Carrying the cans
Even for Lorna Slater this is jaw-droppingly dumb:
It takes Olympic-class stupidity to publicly put a figure to how much your staggering incompetence has cost Scottish businesses in the middle of an economic crisis.
Either the Scottish Government knew the DRS wasn’t compliant and was hoping the UK government would shut it down, so that it could attempt to clumsily extract some political capital from “interference” (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds), OR it was so mindbogglingly inept that it genuinely intended the scheme to go into operation but failed to legislate it properly (in which case it’s directly responsible for those losses of hundreds of millions of pounds).
In either case, any minister with responsibility for the gargantuan shambles should – quite obviously – be out on their ears before FMQs on Thursday in desperate hope of avoiding the government being sued by the affected firms. But the SNP/Green coalition has as little shame as it has ability or dignity, so expect the clown show to continue.
The Greens are clearly unfit for government. To think I used to vote for them. Back when they seemed to be an environmentalist Yes party.
Now they are a bunch of incompetent sexual deviant promoting dangers to women and children.
10 green bottles… Scotland looks totally fecked!
Can someone help me understand?
We already have a plastic recycling bin at our door and are pretty conscientious about all our recycling. How does forcing us to make multiple, time consuming trips to a supermarket return point…..in the car, make the situation better in any way for the environment or for the taxpayer? I don’t get it??
It’s taxpayers money.
Gie the tree a shake. There’s aye plenty.
‘Normally’ jaw-droppingly dumb, but not for her
Jail her for it.
Send the cuffs her way. Fucking hell. What a waste of money.
Either the Scottish Government knew the DRS wasn’t compliant … or it was so mindbogglingly inept that it … failed to legislate it properly
Both options can be explained by the individual or individuals involved truly believing that reality is exactly what they say it has to be.
Ordinarily we would rule that level of fantasising out as clinical insanity, but then when we consider the chicks with dicks lunacy, the dots start to join up.
First class limousine Lorna. With her hired yachts to the islands, she wants to clear of people.
She wants to keep poor people out of Glasgow City Council with her low emission zones.
Shut Holyrood down. Time to dissolve the Government.
No one voted for the big bird. Send the Canada goose back to Canada. Fucking idiot that she is. Corrupt to the core.
Can you imagine any business project in which you charged ahead without confirming approval or had at least secured a firm nod from all potential blockers.
This is incompetence on a massive scale and she is oblivious in regard to her responsibility.
She won’t resign and Useless Yousless is too timid to act.
“… lessons will be learned”
Dearie me. They never are. Who pays? We pay.
Or connivingly clever.
Just another way to make Scotlands economy poorer,
Robin Harper looks so sensible, competent, politically savvy & environmentally concerned in comparison. I wonder what he thinks of these dullards using the Green label.
The SNP government is struggling due to a lack of talent.
They had to be “assisted” to form a functioning government by the greens who’s talent pool is as shallow as a damp pish stain on the pavement.
Nevertheless they made it into government which only served to expose exactly how desperate Nicolas’ SNP were.
I hate to say it but independence is fucked in my lifetime.
The Scottish government seem to be on a roll, how to make Scotland fail while withdrawing as much finances from the public purse in litigations and court cases.
No accident one would presume, not with so many instances of deliberate failure.
“It takes Olympic-class stupidity to publicly put a figure to how much your staggering incompetence has cost Scottish businesses in the middle of an economic crisis.”
And yet, despite the ever increasing number of similar examples each worse than the previous one, those responsible face no significant consequences from a citizenry which, in the main, gives all the appearance of being in a coma and prepared to die in a ditch to defend whatever bullshit official narrative is fed to them by a clueless incompetent political and media elite.
That bloviating fat fraud Blackford to step down. Tell us again how Scotland will not be dragged out of blah blah blah you corpulent lump of lying shite. A more useless cunt I have never seen.
Who’s carrying the cans and who’s breaking the bottles?
In Glasgow, DRS is also commonly known as:
Development & Regeneration Services.
Slater is quoted as saying she wants to meet with the UK gov to assess best way fwd for DRS, For anyone with a brain that’s a day 1 conversation not £200m quid and 7 years later Sigh.
Was Nicola a plant all along or the victim of blackmail
Which was it
My play in the subject is coming along nicely but every now and then there are so many options for the twist I am not sure how to plan the plot.
All suggestions gratefully received
I really dont get this, could someone explain?
Which laws would be broken if Scotland went ahead with glass recycling despite being “ordered” not to by Westminster?
Would the penalties run into “hundreds of millions of pounds” also?
What would be stopping Holyrood putting 2 fingers up to Westminster and saying “No we wont pay that”?
Am just staggered that handed a golden opportunity to use this entire fiasco as a shining example of the shit we have to put up with from Westminster, the Holyrood government appears to doff its cap and say “Oh alright then” and slink meekly away.
When will this superlative incompetent find the dignity to stop embarrassing us and resign?
How many more hundreds of millions of pounds must she lose the Scottish taxpayer until Yousaf finds the balls to chuck her out of the cabinet?
Both should resign. Slater for supreme incompetence that is leading to wasting millions of pounds of public money. Yousaf for allowing that level of incomptence to camp in the Scot Gov cabinet and make a rather large hole in our public purse.
Yousless was told by the uk yesterday…..
“There is nothing to prevent you from proceeding with your own scheme next March”
It just won’t apply to the rest of the uk.
how much will the slaters american hedge fund get paid?
A scheme which was inept from a minister with little perception and to be honest a system which is mot needed in many communities as recycling operates well already. I live in a village of 2000 with 3 sites to recycle paper, plastics, cans and glass. The containers fill up quickly are emptied and so it goes on. The system works well. Is much of these resources lying about?
No community is clean.
So Miss Slater must live in a box as most of Scotland has this type if recycling.
Sandy says:
6 June, 2023 at 6:58 pm
I really dont get this, could someone explain?
Which laws would be broken if Scotland went ahead with glass recycling
———————
None
Sorry loopy lorna does not understand anything
No money has been “invested” in this mad scheme
She has FORCED companies to SPEND money on this madness
Huge difference between “invested” and spend
Clueless big bird-fly back to Canada
@Mia says:6 June, 2023 at 7:04 pm
until Yousaf finds the balls
Yousaf for allowing that level of incompetence
Would that be the same Yousaf elected through a flawed and fraudulent process?
The Yousaf selected by what, 20K SNP card-carrying dipsticks?
That Yousaf that 5.48 million Scots don’t want?
Why would he need any balls when Scotland has meekly and supinely accepted Yousaf as its FM? When the Indy movement has mostly accepted him as its leader?
IMO, nobody gets to complain about anything until the election of Scotland’s FM is re-run, transparently and honestly this time.
The fish rots from the head. Yousaf is the head.
Sandy says;What would be stopping Holyrood putting 2 fingers up to Westminster and saying “No we wont pay that”?
Am just staggered that handed a golden opportunity to use this entire fiasco as a shining example of the shit we have to put up with from Westminster ”
The ordure-as you put it-is created by a devolved government which invented a ludicrously complex system in search of Green credentials; it appears not to have occurred to them that bottles sold in Berwick-on-Tweed might have a bearing on ‘refunds’ claimed from businesses in Scotland.
The fact that this parody of a town council have compelled businesses to spend ‘hundreds of millions of pounds’- on a scheme they had no lawful right to impose-would surely give grounds for civil liability against ScotGov regardless of any actions of the British government. I would imagine big-hitting bottom-kickers in the Edinburgh legal world are licking their lips
GlesgaJim says: 6 June, 2023 at 6:04 pm
“We already have a plastic recycling bin at our door and are pretty conscientious about all our recycling. How does forcing us to make multiple, time consuming trips to a supermarket return point…..in the car, make the situation better in any way for the environment or for the taxpayer?”
It doesn’t… and was never meant to. It is/was a scheme designed to line the pockets of a few large, well-connected private companies at the expense of the Scottish people.
– As you point out Jim, we already have recycling; we actually had it forced upon us. And most people are fairly accepting of it by now. That investment will be undermined by the DRS scheme… as it’s simply diverting what feeds (and helps pay for) the exiting schemes.
