What happened next?
Posted on
June 11, 2015 by
Rev. Stuart Campbell
24 hours in news:
Oil is good again! Yay!
No, not for YOU, Scotland. Don’t be stupid.
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A tall tale
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Probably a robbery
Transphobia
How is it alright for the bankrupt UK to operate with a 90 billion black hole, but 7 billion would be a complete disaster for energy-rich Scotland?
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
George Orwell, 1984
If we today were like we were pre referendum,and had the memory of a goldfish,Scots might fall for it. Not any more. Oil is extra. When you see media u turns like this and then see MPs for English constituencies taking up the questions at Scottish Questions,you begin to realise that your countrys’ future lies not in this union.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that a total of £2.1bn would be raised in the 20 years to 2040-41.
That is about £34.5bn lower than it estimated last year, and less than the tax revenue from last year alone.
It added: “As we always stress, North Sea revenues have been the most volatile receipts stream and are subject to large forecast errors, even over the short term.
What is the point of the OBR. Last year they forecast that Scotland’s oil revenues for the next 20 years at £36.6bn. Now they say £2.1bn. Then they add, “but its all pie in the sky anyway” (My Paraphrase). My greatgrandson talks more sense and all he says is mama.
Remarkably few headlines will be allowed in Scotland, Westminster and uk/scottish media suffering from cognative dissonance in relation to oil and how it affects Our economy but not theirs
Regardless of the oil price, I’m all for FFA, providing we ensure that we receive ALL TAX INCOME (Corporation, Income, VAT, Fuel Duties, Export duties,Alcohol Duties etc, etc. etc.)
We will then be in a position to actually calculate our true earnings. It will also allow us to do so historically and we can then tell them to stick England’s debt where the sun don’t shine, along with their trident renewal and foreign affairs.
So basically, oil is liquid gold if you believe in the union, but will melt your face if you believe in Scottish Independence.
Seriously, when is then next vote, this hinging aboot is driving me nuts.
Thepnr says:
11 June, 2015 at 5:08 pm
It was supposed to be a work of fiction NOT a prediction!
Perhaps I underestimate Mr. Orwell 🙁
Liars, cheats and thieves.
It was UKOK media wot won it but they’re clearly going to stop FFA too, with stuff like
link to wingsoverscotland.com
or
link to wingsoverscotland.com
I think we have to assume the SNP FFA amendment appeared unexpectedly?
As oft discussed, we won’t get it, but I do think our 56 are doing a great job of raising Scotland’s profile by being proactive.
For FFA/FFR to work, companies that TRADE in Scotland must also be REGISTERED in Scotland. That way, their accounts are also required to be lodged in Scotland and we then see EXACTLY how much we should be getting in revenues from them.
That registration should also cover the territorial waters.
In addition we will need our own treasury and, probably, central bank.
To reduce our costs (i.e. the sums sent to London) we will need to have our own regulatory bodies head-quartered up here too.
It would also be helpful to have Westminster provide us with fully itemised invoices for the defence and “foreign affairs” support that they claim they’d give us. That way, we can challenge a few of the sums demanded.
We in turn will invoice them handsomely for the use of our facilities, such as Faslane, along with all the oversight charges we will need to levy to ensure they are not allowing “things” to happen in the places that we rent to them.
Then there will be the clean up charges for Dalgety Bay, Solway Firth, Dounreay, Coulport (and I’m sure the list could be expanded quite easily).
“Ian Murray, Labour’s shadow Scottish secretary, said the OBR’s new figures “highlight the madness of full fiscal autonomy for Scotland. The SNP is looking to deliver something that they know is economically illiterate and raises questions about their economic credibility.”
Old Severin is a great British laughing stock in Scotland but you have to ask, if Scots is so worthless, why wont our chums in the south let go of it, give Scotland full control of Scots oil industry etc…
Pretty please dear imperial masters and Severin?
Now STV are saying that Westminster is opposing FFA because of, wait for it, low oil prices.
Stephen.
link to bbc.co.uk
BBC vote SLab Scotland follows through big style. All night and all day tomorrow. They must really be UKOK krapping it and its a lot like their NO sterling for you YES sweaties stuff last year.
Last year they said twenty years worth of oil receipts would generate £34.5 billion. One year later they now say £2 billion. The ‘independent’ OBR is obviously completely incompetent at predicting 20 year cycles and can’t even predict oil receipts over one year, if it can suddenly drop its prediction by 94% in just ONE year. The SNP was actually serious about demanding full fiscal autonomy and submitting an amendment to that effect to the Scotland Bill a few hours before the OBR made its announcement. One other amendment I would suggest in this time of austerity is to just abolish the OBR – I doubt anyone would miss it…
Isn’t the biggest opposition supposed to be attacking the tories and not other opposition parties?
[…] What happened next? […]
In the name o’ the wee man. Oil is a bonus, not the fundamental crutch of Scotlands economy. All tax receipts, from the likes of Tesco etal, must be included in FFA.
These shysters are basically saying we couldn’t be independent, never mind run a piss up in a brewery.
They are rerunning the referendum, they won; can’t they get over it.
Uk is utterly dependent on north Sea. Without it it’s an economy dependent on selling debt to its own citizens. It’s called a ponzi scheme.
Am I just a cynic or did the OBR wait until the SNP had tabled their amendment before releasing their figures.
Also it didn’t take Kezia long to tub thump……
Collusion ?????? Cynic?????? Me??????
London Labour are tories and have been for a long time as even the dumbest unbelievers are finding out
It is quite clear that the Tories and their media pals have lost the plot. We all know that oil money is the icing on the cake and not the basis for FFA
On the European issue, if all three Celtic countries vote to stay in and England votes to come out, will they have then effectively declared unilateral independence and we can then have our own independence and join a Celtic Alliance staying in the EU?
I don’t think for a minute we see the full figures for oil. We only see what suits them to report .
Do you really think they scuppered independance to save the Union and they really love us.
And they will not be declaring to Scotland the revenues from the fields that were stolen when they moved the boundary north. That revenue must file a huge chunk of the “black hole”
And check out the IFS 63% indirectly Government funded. I dependant?
@Wulls
I said the same this afternoon, no coincidence at all they have all these forecasts stuck in the back of a Whitehall drawer marked ‘not to be opened until doomsday’
PS:
I’ve heard nothing about the police statistics crisis since this morning on GMS. Funny old world init!
@Luigi
How is it alright for the bankrupt UK to operate with a 90 billion black hole, but 7 billion would be a complete disaster for energy-rich Scotland?
I think you’ll find Scotland’s deficit is £12 billion for the most recently published figures. UK deficit is 5.6% of GDP, Scotland is 8.1 % of GDP hence where the deficit gap figure is conjured up from (source GERS 2013-2014). The deficit gap figure of £7.6 billion is what is *projected* by the IFS for the year 2014-2015 that will be published in March 2016.
@Rob James
Regardless of the oil price, I’m all for FFA, providing we ensure that we receive ALL TAX INCOME (Corporation, Income, VAT, Fuel Duties, Export duties,Alcohol Duties etc, etc. etc.)
What are these Export duties you speak of? Can you explain?
As for the OBR report, I would entirely agree with everyone on here that they’re projections are totally made up based on “the current situation not changing” which is why their projections are so different from last year when, you know, the price of oil was so much higher and everyone (including the SNP) was projecting it would stay at that price and indeed only go up.
Now can we declare UDI & get the fuck out of this Unionist cess-pit?
Well the BBC and STV have both ben acting as Brit Nat propaganda mouthpieces today. Just another day of SNP Bad, SNP Wicked and SNP Evil.
Not satisfied with the Tory OBR lie they drag up a spurious study from the Brit Nat front that is the Aberdeen Chamber of Commerce just to rub in the doom and gloom.
Neither the BBC or and STV can contain their delight when it comes to trashing Scotland in any way. I bet they are hoping that the Republic of Ireland hammers us on Saturday as well just to keep them gloating and spreading the doom and gloom about how we are too wee and too poor and too stupid and too whatever to do anything.
Oh and I am get well tired of those who regularly act as apologists for STV as well. STV Aberdeen is totally poisonous and every bit as bad as the BBC if not worse. No doubt Trump will be wheeled out again tomorrow.
In France near Paris on hols.
All I can see is cranes building stuff and fancy metro trains.
They don’t have much oil
Hmmm
So Scotland can neither go it alone or pay its way inside the UK. Can’t fully govern itself independently or dependently.
This must be unique in the world?
O/T
Nicola Sturgeon at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington-includes good Q & A section
link to youtube.com
@ Colin Rippey, maybe you cant answer the simple query, if Scottish oil is such a worthless burden on teamGB, why dont you give up control of it all to Holyrood?
That’s the minimum £1.5 trillion worth of Scots oil out there Colin.
Still no mention of the vast oil reserves up there in the north Atlantic eh?
Probably not worth nuttin’. Move along now..
The more oor Nicola wows them on the big world stage -the more scared the MSM become
Looks like we’re well into PROJECT FEAR III
Thats’s all they’ve got left
Bella’s appeal is now well over subscribed
– but 61 hours left for link to independencelive.net and £3k to go
Please pass it on
@ Jim Thomson. 5.56
(We in turn will invoice them handsomely for the use of our facilities, such as Faslane.)
Waverers ah dont like waverers. Betty slap his puss wie a wet Haddie.
Or just an excuse to form a new and improved “Snoopers Charter?”
link to archive.is
Misreporting Scotland reporting Deputy Dug’s ludicrous $200 a barrel nonsense as fact – one has to laugh or perhaps cry.
“I think you’ll find Scotland’s deficit is £12 billion for the most recently published figures.”
No it’s not, it’s £96 billion.
Oh no, wait a minute, it’s £140 trillion.
Haud on, it’s £5,000 bazillion gazillion.
While working in Inverness for a UK wide restaurant, to sort my tax I had to speak to the tax office in Newcastle!.
I guess my income tax and NI would be classed as raised in England, not Scotland.
All companys operating in Scotland, should be registered in Scotland.
People complain that Amazon, Starbucks, Google etc are cooking the books to hide the money they make and pay less tax, yet the UK government have being doing it for decades to hide how much Scotland makes for itself!.
C4 news putting the boot in now, its the self proclaimed “feisty 56” apparently. Never heard them say that before though.
So little Scots oil, so much Scots scroungerising and clapping, always with the Westminster clapping outrage.
Listen Westminster, if you are subsidising Scotlnad?
Stop it just as quickly as you can while delivering FFA.
We do not believe a word you say nor do we agree with your trumped up statistics from your friends in the Depts of distortion and scaremongering.
If we have miscalculated anything, then we, the Scots will take it on the chin and fix it without Casino Bankers, Pedophile rings, and politicians for profit.
Your whole history has been based on murdering, raping, and
exploiting captured colonies.
Only Scotland and the Falklands remaining and then you can try
living on your own merits.
Go Frack yourselves!
The Daily Mail are at it again, trying to hijack Charles Kennedy’s funeral and use it to attack the SNP.
As for that fecker Brian Wilson….
link to dailymail.co.uk
Coincidence abounds! Unionist news manipulation, gleefully abetted by the unionist media, gets more and more blatant. Do they really think, after years of unionist scare stories, that the majority of people in Scotland takes any notice of them? Well, yes, it seems unionists do. Yet SNP support continues to rise. Unionists are silly-billies.
The Unionist parties have been using a stick to beat us with by their claim that FFA would leave us with a black hole. and therefore the SNP don’t really want it.The SNP have now brilliantly called their bluff by tabling the amendment and the Tories et al will have to vote against it.Now who is scared of Scotland dealing with its own finances.
It will be laid bare for all of Scotland and England to see that the Unionists are more scared by the prospect than the SNP.
Well played the SNP strategists.
Bbc / Stv wont be changing anytime soon.Its Groundhog day news,ad infinitum.
@Andrew Haddow,
The nearer we get to FFA the bigger the defecit will become.They are scared and are again using State mechanisms to frighten the Scottish public.
Total taxes raised in Scotland £54billion (plus corp tax etc paid through London HQ’s for commercial activites in Scotland. VAT is (under) estimated. Total spending in Scotland £35Billion Block Grant, £16Billion (UK) pensions/benefits, £3Billion Defence.
Total taxes raised in the UK £466Billion
Total taxes raised in the rest of the UK £412Billion Plus £90Billion borrowed and spent.
Scotland could save £10Billion? Cutting Trident/illegal wars, tax evasion, (whisky) banking fraud, a tax on ‘loss leading’ drink. Oil development in the West and building turbines, liners on the Clyde would create jobs and growth.
@Ronnie 7:33pm
FGS Ronnie, gies a brek! That wiz ma tea … ouch, ouch, ouch.
@ Ronnie, 7:33pm
Fair ruined ma haddie!
@colin rippey
Re tax expert duties.
For whiskey, correct me if wrong, when manufactured it goes into Bond. Tax is only paid when it is sold or exported. Nearly all export is dreamed to go from English ports so the tax goes straight into the Treasury. Not the only creative accounting the government has.
I’m sure a ‘winger’ will put an annual number on it. It’s a big (help fill in “black hole”) number.
Sorry for the quick follow up.
Whiskey is about £1 billion a year in tax to the treasury.
Bob Mack says:
11 June, 2015 at 7:52 pm
The SNP have now brilliantly called their bluff by tabling the amendment and the Tories et al will have to vote against it.
Indeed, the real meaning of The Vow will soon be apparent to all.
I am sick of it. I am so sick of their pish. I could cheerfully switch off from all this for a year or two and never look back.
Just make sure I never see a union jack or I’ll get a brit-cringe so hard I might break my neck.
I always said that if there was a No vote, the means with which it was achieved would ensure that no Scot could ever feel welcome in the UK.
As you can imagine, not too happy at being right on this count.
@ IvMoz, That’s Brian Wilson going in hard in the local news. Presumably five more years of this kind of attack from big hitters like Wilson and the BBC, and people will vote for anyone but the SNP just to make it stop. I doubt there’s anyone outside of Pacific Quay, that’s lied so hard and so long about and against Scotland running Scotland either.
link to whfp.com
For Norway, the oil turned out to be a boon which will keep them prosperous for generations.
For Scotland, the oil turned out to be curse. We continue to live with massive deprivation and child poverty.
Worst of all, we cannot even be independent and try to sort out our poor state of affairs, because of the oil.
