Odds and Ends Monday 27th February 2023 – Salmond to missing money.

Iain McWhirter has – an article in the Spectator that is worth a read but a little off as well in some ways.

There’s a fourth person in this SNP leadership race, only he’s not on the ticket and he can’t be elected as leader. The former SNP leader and First Minister, Alex Salmond is using this chaotic leadership election to engineer his rehabilitation. 

I don’t think that Alex Salmond is using the SNP leadership debate to engineer anything, let alone his rehabilitation. Alex Salmond is head and shoulders above any Scottish politician in 30 years. The article is mainly about Ash Regan, McWhirter writes that Regan backs Salmonds call for a ‘independence convention’, many people have been calling for this, he goes on to say that She will scrap the Gender Recognition Reform Bill passed by the Scottish parliament before Christmas, which Salmond has called ‘absurd’ and ‘self-indulgent nonsense’.

Regan has also backed Salmond’s call for a rethink of Sturgeon’s policy to rejoin the European Union after independence – a cast-iron commitment of the Scottish Government since the Brexit referendum. But Alex Salmond has been traveling around Scotland for the last two years arguing that it would be preferable and quicker to join the European Free Trade Area, EFTA. The so-called ‘Norway option’, it would allow early entry into the single market and the European Economic Area.

While McWhirter says that Ash Regan is her own woman, of course, the implication in the article is that she isn’t, she is just following Alex Salmond’s lead. I suppose you write what you think your paymasters expect. Ash Regan deserves better.

The Tory myth – Labour is no better. The Tories love to weaponize the poor and those in receipt of benefits. They do this to turn us against each other, to split us, to ensure they can keep us weak and divided, they have been doing it for years and they will keep doing it. The reality is though that the UK has some of the lowest pensions and benefits in the world.

The UK’s leading poverty charities have called for a change in the law to fix the UK’s “failing” welfare system after research revealed that basic benefits given to low-income households are at least £140 a month below the real cost of food, energy, and everyday basics.

That is the reality of life in the UK, not just during this cost of living crisis, it has been that way for as long as I can remember. Socialism for the rich and neo-liberalism for the poor.

“With millions of low-income households going without essentials like food and heating, and food bank use at record levels, it is plain the system is failing,”

The system is working exactly as it was intended to, let’s not be shy in saying it. Benefits are kept deliberately low, they are barely above starvation, that is a policy and a political choice. Keep people afraid, keep them a step away from hunger, it keeps wages low and keeps the people compliant. What I still fail to get my head around is why so many people in Scotland are still not convinced about that yes vote, it can’t get much worse living in this colonial shit hole.

Here we go again and I don’t mean the Whitesnake song – Are the SNP/Scottish Greens Government that bloody useless? Answers on a postcard. It looks like our colonial masters are about to block more Scottish Legislation.

Ministers in London are set to refuse permission for a trading exemption for cans and bottles from outside Scotland under the Internal Market Bill.

Under the post-Brexit Internal Market Act, goods that have been produced in, or imported into, one part of the UK and comply with relevant requirements there, can then be sold in any other part of the UK without adhering to different regulatory requirements.

I am not for our colonial masters overruling the Scottish Government but come on, this appears basic stuff here. Either the Scottish Government needs to sack their advisors or they are as thick as not to know what current colonial law is that is enforced on us, you can’t make this up. This is not picking a fight, this is incompetence of the first degree. This SNP / Green Government just get more Scottish Labour by the day.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist but – Oh the murky waters of the alleged missing referendum money goes on and on and on.

Douglas Chapman, who resigned from the position after being denied access to accounts by SNP HQ, spoke to detectives from Operation Branchform.

You have to question the timing of Nicola Sturgeon and the Chief Police Officer of Scotland standing down. I am not a conspiracy theorist in any way, I do not believe Elvis is alive and well on the moon but in some ways, this story does get more and more interesting even if I sometimes wonder if I will still be alive by the time that Police Scotland completes their investigation.

You can’t help but think there may well be more to this than meets the eye.