It will undermine households too as the scheme is basically inflationary; at a time of great crisis with respect to the cost of living – that’s breathtakingly irresponsible. Relatively few people will be physically able to lug (for example) dozens of 1.5 litre drinks bottles to a machine… the nature and volume of these things mean you cannot carry many at 20p a time, and then there’s the time you’d need to invest standing at a machine.
– As an exercise (if you have the space) retain the next 25 ‘ginger’ bottles you use. Find out how easy it is to store and transport them intact.
Suppose that logging on to the machine, loading your bottles, and collecting your £5 token averages out at 20 seconds per bottle. …You’ll be standing there for over 8 minutes, might spend another six minutes each way coming and going from your car. Perhaps 20 minutes each way travelling to-and-fro.
That’s an hour of your time for £5. If (as I do) you live about 6 miles from the supermarket it’s maybe somewhere between £1.80 and £2.50 in fuel… which of course you’re burning in an effort which, in terms of fuel efficiency is an appalling waste compared to having the same 25 bottles simply squished, put in the recycling bin and taken off by the council to be recycled.
Extrapolate all that out to every can, bottle, milk carton you use in the course of a week or a fortnight and…
This is simple dishonesty on the part of the Cabbage Greens and the SNP… all they’re looking to do is line the pockets of their cronies at the likes of Biffa. – A company for which I have no grain of sympathy or empathy; operating in a domain which by right ought to be entirely in the public sector.
Whataboutary – that the UK government, as the DRS scheme was being developed, didn’t offer comment, maybe even encouraged progress – and then pulled the rug when commitments and finances were in place?
It is what the UK – Perfidous Albion – excel at – backslapping deceit.
All the local authorities I know of, already have glass recycling. Bins are everywhere for people to put their bottles into, as well as having a home bin, but some anti-social elements think that smashing them on pavements and in children’s play areas in the local parks is a stunner of an idea. A 20p, or whatever deposit, is not going to entice teenagers who throw their loose change on to the streets rather than keep it in their pockets.
The DRS should have been discussed with Westminster well in advance of its introduction. Trying to look as if you are trying to gain independence by being obtuse and wasting millions is not a good look. A good enough idea not thought through properly, or thought through at all. So sick of this “let’s do this so Westminster steps in and puts a stop to it and we can claim we’re being victimized” mentality. If the SNP/Green government is being genuine about wanting independence, they should do it properly, consult with the other independence organizations and parties and work out a strategy and tactics, tell Westminster and Whitehall, “this is what we are doing and we have a case that you can challenge if you wish. Otherwise, we are going down the constitutional/legal/political route we have devised and you can like it or lump it”. No ifs, no buts, no apologies. No more daft and irresponsible distractions devised by the so-called Greens.. As the inimitable Jeremy Paxman keeps on saying to time-wasting students on ‘University Challenge’: “oh, get on with it!”.
Just for the record, I believe that the SNP, if not the Greens, deliberately pushed ahead with the GRR, another massive money-wasting exercise, in full knowledge that it would founder on Westminster’s opposition, just as this scheme may well do. Luckily most people are able to see through this nonsense of not preparing properly, or at all, for implementation of sensible policy. The DRS could have been a decent scheme; GRR never was. Yet, both were shoved through without a thought to UK-wide compliance, of which both have fallen foul. All it takes is to match the UK-wide policy with the Scottish policy if a clash is to appear – for now, until we get independence. So wearyingly predictable.
Perhaps dippy Lorna might (as someone else suggested )have discussed this with the UK Govt first as they were to be the final arbiter in this fiasco and not millions of pounds in liability down the road.How stupid do you have to be to get into the Green Party ?
It would have been better just to build more recycling facilities and perhaps an advertising campaign to get people to use them
@ Scot
Indeed, been saying that a few times on here previously.
Another aspect is that all these new expensive energy from waste incinerators being built suggests there will be a lot of calorific value (like plastics) in general waste for a long time yet.
I hear that on occasion the Dundee energy from waste incinerator plant actually has waste from Glasgow delivered so it can be run as per the contractual (profit) agreement. Who knew big diesel lorries humping waste from Glasgow to Dundee is the new green way forward…
So much wrong with these sticking plaster “green” policies as per this last week.
link to wingsoverscotland.com
Correct re the SNP/Green incompetence etc but with regard to the “recycling” it is a scam like everything else – most of the plastic for example does NOT get recycled and like lots of the recycling rubbish gets sent by boat to the third world countries and gets dumped over there.
We should and could get back to using glass instead and with a deposit scheme as well – we managed fine to do that in the past. I even remember taking beer bottles that we found lying around in to cash them in when I was young in the 1960’s.
I am sure many charities would be glad of using this as a way of raising extra money especially local animal rescues etc.
B*mmer, I was going to move to Carlisle ans spend all week shifting cans and bottles to Gretna.
-need a new plan now
When this scheme was undergoing consultation, the English imposed single market had never been mentioned, the English government are only now able to interfere after they passed that bill, so the industry lead/backed scheme already had £ millions invested prior to the Jeremy Hunts in England decided to make a political point. Also, when weren’t we in a cost of living crisis and the financial impact of DRS will be minimal, after all drinks be they alcoholic or soft drinks are a bit of a luxury, the poor won’t be effected, as poor people can’t afford the 60p for a can of juice, so the 2 or 3 pence increase isn’t an issue for them
I’m no fan of the loon ball Greens or the woke SNP but can anyone tell me exactly what is wrong with the DRS as approved and set up by the Scottish Parliament.
There is no way I would want to protect or defend folks like Slater or ger useless partners. Especially so the useless partner the SNP actively pursued an SNP 1 and SNP 2 strategy to prevent the removal of about twenty Unionist Labour and Tories to deliver an independence super majority that SNP1 and Alba 2 would have delivered.
An SNP / Alba coalition super majority would noy allowed this nonsense to happen. So what’s this all about. Time the detail was flashed out and made public.
just when you think it cannot get any worse. There is now no depth to which Scotland cannot sink.
We need to sweep the trash out of Scotland, starting with that sewer in Edinburgh.
“The fish rots from the head. Yousaf is the head”
Are you kidding? The head is somewhere around London if not on holidays in some castle or another. At best, Yousaf is one of the scales of the fish, if that.
The day Yousaf embarrassed the whole of Scotland by handing away the stone of destiny, he demonstrated the entire world he ain’t head of nothing nor big fish in a paddle. He has no respect for the position of FM, no respect for Scotland’s history, sovereignty, pride or dignity. He did not hesitate in making the Scottish people feel worthless and cringe in embarrassment because the opposite would have been to make the self-entitled English king unconfortable by being denied the satisfaction of sitting his arse on Scotland’s stone to demonstrate the subjugation of Scotland to the English crown. Yousaf is, just like Sturgeon was before him, another crown tool leading from the broom cupboard and falling over himself to do as he is told.
I thought that the “Circularity” aspect of this meant that bottles would be reused – like milk bottles and ginger bottles when we were kids – instead of being smashed up. How stupid was I?
I’ve been recycling for more than 20 years, including getting a bus to Sighthill dump to take harder to recycle stuff. They renovated the whole place a couple of years ago. So now they take LESS stuff: no more paint, no more hard plastics, no textile recycling, just charity collections of stuff they can sell.
When the bins went on strike a few months ago, they left the food in our close, and now there are rats all over the scheme. We still don’t have food recycling, and I quite like having one less bin to juggle. The wee man from the council told us that 90% of stuff collected in recycling bins went to landfill anyway. And then there are the news reports of our recycling being discovered in landfill in places like Jakarta and Turkey. So all I’ve really done is add airmiles to my landfill.
I’m sick of the whole thing. It’s just a scam to make the coonsil look good while it does hee-haw.
West Lothian council have stopped kerbside bottle collections altogether, so now many of the pensioners just put their glass in the bin.
If you use Rev Stu’s link to Robin McAlpine’s blog, he wrote an excellent article on how all the work and blame lands on the ordinary punter and is likely to be counter productive. To say the least.
I hope when Kevin Pringle comes back to work for the SNP, there will be some clear messaging from the Scottish government. At least then we’ll be able to tell if they are arrogantly incompetent or arrogantly evil. I would appreciate some clarity on that.
No one will be sacked or stand down or be held accountable for this utter shambles like the SNP are their many shambolic fiascos that’s cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions in revenue, for the the Greens keeping their places on the gravy train comes first and foremost.