Our 56 SNP MP’s are outnumbered 11 to 1 at Westminster.
The Scottish parliament has very limited powers and a relatively limited budget.
I don’t think we will be able to achieve much politically while playing the game according to our opponents’ rules.
Only the sort of action that got rid of the poll tax will get rid of Pravda GB Scottish branch and bring meaningful powers leading to independence.
It’s the SNPs fault, every time they’re looking good and getting popular the price of oil goes down
When we had Labour the oil price was good, we never got the use of it but it was good
The SNP are doing something secret to bring the oil price down but thank God the Tories are finding this out on our behalf and telling us
Where would we be without our informative BBC and Print Media keeping us right
God! the thought of it we’d end up Independent if the great unwashed on benefit thicko brigade had their way
Someone in the Guardian warned us about that
It’s a great paper isn’t it
…and when the price goes back up hey! It’s volatile. The cursed oil again. Are we really going to go through this bollocks ad nauseum? Are we really going to listen to the ‘Scotland can’t be an independent country because’ bollocks forever and ever?
If the rest of the UK had never existed, if we were an island a few hundred miles off the coast of Europe would we, right now be a basketcase economy?
The only reason I can see to not be an an independent country is because we would have to deal with a venomous, gilted ex partner which, as anyone who has been in a bad relationship knows is no reason to stay.
I’m bored waiting for the positive case for the union. It doesn’t exist. We are just sitting in the waiting room right now. In my thinking the union is over and this is dragging interminably.
The EU ref can’t come soon enough when we get off on a technicality. It’s becoming embarrassing
link to offshore-technology.com
Just latest of hundreds of North Sea oil construction contracts all being built in Norway, with a smaller population than Scotland. Scotland builds nothing like this now and all because of decisions taken by Snatcher Thatcher, Major, Brown and Bomber Bliar and Flipper, the Treasury, City of London spivs etc
Its all a giant appalling indictment of SLabour or just another day for Scotland in teamGB.
What’s left for UKOK freak show? BBC Project Fearing again, half demented boozy SLabour has beens like Wilson ranting away with concocted smear campaigns in local rags and in neo fascist Daily Heil for christ’s sake.
The more they try to scare. insult and smear, the more our movement will grow. Because our opponents are committed to the culture of greed they think that Scottish people would rather be a population of scroungers, living off the charity of their betters, than live within their own means. What was it Burns said ‘We dare be poor for all that.’ We’re going to find out.
Listening to Scotch Labour MSPs regards FFA I think there has been a faulty line of communication.
“We are all about aspiration now. Turn up the aspiration. Maximum aspiration”, was the actual message from Accounts HQ.
Alas, this was heard as “desperation” as it filtered down the line.
Westminster will never let this happen (FFA). The Westminster Casino has been kept afloat with our oil revenue for 40 plus years now and have still managed to botch up the economy. They blame the Labour Party for this but the current deficit (90 billion) and debt (1.5 trillion) has doubled since they took over. The price of oil may have dropped (and will no doubt rise again) but they can’t survive without it.
Scotland also exports more than it imports. England imports more than it exports hence the constant need for them to borrow.
And just as a reminder Scottish salmon is the number one UK food export and our whisky constitutes 25% of ALL UK Food and Drink revenue. I could go on and on as the list is endless …. Scottish income tax, fisheries, timber ….
Billions and billions are flowing from Scotland into the Treasury. They’ll never let us get FFA as long as we’re shackled to them.
Nicola Sturgeon should start imparting facts and statistics at Holyrood based on the views of expert economists to shut Dugdale, Murray et al up. More anything remind them that most countries on the planet are running a deficit such as the one we’re lumbered with right now.
Listening to unionist biased news you’d think FFA would see Scotland as the only country in the world running a deficit.
The Defcon fear levels were at a all time high.
Under Westminster the UK’s debt has spiraled out of control.
Could Scotland really do any worse,I for one don’t think so.
Scotland, the only country in the world that has no good news, only bad.
The analysis of the economic benefits that accrue from the Scotch Whisky industry is a notable case of how the strength of Scotland’s economy can be underestimated, if not undermined, by considering Scotland’s present economic and fiscal situation as a ‘region’ of the UK.
link to reidfoundation.org
link to commonspace.scot
The latter source reports: “Professor John Kay, visiting professor of economics at the London School of Economics and fellow of St John’s College Oxford, estimates that only £400m of the £25bn global retail sales value of Scotch whisky (only two per cent) remains in Scotland. This £400m is mainly composed of wage and production costs. The substantial profit margins and intellectual property value has been exported with the cargo.”
It’s the start of the campaign for next years Holyrood election…….. They’re going to get even nastier
Their backs are against the wall
The bottom line is, Scotland needs to get control over broadcasting, or they will just carry on brainwashing us.
I’m with r-type grunt..its gotta be UDI. there’s no way they’re gonna let us ever win indieref2, or 3 etc
Not only is Scotland apparently the only country in the world running a deficit, it’s the only one in the world whose deficit must be eliminated immediately.
London subsidises the whole of the UK with the financial services sector according to the Tories
I mean, they’ll never go bust or leave London will they?
They would never ever transfer their offices anywhere else would they?
Can you export Morris Dancing?..or is that counted as culture?
Melton Mowbray pork pies maybe, is there money in that?
The Queen!!! they could sell the Queen
Why not! they’re selling everything else
I just did not realise just how volatile that oil price is.
One day – Bonanza!
Next day – Bust…
You think that editor with the funny moustache would be able to edit out the good news so they could give a consistent story. Slacker!
link to wingsoverscotland.com
The dream of Independence is becoming a reality
Slowly slowly catchee monkey!
I’d just like to reiterate what Cadogan Enright said earlier, we really do need to help those that are working hardest on our behalf.
However you feel right now, by the time the next referendum comes around we need to prepared, believe me when that time comes you will be happy that we continued the fight now.
Please support Independence live which currently is at only 47% of the target of £5800. This to pay for a full time coordinator and doesn’t even cover the expenses of those that travel to record various events and conduct interviews.
The Independence movement is lucky to have such dedicated people, let’s not let them down by abandoning them now.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/going-forward–2#/story
(OBR) ” It was formally created in May 2010 following the general election (although it had previously been constituted in shadow form by the Conservative party opposition in December 2009)”
Ah, so it’s a Conservative Party advisory body.
“George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed after the 2010 general election, announced the body in his first official speech.”
Ah, so it’s a Conservative Government body.
“The office is currently headed by Robert Chote, formerly a director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.”
Ah, so Lord Chote moves from one “independent” “non-political” body to another. How quaint, how – quangoish.
Oh, did I say Lord Chote?
I know people are proud of Nicola’s tour of USA, drawing attention to Scotland, drumming up trade and answering all questions put to her directly, honestly and succinctly.
But I was looking at which organisations she visited. IMF, World Bank, Council on Foreign Relations….
I know that is the world in which we live today. But I was always hoping that an independent Scotland would do things a little bit differently. You know, like Iceland or Uruguay or Switzerland or Eire…
If an independent Scotland is to be a full part of what some people might describe as the existing order (or NWO), I do not see how that can possibly tie in with the political aspirations of our citizens — and indeed many of our public figures, from Cat Boyd and Tommy Sheridan to Lesley Riddoch and Andy Wightman.
Scotland as a whole votes left-wing and the young are squarely behind the SNP and the Greens.
I know voting for independence is not voting for permanent SNP government (in fact, the SNP might cease to exist following indy!). But I was saddened also when Nicola tweeted her delight that Hillary Clinton was running for US president. I presume it was because she is a woman. That is, of course, good.
But given what Nicola supposedly thought of Thatcher, do we really need to be heading in a course whereby we would welcome a terrible war-mongerer mired in corruption (let’s be honest) as president of USA? For the life of me, I cannot see any difference between Thatcher and Ms. Clinton!
O/T but, my burd sais gie hur strength…
The UK has found a new burd and she is gutted. 250,000 people voted for *cough, cough, chough* the? Golden eagle right? Pah! The whooper Swan? Nope! the Capercallie? Fug that! Noway hosay, tbe voters want “THE ROBIN!!”
the following image was used to promote the whole charade on the news earlier, doesn’t look much like a robin tho. I think they might’ve been aiming for something more symbolic but hey ho for the democratic vote and the fickle Brittish twitcher.
link to ts4.mm.bing.net
IS NOTHING SACRED NOR EXEMPTED FROM UKOK BRANDING?
@Alastair
For whiskey, correct me if wrong, when manufactured it goes into Bond. Tax is only paid when it is sold or exported. Nearly all export is dreamed to go from English ports so the tax goes straight into the Treasury. Not the only creative accounting the government has.
I’m sure a ‘winger’ will put an annual number on it. It’s a big (help fill in “black hole”) number.
You do know that this export duty on whisky is myth right? An article did appear on this website sometime in 2013 (not written by the Rev, someone else wrote it) where this notion of export duty was introduced as “something that is attributed to England” and hidden from Scotland.
It’s a myth, I do wonder how is has managed to work it’s way into the consciousness of people but somehow it has.
Simply put, alcohol is sold in the UK and at the point of consumption (wherever in the UK that is) HMRC collects a duty on it. Alcohol exported overseas is sold in the foreign country and (if any) duty levied on the alcohol would be collected in the foreign country and not sent back to the UK.
If Scotland were independent it would export whisky to rUK but the duty would be collected by HMRC in rUK when the product was consumed. It’s the same as saying when you go into a shop and buy a bottle of champagne HMRC collects the duty levied on the bottle, the duty does not get sent back to the French producers.
‘If Scotland stays in the UK, and the UK continues in its policies that have resulted in growing inequality, even if GDP were slightly larger, the standards of living of most Scots could fall…Cutbacks in UK public support to education and health could force Scotland to face a set of unpalatable choices….It is clear that there is, within Scotland, more of a shared vision and values ,a vision of the country, the society, politics, the role of the state;values like fairness, equity and opportunity’
So says Joseph Stiglitz (The Great Divide p357) former chief economist at the World Bank. It’s obvious that Scotland needs independence to progress with its own vision- and rightly so- it won’t be forthcoming in the current UK political setup which makes a mockery of participative democracy.
Is it not the case that half a barrel is better than none.
The indoctrination continues. Interesting to see so-called intelligent colleagues’ incredulity about Scotland’s autonomy. The implicit belief is that the UK economy is A OK now that the Tories have a foothold.
Steve keen mentioned the phrase ‘theory induced blindness’ – referring to neo-liberal economists. Even when you show them the evidence, they say it can’t be the case because the ‘theory’ says so.
We have entered our first quarter of deflation. The first in 50 years. The government believe austerity will work in a very weakened economy – see Greece.
Osborne will most likely have to engage in deficit spending, but the Right wing press will smooth it over no doubt.
I spoke to a banker about capital (pre-Indy ref). Mockingly he asked, what would underpin your currency? (I’m pro Scottish pound) “Fresh water?” How he guffawed.
I asked him why China might invest billions in water plants in Patagonia. Because they are daft?
People, aided by the financial press have lost sight of what wealth actually is.
The UK is run on the printing of fiat money. It blew away its capital over 3 decades. That’s what ended the United Kingdom.
Well who knew? Unknown tribes in as yet undiscovered and remote regions of the Amazon basin could have predicted these headlines.
Only in Scotland is oil a poisonous and volatile burden. For every other bugger its Christmas every day of the year.
Westminster and its media, a match made in heav… hell.
16th September 2014, Herald editorial: “The Herald’s view: we back staying within UK, but only if there’s more far-reaching further devolution” … “(We) stand with the people of Scotland in demanding much-strengthened autonomy; something the main pro-UK parties have a profound responsibility to deliver.” …
… “This newspaper has been a passionate advocate of Home Rule for Scotland and continues to be so.” … “It will be The Herald’s mission to harry the pro-UK parties every step of the way, to ensure they deliver the devolution Scotland wants and expects.”
11th June 2015 (Herald news): “SNP plans for control of tax and spending under fire as big drop in North Sea tax revenues predicted”
Ah, right. My word is my bond.
Oil good! SNP baaad! Scotland stupid! Me keep oil money, spend on champagne. They not know difference..
Alastair
Not sure where the idiotic assumption that there is a tax on Whisky that’s exported outside the UK
The simple fact is this
Whisky, like any spirits produced in the UK is subject to Duty, Excise and VAT. The normal practice is for produced spirits to be held in bond and Duty, Excise and VAT only paid when the spirits leave the bond for sale in the home market.
If Whisky is for export then the Whisky is shipped direct from the bond and as it is leaving the UK, there is no Duty, Excise or VAT taken to account
Just on a side note, has anyone seen the Carlsberg ‘SNP’ ad? It came up before a youtube video I was watching and has a ‘Scottish’ guy wearing a kilt shouting about ‘independence’ whilst standing at a petrol station. The voiceover makes the claim that most people in Britain think that the SNP is a ‘petrol company’.
Bizarre.
OBR – Office of Bizarre Raconteurs- InsOBRrieties’ definition, lack of sobriety or moderation; intemperance; drunkenness.
Excessive uncontrolled actions.
Officially Biased Reporting
Offensive British Rogues
Obfuscation Banality Recklessness
Phronesis
Great quote
O/T
Well done Mike Small. Bella reached 50k target 🙂
@Colin Rippey
The duty paid on whisky when it’s taken out of bond is paid to the UK Government, the Treasury. It doesn’t matter whether it’s exported, sold in the UK or burnt on the spot, the duty is paid when it’s taken out of bond.
@Bob Mack
It will be laid bare for all of Scotland and England to see that the Unionists are more scared by the prospect than the SNP.
Well played the SNP strategists.
Jack Foster wrote an article on NewsShaft speculating that that was what the SNP were doing with FFA. Just like the second question in the referendum, the SNP have set up the unionists to publicly declare their hand and reject it. It also means they are constantly stuck on negative mode, with Dugdale and Murray leading the SLAB crack Special Forces team…. 😀 😀
Kenny @9.37pm.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Nicola was cultivating powerful figures who could be our allies against Westminster at some point in the future should we need them.
SNP need to nail this FFR issue. If they have concerns over the effects of it’s implementation (and i’m sure they have) they need to find a way of explaining this properly.
I’ve witnessed enough opportunity for them to do this.
At the moment they are leaving themselves open to a good kicking in the msm.
