishes of the democratically elected governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland whenever it feels like it. In the document, Starmer writes writes “each of us will maintain a professional and respectful working relationship with our counterparts in devolved governments” but that “an overly deferential or laissez-faire approach to devolved government engagement almost inevitably creates political challenges or misses positive opportunities.”

Translated this means – those uppity Celtic provincials need to be slapped down and reminded of their place. Ever since the betrayal of just about every promise made by the Better Together parties during the independence referendum in 2014, anyone who has been paying attention has suspected that this neo-colonialist attitude towards Scotland and Wales was what really lay behind Westminster’s actions towards the smaller nations of the UK, but now we have it confirmed in black and white.

Shortly after the leaked letter was shared by journalist Will Hayward Plaid Cymru leader Rhun Ap Iorwerth raised the issue during Tuesday’s session of First Minister’s Questions in the Senedd in Cardiff and said: “There we have it in black and white: Keir Starmer’s own version of Boris Johnson’s muscular unionism, not only dealing with devolution in bad faith, but undertaking a direct assault on the democratic views of devolved governments.

“By staying ever loyal to him, the first minister [Labour’s Eluned Morgan] is aligning herself with efforts to undermine her own government.”

He went on: “Why has the Labour Party turned against devolution to this extent, and why has the first minister allowed the UK’s Labour Prime Minister to treat our parliament, our government, and the people of Wales with such contempt?”

What this confirms is what supporters of independence have long said, devolution cannot protect Scotland from decisions which the Westminster government decides to foist upon us, that is true irrespective of whether the government is Labour or Conservative, both parties are equally British nationalist and both are equally wedded to the doctrine of the total supremacy of the Westminster parliament. This doctrine does not permit the flourishing of elected parliaments in Scotland and Wales which have democratic mandates in their own right to carry out policies which may be at variance with the wishes of the ruling party in Westminster.

Devolution was always conceived by the Labour party as being little more than a mechanism for allowing the Labour party to continue to maintain a power base even during those periods when it was out of power in Westminster. It’s clear now, that with Scotland consistently voting for a Holyrood with a pro-independence majority and Wales poised to evict the Labour party from its century of dominance in Welsh politics and replace it with a Plaid Cymru led government, devolution has run out of road.

Devolution cannot survive in its current form, not while the governments of both Scotland and Wales are in favour of independence and the government of Northern Ireland as of next year will most likely be pressing for a referendum to reunify the island of Ireland. Meanwhile Westminster governments maintain the position of the absolute supremacy of the Westminster parliament and hold as Starmer has explicitly spelled out that Westminster has the right to overrule the democratic choices of the people of Scotland and Wales.

A devolution settlement which was designed and built as a safety boat for a Westminster centric Labour party is incompatible with the political landscape of the UK in the 2020s. Starmer has decided to confront this incompatibility by bludgeoning the devolved parliaments into submission.

This is all the more galling as the instrument which the Labour party is using to override the devolved parliaments and impose it will on devolved matters is the UK Internal Market Act, which the Labour party opposed when it was introduced by the then Conservative government, only to change its tune once it became the party wielding the big stick over the heads of the devolved governments. The Act was passed without the consent of either the Scottish or Welsh parliaments.

As recently as October 2023 the Labour party in Scotland and Anas Sarwar backed a vote in Holyrood calling for the Act to be repealed. Sarwar had previously condemned the Act as “an attack on devolution. Sarwar led Labour MSPs to vote in favour of a motion calling for the repeal of the Internal Market Act because it had “undermine[d] democratic decisions of the devolved legislatures … to the detriment of the people of Scotland”.

However by February last year Sarwar had decided that undermining the democratic decisions of the devolved legislatures is perfectly fine as long as it’s a Labour government in Westminster which is doing the undermining.

The devolution settlement is dead, killed by the party which posed as its champion. The prospect of ever deepening devolution which was held out to Scots during the independence referendum campaign was just another of the many lies of Perfidious Albion. Devolution has run out of road, the only choices facing Scotland and Wales are independence or the increasing and accelerating neutering of their devolved parliaments until their eventual reincorporation into a unitary United Kingdom in which all decisions are made by the leader of whichever political party secures the majority of Westminster seats, the overwhelming majority of which are in England. That’s it, that’s the choice.

As Scotland goes into May’s Holyrood election the people of Scotland can vote for pro-independence parties which will resist Westminster’s power grab and will continue to push for full independence, or we can vote to throw in the towel and submit meekly to whatever indignities Starmer, or in the future Nigel Farage, chooses to impose on us. But the devolution settlement has run out of road. Only independence can guarantee that decisions which affect Scotland are made in Scotland.

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Wee Ginger Dug

Biting the hand of Project Fear

Shettleston doesn’t need Reform’s racism, it needs to be part of an independent Scotland

It’s not just independence which is at stake in this election

The rapid implosion of Reform’s Scottish campaign

James Dornan MSP looks back on his career

Reform’s chaotic launch and the implications of the Iran war for May’s election

Thoughts on the failure of the assisted dying bill

Scotland: Too wee?

Is it time to look again at the long-debated theory that Scotland is ‘too wee’ to be a successful independent country?

Lessons from 2014 for next time round

So-called muscular unionism is a sign of Westminster’s fragility

Devolution has run out of road