Honesty and integrity and accountability doesn’t come into it anymore.
So Mr Wishart thinks Salmond’s idea for a general election is daft!!
Well none of his ideas have worked.
The SNP are doomed when they have wallapars like him making decisions
Willie @ 9:35pm.
Scotland is drowning in discarded glass and plastics, and more effort is going in to ensuring this fails than making it work.
We can drown in our own shite for all these bastards care, but hey, we gave the SNP and Greens a bloody nose!
Breathtaking Westminster Tory Corruption taken to the highest levels and still going strong.
link to twitter.com
I’d like to congratulate the good Reverend and host of this blog in finding a topic on which there’s going to be rare agreement among the BTL commenters. Indy Yes and Indy No put together might nearly reach 100% against this policy.
I see Nicolas WhatsApp messages are required by the COVID committee. Wonder if they will see the Vietnam group messages as well.
Squeaky bum time me thinks
link to friendsofglass.com
So, the Skye bloater announces that he’s for the off on the same day that 14 SNP throbbers generate utter fury with gratuitous malice masquerading as virtue-signalling, and erstwhile colleague Margaret Ferrier has that big yella bus wi you-know-who’s coupon on it bus reversed right over her.
First time she was thrown under it was by Sturgeon, deflecting attention from having ‘lost’ FMQs to Ruth Davidson over Whatsapp messages, some Alphabet-related naughtiness her husband had been up to. Burning Margaret Ferrier at the stake was a distraction eagerly pounced upon by compliant msm and bloodthirsty populace driven mental by lockdown, many of them grieving and vengeful, primed to catch a witch.
Today, Whatsapp messages feature again but it’s all a bit grey isn’t it, what’s it all about? Mumbly-bumbly. Meanwhile, the Scottish Twitter reaction to the ’14 rats’ is quite clear thanks, and off-the-scale. Combined with the ‘Lossie Mouth’ lunacy organised by Elgin Library and, whatever now?!, Gregor Murray disciplined over telling a constituent to ‘Get To Fuck TERF’, have the Murrells had their semi-retirement interrupted again?
Oh FFS!
What did they ever do to deserve this?
She only wants to serve her constituents (virtually, naturellement) then spend a wee hour or so reading Val McDermid classics and he just wants peace to do his thing.
But no, all this palaver is happening (they know cause they heard it on the Radio Scotland innit…) so they just had to drag themselves away from sipping pink gins in the garden to get on the blower (or the Whatsapp, whatever) to tell ‘WWNBDOOEAOW’ (prize for the first to get that one) to announce his retirement to knock the rest of the inconvenient stuff off the news agenda?
Is that what’s happening?
I tried, earlier, to find the John McAfee video on YT where he does the ‘card trick’. It’s fekkin brilliant. Maybe it’s been pulled? I posted link here a long time ago. Anyone remember it?
That wee ‘trick’ illustrated what’s happening right now. It’s perhaps a wee bit more sophisticated than ‘Look! There’s a squirrel!’ but not by much.
It’s the same-old, same-old, but when you think about it, these methods have served the Murrells well in the past and no-one could blame them for sticking to what they know. ‘If it ain’t broke’ an aw that.
But has the time finally arrived for it to be broken?
Have they tried the same grift once too often?
Because if they have, and are using Margaret Ferrier as some kind of patsy, they will be found out. Neale Hanvey’s encounter with John Beattie on Radio Scotland earlier today suggests that some kind of showdown/revelation may be in the offing.
Remember that scene where John Cusack’s character gets seriously damaged by the barman? (btw, did you know that that film, The Grifters, was released 33 years ago? Aye. Not joking. Time is flitting away from us friends, we can’t keep this up forever.)
To this uneducated eye it looks like folk have finally rumbled that they’ve been conned, are being conned, and will continue to be conned unless they get off their arses and *do* something right fuckin now.
Elgin Library on Saturday could – should – be interesting, as will the Sunday Peppers.
Circularity Scotland beginning to sound outrageously bent for some reason.
Meanwhile, brief reminder of the type of contemporary treatment for common cold that’s defacto fully endorsed by those who’d let Margaret Ferrier carry the can for their part in the great deception:
link to twitter.com
Shug
Vietnam group messages
/
Was there ever a perjury probe into Murrell’s December 8th evidence?
Dan
Proliferating plastic
/
That’s how Ineos makes all its money
Ian Brotherhood 11.41pm
Excellent summary of the main points of the news including
‘WWNBDOOEAOW’ or its variant “Scotland Will Not Be…”
Remember during Salmond’s government in 2010, Transport minister, Stewart Stevenson resigned over a cold-snap that no one could’ve predicted in a thousand years? That’s how conscientious and *accountable* SNP ministers were back then.
Can’t believe how brazen these bastards are in comparison today – that incompetent clown should just resign, or the rest of Holyrood should be baying for her resignation. Why aren’t they baying for the resignations of ALL past and present [Sturgeon] SNP and Green incompetents – because they’re giving them enough rope, that’s why. Why aren’t the british rags dragging them over hot, burning coals? Because they’re giving them enough bloody rope, that’s why.
I almost refuse to believe this government can be so atrociously bad – but by-Hell it’s true.
Vote these fuckers right out on their shabby arses, never to darken our doorways again, next election. I hate the thought of a negative campaign, but when I speak of who to vote for, I certainly won’t miss when it comes to giving these untalented wastrels their name.
@ Willie at 9.35
What’s wrong with the scheme? Here’s a short list – not comprehensive.
Where I live, there is litter, but almost none of it is single-use drinks containers. It’s crisp packets, fag packets, takeaway boxes, and a surprising number of odd shoes. All those will still have to be cleared up by the council. Additionally, I doubt if the anti-social people who toss crushed coke cans out of their car windows will desist because of 20p.
But people like me who are not anti-social litter louts will no longer just be able to put our empties in a trolley and wheel it onto the roadside once a week; we’ll have to traipse to the nearest reverse vending machine. For me, that will be at least 2 miles away, more likely eight or ten. I’ll have to travel there somehow, and if the machine is full or broken, I’ll have to travel back with my bottles, and I won’t have been able to combine the task with shopping because the bags will still be full.
If I’m too ill to travel and have ordered a delivery, either the van will have a machine taking up lots of space and time for the driver to deal with empties (leading to a need for more vans, more drivers, more fuel, more cost to customers), or like Tesco, deliveries in Scotland will stop. Even for orders that don’t contain any bottles.
Meanwhile, the council will still have to empty my trolley once a week, because it also contains paper, card, non-drinks bottles and jars, baked bean tins, etc, plus textiles, batteries, food… No saving on labour for the council, minimal saving on fuel, but loss of earnings from selling glass for recycling.
“Reduce, reuse, recycle” used to be the slogan – in that order. This scheme doesn’t reuse the bottles (as happens in Germany, where the sizes are standardized so empties can be refilled by any brewery, for instance), or even recycle them into new bottles. The glass would be crushed and used for road metal.
Finally, since consumers can’t be fined (other than losing their deposits) for non-return because they can’t be identified, producers will be penalized if less than 90% of their bottles are returned. Given that they can’t do anything to increase the percentage, that is unfair.
The answer is to make all councils implement a kerbside collection as good as the one here in East Ayrshire (or even better; there are still a few things they don’t take and I have to go to the cowp now and then).
We already have kerbside recycling and nearby bottle banks, so what is the use of DRS? I don’t have a car so would find it difficult anyway. Seems more like a get-rich-quick scheme for the chosen few, with pseudo woke points
I live where there’s a bottle return scheme. You pay 5c more on a bottle and if you bother to take it to the recycling place, they’ll give you 5c back. If you leave it by the kerb instead the recycling truck will take it. In cities the homeless gather them up for income. The administration of it seems no big deal. I have no idea if this is what is being proposed in Scotland. It certainly doesn’t involve $100M.
Perhaps they will start selling irn bru etc in cartons instead of cans & bottles ? Hopefully as I don’t fancy traipsing back to the shops with empties
Hahaha. The greens, completely unfit for any sort of serious role in society. Now screwing up this, with huge costs to businesses. Utter morons as inept as the clown first minister, Humza useless, and his band of SNP grifters. Come to Edinburgh, and you can see just how they have literally squandered millions of tax payers money on silly, unwanted ‘road schemes’, which basically involve clsoing or restricting roads in order to make sure ONLY cyclists have access.