Maybe Tasmania about to that very thing on qt 🙂
“But given what Nicola supposedly thought of Thatcher, do we really need to be heading in a course whereby we would welcome a terrible war-mongerer mired in corruption (let’s be honest) as president of USA? For the life of me, I cannot see any difference between Thatcher and Ms. Clinton!”
But you need to back up that kind of stuff with fact and evidence etc Kenny.
Tasmania? effin tasmania? Tasmina obviously.
Posting this for anyone who may have missed it. Excellent short film about the work of Dr David Patrick, who analysed the print media coverage of the referendum campaign.
‘Writing Off Scotland’ –
link to youtube.com
If this target is met I will be interviewed – https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/going-forward–2#/story
2 Bn over 20 Years? Sounds like the perfect time to say to Westminister – “Oil & Gas Revenues will be equivalent to 100m/year according to your ‘Independent’ Figures. As the Smith Recommendations stated that any change could not make either Scotland or the UK financially worse off at the point of change, we’ll accept a 100m reduction in the Block Grant in return for Holyrood collecting, and keeping, all the Oil & Gas Revenues from Scottish Waters”
Not our fault if the Oil Price goes back up after that.
Am enjoying sword play on Twitter with Fats MacDougall:
link to twitter.com
btw – Darlings if https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/going-forward–2#/story gets there I will be doing a live interview! See the real me!
Dugdale and Murray leading the SLAB crack Special Forces team…
That just conjures bizarre images
Well, on the bright side: if all the oil Scotlandshire produces over the next twenty years is worth only two billion, then it’ll be practically free at the pumps.
May I suggest a crowdfunder to buy the North Sea, the profit to be used to fund alternative, sustainable industries?
yesindyref2
‘It doesn’t matter whether it’s exported’
Actually there is no Duty, Excise and VAT liable on Whisky that’s exported out of the UK
Interesting aside is regards Whisky sold in ‘Duty Free’ shops at airports – the reality is, its not duty free!
That’s despite the fact that Whisky and other spirits that are sent to ‘Duty Free’ outlets under bond, without Duty, Excise and VAT. The shops do not actually sell at a realistic ‘duty free’ price.
Consider VAT alone is 20%, think about that the next time you travel abroad. Duty Free shops are the biggest rip off going (same for any products sold in Duty Free)
@Luigi says: 11 June, 2015 at 5:05 pm:
“How is it alright for the bankrupt UK to operate with a 90 billion black hole, but 7 billion would be a complete disaster for energy-rich Scotland?”
Oh! That’s an easy question to answer, Luigi.
You see, while the UK has Scotland’s oil, gas and other assets to rely upon but Scotland’s oil, gas and other assets are not there for Scotland’s use as they have already been commandeered by the UK for London and the south east’s benefit.
Grouse Beater says:
11 June, 2015 at 11:01 pm
Am enjoying sword play on Twitter with Fats MacDougall:
You re engaging with one the biggest liars in Scottish history GB. Scotland was sold by a parcel of rogues and in 300 years, dudes like Blair will have the exact same place in our countries history.
@Still Positive
Getting World Bank recognition of statehood is one of the first steps of Independence. They have to be convinced that the country can handle currency, economy, fiscal matters. Then the IMF are also important – Sturgeon gave speeches to both, and will have made contacts and an impression.
Ian Brotherhood:Posting this for anyone who may have missed it
Superb verbal thesis, and a great find, Ian.
Many thanks. 🙂
QT. Another sub par performance by the SNP rep. 🙁
e.g. Given two balls to hit out of the park from one question. Namely citing the numerous examples of disrespect for purda by the UK Government (Treasury involvement, Whitehall, ‘The Vow’ etc)
Rebutting the absurd statement from the Tory that that the UK Government ‘couldn’t say’ that they would prefer Scotland stayed in the UK.
She missed both.
@Edward
Duty etc. is payable unless exported to an approved (SEEP???) warehouse. Duty and taxes are due when taken out of them, no idea who gets the loot though, whether it’s UK or the host country.
@yesindyref2
The duty paid on whisky when it’s taken out of bond is paid to the UK Government, the Treasury. It doesn’t matter whether it’s exported, sold in the UK or burnt on the spot, the duty is paid when it’s taken out of bond.
Just so we’re absolutely clear, if Scotland were independent and exported whisky to rUK, duty would be collected by HMRC in rUK. An iScotland would not receive the duty collected in a foreign state.
You agree with this yes? Just asking because there are people who actually believe that an iScotland would somehow be paid the duty on whiskey exported to rUK.
@Colin
Scotland exports £4 billion pounds worth of whisky overseas. Nothing to do with UK duty. That is what we are talking about.
@Robert Peffers
How much oil & gas revenue does the UK commandeere? What is the figure?
I have been boring folk for years about the absolute necessity to establish that the Scottish economy is not reliant on oil revenues.
But they are at it again and we haven’t.
We need to establish that we are self supporting (with or without oil) and we win.
Nothing else matters if we don’t do this
First class performance from Tasmina on QT from Gateshead.
We are not short of talent
Re Tasmina. still much better than last week though.
Dave McEwan Hill
You and me both. Oil is just a smoke screen.
Colin Rippey at 11.41
Scotland is unlikely to be paid any duty on whiskey exported to the UK as this would have to have come from Ireland or North America
@Dave / Chic
I worked on an economic model of Scotland in the mid-70s, before oil bit. Scotland was well able to be a successful independent country back then. Since then we’ve had deindustrialisation, Scotland moved over to Silicon Glen. That moved to Malaysia etc. Scotland moved to the financial sector. Scotland is adaptive, we have to be.
Dependent on oil? No.
Chic McGregor at 11.42
Rubbish
yesindyref2 @ 11.27.
Knew that she knew what she was doing. It’s all falling into place.
Hopefully we are on our way to a free Scotland within my lifetime – I really would like to see my grandchildren benefiting from a fair society.
@Dave McEwan hill
OK for 2014 Scotland’s overseas whisky exports fell slightly to £3.96 billion pound or approx £3 a bottle, or are the figures wrong?
UK duty per bottle is around £7-8.
So if all the Scottish whisky produced were sold in the UK we would be looking at around £10 billion in duty, but it isn’t.
That £4 billion export figure is for manufacture and bottling costs of about £2.50 + a reasonable profit.
@Dave McEwan Hill
That’s one way to avoid answering a question (and yes I did notice the typo in the second reference to whisky).
@Chick Mcgregor
I think you’ll find that @Alastair and @yesindyref2 were in fact talking about the mythical export duty. Now can you explain what you mean by £4 billion of whisky? Are you saying that an independent Scotland would earn £4 billion from whisky? Really? Or do you mean Scotland’s GDP would include £4 billion from the whisky industry, not necessarily profit as such (’cause if you are I don’t think anyone disputes this).
@Dave
BTW Scotland exports NO whiskey.
Re Tasmina Ahmed-Shiekh
I’ve been impressed with her since the General Election.
She spoke really well just after the GE on a TV programme (sorry, can’t recall which one) repudiating Unionist fears and lies when they were still in shock-mode at the SNP’s success.
I hope she continues to do well.
Colin.
I am saying that Scotland exports around £4 billion in value whicky per year that provides a balance of trade earning that can be offset against anything we need to net import.
Still Positive. says:
11 June, 2015 at 10:34 pm
Kenny @9.37pm.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Nicola was cultivating powerful figures who could be our allies against Westminster at some point in the future should we need them.
Yes, I do agree that we need this. Personally, I think getting the support of the EU bigwigs is the most important and I was saddened the EU did not do more to support pro-Europe YES when the UK government was using Europeans AGAINST us.
Of course, I know the EU could hardly campaign openly against a member state, but I liked the way the French handled Carmichael’s attempted Project Smear, which failed largely thanks to France.
But these IMF and World Bank people are not charity workers! And it just never pays, especially in the long-run, to give up your principles. I have seen confirmation of that time and time again.
@Paula Rose.
Ok,ok! I’ve done it. Needed to see you again. Better be good!
BBC, STV, newspapers! SNP bad! Too Wee, too poor, too stupid to run your own country!
Edward
No ping pong please but my post did say correct me if I’m wrong but it was not an invitation for you to suggest I am an idiot.
Now where’s the conical hat – aaah – in the corner.
whisky, and no I haven’t had one.
Colin Rippey says:
Just so we’re absolutely clear, if Scotland were independent and exported whisky to rUK, duty would be collected by HMRC in rUK. An iScotland would not receive the duty collected in a foreign state
So what? Everyone knows this. Its why booze prices vary so much across the planet.
Anyway Colin, once again, why is their such open panic pouring out from our unionist chums over FFA that would mean Scotland gaining control over Scottish oil reserves and industry?
Scot’s oil worthless you’re all shrieking, So give it up then Colin?
Whisky is a produce of Scotland, a particularly high added value one, which features on our trade balance as a significant positive.
The approx. 100,000 hectares of land used to grow the barley could be used in other ways, but not nearly as lucrative.
That is the real worth of whisky to Scotland.
What duty other countries decide to place on its retail sale is irrelevant.
One of Britain’s greatest mysteries is how oil, money, and democratic rights run out just as Scotland demands its fair share.
Here’s a wee glimpse of what the term ‘social security’ used to mean (aye, even to Americans!) before the NeoCon project made it synonymous with deceit, theft and laziness – a neat way to get the working-class divided and squabbling:
‘Public Information’ film from the 1950’s –
link to youtube.com
Kenny @ 12.18.
See my post at 10.34 and indyref2’s reply at 11.27 and my reply to that post at 12.04.
Think we are on the same side Kenny. But I understand your concerns.
Conservative MSP Gavin Brown is to stand down as the party’s finance spokesman in the Scottish Parliament .
The announcement came as the Lothian MSP revealed he will not seek re-election to Holyrood next year.
Mr Brown has been an MSP since 2007, and was appointed finance spokesman by the then party leader Annabel Goldie in May 2011.
He has described serving the people of the region as “an enormous privilege.”
Mr Brown said: “I will have served nine years by 2016 and would like to seek a fresh challenge going forward.
“Given that I will not seek re-election, I am standing down from my role as Scottish Conservative finance spokesman.
“This decision takes immediate effect. It has been a thoroughly fascinating role at a key time in Scottish politics. However, it is a pivotal role and I believe it must be held by someone who intends to stand at the next election.”
I think Tasmina more than held her own in that group and outed Labour for not agreeing to 16/17 year olds being allowed to vote in the forthcoming Referendum. She also got a couple of facts across such as the £1000 plus per head being allocated to London versus £5 a head for the north of England (I noticed some people looked absolutely gobsmacked with that), the train link focused on London to Manchester to the detriment of N East England / Scotland, education one way to deal with Isil, her response to the banking question and so on.
Additionally, and as per usual, she didn’t get anything like the time afforded to UKIP, Labour or the Tory politician to answer any of the questions.
What I would say is that when the Isil question came up there was an opportunity to mention the part the UK played in its creation such as the invasion of Iraq. However it was the last issue to be discussed and she may have realised that she would be lucky to get her ‘education’ point across never mind launching into a more contentious issue.
Soon as I read Colin Rippey’s alarm call about whisky duty not being worth the delusion its imprinted upon I poured myself another glass of malt! Slainte! 🙂
Chic McGregor @ 12.13am
The actual excise duty on a 75 cl bottle of Whisky
is £ 8.30 for 40% proof and £ 8.92 for 43% proof
So the price of a bottle from a whisky producer is their sale price (cost to make plus profit), plus excise, plus VAT (calculated at 20% of sale price plus excise)
For whisky exported, its just the sale price, being cost to make plus profit
(To calculate excise, its £ 27.66 per litre of pure alcohol, so £ 27.66 x (size of bottle) x proof percentage)
@Colin Rippey
No, it’s as I said. That’s the whole purpose of a “bonded warehouse”, whisky can mature without the distillery / owner / bottler paying duty for the few years it’s maturing in the cask.
“23. Excise duty is levied and collected (following a period of duty deferment) at the point when the product is released for consumption from the bonded warehouse – wherever it is located in the UK – not at the point of sale to the final consumer. “
link to scottish.parliament.uk
@Colin Rippey
Just in case you didn’t get the point of that, and read the previous paragraph as well about the HMRC following whisky from the moment the grain is bought, if Scotland was Independent, or if whisky duty / tax was devolved, it would be the responsibility of the Scottish Gvoernment to set the levels, but also to collect the revenues NOT the rUK.
The rUK could put whatever purchase or sales or import tax it wanted on the bottles, that tax would be its, as it would be on any consumer product. But the duty due on the whisky when released from bond would be the Scottish Government’s.
Yesindiref2: the duty due on the whisky when released from bond would be the Scottish Government’s.
What is it with the English? Soon as they admit something is Scots indigenous they then claim it belongs to them.
@Still Positive
Yes indeed. I’d say that there were a lot of loose ends before the last referendum, a lot of work needed to be done but no leverage to get it done, not with 6 MPs at Westminster. With 56 out of 59 however, the SNP ahve a lot more leverage, not just at Westminster but in the EU and worldwide. And Sturgeon is just the one to use that, even comparing what Scotland could achieve to what Germany achieved with unions, workers, business and the public sector (presumably government).
Next referendum there will be a lot less uncertainty, and a lot more patiently detailed “steps to becoming an independent country within the EU”. I think that will carry up to half the previous NOes.
I don’t mind Wee Rhona Dougall on the telly as long as she sticks to the script she’s given and doesn’t attempt to be too clever and thinking she’s some sort of Investigative Wee Journo
Because tonight her attitude nearly got her greasy Wee Unbrushed Heid bitten off by an increasingly (Fed up with stupid questions First Minister)
If you didn’t see it try and pick it up somewhere
I thought the FM was about to reach through the telly and do a Raptor on Wee Rhona and she’d have had nobody to help her (Help me Rhona)
I must admit I like it when the First Minister gets Nippy
What does that say about me?
@Grouse Beater
I don’t think he understands the difference between duty and tax. Or excise and revenue!
Cereal, sorry, not grain. Did I say grain? Wash my mouth out with a malt. Mmmmm. That’s better.
Take a look at the number of countries Worldwide that don’t have any oil at all and are doing well for themselves: Would no doubt be over the moon if oil was found off their shores.
