Bits and Pieces – Monday 31st January 2022

Healthy Eating – It seems that certain politicians have a healthy eating new years resolution, especially around the consumption of carrots, as Keir Starmer has promised boosting the powers of the Scottish Parliament will be an early priority if he is Prime Minister, the Labour leader said a Government led by him would “settle” the issue of Scotland’s place in the UK without a referendum. Now how is he going to do that we may ask, Starmer said the second element is making the “positive” case for the Union, which will involve reforming political institutions around the UK. Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown will produce a report for Starmer and new powers for Holyrood are inevitable.

So basically Starmer say sweet * all about how he is going to save the union and make Scotland an offer we can’t refuse. Just the same old bullshit.

True Labour – Above Keir Starmer offers carrots to starving Scots and here we see the real Labour Party with demands from Labour Tory MP Ian Murray for the head of the civil service to step in and stop the Scottish Government planning for independence. So the SNP who have a mandate to hold an independence referendum and to prepare the case for an independence referendum in their manifesto, and that Scottish voters voted for in record numbers, should not implement that manifesto commitment because they don’t like it.  Seemingly “Many would consider this is a deeply inappropriate use of public funds at any time, but not least while Scotland is still in the midst of a pandemic, when energy bills are rising and families’ household budgets are squeezed,” I don’t.

When former Tory MSP Adam Tomkins says “I’m not in favour of Scottish independence and I’d much rather see a Scottish Govt with very different priorities, but I don’t understand this,” he said on Twitter.“Civil servants exist to support their ministers and, like it or not, it is Scot Gov policy to pursue indy via a second indyref.” Prof Tomkins added: “Muscular unionism was stupid, self-defeating and rightly abandoned when Whitehall flirted with it last year. When people like Tomkins make your party look undemocratic and right wing you have a problem, and Labour have many of them, two being they are infected by Tories like Starmer and Murray.

Two mains reasons – I believe in Scottish independence is democracy and poverty. Margaret Taylor writing in the Holyrood Magazine “2017 to 2020 just over a million people – a fifth of the population – were living in relative poverty, according to Scottish Government statistics” , that is both a scandal and a national stain on our country. Neil Cowan from the Poverty Alliance notes that “From 2010 we have seen a profusion of policies from the UK Government that have driven people into poverty. In its poverty report the Joseph Rowntree Foundation likened the poverty crisis in Scotland to the climate emergency, all of the contributors put forward solutions but there is only one solution at the end of the day and that is independence, but is there the political will in the SNP to achieve it.

Just all crap – Two years after we left the EU we have all kinds of reasons to celebrate our new freedoms. We are doing some very big things. We have taken back control of our money, our borders and our laws. We have done more than 60 free trade deals. (Boris Johnson). I voted leave and to be honest I have admitted to partly regretting that vote in some ways and maybe not so much in others but this is all just bollocks. The Tories are to bring in the Brexit Freedoms Bills and you can bet it won’t favour the working man and woman in the street that is for sure. This is all about trying to take the pressure off the Tories and appeal to their knuckle dragging voters in the north of England.