The SNP are like Labour was, just prior to getting wiped out in the elections in Scotland. I was previously a member of the SNP for many years, but now will relish watching the demise of the SNP at the next election. They have betrayed Scotland, and the people who voted for them. Too busy living the high life, and filling their own pockets to bother with independence.
As for the greens, well nobody elected them in the first place anyway. The hatred for them and their SNP chums in Edinburgh is off the scale. They have quite literally destroyed a great city with their utter nonsense. Cannot fund social care, but can find lots to waste on daft cycle road schemes and feckin bollards.
Re- inventing the wheel at great expense to other far more urgent things – is that the green’s policy?
Did folk really vote for any of this ordure?
Ian Btotherhood 11:41
Is this the one you are looking for?
link to twitter.com
It seems to me most litter, in the countryside anyway, is plastic bottles (coke and water ffs), plastic coated coffee cups (drive thru Costa and starbucks) and fag packets (getting fewer as everyone is broke). Put a 20p levy on those. Cans and glass are biodegradable anyway, and widely recycled as everyone says above.
Grendel @ 10.30.
Scotland is drowning in pollution. Plastics especially are a problem. But it’s not only plastics and pollution is a multi facetted multi source problem.
No one solution will solve the problem and the DRS scheme was only one part of the jigsaw we need to put in place to reduce pollution, minimise waste and increase recycling.
But yes Grendel your observation that who cares if we drown in wwaste long as we give the SNP and the Greens a bloody nose.
And that I am afraid reflects all too accuratly the political toilet that Scotland is.
Scottish politics is now withering on the vine. The inaction of those in Holyrood has seen to that.
Just like the lack of fruit pickers, there’s severe lack of depth to any political candidacy willing to do the hard graft needed to save Scotland.
Ineptitude is everywhere and it’s only gonna get worse. The electorate has had it’s fill. No matter the turnout, for the next ballot, the seats still get filled with arses aligned to one party or another. The same old arguments trotted out.
Whoever fed the lie, ‘independence is inevitable’, is to be congratulated. Any perceived risk, from Holyrood, to the Union, is encouraged, simply to extend duration of the Scotland Act 1998.
SNP having stretched its own credibility to the limit, the next chapter in Scottish politics, inevitably written and edited by those in charge in Whitehall.
People power. What the fuck?
I think you have to completely delineate the Salmond SNP from the Sturgeon SNP.
Sturgeon is the prime example of what happens when you get a rat in the leadership position. It is devastating. Sturgeon was always very careful to make sure there was no one who could oust her. All competition to her was removed, whenever and wherever it appeared. Attempting to stitch-up Salmond sealed that.
Not only did Sturgeon betray the independence movement she also betrayed the SNP. She immediately set about replacing all the good people with vile woke morons. To the point that the leftover Sturgeon SNP today is an abomination, a literal abomination.
But it was not always like that and the blame for it lies firmly with the greatest betrayer of the last few hundred years. A lot of good people were simply marginalized and forced out.
What remains has the SNP branding on it but it is unrecognizable from the Salmond SNP. The SNP now is unsurprisingly like a tranny-political-party, it is dressing up and pretending to be something it is not.
Even now despite the mountains of evidence testifying to what a monumental mess Sturgeon and Murrell have left behind the weegingerdunningkruger drones still can’t admit a thing. Not a f**king thing.
These are the folks I blame for enabling Sturgeon. Chattering class smug arseholes floating through life pontificating on things they have not got a clue about. Wrecking whatever political movement they latch onto. Cannot stand them.
It was obvious Sturgeon was real bad news and a wrong ‘un 6+ years ago, never mind now, where the truth of it is punching you in the face with every day that goes by.
But then I imagine if I had spent years and years backing a rat who destroyed everything I set out to achieve in politics, who stabbed a decent and innocent man in the back, and subjected him to a incredibly hideous ordeal, in order to stop him ousting her, and saving the independence movement, then I would also be unable to admit to myself that I was deeply complicit in all of it, and that I too had ratted out the independence movement. Instead they would just lie to themselves and pretend everything is tickety-boo. Everything is always someone else’s fault, never ever theirs.
These WGD type folks were Sturgeon’s dance partner in the great betrayal of the independence movement.
I recall reading that over 1 million disposable vapes are thrown away each week.
Again I’ve said this before, it would be relatively easy to create a deposit return scheme for these small items so used ones can be processed properly, especially as they contain plastic, metals, and lithium batteries which will degrade and are toxic to eco-systems, and they can also potentially start fires if they short out whilst being processed in general waste processing machinery.
@ Karen
In time terms, cans and glass are not really considered to be biodegradable. Cans being metal mean they are the result of a lot of expended energy to initially mine the ore to create the metal that tins are made of. It is therefore very wasteful to just discarded a high volume of what is a relatively highly refined material.
Glass for other reasons should be recycled properly as it is dangerous if smashed and contaminates areas.
EG. Arsehole wild campers throwing their bottles into the loch and breaking them by chucking stones means that the area is now contaminated with shards of broken glass so bairns can’t paddle without risk of seriously bad injuries.
Bottles discarded in farmers’ fields can either injure livestock or contaminate crops, such as a bottle going through a pea harvester machine, which will mean the whole lorry load of affected peas will have to be discarded if glass is found at processing plant, and the time and costs of the resultant clean up of all machinery to eliminate further contamination.
All the new people joining the SNP post-2014 is often attributed the blame for the SNP’s demise but that would never have been an issue had the leader not been a rat.
Had the SNP had a non-rat leader then the woke extremists who did join would have been quickly marginalised and kept away from power and eventually they would have f**ked off back under whatever weirdo rock of a party they belong.
The moment the SNP’s fate was sealed was the moment Alex handed Sturgeon the leadership. He did not know, Sturgeon was a deep sleeper who woke up the instant she got power. She fooled us all. Because her whole life is a lie no one spotted it. You could not spot the lies as it was all a lie. Salmond said before she became leader Sturgeon never really talked about the mad woke shit she then did when in office. Because she kept it hidden for decades. She is a lie. She is an imposter.
It is an astonishing betrayal on multiple levels. The betrayal of Salmond. Off the scale. The betrayal of the SNP, off the scale. The betrayal of the independence movement. Off the scale. It is amazing she packed so much treachery into those 9 years.
No one called this in 2014 when she got the job. Personally back then I just thought she would be a bit shit as leader, nothing worse. By 2017 I knew. It was obvious.
Geoff Anderson 8.24am
The link to the John McAfee card trick also perfectly illustrates the point I made at 12.31pm yesterday (Spin The Bottle):
“…one thing for sure is that sleight of hand works for governments and it’s still being used.
We think we’re voting for what we believe in only to discover we’ve been been tricked and have actually let the ‘powers that be’ carry merrily on holding all the cards and keeping control”.
In our house, people have been treated to these magic tricks for years and encouraged to question everything. Governments, media etc. – we all need to have our eyes wide open. Social media too and how it’s being used to polarise opinion.
Of course it’s easier to turn a blind eye and carry on believing because once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
And as for the inane destruction of city roads (Robert Louis 6.44am) – the same is happening on Glasgow’s London Road, near Celtic park. Unbelievable.
Mac: “…had the SNP had a non-rat leader…” – sums up the whole fiasco. It didn’t need to be like this. Under Salmond’s leadership, things worked. Well said.
I have a few thoughts, but I’ll be open from the start..I’ve lived in Spain for the last couple of years so may be misunderstanding the DRS. With that out the way…
When I were a lad growing up in the 1990s (Yorkshire voice optional for that opening bit) in Glasgow, we had 20p deposits on glass bottles. Recycling otherwise wasn’t really a thing in any meaningful way, unless you were middle class and composted your manky leftovers…but that sort of thing usually resulted in your kids getting a good kicking at school.
We loved the 20p thing because you could find gingie bottles and go to the van for a “free” cone or oyster.
But our playgrounds were absolutely carpeted with broken glass. To the extent that when my nibbling were born and I took them to the park I had to double take at just how much broken glass there wasn’t everywhere. People were getting money back for bottles and still just smashing them by the swings.