Here in the UK it’s all of a sudden seen to be some sort of a curse, ball and chain or massive obstacle that the Scots have to overcome. Worse still some brainwashed and / or ignorant Scots seem to believe this. If the 60 million plus UK population was benefitting greatly from oil at 120 / 130 dollars a barrel I suspect that 5 million Scots could more than cope with the current 60 dollars a barrel of oil.
It’s no wonder Labour in Scotland is rapidly going down the stank. We expect Westminster to promote the ‘too wee, poor, stupid’ concept but when you hear another Scot, such as Kezia Dugdale, promoting this it just turns your stomach.
She should ask herself if it’s such a worthless burden why are we having trouble prizing it out of Westminsters claws. And more than anything, the age old basic, if Scotland is such a financial liability why are they so desperate to hang on to us. DUH!
@yesindyref2
So in your world, an independent Scotland would impose a tax on all whisky exported to foreign countries (you can call that tax duty if you want).
That would be a totally different situation from what occurs now. I wonder how the whisky industry would feel about their product suddenly becoming more expensive to export to the US, to Japan, to China, to Europe, or even the rUK.
Any whisky exported to rUK would still be subject to the exact same duty imposed on all alcohol sold in the rUK, and that duty would be collected by HMRC in rUK.
And again just to be clear, in the UK at the moment whisky has a duty of £26 per litre of pure alcohol alongside other spirits of similar alcohol by volume.
What in your mind would be the amount of tax an iScotland would impose on whisky before it is exported?
@Colin Rippey
Did you bother to read my postings before spouting fantasy?
@ Colin Rippey If Scotland was Independent it could if it so chose to not sell whisky to the R/uk. You Already know that you need us More than we need Wastemonger. And hopefully soon we will leave like the angels share.
OBR Who set that up and appointed people on it
IFS Who set that up and appointed people on it
Mark Carney “”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
Anymore Institutions I haven’t thought of
Jings Crivvens Help ma Boab
Djae think it’s a plot
O/T – what’s happened to Alan Cochrane over at the Telegraph? Have they put him on a new contract where he only gets to write a guest column on an occasional basis?
For those of us looking for a journalist who “cuts through the baloney and explores all corners of the devolved government in Edinburgh with vigour” where do we now go?
Try not to feed the trolls, especially ones who think they know something and just come across as some smug intellectual wanna-be.
Just to be clear, mind.
link to caltonjock.com
ALANM @ 7.16
“For those of us looking for a journalist who “cuts through the baloney and explores all corners of the devolved government in Edinburgh with vigour” where do we now go?”
Here
link to tinyurl.com
Does anyone have infroon Derek Bateman’s last post, which has mysteriously no longer available, concerning major problems at BBC Scotland News?
@ALANM
Oh dear – Poor old Cockers put out to grass at the ToryGraph at last?
He really should have retired years ago before dementia set in.
I suppose he will still be on the BBC PQ now and again though – they are desperate these days.
Just shows you – No Unionist can withstand the power of the “Curse of No”.
Here’s another ‘what happens next?’
Twice now, in the space of less than a year, the voters of Scotland have voted for FFA.
FFA will now be put before parliament.
Bu99er all will happen, of course !
DevoA-Wee-Bit-More-With-Bear-Traps is what WM has in mind.
Dr Jim says:
I must admit I like it when the First Minister gets Nippy
What does that say about me?
_______________
That you would like to be dominated by our First Minister?
Dr Jim @1-21am
Completely agree about Rhona on STV Tonight (Thurs 11th). It was good to see the FM have such restraint and just treat her like a thick child. How does that woman, Dougall, get to do ‘serious’ political interviewing? ( Can’t help thinking of the ‘Magic Roundabout’ character!!).
The next item when she interviewed Hosie and that Labour idiot meant a good night for the SNP, IMHO!
@BtP
here is the link from Scot goes Pop but has been taken down as goes to a 404 error.
“Derek Bateman
Serious Trouble at BBC Scotland – The reputation of BBC Scotland takes yet another serious hit today as details begin to emerge of shocking management behaviour in News and Current Affairs….
9 hours ago”
Shame it must have been a good read.
I think he must have got a call from his lawyer first thing this morning?
@yesindyref2
Did you bother to read my postings before spouting fantasy?
And your snippet (emphasis mine):
23. Excise duty is levied and collected (following a period of duty deferment) at the point when the product is released for consumption from the bonded warehouse – wherever it is located in the UK – not at the point of sale to the final consumer.
An independent Scotland would not be in the UK – why is this so difficult to understand?
The link you provide makes no mention of anything to do with independence nor does it make any mention of the what “export duty” is levied on sales of whisky to foreign states.
Once again, this notion that Scotland is somehow “cheated” out of export duty on sales of whisky to foreign states is a myth. Why do you believe this?
And I ask you again (since you brought it up), the current UK duty on whisky equates to around 60% of the retail price a consumer pays.
if Scotland was Independent, or if whisky duty / tax was devolved, it would be the responsibility of the Scottish Gvoernment to set the levels, but also to collect the revenues NOT the rUK.
This revenue you speak of, what would it be? Can you explain what this is? It would not be the alcohol duty that the rUK levies on its citizens as that is now collected by the foreign state.
This revenue you speak of (if I am reading your statement correctly) is a new tax that would be slapped onto any bottle of whisky exported from Scotland (in other words – your mythical export duty would come into being).
What level would this newly introduced export duty be? How much would it increase the price of a bottle of whisky?
Folks,
Today is Charlie Kennedy’s funeral.
Thoughts go out to his family and especially his wee lad Donald.
@BtP @ Hoss
type cache: before the http part of the URL and the cached version comes up
@Skilday says: 11 June, 2015 at 5:28 pm:
“Remarkably few headlines will be allowed in Scotland, Westminster and uk/scottish media suffering from cognative dissonance in relation to oil and how it affects Our economy but not theirs”.
But! But! But!
Where is this, “Scottish Oil”, they speak of?
The only oil anywhere in the United Kingdom is officially recorded in the accounts as coming from, “Extra Regio Territory”, and the revenues are thus 100% the property of Her Majesty’s Treasury in London.
The only benefit that Scotland gets is through employment of those who service the oil & gas industry for most of the international companies actually extracting the oil & gas have registered offices outwith Scotland so even the workers income tax and the tax on the profits and shares in those companies is from the London Financial sector.
Hoss: Derek Bateman- Serious Trouble at BBC Scotland – The reputation of BBC Scotland takes yet another serious hit today as details begin to emerge of shocking management behaviour in News and Current Affairs….
9 hours ago”
Either ‘rogue’ engineer switching feed to SNP interviewee off and on until line goes down, ‘Sorry, we seem to be having technical problems’ or management demanding less time for SNP interviews.
Capella says:
“type cache:”
Clever. Bateman stuff. Thanks.
Colin Rippey
Let’s boil things down to basics.
Do you believe Scotland is a nation, or do you consider it to have been extinguished in 1707? Do you think nations should govern themselves in all aspects, including control over all tax and spend decisions?
I shall consider you to have forfeited the argument if you hide behind the EU.
Hoss: Poor old Cockers put out to grass at the ToryGraph at last?
He served his political purpose, as brutal politicians are apt to say. No loyalty in the No camp easy to predict.
We are once more under attack by the Westminster dogs and their proxies. FFA is scaring the wits out of them.
Watching ” Scottish Questions” this week we saw them going into full flow.
Attempts by Mundell, shamefully trying to make out the SNP were financially hopeless.This is being said everywhere in various ways, in the hope it sticks.
Of course aided and abetted by Labour at every chance. The BBC are overflowing putting out SNP bad joined by all the MSM.
FFA is not an albatross for our necks, it is a chance to advance Independence by a large margin. We are once more under full BT attack. The most debt Scotland has, is Westminster induced, a lot of it to rob us, but also to keep us down.
So expect very much more doom and gloom spread like dung with a shovel. They have learned nothing, Scots now what they are, and know who they are, it is too late to put the cat back in the bag. The emperor has no clothes, we see him clearly and he is no joke, he is a nasty, wrinkled very old man.
So, on oil, and OBR’s bollocks prediction capabilities, there is this in Norway: “It’s out-take, at just 2.6 percent of the value of the $890bn fund, is nonetheless well within the country’s self-imposed limit of 4 percent. ”
Norway responds to downturn in oil prices with a plan.
Dear! Oh! Dear!
BBC Radio Against Scotland this morning is debating FFA. I’m sure that BBC-AS has a pair of special lists. One of idiotic members of the public and another of, “Independent”, experts that they trot out for these programmes.
I’ve never come across so many biased broadcasters, independent experts and sheer bloody numpties in my life.
Oh! No! Now they have trotted out, of all people, Jackie Baillie. If it was farcical before it has now reached the point of sheer utter idiocy.
Listening to John Beattie just now.
He has got yon John McLaren on along with Stewart Hosie.
It sounds as if his earpiece is telling him to tell us every few mnutes that McLaren is neutral (stop laughing at the back).
That would be the same McLarenn who appeared on TV countless times in the run-up to 18/9 arguing for BT.
A few mnutes ago McLaren made a pretty lame atempt to convince is that he was neutral in spite of having worked for Labour in the past.
We’ve now got Gorgeous Pouting Jackie Baillie on which should be good for a laugh.
Jackie Baillie saying every hospital would close with FFA, such is the catastrophe.
What gets me about this shite is no one acknowledges that Swinney is the only Finance Minister in Europe who has balanced the books into the black for 7 years, and even SNP don’t exploit that.
So now, Swinney and SNP want FFA so they can run the country into the ground?
Why can’t they see what a financial disaster we are shackled to?
Can someone please explain in baby steps what the “type cache” thing means?
I really want to read the Derek Bateman piece about BBC Scotland. Can someone please explain how to do this?
Thanks!
If we are prepared to invade and go to war with Countries who have oil we don’t own, imagine what we would do to Countries who have oil we do control.
Haha, Jackie git telt!
‘You and your ilk are delighted that Scotland would be in debt, you just go around like fish taking the hook London throws out’
Good to hear.
Also, Jackie says there is no oil off the West coast, that is a myth, apparently.
Go to Off Topic and I paste it there for you.
Will take about 20 mins to appear.
Like others I would like to learn what Derek Bateman said about BBC news.
Can somebody just give us the jist?Thanks.
well you know we have hit an onion nerve when they pull out the big oil lie once again.
How stupid do they think we are, Scotland the only country in the world who`s oil is worthless aye right more like dont tell them how much it is worth if they take it away from us how are we going to pay off the 1.5 trillion we owe and borrowed because of the oil.
As for FFA it isnt going to happen not now not ever they can not afford it,all we are seeing is delay tactics something they are very good at and if we let them they will string this out for the next 10 years,no the only choice for Scotland is independence the sooner the better.
Yes BBC at it again on FFA, we should know by now, they are an arm of the Westminster cabal.
@ Fireproofjim
It seems that there are deep resentments about the way staff are allegedly treated in News and Current Affairs. But since this is likely to become a legal matter, it’s probably best to wait and see what is reported. I’m sure Derek will be more forthcoming as soon as he can.
Edward, a standard spirits bottle is 70 cl not 75 cl, wine is 75 cl.
Whisky is best viewed in terms of what its value as a produce to an independent Scotland would be.
Which is substantial.
Scotland produces around 70% of a bottle of whisky for every man, woman and child in Scotland every day.
In balance of trade terms it would almost pay for everything else Scots eat and drink.
That is, in theory, we could abandon all other food and drink production in Scotland and use whisky export revenue alone to import everything we need to eat and drink. Nearly.
That is how big it is.
Of course we also produce nearly 30% of British beef, nearly 25% of lamb, around 80% of conventionally caught fish and nearly 100% of aquaculture (mainly salmon).
But unlike Scotland, the rUK is a massive net food and drink importer.
The UK overall had a £21 billion pounds trade deficit on food and drink last year. That dwarfs oil revenue.
That amounts to well over a £1000 per family per year going out of the UK economy which, of course has to be paid in one way or another, before we (UK) start paying for anything else.
@ Quinie frae Angus
Google caches all web pages. So if a page you want to read has been removed, you can sometimes retrieve it by typing “cache:” (without the quotation marks). before the address.
So
link to wingsoverscotland.com
would become
cache:link to wingsoverscotland.com
Colin Rippey wrote
“Any whisky exported to rUK would still be subject to the exact same duty imposed on all alcohol sold in the rUK, and that duty would be collected by HMRC in rUK.”
That is true for importers in respect to VAT, but not necessarily duty. Free market?
It could be released to the EU export market ‘duty paid’ (and rumpUK is an scottish export market) after being paid to an independent Scottish government, which would be the only way the manufacturers could reclaim relief on import duty paid for imported ingredients. There is the consideration that Duty points will change if Scotland becomes independent….Something that some people like that kevin hague guy do not seem to have considered at all in their analysis….perhaps it was inconvenient to do any analysis of the numbers, but probably just because they didn’t grasp the nuances and minimising the tax receipt value fits the agenda. To be honest to him, He probably didn’t fully realise the impact
It is something I have considered for a future pension investment should Scotland become independent. If a Scottish government cut the rate of alcohol duty, it would make it a very cost effective way for alcohol importers from outside the EU to import to the rump UK by going through Scottish ports ‘duty paid’ for release onto the open EU market which is really the RumpUK. ….So the port companies could be a sound investment In fact this is so likely, I would consider that some sort of non- rump UK damaging trade agreement would have to be formed. I think this is happening for Northern Ireland alcohol duty receipts with ‘duty paid’ stuff crossing from Eire….and in fact the other way too.
The one thing for certain is that purely consumption based tax consideration is just plain underestimation of what the scottish tax revenues would be, because the natural change in location of the duty point alone will force duty more onto onto production, especially for exports.
So my guess would be that an independent Scotland could increase it’s total tax receipts by cutting the Alcohol Duty rate.
On the other hand, This can all be summed up by SNP Bad and SNP Lies…..even thought I aint in the SNP and its actually my musings on some future potential pension considerations.
@Bugger the Panda
OK thanks, BtP. Will look for it on Off Topic in a wee whilie.
Here is the Derek Bateman story that you are asking for 🙂
link to archive.is
FFA would seem simple. All tax and spending except defence and diplomacy. Among other things, it would stop Scotland contributing to things we get no benefit from, like the so call National Infrastucture projects which pour money into SE England.