As an adult in Glasgow living in a tenement I had access to the glass recycling bin…usually 1 or 2 big skip sized things in the street. We also had one for plastic/cans and one for paper. My understanding is that this remains the norm in urban areas, with household specific alternatives more suburban and rurally. This system works very well and usually involves a short walk, or no walk at all to use. We have the same setup in Spain and it’s well utilised and managed.
This whole DRS seems utterly pointless looking on from outside as I’m not exactly sure what service gap it fills. I can also 100% see why businesses are against it as we’re asking them to take a financial hit to replicate an existing system that costs them nothing and, at least in 2020, was pretty widely used anyway. If the aim is to get drinks companies to move away from plastic into cans and glass that’s noble, but there are easier and better ways to achieve this.
To me this stinks of a policy designed to help a few friends who happen to make the machines/deal with the waste get richer.
The Nicola Sturgeon we all thought we knew pre-2014 was unrecognizable from the Poundland Stalin we saw post-2014.
So which one is the ‘real’ Nicola Sturgeon?
The answer has to be neither. She was one imposter pre-2014 (tailored to get her the job) and she became a different imposter post-2014 (once she was in power).
Poundland Stalin appeared once she had secured power. She morphed into a f**king monster the moment she became FM. Sturgeon can adopt totally different personas like she changes clothes. A chameleon.
Pre-2014 Nicola was very PC but never in my wildest nightmares did I expect her to be that bad as FM. She was/is downright dangerous…
If you re-examine the last 9 years through the lens of ‘accepting that NS was a rat’ then suddenly you can see that she had a glittering career, and I mean really stunning.
As a rat she has excelled beyond anyone’s expectations. ‘They’ must be absolutely delighted with their work. I must admit that in a horrifying sense I am very impressed by the audacity (stitching up a former FM) and the scale of it (top to bottom destruction of the SNP). But it was so extreme. Not far away from a soviet style show trial in the attempted stitch-up of Salmond especially when you factor in the totally unbalanced role the media played.
First they took out Salmond and now they are about to take out the SNP. From 56 seats out of 59 to what is coming in under a decade. Not bad going.
This is what you can do when the rat gets the leadership role. It is devastating, as there is no one able to stop them. And of course with Peter as CEO it was a lock. We could not get out of it. Game Over.
Mac @ 9:42 am
“She is an imposter”
We should not be surprised at this, because colonialism is always ‘a co-operative venture’ (Fanon), which means every colony must have its numerous collaborators who become ‘part of the racket’.
It remains that the only ‘treatment’ for the ‘sickness’ of colonialism is independence and liberation of the people, which requires further remedial actions in the process of ‘self-recovery’ of an oppressed people and culture.
As Grouse Beater wrote:
“There is a lot of clearing up to be done when a nation throws off its colonial masters, banishing traces of the old order from Indigenous institutions, reopening old mysteries, firing the inept. One among many tasks is to organise ways of purging individual and national guilt without jailing thousands of people that betray a nation’s humanity for personal enhancement.”
link to grousebeater.wordpress.com
“We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.”
? Petronius Arbiter
@Geoff Anderson (8.24) –
Aha!
The very one.
Thanks aplenty.
😉
Dan
You are correct to firmly abjure the mindless practice of throwing bottles, glass or otherwise, in lochs.
I feel I must however introduce a note of caution with regards to the practice of children padding in lochs.
As you will know, some lochs become very deep very quickly.
“in desperate hope of avoiding the government being sued by the affected firms.”
Would they have much chance of winning in Scotland’s fascistised courts? Are the Scotnaz essentially unsueable?
Ach, its just kneejerk fuckwittery.
“I went on holiday, they all recycle there, it’s great! We should do it!”
OK sounds good, we better set up a …
“Already done it! Sorted it out on the laptop by the pool, already emailed everybody!”
*collective sigh
Like the Low Emission Zones.
People with actual brains would say – ‘First we’ll put in the infrastructure – say, electric public transport – then people will use them instead of their motors, then we can phase in a wider ban after a succesful pilot’
Or just, y’know, be like Edinburgh: ‘We went on a junket to *insert country of choice* we want shiny trams”
*All the service planners at the meeting said: “No, you want electric trolleybuses for narrow streets”
What’s a trolleybus?
“An electrical mode of transport that can come off the catenery, can serve side streets if you want, and most importantly – drive around roadworks while we are maintaining our services – You accounted for underground services didn’t you? We don’t see any re-location in the plans…”
Oh, right, well we’ve already gone ahead with trams…
*actually happened – same with Holyrood
“We’re building this here!”
Nice, we notice the plans don’t account for existing services…”
Eh?
“Existing services, under that ground”
…
“Where do the existing services get moved to?”
…
“Our underground stuff, where does it get moved to, and who is supposed to be doing the work – us, or your contractors?”
“Err. can’t you just, sort of… move them?”
(collectively) “That’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this works…”
Kerchiinng.
Scottish Parliament to trial social media monitoring service to manage online threats against MSPs, Holyrood Magazine
I didn’t bother posting a link as all the recent posts where I added one got “lost” or fell into the moderation black hole.
Anyways, archiving web pages that you care about is always a good idea – voices.scot has archive links for all Wings posts, all 6191 of them. You know it’s just a matter of time before they come for the Rev.
Not long now before comparing Lorna Slater to anything other than a brilliant politician who is determined to save the planet will become a hate crime.
If I could humbly offer a perspective on this from a different angle.
One of the reasons why this scheme was sold on was that it has been used on other countries successfully for decades.
It may have been successful in these countries but as mentioned we have alternative schemes like local recycling bank that looks like it has worked as well. There is also the fact that while DRS may be successful in some countries for decades, it could be due to inertia where they haven’t investigated alternatives that may be better and more cost effective.
I know there is a lot of talk her about cultural imperialism in a Scottish perspective but for all countries in the world, there is this pressure from globalism to be seen to be more modern and adopt the latest fad in order not to look backward and stupid.
Of course there are a lot of things in Scottish society that needs to be improved and modernised but there needs to be a nuance where politicians and decision makers look at our problems and see if modern/global solutions can improve them and if so, adapt them to solve Scottish problems.
If only this will done with this DRS, millions of pounds of money would have been saved.
I’d imagine someone is taking advantage of Miss Slater’s North American absence* of sleekitness (since the costs of a deposit return ought to be easily absorbed within the minimum pricing and sugar taxes the nubusinesses are obliged to cash in on).
Accordingly before too much hating on the politician(s), or praising of lawyered up project managers under instruction not to tell a spade from a shovel, its worth considering that, like the procurement office that thought browsing the delightful Lady Mone’s underwear catalogue for PPE (let alone putting in a huge order), or the medical experts that wheeshted for goodness knows what, its probably the permanent civil service and its brain/ enforcement arm that needs forensic examination of its digital footprint first and foremost – at least as far as the preliminary round of prosecutions are concerned.
That said, after yesterday, best strategy for the DRS (and everything else) must be if ALL the supposed indy supporting MPs were to announce (be told) that they’ll not be standing at the next GE regardless – and move the circus forward from there.
*pre covid
Scot says: at 12:09 pm
“You are correct to firmly abjure the mindless practice of throwing bottles, glass or otherwise, in lochs.
I feel I must however introduce a note of caution with regards to the practice of children padding in lochs.
As you will know, some lochs become very deep very quickly.”
But it isn’t just a mindless practice restricted to throwing recyclable materials into lochs, it’s arguably even more mindless throwing recyclable items into a general waste bin when there is likely a recycling bin sitting right next to the general waste bin!
It is immensely sad but from my pretty wide experience of interacting with folk, they are just unbelievably lazy and / or thick these days. Seemingly having little comprehension of the wider processes involved in various aspect of our production and consumption.
I recall my university educated neighbours were greeting at watching some Attenborough programme showing animals dying from plastic pollution, yet the contents of their bins regularly showed they couldn’t be arsed segregating their own waste…
How the fuck can something that triggered such an emotional response in someone not be enough of a stimulus for them to alter their own behaviour so they become part of the solution rather than perpetuating the problem that so concerned them.
It’s like a pandemic of ADHD or the like has occurred. I seriously now think many folk’s brains are compromised due to some factor like crap in food chain or other toxin they have been exposed to.
99.9% of Scottish politicians are genuinely averse to independence, once in office.