However, between the lines I can already see that FFA is being interpretated as ‘the money Holyrood spends’, a replacement for the block grant just. Presumably Scotland is expected to continue to send the balance south to spend on more than just defence and diplomacy.
The Unionists don’t want us to have FFA. We can’t take, we can only be given it. They will never give it.
Even if Scotland did get it, it would be far from the simple pure FFA people imagine. It would be partial and full of traps to trip up and discredit the Scottish Government to put us off even limited self determination.
However, it looks like we need to go through the motions for voting for it, expecting it, demanding it, debating it … then being denied it!
Which is just fine. When the FFA demon has been exorcised, we can concentrate on real powers and control through full independence!
galamcennalath: 12 June, 2015 at 10:33 am
FFA would lessen WM’s grip on Scotland – they would be able to set traps as you say, but nowhere near as many traps as we are about to see with “additional” powers/Smith Minus that we are to be blessed with in the coming session.
I do agree that we need to go through the motions though. The three unionist parties need to be outed as the anti-democratic, anti-Scottish, selfish, corrupt organisations that they really are. Some people may still believe that the red and yellow tories support home rule for Scotland. We will soon find out – places to hide are fast running out, since the 56 appeared at WM.
O/T
I just signed this petition
link to change.org
Re Jackie Baillie and understanding her output.
Baillie is a product of the Colonial British Empire (born in Hong Kong) and I strongly suspect that her background dictates her behaviour.
She is a dyed in the wool British Nationalist and almost certainly views Scotland and the idea of Scotland, in a patronising and colonial way.
Her world view is anachronistic.
Scotland is a colony as far as she is concerned.
Baillie is a part of the colonial establishment, where telling lies to the natives is just part of the colonial mindset and acceptable.
Baillie is patronising in the extreme; her abundant lies illustrate this.
In summary, Baillie is constantly looking down her nose at Scottish people and views us with contempt.
Nicola has done well winning hearts and minds in the States and I understand a certain amount of Realpolitik is inevitable but it’s a bit disappointing to see her give time to the IMF and buy into the NATO false narrative on Russia.
I’ll treat the SNP as s means to an end now but post-Indy I think I’ll move to the Greens.
I get the impression we would have to sign over all our food,drink,oil,energy etc revenues to London and only then would they let us have independence. Blood sucking leeches.
@Chic McGregor says: 12 June, 2015 at 12:17 am:
” … I am saying that Scotland exports around £4 billion in value whicky per year that provides a balance of trade earning that can be offset against anything we need to net import.”
You hit a nail there, Chic. Here’s some basic facts that seem to be mainly hidden away and never mentioned. Due mainly to the usual artificially created, and unnecessary, complicated, “Creative Accountancy”, of the United Kingdom.
Scotland is a net exporter of food, (including drink), power and fuel. While the rest of the United Kingdom are net importers of all three. Now let us consider how that, “Creative Accountancy”, is disguised to make it look as if Scotland is a poor country and England/UK are subsidising Scotland.
Food and drink exports are recorded by the point in the United Kingdom from where the goods leave the United Kingdom. Not, as they should be, by where the goods are produced in the United Kingdom. For example, the London registered company, “Diagio”, reports its exports of Scottish produced whisky, gin and other spirits. However, these are recorded as English exports because they leave England via English ports and airports.
The same applies to even Scottish bottled water, meat, fish and other food and drink exports. Then we come to the Scottish produced power and this again is creatively accounted by use of the absolutely thieving, “Grid Connection Charges”, applied to the United Kingdom’s, “National Grid”. These impose upon the Northern Scottish power producers an extra charge upon each kilowatt of energy they add to the National Grid of and subsidise the south of England power producers. Here are recent statistics :-
Here are recent official figures : –
North Scotland = £25.546025 .
West Devon & Cornwall = -£5.804749.
Central London = -£5.804749.
So the Northern Scottish Power Generators are paying £25.546025 for every Kilowatt of power they generate while those in South Britain are subsidised by £5.804749.
That is a total difference of £31.350774 for every kilowatt the Northern Scots generate. Then there is the often forgotten fact that the great bulk of the Northern Scottish power is exported to, (mainly), England while the South of England is importing power. Incidentally Scotland exported over 26% of her generated power in the last financial period.
Then we have other, “Nice Little Earners”, for United Kingdom plc. The Scottish Crown Estates legally belongs, under Scottish law, to the sovereign people of Scotland while that of the United Kingdom belongs to the United Kingdom Crown, (under English law, (as a Constitutional Monarchy)), that is the Westminster Parliament. Yet in the late 1800s the Establishment took the Scottish Crown Estate management away from Edinburgh to London and included it with the Kingdom of England Crown Estates, (which included Wales & N. Ireland).
We also see the fines, (both court & on-the-spot), levied by the independent Scottish Legal System sent directly to the United Kingdom Treasury. Yet when it comes to paying for the policing of the off-shore oil & gas installations it is the local authorities adjacent to the installations that stumps up for the costs.
There is also a scam with Aggregates, (that is the tax upon the extraction of stone, gravel and sands), in Scotland. Not to mention that UK wide companies with English Head Offices collect such things as VAT, Road Fuel Duty, Betting Tax, Alcohol Duty and lots more on behalf of the UK Treasury pay these into the system via their, (mainly London), Head Offices and this is thus shown in the books of United Kingdom plc as English raised revenues.
The real biggy is, of course, that all oil & gas revenues are recorded as being from, “Extra-region Territory”, yet around 95% of the stuff comes from internationally recognised as under Scottish jurisdiction but 100% of the revenue is accounted for as United Kingdom revenue.
The obvious truth is that the figures trotted out by the Unionists have more holes in them than an Icelandic fishing Trawler’s nets.
@CameronB
Let’s boil things down to basics.
Do you believe Scotland is a nation, or do you consider it to have been extinguished in 1707? Do you think nations should govern themselves in all aspects, including control over all tax and spend decisions?
I shall consider you to have forfeited the argument if you hide behind the EU.
I have NO problem with Scotland becoming independent if that’s what the people of Scotland vote for, NO problem.
What I have a problem with is in the argument for independence there is a belief that there is some sort of “hidden income” that is not made visible to people voting for independence, and that voters are “tricked” into believing that Scotland would be better off remaining part of the UK.
I really don’t know why people who seek independence still try to convince others that “London keeps all the money”, “extra-regio territory has all the oil & gas revenue”.
Why don’t you all just play the line “it will be difficult at first, perhaps very difficult in economic terms as iScotland comes to terms with managing it’s own economy – but it will get better eventually and it will mean Scotland gets the government it votes for and not a government fundamentally chosen by the rUK”.
Have a position of Scotland having it’s own currency as that will totally remove all arguments of deficit gap black holes, as only a nation that controls it’s own currency can control it’s deficit via borrowing – a nation with it’s own currency can choose to have “as big a deficit as the market will support”.
Other countries of similar size have gone through extremely tough economic conditions over the last few years (Ireland to name one) but they are coming out of it now, sure they’ve had lots of hardship but it’s behind them now and their economy is back to growing again.
Jackie Baillie also went to boarding school in England. She’s elite don’t you know.
an’t connect to Wigs Twitter, says server not found.
@Robert Peffers
The real biggy is, of course, that all oil & gas revenues are recorded as being from, “Extra-region Territory”, yet around 95% of the stuff comes from internationally recognised as under Scottish jurisdiction but 100% of the revenue is accounted for as United Kingdom revenue.
The GERS methodology estimates what an independent Scotland would earn from oil & gas, do you accept the GERS methodology? If not, what are your figures for how much revenue an independent Scotland would earn in revenue from oil & gas?
This is a simple question, you’ve never answered it. You’re very keen to trot out figures for all sorts of areas but I’ve never seen your figures for this specific question. Do they differ from what GERS estimates them to be?
Dugface says oil would have to reach $200 for Scotland’s books to balance. Pity John Swinney didn’t ask what oil would have to reach for the UK’s books to balance.
@Chic McGregor
Here’s some of the facts about whisky that Chokka folks love to leave out when banging on their one line argument of “consumption tax”…
• Exports generate £3.95 billion for the UK balance of trade.
• Exports earn £125 every second for the UK Exchequer.
• About £1 billion contributed to the Exchequer in taxes (assume consumption for rUK only).
• 38 bottles were shipped overseas each second.
• 99 million cases (12 70cl bottles at 40% vol) were exported worldwide.
• More than 10,000 are directly employed in the Scotch Whisky industry – many in economically deprived areas.
• Over 40,000 jobs across the UK are supported by the industry.
Now where appropriate, replace UK with Scottish.
According to our critics, the Scotch Whisky industry, just like our oil industry, doesn’t really help our independence case…ALLEGEDLY.
Colin-who compiles the GERS figures? UK govt.? and you believe them?
Colin-according to Wikipedia on the gers figures “significant amounts of public spending are not easily identifiable by nation or region” so I would tend to believe the other posters over your opinion.
@Grouse Beater says: 12 June, 2015 at 1:11 am:
” … What is it with the English? Soon as they admit something is Scots indigenous they then claim it belongs to them?”
This is what I’ve been chipping away at for what seems like forever. It is the old unremitting Establishment propaganda. They deliberately use the terms, country, kingdom, England, Great Britain, Britain and so on as if they were all mutually interchangeable but Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Northern Ireland are distinct entities.
Then if there is any remaining doubt that everything belongs entirely to the English Establishment they invent a new term to cover the doubts. As they did when oil & gas was discovered to be mainly in Scottish territory.
They dreamt up that glorious new term, “Extra-Regio Territory”, to secure the revenues for the English Crown, a.k.a the United Kingdom/English Parliament.
@David Smith 11.01
I’ll treat the SNP as a means to an end now but post-Indy I’ll move to the Greens
Thanks a lot and we SNP supporters will remember that sentiment come the Holyrood Elections
Too many times I keep hearing this and it does not sit well with me that the Party who has sacrificed and done more for Scotland is to be abandoned on delivery of what folk want
for others
@ Valerie says ‘’Also, Jackie says there is no oil off the West coast, that is a myth, apparently.’’
Jackie at her lying AGAIN!
link to youtube.com
@Wp 11.23am
Stuart Hosie said to apply the same logic to the UK
the price would have to be $1500 a barrel
They’re a scream these Unionists they didn’t think that one through
I stumped up an extra £50 for these guys – can u contribute or post on your local network?
44 hours left
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/going-forward–2#/story
Or
http://Www.independencelive.net
Going a bit O/T for the moment.
I had been doing a bit of googling about Quantitative Easing. From what I can gather, the process is that the Bank of England, owned by the UK government, electronically prints money and with that money buys UK government bonds. The UK government has to pay interest on these bonds and with the ones bought by the B.O.E, the interest is therefore paid to them.
In effect, money from one part of the UK government is being transferred to another part of the UK government and it is sitting in the Bank of England Asset Purchase Fund (BEAPFF). Also from what I can gather, the cash reserves of this fund is standing at £35 billion. If true, it could be used to fund government spending thus rendering austerity measures obsolete.
If that I have gathered is correct, it shows that there is a lot of ‘black arts’ and paper shuffling at the heart of HM Treasury. We don’t know the true extent of tax and spending in Scotland and therefore unable to make a correct assessment of FFA as all parties in the debate have to rely on data form HM treasury that is not fully transparent.
In this way, it is going to be hard to persuade people about ignore these scare stories and make a convincing argument for FFA. IMHO, one way to get round this is to highlight these ‘accounting’ practices by HM Treasury which produces these figures.
The Graun can totally go fuck itself with an artisanal sourdough ciabatta.
Are they really that thick?
Dr Jim
Like you I am SNP through and through, but it is inevitable that, come Independence, various supporting factions, like Greens, will hive themselves off and make their own way.
Nothing wrong with that. The big prize is Independence and after that we will be like any other country with a spectrum of parties.
Meanwhile we must encourage every shade of opinion to vote for Independence.
Icy spark
Thanks for the Bateman link re BBC
James Kelly MSP is a dead ringer for brilliant recently passed away comedian John Fortune
@Robert Peffers
The English also subordinated our Scottish royal lineage with the title QE2 instead of the correct QE1 of GB+NI,same applies to Edward 7+8 should have been E1 + E2 of GB+I +GB+NI.
@Joemcg
The GERS figures are compiled by the Scottish Government’s chief statistician. They are an attempt to present the position that an independent Scotland would find itself in upon independence.
Again, the Scottish Government’s chief statistician produces the report, the data within the report is drawn from a range of sources, some of which is taken from HMRC data. But the source is there for all to see and for you to look at and make up your own mind.
Now, if you’d rather accept “the opinions of some people on the Internet who have nothing to back up their figures” as opposed to the Scottish Government themselves (you know, the same Scottish Government that has been run by the SNP since 2007) then that is entirely up to you.
GERS is an attempt to present the situation upon independence. Unlike the OBR or the IFS, GERS only presents “what is believes has happened” instead of projections such as the OBR that will almost certainly (in the case of oil) be hopelessly out of date within months of being published.
It’s not that long ago that the GERS 2011-2012 came out with what appeared to be a favourable position for Scottish independence in that the deficit gap between Scotland and the rUK was in Scotland’s favour. The 2011-2012 GERS reportswas used as the source for some of the SNP White Paper (and indeed used as a source in The Wee Blue Book).
Now that we’ve had 2 GERS reports since 2011-2012 that don’t present such a rosy picture we find people “challenging” the figures.
You can believe what you want, but having a mind-set of “I don’t believe that GERS stuff, it must be wrong ’cause this guy on some blog somewhere said it’s wrong” then I think that says more about you than the validity of the GERS report frankly.
Dr Jim.
No need to take it personally. I’ve been an SNP member for many years. I appreciate hugely what they have done but the notion of an independent Scotland transcends any one party. I will continue to back them to the point were independence is achieved.
I just believe they are backing the wrong geopolitical horse now.
I suspect that if the vote on NATO membership were taken today, there might be a different result.
@Giving Goose says: 12 June, 2015 at 10:46 am:
” … In summary, Baillie is constantly looking down her nose at Scottish people and views us with contempt.”
Besides which, Baillie is as thick as a daud o afu smelly stuff in a rather narrow necked glass vessel.
OT. I accept that Scottish independence will not be a panacea and will only represent an open door to Scotland’s self-betterment, but is Fintan O’Toole perhaps ignoring the incredibly conservative nature of Irish society, with respect to the longstanding dominance of the Catholic church?
Scottish Independence ‘might not change much’
link to archive.is
Colin Rippey
Thanks for the reply. Please correct me if wrong, but I’ll assume you are a non-Scot who believes what the BBC and Westminster tell you. Surely you don’t expect the Establishment to play an honest game? Did you believe them about Saddam’s WMD? What about protected pedophiles in government?
Would you accept that these small countries that have recently experienced financial difficulty, especially Ireland, were saddled with toxic debts sold to European banks by the bankrupted American banks who were no longer kept in check by Glass-Steagall? Their financial difficulties were sold to them by shysters. With regards to a Scottish currency, I have always favoured using Sterling during the transition to independence, before launching a Scottish currency. This would, of course, be backed by Scotland’s oil and positive trade balance, so will most probably be extremely strong, unlike Sterling. This would produce both chalenges and opportunities for Scotland’s future development, though I’m sure we’d get by and most probably prosper once able to enjoy the full benefits of our labour.
Colin Rippey
P.S. You do understand how colonialism works?
# Valerie says:
12 June, 2015 at 9:54 am
“Also, Jackie says there is no oil off the West coast, that is a myth, apparently.”
She might want to read this before repeating her claim.. never say never.
link to inpublic.globenewswire.com
@ Colin Rippey says
Now that we’ve had 2 GERS reports since 2011-2012 that don’t present such a rosy picture we find people “challenging” the figures.
Usual condescending sneary unionist stuff Colin. Its like Britnats raging away at SNP for an FFA date, as in “you can give an independence day date, you can give us an FFA date too, you clowns and liars”
What is clear that a Scottish independence date is completely different from Scottish fiscal autonomy. Project Fear, BBC, you etc all shut down Scottish independence for a wee while and now you’re all monstering FFA.
Why the naked fear Colin?
Independence,FFA,
I keep hearing arguments like (will we be worse off, better off, the economy might be volatile)
Can I just say we’ll be Responsible
and for those who genuinely worry about it let me ask this question (Do you trust the Tories or Labour to do the best they can for Scotland and are they making a good job of it now)
It always seems to me that the Unionists and the Fearties
want all the answers from us but they’re answers are always the same which are (Better to stick with what you know or that somehow it’s in Scotlands interest to just depend on the “Real Bosses” in England because somehow or other they’re really smart and we’re not)
It’s about time the aforementioned Unionists and Fearties started answering the bloody questions as to their support for corruption and outright thievery within the Governments they would choose to have us ruled by
To answer Fireproofjim Do you want to see a competent and professional team like the SNP supplanted by unproven parties who have as yet not shown any indication of those qualities
It’s fine having ideas but those ideas have to be demonstrably proven and so far I hear a lot of Re-Nationalise the Railways, Pay everybody more, and stop using oil for fuel, which as an idea is all fine, but prove it can be done,
and that’s a lot of the problem with other parties at the moment, it’s really easy to be in opposition to something
look at Labour, it’s a lot more difficault actually doing something
I merely point these things out as I have had conversations with folk of differing views and I even have a young lady relative who is quite well known in one of these semi popular parties who herself admits she wouldn’t have a clue what to do if she were to be elected
Now that kinda worries me
Whilst I understand an accept everyone has to learn the ropes, just being Radical for the sake of it is a lot less than enough
The SNP didn’t do this overnight, they’ve been working at this for years and if the powers that be in London thought for one second the SNP could be shifted out they’d be on us like treacle and newcomer politicians wouldn’t have a hope so in the fairly long term the SNP must be allowed to Govern, it’s not only their right, it’s our safety
@Wp Stewart Hosie said it would be $1.500 to balance the UK’s Books.
@David Smith
The SNP will change in line with its members,so membership of NATO,fracking and backing big buisness will all be under reveiw.
Having been present at the SNP conference, as a delegate, for the first time this year.I saw democracy in action,when every member was able to vote on ammendments.Dont forget that your local branch can submit an ammendmend at any conference,and If you wish to suggest one you have the power.
I have a feeling the party will change over the years,and some Green supporters like yourself will possibly stay with the SNP following independence.
The GERS figures are compiled by the Scottish Government’s chief statistician. They are an attempt to present the position that an independent Scotland would find itself in upon independence.
That is not entirely correct. The Government Expenditure and Revenue return is part of the requirement of the Scottish Government’s transparency requirements and have been posted by all Holyrood Governments.
The numbers have been used to base arguments for and against independence but obviously there are areas that are not covered. Trade balances, foreign currency reserves, interest payments on deficit borrowing etc. all fall outside the remit of GERS.
Their primary purpose is not to make a case for independence and they were never designed to do so.
I once drafted a report for the old Scottish Office, assessing the cost-effectiveness of expenditure of tens of millions over a number of projects throughout Scotland. This expenditure was subject to very specific Treasury rules, which roughly 80% of the projects failed to meet. The report wasn’t published for a number of years, and when finally published, omitted almost all failures and reported on those projects which passed or narrowly failed the test.
I have found it hard to believe any official stats since this experience.
Anyone aware of any SNP representation at Charles Kennedy’s funeral?
Watching BBC Scotland news and no suggestion either way and we saw Danny Alexander and George Brown, but no one from the SNP!
@CameronB Brodie
Thanks for the reply. Please correct me if wrong, but I’ll assume you are a non-Scot who believes what the BBC and Westminster tell you. Surely you don’t expect the Establishment to play an honest game? Did you believe them about Saddam’s WMD? What about protected pedophiles in government?
So I disagree with you on something and your mindset is that I must have an opposite view to everything you believe in yes? You have come to this conclusion because of what? I have challenged the view that Scotland is missing out on whisky export duty that doesn’t exist. Now because of this I believe in WMDs and protecting paedophiles. Quite a leap you’ve made eh?
Would you accept that these small countries that have recently experienced financial difficulty, especially Ireland, were saddled with toxic debts sold to European banks by the bankrupted American banks who were no longer kept in check by Glass-Steagall? Their financial difficulties were sold to them by shysters.
Perfectly willing to accept the the citizens of countries such as Ireland were criminally served by their banking industry (just like the citizens in the UK) and they had to suffer the hardships of almost economic ruin because of it.
My point was that they have suffered the type of economic problems that would present themselves to an iScotland – but they have gotten through it (it was tough but it didn’t last forever). They’ve come out the other side.
With regards to a Scottish currency, I have always favoured using Sterling during the transition to independence, before launching a Scottish currency.
This is where you lose me. If iScotland wanted to keep using the £ (and let’s say that the rUK threat of not having a currency union was a bluff and iScotland and rUK were in a currency union) then iScotland would be faced with borrowing constraints laid down by the currency union they were in.
The figures we have from GERS tell us that iScotland would have to borrow more in terms of GDP % than the rUK would. This would be a fundamental problem and would have to be dealt with by either spending cuts or tax rises (or more likely both).
But…it wouldn’t last forever. It might take 5 years for iScotland’s economy to align to being independent, but it would align and then start to grow again.
This would, of course, be backed by Scotland’s oil and positive trade balance, so will most probably be extremely strong, unlike Sterling.
Based on what? What economic data can you present that backs up this claim?
@heedtracker
Now that we’ve had 2 GERS reports since 2011-2012 that don’t present such a rosy picture we find people “challenging” the figures.
Usual condescending sneary unionist stuff Colin. Its like Britnats raging away at SNP for an FFA date, as in “you can give an independence day date, you can give us an FFA date too, you clowns and liars”
What is clear that a Scottish independence date is completely different from Scottish fiscal autonomy. Project Fear, BBC, you etc all shut down Scottish independence for a wee while and now you’re all monstering FFA.
Why the naked fear Colin?
Where has this come from? So I responded to your comment on GERS and now I’m somehow part of project fear!
At the recent general election George Kervan (who has spent the last few decades as an economics lecturer) was elected as the MP for East Lothian. Here’s what he said about FFA in an article on 9th May on The National:
For Scotland to accept fiscal autonomy without inbuilt UK-wide fiscal balancing would be tantamount to economic suicide.
If you want to find project fear look no further than this. Think about what he says, “Scotland cannot be fiscally autonomous without being bailed out by rUK”.
The best possible cushion against volatility in oil prices is to be an oil producer, not simply a consumer. The next best cushion is an oil fund like all the sensible oil producing nations of the world. We have neither best, nor second best. We have Westminster and the BBC, turning Scotland’s oil into pish for 40 years.
@Colin Rippey says: 12 June, 2015 at 11:17 am:
“The GERS methodology estimates what an independent Scotland would earn from oil & gas, do you accept the GERS methodology?
Are you kidding, Colin? Do you know why and by whom the GERS was invented by?
” – If not, what are your figures for how much revenue an independent Scotland would earn in revenue from oil & gas?”
Dependant upon how many installations in the Scottish Territorial Waters, (and including the several thousand Sq Mls stolen by the UK), are under maintenance or other shut downs at the time the answer is around 95% on a geographic basis of whatever the present reported Extra-Regio Territories is credited with earning.
“This is a simple question, you’ve never answered it.”
In the first place it is not a simple question as I’ve more than once explained in detail.
“You’re very keen to trot out figures for all sorts of areas but I’ve never seen your figures for this specific question. Do they differ from what GERS estimates them to be?”
There are very good, and oft stated, reasons for me not trotting out the figures, Colin. The first being that the figures can only be estimated from among the many con-tricks deliberately introduced by the Establishment with the object of obfuscating the truth. However, by looking at the UK produced figures that do exist many truths become crystal clear.
Here, as always are a few truths : –
The per capita Scottish GDP exceeds that of both the United Kingdom, (which figure also includes the Scottish per capita GDP), and that of the country of England as a whole. In plain language – each Scot contributes more towards the UK Treasury than either the UK or English residents.
The oft quoted statistic that the Scots get a higher per capita funding than others in the UK is balderdash for these obvious reasons. The UK is actually a legal bipartite union of Kingdoms, (Which is why it is named, “The United KINGDOM”. It is legally neither a country nor legally a union of four countries.
Thus the present set-up where the country of England is run my 533 people who were not elected as members of the Parliament of England but elected as members of the United Kingdom Parliament results in the Westminster Parliament becoming the de facto Parliament of the Country of England that devolves English powers to the three devolved administrations along with block Grants in order to fund their devolved functions.
So, Colin, the real World situation in regard to how the United Kingdom is funded is thus – Only England is wholly funded by the United Kingdom Government Ministries.
Thus the country of England has no Block Grant and, as the other three countries have different levels of devolved functions, their per capita funding is decided by the Barnett Formula that, of necessity, must calculate a different level of per capita funding to each devolved country as it is based mainly upon the needs to devolve funds to run the devolved functions from the UK Ministries with that devolved funding also coming from the UK Ministries. Which leaves only England funded directly from those UK Ministries.
So it is really laughable when people, like you, Colin, make claims that only we Scots are getting more than our fair share of UK funding. So here is the that truth you either do not know or that you think we Scots are too stupid to understand.
First of all the English figures are lower as England is not only 100% funded as the UK by UK Ministries but gets a great deal more by getting much extra funding by other than ministerial funding. I.e. the £4.1 billion for the New London Sewerage System that was funded, (not by the Normal DEFRA funds), but from Government Reserves. This was a double whammy for Scotland, Wales & N.I. as we all contributed towards those Government reserves but the grant did not carry Barnett Consequentials.
Next of all the UK Country that gets the highest per capita block grant is N.I as N.I. has the most devolved functions and thus the most devolved funds from UK Ministries. Scotland comes next with less devolved functions and funding than N.I. but more than Wales. England has no block grant but the basic figures used by the Barnett Formula is based upon an estimated per capita figure of the values England gets from UM Ministerial funding but, (as already explained), vastly underestimated by those extra, non-ministerial, funds that only England gets. Such as the grant to set-up, “Transport for London”; The London Cross-Rail System; The HS Rail Links; The London Olympics; The London Dome; The refurbishment of every London Rail & Bus Terminal and such as the infrastructure for the Chunnel. Note that every other UK country must finance their transport stuff from within their block Grants. For example the new Forth Crossing is 100% funded from within the Scottish Block Grant.
So there you go Colin, the GERS Figures are designed by the UK government to confuse the real issues and the so called, “Independent”, institutions such as the OBR are UK Government designed, peopled and funded. They are far from independent.
So instead of quoting us the minutiae of the complex Creative Accountancy of the United Kingdom a brief look at the figures they cannot bias tells a quote different story As does the simple fact that if Scotland had indeed been subsidised by the England we would never have been forced into a union with England in the first place.
Now, as you were demanding I quote you figures that are totally irrelevant in any case, can you deny any of the points I make above?
@Colin Ripley
Exploding the myth of a “subsidised Scotland”
link to m.youtube.com
Get real folks.
Scotland doesn’t exist in isolation in the world nor indeed should it. It needs to trade for the things it can’t or doesn’t produce for itself & that means having friends, allies & trading partners in all other countries.
Any country aspiring to independence of necessity needs to convince folks like IMF, world trading markets, financial markets etc that they are a country to be trusted & can be trusted to do business with. Ergo-Scotland has to impress whether you like it or not. It’s called operating as a small nation amongst many more ‘big fishes’ in the sea.
It isn’t about Scotland crawling to the IMF EU or anything else like that. It is just a small country going out into the world & saying this is us, this is what we want to do & why and you have nothing to fear from us.
Nicola isn’t expecting support from those institutions or countries indeed she would be wrong if she did. It would be unthinkable for any country, world institution, EU etc to publicly say anything as that would be seen as interfering in another country& they’d be pilloried for it & quite rightly so.
Nicola is putting Scotland onto the international stage & basically saying this is us & we are just as it says on the tin-a small nation with a responsible government looking outwards rather than being like rUk isolationist & looking inwards.
This is an eminently sensible move. Imagine how countries outside UK feel/think when Scotland is mentioned. Every day in the press, we have a plethora of scary Scotland stories.We can debunk many of those here but many won’t know anything about a website in Scotland & why would they?
Those press stories are picked up by foreign news agencies & transmitted to all corners of the earth so the Scottish Government has to fly the flag for Scotland & ‘normalise’ the impressions conveyed by Scots representatives.