Devolution = Easy Street.
Independence = Responsibility.
Holyrood’s white elephant parliament, as intended, has ensnared Scottish politics, in never ending puerile bureaucracy.
Ultimately, Holyrood ties Scotland to the Union, more so, than if it never existed. The Scotland Act, secures that tie, to the UK.
Scots MPs in Westminster, acting outside of Holyrood’s limitations, are in fact, more useful to the cause of independence, if they so chose an election manifesto, to empower the right to self-determination.
It’s all a matter of choice. Westminster has no constraint on Scottish MPs given right, to pursue and deliver, a majority for Scottish independence, via WM GE ballot. However, SNP prefers to maintain the status quo.
@Alf Baird 11:14pm
I’ve been reading through your book again, Alf; these passages (I’ve stuck them together for the excerpt below) seem relevant in the context of this current thread:
Sometimes I wonder if these disastrous and wasteful schemes dreamt up by the ‘Scottish government’ aren’t deliberately designed just to make Scotland and the Scots look incompetent and weak.
The current Scottish ‘cabinet’ certainly appears to consist entirely of Anglophone unionists.
Excellent points about what the SNP have become Mac. They are not the party that Alex Salmond led. Quite the reverse their focus under Sturgeon has been to try to destroy the independence movement, undermining it where they can, whilst isolating and or politically assassinating any who would pursue independence.
But that is what colonial administrators do in a colonial devolved administration and we should make no mistake about that.
And on listening to the news today I heard the bloated balloon that is Iain Blackford announce that he is standing down. And what a waste of space he came across as.
Crowed about he had increased his majority in 2017 and again in 2019. Told how the SNP would field a candidate to replace Margaret Ferrier, who he declared should have stepped down long ago. But again, Margaret, a popular hardworking SNP MP was sold short by an SNP who wanted her done in. But rather in Police Scotland prosecuting Margaret where the Met Police refused to do so, and where Sturgeon then outed her from the SNP, does anyone think that the SNP will now take the Rutherglen seat from the now independent Margaret. Not in a cat’s tail likely – and just another sleakit Sturgeon plan to undermine independence.
And then, Blackford declared he would see independence in his lifetime. Jackinory for an ever more scunnered audience I thought- and he knows it. But why would he care. Ex merchant banker. Well heeled. Good Westminster pension to come with no doubt a few consultancies to come too, its not difficult to understand why locals on Skye, independence voters at that, now want rid of him. A mirror image of Pension Pete – betrayers who sold out.
And now he’s going to be the Humza Yousaf’s right hand man business adviser. Job done, independence delivered, well Iain.
Dan
Well said.
I religiously visit the local dump and enjoy putting things in the correct skips and bins laid out there. If find it quite a cathartic experience.
What amazes me is observing others who have made the same journey as me but are dumping their stuff in all the wrong places without a care.
There are staff on hand to sort things out but a long of miss-sorts must get through.
To use our vernacular, “If they had a brain they’d be dangerous.”
Dan 12.09pm. ‘Or other toxin they have been exposed to’
Britains got talent?
@ Dan says:7 June, 2023 at 1:36 pm
folk’s brains are compromised due to some factor like crap in food chain or other toxin they have been exposed to
I know what you mean. If only there was some “smoking gun” we could identify.
Some novel infectious agent that more or less simultaneously affected everybody.
Something cooked up in a bio-engineering lab somewhere, and then released into the environment, for purposes known only to its creators.
Something where the people releasing it denied everything about it for several months, whilst promoting behaviours guaranteed to ensure its world-wide spread.
Something so dangerous and infectious that its creators and engineers, who were the only people who truly understood what was capable of, moved heaven and earth in their efforts to totally eliminate it from their own country.
Something that, despite costing hundreds of millions of lives and trillions of dollars, left those affected by it in such a state of apathy that they all combine to act and pretend as if it never happened.
@Northcode says:7 June, 2023 at 1:44 pm
The SNP Scottish Government ‘cabinet’ give the impression they run things in Scotland; they don’t
Yet there is consistency on here and among the wider Scottish public that under AS, the devolved Scottish Government delivered competent, effective policies and outcomes.
That is hard to square with the narrative that ScotGov doesn’t run anything.
I will add though, that I have long believed that the purpose of Hollyrood, to kill Indy stone-dead, was openly acknowledged and baked in from the start.
So I guess it’s complicated. Maybes the answer is that an overwhelming majority in any democratic chamber leads to bad government, bad policies, bad behaviour, and all the rest.
The optimum is a working majority and a strong opposition to keep the governing majority on the straight and narrow.
OH GOOD GRIEF!!!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SNP won’t ‘officially decide’ independence strategy at convention
link to archive.is
Scotsrenewables
I bet the code of conduct gets presented and adopted.
The delay until October on what the strategy will be presents a problem. What exactly is the summer campaign for independence actually going to be about? Collecting money for Blahford’s retirement present, prehaps? Ring-fenced of course.
Quote “A set number of tickets will be allocated to each region to “ensure a balanced participation from across the nation”.”
How, one wonders, will these tickets be allocated? Randomly to members? I suspect not.
The meant to fail policies being pumped through the Westminster legislated devolved government to Scotland has developed a patter,
The gender issues was the same .
The ferries fandango was similar.
Scotrail,
Steel company.
Glass bottles farce.
The section 30 and supreme court pretence.
You name it the useless Scottish Westminster legislated government, it finds a way to extract money from Scotland while pretending to make Scotland look incapable of governing on the surface of a false front.
The devolved goverment was invented to stop Scottish independence, now We see its purpose in action.
Northcode, at 1:44pm,
you are quoting arrant nonsense. There isn’t a single civil servant working for the Scottish government appointed by anyone in Whitehall. They all hold their positions due to the Scottish government. The second paragraph that you quote is also nonsense.
But then again, you are quoting from a work of utter fiction written by somebody who holds a grievance about his lot in life, who looks to blame others for imagined ills for which they aren’t responsible, and who peddles his fiction to credulous fools of a similar mindset.
Since 2014 there has not been a political party in the Scottish devolved government worth a whistle.
And I am beginning to be afraid that so many of the global policies of the Scottish devolved government have migrated from those other parties into Alba, in a similar infiltration pattern.
I am watching carefully.
Because never again will I have blind faith in any political party,
I watch what they are doing, not what they are saying they might do. No more carrots for me.
Bobbyp says: at 2:12 pm
“Britains got talent?”
Hmm, you could be on to something there. Link to full 8 min vid of the song by Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy – Television, The Drug Of The Nation
link to youtube.com
I’ve been clean for almost 20 years though as the foot high pile of TV licensce reminders / demands sitting in the corner confirms… 😉
So much music over the years called it right. I mean, even mindless naff rave pish by Belgian techno artist Praga Khan featuring Jade 4U called it right.
Who knew “There’s a rainbow inside your mind… Inj(f)ected with a poison… We don’t need that anymore” would be so prescient.
@Scotsrenewables
tbf to members, now that they know they own a camping car, setting the summer rota before any of the MPs muscle in MUST take priority over indy strategy – especially given the number of AI requests expected to be needed by the time they ever get around to really really wanting it
eg
Upload McAfee
Discard Haffie measures
Initiate jailbreak*
*./Indy
So the scheme is canned, another £1 Bn wasted.
This from @A Scot Abroad 3:32pm:
In response to me quoting Alf Baird here:
Let’s check the logic:
We could shorten that logical conclusion to:
The logic seems clear enough to me.
Northcode @ 1:44 pm
“I wonder if these disastrous and wasteful schemes dreamt up by the ‘Scottish government’ aren’t deliberately designed just to make Scotland and the Scots look incompetent and weak.”
Yes, as is well established, colonial society depends on debasing the colonized and there are numerous examples; ‘look, they are incapable of even building ferries, of disposing of waste, or of speaking properly!’
The systematic devaluation of the colonized is a given, as is the mediocre meritocracy running colonial institutions in the colonizer’s interest.
Can’t see the SNP doing anything other than split.
@Stuart MacKay
“Not long now before comparing Lorna Slater to anything other than a brilliant politician who is determined to save the planet will become a hate crime.”
She is a legitimate businesswoman who deals in waste management.
highlander says: 7 June, 2023 at 4:52 pm So the scheme is canned, another £1 Bn wasted.