Like you they have all been fed the Scotland & SNP Bad stories but they have no reason to disbelieve any of it. Now Nicola et al are going about their business of correcting world opinion. You may not like it but tough-it has to be done if you want independence.
Scotland is signalling its intentions to join the ranks of the independent nations so get used to it.
And I say this as a supporter of independence 🙂
So I disagree with you on something and your mindset is that I must have an opposite view to everything you believe in yes? You have come to this conclusion because of what? I have challenged the view that Scotland is missing out on whisky export duty that doesn’t exist. Now because of this
Colin Rippey
I believe in WMDs and protecting paedophiles. Quite a leap you’ve made eh?
No. It was quite a logical leap, IMO, as you appear to be following the ‘arguments’ put forwards by Better Together, a.k.a. “Project Fear”. I was not suggesting this was your position, merely asking for your confirmation, or otherwise. Still waiting.
The rest, well it’s all pie in the sky, as Project Fear got their No vote. Let’s move forwards constructively, shall we?
Just about to head out, so we can continue this evening, if convienient.
The income from Land ownership in Scotland would be a useful contribution!
link to caledonia.org.uk
Colin Rippey
This is where you lose me. If iScotland wanted to keep using the £ (and let’s say that the rUK threat of not having a currency union was a bluff and iScotland and rUK were in a currency union) then iScotland would be faced with borrowing constraints laid down by the currency union they were in.
Who owns Sterling? Certainly not England.
You honestly couldn’t make this up. Orwell’s political ideology is alive and well.
Problem is …half of the Scottish people are very much aware of what is going on!
Ah well …roll on the EU Referendum, for that will be the key battleground. However, this time, we hold the key ace. Just as they used the ‘Economic Case’ against us in the Referendum, we will use that same case against them this time round. The argument of being in Europe will destroy the GB Union once and for all, for they can’t even use that against us!
In fact, if you actually think about it, this is the Referendum in mirror format …only this time, we are the side who will argue the Economic Case, be the side who guarantees Europe, and point out that Big Business WON’T be leaving Scotland should we guarantee our place in the EU.
Once the electorate realises that safety in their assets, jobs and basically the future lies with Europe, then the Union will truly end as people clamour for the Union to be dissolved should the rUK vote to leave Europe.
Well well well, it turns out John Swinney was at Charles Kennedy’s funeral, but sign of him on BBC Scotland there was not, they managed to spot Gordon Brown the most camera shy (ex) politician in the western world, who has an aversion to cameras akin to the late Howard Hughes, but they could not see the representative of her majesties Government in Scotland the (current) deputy First Minister,
Who the fuck knew?
certainly not Laura (dimples) Bicker!
@Colin Rippey says: 11 June, 2015 at 11:44 pm:
“How much oil & gas revenue does the UK commandeere? What is the figure?”
I realise, Colin, that you are probably the most recent version of the UK funded Trolls we have had as regular visitors for some time now but will answer you this one.
As the entire revenues from the off-shore oil & gas is classed as from, “Extra Regio Territories”, no matter whether they come from the internationally recognised, (International Law of the Seas), English Legal jurisdiction or from the internationally recognised Scottish Jurisdiction the UK Government commandeers them as coming from Extra Regio Territory.
Now, unless you do your own proper research first, just stop wasting our collective time with these spurious points for you know, as well as I do, that if Scots were actually being subsidised by England, or even if we were just getting our fair share, we would have been thrown out of your evil Union hundreds of years ago.
Colin Rippey, pretty weak come backs there Colin.
You decided that YES voters don’t know how Scots whisky’s taxed, so NO FFA but when asked direct queries like, why not give Scotland control of Scots oil industry, as we’re now being threatened that it’s all worthless, all you can do is say nothing at all.
Funny that Colin. You’re all the same though.
PS Colin, you’re probably picking up stuff like whisky duty from that very smeary/sneary/condescending Scottish tory boy blog chocablog. His real problem is only blogging half his stories. Keep it mind.
i agree FFA will not be given to do so would show that westminster has mismanaged the Sottish revenue for decades,yes it will lead to independence once the real Scottish figures are produced and not the made up ones from westminster with their creative accountancy,this is why FFA as most people understand it will not happen.
We will get what they are offering and that is it and they will have the cheek to say its the most devolved parliament in the world and that they gave us everything we asked for but as usual the Scots want more,perpetuating the usual lie to Scotland mantra.
I worry about FFA not because i dont like the idea but because it will get kicked around westminster and will never see the light of day,as i said before its a delay tactic and one they can use to beat up the SNP because most people dont have a clue that we can not take FFA it has to be given.
Screw the lot of them come on Nicola indyref2 lets get out of this mad house this is an official request from a concerned Scottish citizen,well you did say it was up to us when the next indyref is ,consider yourself notified i want it on the SNP manifesto 2016 or i might just vote for Labour again (only kidding about the labour bit)
Thanks guys for the info on Stuart Hosie and his retort to Dugdale. So glad he never missed that opportunity.
From Bateman’s latest blog entry re BBC Scotland:
“… Whatever action is taken, the line of responsibility goes far beyond one person and reflects badly on the administration of a key national institution which has turned a blind eye to case after case of intimidation and believed itself invulnerable to action. Many thousands of Scots have either stopped believing the BBC’s output or stopped consuming it altogether.”
I agree with every one of Bateman’s assertions contained within those two sentences.
BBC Scotland: an unfit for purpose disgrace. Scotland need its own national broadcaster ASAP.
Regarding Charles Kennedy’s funeral, today’s sewer-dwelling Daily Mail has excelled itself once more.
It has devoted its front page, plus three inside full pages to lies, insinuations and smears against the SNP and its followers for:
… a “hate campaign” of “vile teeets” directed at Kennedy; someone working for Ian Blackford MP, whom they call an “SNP chief” and an “SNP official”, resigning for “hounding” Kennedy; Blackford himseld “banned” from today’s funeral; an article from Brian Wilson entitled, “A fitting tribute to Charles would be for the SNP to tackle the poison and intolerance” ( yes, really!); and a full-length Comment entitled, “End the vile abuse and hollow apologies”….
Dirty scum. FFS, I hate these bastards with a passion.
Re Bateman-read this from the graun. Connected!
link to archive.is
The Bateman BBC post seems to have disappeared from his blog
What’s up?
(He ended with the tantalising assertion of “more to follow” but now there’s nothing at all – some lawyer got to him?)
BBC Scotland: an unfit for purpose disgrace. Scotland need its own national broadcaster ASAP.
We already do
link to bbc.scotlandshire.co.uk
Awe, what grown man takes a selfie with his cuddly toy?
Over this dude’s dead body more like.
link to bbc.co.uk
Dontcha wish your Director was hot like him?
Dirty scum. FFS, I hate these bastards with a passion.
Don’t give in to the dark side. Fascism feeds on hate, British or otherwise.
@Cameron B Brodie
“CameronB Brodie says:
12 June, 2015 at 12:30 pm
OT. I accept that Scottish independence will not be a panacea and will only represent an open door to Scotland’s self-betterment, but is Fintan O’Toole perhaps ignoring the incredibly conservative nature of Irish society, with respect to the longstanding dominance of the Catholic church?”
Either Fintan is willfully ignoring a lot of pertinent facts, or maybe the Evening News is misrepresenting him (shock!).
For one thing, Ireland didn’t become independent in 1922… it just got a parliament with something approaching Full Fiscal Responsibility … but not quite. It was a British Dominion until 1937, with sovereignty held by the (English) king in parliament. The Irish had no choice but to continue to use the pre-existing British civil service, legal system and taxation system – under the terms of the Anglo-Irish treaty. As a British Dominion, they had limited outlets for autonomous trade, or government borrowing to aid industrialisation.
An independent Scotland would face none of these issues. What we CAN learn from Ireland’s exit from the empire is that you need a lang spoon tae sup wi’ the de’il: skilled negotiators will be required for the Scottish team.
re: conservatism/catholicism as a cause of poor Irish economy in 20th century … I think this is largely a unionist/imperialist myth, touted to show the follies of national liberation. Ireland’s economy had been deliberately suppressed for hundreds of years, and it’s assets had been systematically stripped by colonialists: they needed massive inward investment to industrialise, and only began to receive it after joining the EEC: then they became the 3rd wealthiest country on earth for a while (without any oil)! De Valera’s Irish government climbed into bed with the Catholic hierarchy in the 1940s and 50s: this surely retarded social progress, but wasn’t a big factor in government or economics.
John King- John Swinney was indeed shown by BBC Scotland making his way into the church, though the spiel from Craig Anderson was out of sync with those pictured. We saw Swinney while he talked about Gordon Brown if memory serves. I only saw the tail end of Laura Bicker’s piece but that was on the national news and not Reporting Scotland.
UKOK fascism is getting to you? this’ll cheer you up because on this day Archie Gemmill scored against the Netherlands in Mendoza, 1978.
link to youtube.com
BBC Scotland staff consider industrial action in dispute over bullying claims
link to gu.com
Nicola’s talk at the CFR and other such Pax Americana institutions – it sticks in my craw, but not half as much as it must stick in hers. And yes, her toeing the line on the Ukraine/Russia issue was particularly hard to watch.
But as was said above, realpolitik is a nasty if sometimes necessary game. American support, or even neutrality, for Scottish independence is crucial. At the moment they take their cue from Westminster. The SNP government has to break this “agreement” by showing how smart we are, how economically sound we would be, and what a good friend to America we would be. After independence, anything goes, and we would be free to express anti-American policy sentiment if the situation warranted.
A very good guage for measuring whether she’s done the right thing on her hearts and minds tour is how much the unionist establishment has berated and tried to demean her. They’ve been going at it hammer and tongs, so she must be doing something right.
And another complaint I have with the BBC; Laura Bicker needs to stop talking to the camera while apparently sucking on a spangle.
Guys …may need to cool it on the Laura Bicker browbeating. A small group of us met Laura at the recent SNP conference. The lass was alright, and I believe she may be a Yes supporter. When the likes of Nicola Sturgeon or Alex Salmond completed their speeches and the audience applauded, Laura was on her feet and taking photographs of the crowd and of the main stage on her OWN mobile. I believe she took the photos for her own personal momentoes. I believe Laura is one of the good guys. Don’t be too quick to condenn. I don’t believe every news reporter at the BBC is for the Union.
Derek Bateman has posted an explanation for the disappearing post now.
Classic BBC vote SLab or Else Scotland attack propaganda headline here. Just when you think Pacific Quay liggers cant get any worse…
TGIF.
link to bbc.co.uk
Scotland’s papers: Toddler left alone with dead mother and SNP official quits
@Lollysmum
Good spot. Thanks for that link.
It adds weight to my perception that this constant grinding away at Scotland by the Unionist supporters in the media and in politics cannot be sustained for much longer.
Ms Baillie, the Uriah Heap of the labour party, this morning patronised and talked Scotland down on GMS. Her cloying humility, obsequiousness, and insincerity, is too typical of those willing to live in a country they believe is a basket case and has to be get by on the handouts of Westminster.
I absented myself as she continued to prattle on, out and away up the Fife coast to chill out. Sometimes it’s the only way to get refreshed, ready for the next wave of project fear washing in on the evening news.
Well done to you all on here who take the time and effort to soldier on time and time again arguing for Scotland to be a normal country. 🙂
Right..I’m ready to switch on the radio …FGS!!
BBC, Ming on the funeral and mentions attendees Brownie and Swinney as among the ‘great and good in politics’
@heedtracker
Brilliant link. Haven’t seen that for a while made my day. 🙂
Apologies to Chic McGregor for getting my 70 cl and 75 cl mixed up. In my defence I was enjoying a cheeky red at the time, which is probably why I had 75 cl on the brain 🙂
Derek Bateman has reposted
Cracks in the wall of BBC Scotland News and Current Affairs?
link to derekbateman.co.uk
WOW-a non-critical piece of film from BBC Scotland about Nicola’s week in USA. I’m gobsmacked by the even-handedness of the piece
link to bbc.co.uk
I was forced to drive into Glasgow today something I never enjoy but as I was sitting in traffic I think I might have come up with a plan for solving the emissions problem and improving our health all at the same time
“Get the Effing buses of the road” we’re choking to death on black diesel smoke and fumes belching from these hideous monsters carrying ten people at a time for half the day Figures show if you live in town you live two years less because you stand at bus stops
OK calm again, why not restrict bus travel to only the edges of towns then use electric shuttle type smaller buses to cross towns in criss cross fashion, our towns get cleaner more folk walk and, cyclists have an easier time we don’t die so much of grotty lung disease from diesel fumes everybody’s happy
We could even build the buses at Fergusons who have become experts in battery powered ferries thereby creating jobs into the bargain
Now I’m sure somebody is going to point out a flaw in my thinking here and I sincerely hope you do because it might mean we come up with a real idea instead of just those of us who hate buses, then we can send it to Holyrood and get a Blue Peter Badge or Something
Just think The BBC would have to report Wings Over Scotland solved a pollution problem, now that’s Civic Nationalism
@ Lollysmum
Guess who is on “gardening leave?”
Lollysmum
That BBC piece did, however, get the ‘You didn’t see Obama’ bit in twice!!
Don’t think we’ll ever be happy, I suppose!!
Re the Daily Mail’s piece on the resignation of an SNp official in Charles Kennedy’s former constituency because of on line comments about Kennedy.
It was full of the Mail’s usual foul exaggeration, but the poster left himself open to accusation by his unwise vendetta against Kennedy.
It is a another reminder that it’s not wise to abuse anybody on line these days, as there is a trail on the Internet which can be accessed by anyone with the skill. (Just see what Stu can do in tracking down obscure and concealed details for Wings.)
Always best to avoid abuse and use the truth to condemn the liars.
@Colin Rippey
“23. Excise duty is levied and collected (following a period of duty deferment) at the point when the product is released for consumption from the bonded warehouse – wherever it is located in the UK – not at the point of sale to the final consumer.
An independent Scotland would not be in the UK – why is this so difficult to understand?”
Errr, yes, finally you get the point, and in your own hand. When Scotland is not in the UK, that paragraph would be written so:
“23. Excise duty is levied and collected (following a period of duty deferment) at the point when the product is released for consumption from the bonded warehouse – wherever it is located in SCOTLAND – not at the point of sale to the final consumer.”
Do you get it now?