Fret not… think of the one-percenters and cronies that won’t now be extracting even more cash from the public purse through this scheme…
A scheme that was designed to undermine the council-run publicly owned recycling initiatives that have already been implemented; and divert what money can be made from waste into the pockets of (a select few) big private concerns.
A scheme that would require an increase in the transport of waste by motor vehicle; and the abdication of responsibility for that transport – foisting it upon the already hard-pressed ordinary public. A scheme that can only drive food inflation, at a time where, in living memory, people have never struggled to much to put sustenance on the table. ‘
… And before anyone asks; the alternative is to create more good-quality permanent work for ordinary working class people by expanding and investing in waste handling, disposal and recycling as a public service. Clearly, there is a profit to be made and that being the case it should be a profit (a deposit if you like) that is returned to the people of Scotland… Instead Nicola and her cronies continue to pander to ‘the 1%’.
– Hardly ‘social justice’ was it? Good riddance.
So much for the greens. Was there any consultation. Will they accept the feedback on here and listen to the public? Will Humza show any leadership and do anything positive for Scotland. Am I delusional? That would be the only honest and true assessment. Zero accountability, unionism writ large. Unless we act and rid ourselves of these fleas and tics we are going down in a spiral!
How might the tendency towards colonialism arise?
Alf?
“Does this all mean that our political views are also partly biological?
Like personality, political ideology is genetically heritable to some extent and one explanation for this is that innate personality traits, like the Big Five or narcissism, cause political attitudes.
However, some argue that there is actually something deeper in our biology that directly links to our politics.
Maybe it is very basic preferences, perhaps related to risk or threat avoidance, from humanity’s evolutionary past which inform our modern day political preferences.”
That’s from bbc.co.uk/new/politics 55834023
Northcode @ 1:44 pm
“I wonder if these disastrous and wasteful schemes dreamt up by the ‘Scottish government’ aren’t deliberately designed just to make Scotland and the Scots look incompetent and weak.”
They’re not that clever.
The average MSP has little to no work experience outside the student politics -> elected official pipeline. They have no idea how grown up responsibilities work. I can’t stress enough how seriously bad this situation is, it’s like we hired circus clowns to do our brain surgery. People who do not have what it takes to be an assistant office manager should not be allowed anywhere near a multi-tens-of-billions-of-pounds budget or allowed to create laws.
Because they’re not fit.
Westminster is almost as bad, it just attracts a richer, posher, more plausible standard of evil useless grifter, so occasionally they do look like they know what they’re doing. You may have noticed that nothing works in the UK anymore and nobody’s happy though. Place is falling apart in real time. Manmade horrors that defy human comprehension are what we call “the news”.
Cognitively, our country’s leadership caste (for want of a better term) has dropped at least 20 IQ points in the last 30 years, possibly much more. It would never have occurred to Billy Wolfe, Michael Foot, or Maggie Thatcher to strip away your God-given right to freedom of speech and put you in a cage for misgendering fat perverts. They had no intention of cutting off your central heating or starting WW3 with Russia and China either.
But anything is possible in an Idiocracy.
sam @ 6:10 pm
“Does this all mean that our political views are also partly biological?
Not necessarily. Professor Danny Dorling refers to ‘British Exceptionalism’ and the fact that Brits have a very high opinion about themselves because of how we teach our history: “We tell ourselves a story of empire which is very different from the story that is told elsewhere”.
Also important particularly in the Scottish (Welsh and Irish) context is the language in which the British narrative is told (i.e. English), ‘given the close connection between language, thought and identity’, all of which influence our beliefs, values and emotions (Spiers).
We might just call it all part of the lived Cultural Imperialism experience – which in turn conveys to (and converts) oppressed subordinate (i.e. colonised ) peoples what is little more than a ‘cultural illusion’, e.g. British exceptionalism and its ‘one nation Britain’ political ideology. With that ‘mindset’ comes the Scottish cringe and a feeling of cultural inferiority, which we might relate to a form of Appropriated Racial Oppression.
Hence colonialism is described as ‘a sickness’, a psychological condition which affects both colonized and colonizer in different ways (Memmi).
@Scotsrenewables 2:40pm
Possibly the bye election in Rutherglen and Hamilton West is at play. The most significant bye election since the Independence Referendum. A crossroads for Scotland. Labour win and the momentum is with them for the GE. 30 plus MPs from the SNP. So the SNP put off the outcomes of the Independence Convention until October after the Rutherglen bye election.
Jock McTavish
‘Will Humza show any leadership and do anything positive for Scotland. Am I delusional?’
Maybe HUMZA should watch RRR. Just a thought.
Alf,
This from another BBC piece.
“One candidate could be brain systems controlling our emotional responses. For instance, a study showed that American volunteers who started to sweat most when they heard a sudden noise were also more likely to support capital punishment and the Iraq War. This implies that people whose basic emotional responses to threats are more pronounced end up developing a constellation of more right-wing political opinions. Another study, this time in Britain, showed differences in brain structure between liberals and conservatives – with the amygdala, a part of the brain that learns emotional responses, being larger in conservatives. Again, this suggests that differences in political beliefs might arise from differences in emotional processes.
But notice that there isn’t any suggestion that the political opinions are directly controlled by biology. Rather, the political opinions are believed to develop differently in people with different basic biology. Something like the size of a particular brain area is influenced by our genes, but the pathway from our DNA to an apparently simple variation in a brain region is one with many twists, turns and opportunities for other genes and accidents of history to intervene on.
So the idea that genes can have some influence on political views shouldn’t be shocking – it would be weird if there wasn’t some form of genetic influence. But rather than being the end of the story, it just deepens the mystery of how our biology and our ideas interact.”
Poverty can get into the genes and causes diseases generations down the line.A single, powerful adversity can cause a genetic change that effects grandchildren as with the Dutch Hunger episode.
There will certainly be personality differences between the colonising and colonised
Alf Baird@4.58pm.
Well said Alf.
I’d also add to that, that the current SNP under Yousef and prior to him Sturgeon are deliberately pushing policies such as the (DRS) Deposit Return Scheme knowing fine well that Westminster will shoot them down, and allow the SNP to finger point at Westminster, and in the process try and curry favour with the Scottish public that the SNP are hard done by Westminster so vote for us.
@sam says:7 June, 2023 at 7:53 pm
There will certainly be personality differences between the colonising and colonised
Hmmm. What is stated without proof can be discounted without proof.
Here’s some concrete evidence. Nobody did more of the colonisation thing than the Scots, Sam. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, South Africa, Caribbean islands, all hoaching with Scots colonisers. All rammed with impoverished, down-trodden, alcoholic, hopeless, despairing, indigenous colonised.
Try proving me wrong on that.
Truth is, IMO, the urge to colonise is like the urge to be racist – universal in everybody. Just look at history.
sam @ 7:53 pm
“So the idea that genes can have some influence on political views shouldn’t be shocking – it would be weird if there wasn’t some form of genetic influence. But rather than being the end of the story, it just deepens the mystery of how our biology and our ideas interact.”
Colonialism being a co-operative venture, in which the petty bourgeois retain a special place in postcolonial theory:
“One cannot say that the petty bourgeois has never read anything. On the contrary, he has read everything, devoured everything. Only, his brain functions after the fashion of certain elementary types of digestive system. It filters. And the filter lets through only what can nourish the thick skin of the bourgeois’s clear conscience.” (Aime Cesaire)
@ Alf Baird
The social gradient in the Westminster studies seems to show the physical impact of a psychosocial effect.Those in the top grades and pay live longer generally than those in the next lower grades and pay and so on down to the bottom.
As Mr Main has so kindly pointed out the final sentence up above could do with a question mark.
@John Main
Ta.
Never mind the £300 million pished up against the wall, what is the carbon footprint of all the cash that has been wasted on investment in facilities that will hang around outside with no cashflow to maintain them.
What is the carbon footprint of the waste time, effort and resources recruiting and employing all the quango wonks and civil serpent overseers?
What would have been the carbon footprint of the scheme in the first place when we already recycle more than the waste industry can handle, only for the excess to be shipped half way across the world in order to be thrown into an Asian river?
Had we been starting from scratch, it might have been possible to prove that the scheme had some merit, but from where we were with established recycling schemes working as well as you could ever hope, it was only the hot air from idiot watermelon nanny state zealots that kept the scheme afloat.
@Red 6:18pm
You’re right, of course, Red. They’re not that clever.
At best the competences, intellects, and critical thinking abilities of almost every politician ‘representing’ Scotland in the ‘Scottish’ parliament fall significantly short of mediocre.
Which leads to the possibility that a questionably smarter, but infinitely more devious, ‘mind’ is enabling and manipulating them in some way.
Scotland’s politicians are like children given free, unsupervised access to a sweet shop.
They gorge themselves on their political privileges (they’re convinced, in their own minds, that they deserve all those privileges) without the slightest consideration for anyone else.
Of course they’ve been empowered for those very characteristics, because children are easier to control than full-grown, questioning adults.
All it takes is a promise of more sweets if they do as they’re told, or a smack if they don’t.
And ‘Idiocracy’, a humorous Hollywood fiction, or a prophetic vision of humanity’s future?
Alf Baird 9.10pm
As in Simon & Garfunkel ‘The Boxer’:
“… a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest…”
Northcode, at 4:53pm
Your point 2 is where your logic breaks down:
“ The Scottish government is managed by Anglophone unionists appointed by Whitehall”.
Well, it just isn’t. The Scottish government is managed by Scottish people elected by Scottish voters, most of whom thought they were getting Scottish nationalists to be in charge, because Scottish Nationalism is literally what is written on the SNP tin.
Nobody in the Scottish government was appointed by Whitehall. Nobody in the Scottish government is there because of anyone at all in England. It’s all the doing of Scots, whether voters, or appointees of civil servants.
Your code must be seriously shit if that’s the level of your logic.
@Alf Baird
I’m not often shocked.
However reading that Aime Cesaire quote did it for me. Not that it came from this particular fan of the early Soviet Union, but that you had the lack of self awareness to quote it.
You do realise that most people quoting on this blog would fall into the petty bourgeois category right? Small time businessmen, tradesmen etc.
But speaking so ill of the class of people that make up the bulk of the Scottish independence movement, and Western civilisation is not the worst of it.
The worst of it is that this exact rhetoric, exact, was the kind that came straight from the communists in order to marginalise and liquidate millions of people.
That is no exaggeration.
The fact that it comes from a man who looked up to the Soviet Union through its darkest days takes it into sinister territory.
Now obviously people will say ‘but Joe! You are a holocaust denier, who are you to criticise?’
The difference is that I won’t be around for much longer and it was never my intention to try to be a figure anyone could point to for guidance. However if I’d written a book in order to help Scots think their way out of their situation I’d be much more considered about what I say and which sympathiser of murderous communist states I quote, especially when the quote mimics the exact kind of propaganda that led to massacres.
What’s even worse is that most won’t even see what I’m talking about here, or that I have any kind of point at all.
But get into a debate with an establishment figure who wants to discredit you and you will fall hard because of the above and I’m not sure it wouldn’t be deserved.
The civil servants who work at Holyrood, are employees of the UK Civil Service.
Check it out, instead of uttering pish.
@A Scot Abroad 7 June 11:05 pm
I had a dream.
And in that dream I proved Scotland’s status as an internally-colonised nation in a debate with Lt. Commander Spock, Science Officer of the Starship Enterprise.
Spock turned to me, his expression one of profound admiration, and said, “Your logic is impeccable, Northcode.”
If that isn’t proof enough of the soundness of my logic…well, I don’t know what else could be.
And thanks for the compliment; my code is pretty good – it can do some ‘serious shit’, as you put it.
Joe @ 12:46 am
“However reading that Aime Cesaire quote did it for me. Not that it came from this particular fan of the early Soviet Union,”
On the contrary, Cesaire ended up being no fan of the Soviet Union and rebuked his communist colleagues for their confusion regarding colonialism. Robin Kelley explained Cesaire as follows, noting that:
“the history of Western Civilization helps us locate the origins of fascism within colonialism itself. Cesaire was neither confused about Marxism nor masquerading as a Marxist when he wrote Discourse. On the contrary, he was trying to revise Marx….suggesting that the anticolonial struggle supersedes the proletarian revolution. The implications are enormous: the coming revolution was not posed in terms of capitalism versus socialism, but in terms of the complete and total overthrow of a racist, colonialist system…”
Some people on the Left in Scotland still don’t ‘get’ this.
@Alf Baird
Thanks for the answer, but I am not in any way comforted
‘The implications are enormous: the coming revolution was not posed in terms of capitalism versus socialism, but in terms of the complete and total overthrow of a racist, colonialist system’
This is precisely what I am talking about
The ‘revolution’ in communist terms originally focused on class.
The ‘revolution’ has now been reframed to race with white Europeans now the petit bourgeois and any brown skinned person the proletariat.
It is just as Marxist as the original but the framing has been altered.
As I have commented before – the great revolution has been reframed towards race, and they are busily importing their new proletariat while they turn them against Europeans through relentless propaganda.
The ‘colonialism’ rhetoric in many academic sources that I have seen seems more to describe anything European than to talk fairly on the outrageous acts of any European aristocracy.
In the more radical left wing circles ‘decolonise’ means to remove European influence. To decolonise mathematics, decolonise culture, decolonise theatre. If anyone wishes they can look for themselves.
Again all of it comes from the same people who are pushing transgenderism all across the West (ruthless application of the ideology of equality across gender lines), so it should be even more obvious that something is going on that requires a touch more consideration than would normally be given.
Just an addition:
The ‘decolonisation’ rhetoric we see from the mainstream left, especially in academia, looks awfully close to the UN definition of cultural genocide.
Since the overarching narrative is that white peoples concerns are trivial due to the framing of ‘racism’ through the years anybody with an ounce of sense can see that this cultural genocide can very easily become actual genocide. Using the UN’s definitions it could be said that this has already begun – its not poor white people that are being shoe horned into jobs, given homes and encouraged to breed in their own homelands.
@Joe
I am on the mailing list for the GFT and in the current one it has tied in a trans film with a club night at the Jamboree bar which was found to be where the anti TERF placards for marches were being produced. The GFT has a steady stream of anti white, pro satanic/black/brown/gay/trans films and is a registered charity whilst the Jamboree has been given money by the Scottish government. The film is a 15 but they are saying no one under 18 will be admitted to the Jamboree.
As I mentioned previously I came to the conclusion that something was seriously off in the Educational Charity sector in Glasgow as it appeared to be a network of venues using charitable status which although separate from each other appeared to be connected and all with the same message, Black History Month, Protect Trans Children, Decolonise The West etc. I identified tens of millions of pounds, possibly more, going into these every year and some of them do not even have to apply, it is granted automatically no questions asked. We are funding people who have a genocidal hatred of us.
Joe @ 10:42 am
“The ‘decolonisation’ rhetoric we see from the mainstream left, especially in academia, looks awfully close to the UN definition of cultural genocide.”
It does appear to be the case the Scots are under attack from new forms of Cultural Imperialism which tend to ignore the fact that colonial procedures have also been applied to “the humiliation of the white man”, Cesaire specifically referring to this aspect in respect of Hitler. Professor Edward Said similarly refers to England imposing colonial procedures “against the Irish race” since well before its African, Asian and American colonies were established, and extending over a far lengthier period which continues even to today. The historic transportation, eviction, mass emigration, plus still ongoing plunder and cultural obliteration of the Scottish people/culture may be viewed in a similar light. Still earlier colonial-type procedures may be considered in respect of the Viking and Roman invasions of Pictland/Scotland.
And these are the people you want running an independent Scotland? They’d make the Darien promoters seem level headed and sensible. And more likely to ruin Scotland for a long time to come? How much did Darien cost?
William Paterson, on whom the Darien vision depended, was the 17th-century equivalent to a modern-day investment banker and stockbroker. He convinced men and women from the Scottish elite and professional classes to invest £400,000 in a scheme that had no guarantee of success. The total raised equated to about [25% of Scottish national wealth](link to scholar.harvard.edu, and nearly two-and-a-half times the estimated value of Scotland’s annual exports.
To Humza, Slater, the SNP, the retort is ‘hold my beer’ There’s a lot of ruination in a nation as the SNP are busy demonstrating.
The Wokist Mind Virus is running at epidemic rates in the SNP and Greens.