Derek Bateman piec.Its not the 1st ime Mr Bateman has written about Disquiet in the ranks of Bbc Scotland journalists.
Ma hearts pumping fu o Pish for their predicement.
Boothman McQuarie are a law unto themselves ( with Bbc Trust knowledge). I cant wait untill Scottish Grand Committee gets started.
In the meantime the Bbc (so called journalists) have the remedy to hand INDUSTRIAL ACTION, or to put it in laymans terms STRIKE,or Forever Hud Yer Wheesht. & ma Heart will go on & on Pumping Pish for Them. that reminds me of ah song/film where ah Big Boat sinks.
G H Graham @ 4.09
“…sucking on a spangle.”
Spangle…your giving your age away with that one. Might need n explanation for the younger set among us.
@Colin Rippey
Actually having quickly read another couple of postings you seem quite a reasonable guy, so I’ll try to be more polite!
“Hidden incomes” or something like that. Well yes, there are. There’s a fair amount of UK expenditure and revenues that are not broken down by “region” (i.e. Scotland etc). You mentioned GERS, somewhere around page 88 (that’s not a real page estimate), it explains that GERS is still an estimate on many points as though year by year there is more breakdwon, (something like 88% using that figure again), there is still a portion that isn’t broken down by the Treasury / HMRC. There are figures given in UK terms, of which Scotland is merely attributed a per capita amount i.e. 8.4%.
I export at times, and to take the US for example where I have a US Gov login to provide information on a shipment, it provides info on the final point of departure. But this is from the UK, as the UK is the country of export, not Scotland. So my small exports are attributed to the UK and Scotland takes an 8.4% share of that. Mine mostly go from Stanstead (Fedex) which is in fat in England so even if broken down it would show England not Scotland at all. We would on that basis get 0% for my 100% Scottish export. Many companies in Scotland that export out of the UK and the EU would have the same country of origin – UK / England, not Scotland. Quite simply it’s cheaper to freight from Southampton.
Here’s where geography and price come into it. Fedex used to be based at Prestwick so that would have shown 100% for Scotland. If I ever shipped a container, it could go from Greenock. But it’s much cheaper to get it freighted down to Southampton and sent off on a container from there. Guess what, the port of departure is in England, not Scotland.
However, with Independence the departure country would be Scotland not England (or the UK), so all exports from Scotland would then show up as exports from Scotland not England or the UK.
There’s a similar thing for whisky; though there are bonded warehouses in England, which currently would show up as UK revenues / excise duties, in iScotland the original point (apart from SEPP) would be Scotland, not the UK. Alchohol isn’t my thing, and without research I couldn’t say any more. It’s enough for me that the SCOTCH WHISKY ASSOCIATION (SWA) who came out against Independence, seem to be for the Scottish Government having the powers over alchohol duties and revenues. My guess is that they, at least, do understand the ins and outs of revenues on whisky.
I like Rhona STV. She has a job to do, and I think she does it fine. One of those jobs is to “hold the government to account” and that means she may appear at times to be attacking the FM and the SNP who are currently the government.
I think the FM is up to it!
@ Dr Jim 5:16 – for starters put bus and coach stations on the periphery of large conurbations and use minibuses to transport people through the towns/cities – in many cases a motorway service station would surfice.
@yesindyref2
23. Excise duty is levied and collected (following a period of duty deferment) at the point when the product is released for consumption from the bonded warehouse – wherever it is located in SCOTLAND – not at the point of sale to the final consumer.”
Do you get it now?
I’ve never at any point disputed that any alcohol sold in Scotland would incur a duty that would be paid to a Scottish government under independence.
That is nothing to do with my original comment in this page which was a challenge on the myth that there is EXPORT duty levied on whisky exported from the UK and is “hidden” from Scotland’s “accounts” in GERS.
If you read the GERS methodology there is an attempt to estimate the levels of duty an iScotland would get in revenue from alcohol AND tobacco using some stats to do with household purchases (I think, can’t remember exactly).
But if you were to peruse various other pages on this site and other independence sites there is a belief that ALL duty raised from whisky sales in the UK would somehow go to an iScotland. They wouldn’t, and there is no export duty either.
If making millions for the allegedly non-profit making state broadcaster and fall foul of its stated ethics you are allowed to continue being employed for many years.
A lowly staff member complaining about treatment you will be seen as a trouble-maker and ultimately ostracized. There’s worse in store if you are a union representative.
The BBC has a strict regime of regular ‘personal progress’ meetings with individual staff, supposedly to show them that the management cares about their development and happiness. It’s an opportunity to discuss things that upset you, like a bullying boss. Some get a shock when they first hear their report read back to them.
Annoy the head of department finds your progress expressed in some official-speak in your annual report. If your senior producer or head thinks you a threat to their job they’ll find ways of lowering your status.
‘Not a team player,’ is one method to slap down a lively talent, ‘a maverick’ is another, meaning uncontrollable. A head of department has lots of ways of making himself appear a saint handling so many difficult egos.
In time you learn to do as you’re told. Don’t ‘rock the boat.’
None of things found their way on my reports. I am too sensitive to the behaviour of colleagues to be taken unawares however … ‘Shook hands with Peter Ustinov’ was duly noted as a ‘reprimand’ for having the temerity to half-step out of my studio door to meet him. He was a guest on my programme.
Recently I asked for copies of all my reports and salary payments – no trace of my employment could be found anywhere in the BBC. The Stasi has nothing on the BBC.
@ ronnie (5.41pm).
C U, yer no wise!
🙂
Scunterbunnet @ 3:01 pm.
Thanks for filling in the historical context. I think I was right to suspect the sustainability of his argument.
john young,
“Is it not the case that half a barrel is better than none.”
Not if the full barrel belongs to us and has been stolen from us.
Dave McEwan Hill,
“I have been boring folk for years about the absolute necessity to establish that the Scottish economy is not reliant on oil revenues.”
The problem is the rUK economy is.
That is why they will not let us go unless they have sucked us dry of the last drop.
@ Stoker Ah neva said ah wiz (wise) am jist wan o the sheeple that uazes grey matter, mair than can be said fur the Bbc Scotlands so called churnalists.Roll on the Demise of the BBc/Stv.
Heedtracker says
“Awe, what grown man takes a selfie with his cuddly toy?”
That Munguin ya muppet. 🙂
__________________________________________________________
Legerwood says
“G H Graham @ 4.09
“…sucking on a spangle.”
Spangle…your giving your age away with that one. Might need n explanation for the younger set among us.”
Cumon, I don’t think there’s anyone on here who cant remember Spangles
Aa near passed oot laughing btw G.H.G. 🙂
The fall out at the BBC is starting to ripple outwards. Severin has a surprisingly fair and factual piece over on the Groaniard.
I hadn’t realise the discontent and staff negativity was anything like the level it is. It will be interesting to see what further revelations fall out of this.
Aw cheers Ronnie,
am awa tae ma bed in a wee while an if Aa as much as dream o you at the forcas…the foc…the fuc… the front o the boat wi yer airms ootstreached a’ll hunt ye doon! 🙁
atrueindependentscotland
Ah whisht you,s awe wid stop replying tae Colin Rippey am gettin drunk on the fumes, the good news is its the Angels share Nae Tax lol.
@ John King Dey yea take ice in yer dram ah,ll grab a lump oan the way past the Iceberg cheers.
@ G H Graham
@ Ledgerwood
Auld English Spangles wur ma favourite,they never made Dandelion & Burdock wans. smilies.
@ronnie anderson
The red ones!
( No political affiliation implied )
Brian Wilson:
“… What I find more troubling is the way the well of Scottish politics is being poisoned by intolerance.”
Your right there, Brian, the intolerance of the five shades of Unionists; Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, UKIP and Orange Order is, indeed, poisoning the well of Scottish politics. Do not drink what they put into the well! At the very least, you’ll end up with diarrhoea – coming out of both ends!
“It may finally occur to Nicola Sturgeon and her high command that they no longer need the outriders whose appointed role is to threaten, denigrate and abuse anyone who stands in their way.”
Tsk! Tsk! That’s a bit strong, Brian… high command.. outriders.. appointed role.. threaten, denigrate and abuse…
Next time, put something in brackets to forewarn us sensitive ones to prepare us for what is to come, there’s a good chap. Maybe something like, (‘What I am about to say next is a load of lies and constitutes as a smear, for no reason than I hate the SNP and what they stand for. So there!’)…? That should do it.
“It would be a fitting act of respect to Charles Kennedy and the civilised politics he represented if his chief tormentors were now called to account.”
What, do you mean people like David Wilkes who, when reporting for the Daily Mail in August 2010, said:
“A source said the couple’s split had come as ‘no surprise’ to those who knew them.
The source added: ‘That’s what you get for marrying an alcoholic. Charles never sobered up and he would regularly go off for several days on the p***. I guess you only really know someone once you live with them for a while.’”…? Oh, okay. Right enough.
What happened next?
We haven’t heard from Rev Stu for over twenty six hours.
Don’t mind him having a day off.
But he must be careful. He is almost the establishment’s enemy number one.
Colin Rippey, keep doing what you’re doing.
Intelligent scepticism and challenging received wisdom is something the independence movement depends on if it is to avoid preaching only to the converted.
Little known factoid: George Orwell started writing ‘1984’ near Eaglesham, and finished it on Jura (he was here seeking treatment for TB just after the war).
… so ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’, and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ were all invented here in Scotland, and so was the adage ‘Freedom is Slavery’.
Maybe George had been to a SLab meeting, or listened to BBC Radio Scotland, to come up with the idea!
@Colin Rippeu
I suspected we were arguing at cross-purposes but it was more fun that way. Bascially you were talking about the small amount of revenue the rUK would slap on a bottle of whisky, and I was talking about the huge amount the Scottish Government would make.
On the other hand, if the Scottish Government reduced the excise duty on whisky it would greatly encourage tourists to come here, visit the disilleries, and take their full amount of tax paid bottles back home with them, or outside the union take advantage of tax-free prices.
Curiously I know of one or two distilleries which have plans to expand greatly, double capacity or more. What do they know, I wonder?
@Colin Rippey
Gers figures are like a Profit and Loss Account. You are correct in asserting that they are compiled by the Scottish Government. Unfortunately, however, they do so using the accountancy ledgers produced by HM Treasury. Perhaps now you can see why we are sceptical.
OT Remember the remarkably similar handwritten letters sent out to constituents by certain Slab candidates. I believe I have discovered the culprit. None other than Crash Gordon himself. Well the fact he claimed £732 on expenses for ink cartridges for his favourite fountain pen makes him number one suspect in my book.
@Heedtracker
Great Link. Brilliant goal. Watched the follow up video of the pitch invasion after the 1977 victory at Wembley but failed to spot myself removing a souvenir from the pitch.
@Scunterbunnet
He probably had access to a time machine inherited from H.G. Wells, and had jumped forward in time to have a blether with Cameron on holiday, who knew I was going to say that via the thought police.
For those of a masochistic bent, here’s a link to John Beattie’s show this morning, featuring the magnificent Jackie Baillie, doing her inimitable thing from 37.55 onwards –
link to bbc.co.uk
@Colin Rippey says: 12 June, 2015 at 11:11 am:
“I have NO problem with Scotland becoming independent if that’s what the people of Scotland vote for, NO problem.”
Well, Colin you certainly could have fooled me on thar score.
“What I have a problem with is in the argument for independence there is a belief that there is some sort of “hidden income” that is not made visible to people voting for independence, and that voters are “tricked” into believing that Scotland would be better off remaining part of the UK.”
And your proof that there is not a, “Hidden Income”,is What exactly, Colin? I’ve detailed you several such scams. The National Grid Connection charges, The Crown Estates, The way that oil & gas is classed as from Extra Regio Territory when at least 95% of it lies in Scottish jurisdiction. The way fines from the independent Scottish Legal system are grabbed by the Treasury and the scams whereby lots of English funding is made from sources that Scots, Welsh and N.Irish contribute to but which bear no Barnett Consequentials, to name but a few.
“I really don’t know why people who seek independence still try to convince others that “London keeps all the money”, “extra-regio territory has all the oil & gas revenue”.
So tell me Colin, under what other heading, other than Extra Regio Territory is it you imagine the Treasury accounts the oil & gas revenues as?
“Have a position of Scotland having it’s own currency”
Since the Pound Sterling was accepted as the currency of both Kingdoms, (you will find that was agreed in the Treaty of Union 1706/7), then the Pound Sterling was agreed by the two equally sovereign Kingdoms as their joint currency. Whatever gave you the strange idea it belongs to only to the three country Kingdom of England?
BTW: The Bank of England has never, ever, been owned by either the country, or the Kingdom, of England. It was so titled because the Kingdom of England banked with it. It began as a company entitled, “The Governor & Company of the Bank of England”, The Bank of England was founded in 1694 to act as the Government’s banker and debt-manager after receiving a Royal Charter.
It remained a private company until nationalised in 1946, (but not by England), by The United Kingdom. It is thus owned by the people of the United Kingdom and that includes the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish. In 1998, it became an independent public organisation, wholly owned by the Treasury Solicitor on behalf of the government, with total independence in setting monetary policy.
So that’s just one more spurious arguments you have miserably failed to make and have once more been found out as a liar.
You’re not very good at this trolling game – are you Colin?
Scunterbunnet: Maybe George had been to a SLab meeting, or listened to BBC Radio Scotland, to come up with the idea!
As you know Orwell worked for the BBC in London during the war, and in the propaganda department! He’s a few things to say about his experiences in various essays, and he did allude to his Ministry of Truth in ‘1984’ partly based on his BBC days
@Colin Rippey says: 12 June, 2015 at 11:17 am:
@Robert Peffers
The GERS methodology estimates what an independent Scotland would earn from oil & gas, do you accept the GERS methodology?
I had to go out so this is a bit late, Colin. Here is your answer. No I do not accept the GERS figures as the Scottish Government are constrained by the Establishment as to what they contain. Furthermore, many of the so called Scottish Government Civil Servants who deal with such things are actually Whitehall Civil Servants and as such are part of, “The Establishment”.
Here’s facts –
Here too is a description of, “The Chief Statistician of Scotland that you spoke of. Written by no less a person than the above Permenant Secretary, (who has already been described by Whitehall as, “Going Native”: –
You are not very good at this Trolling Stuff, are you Colin? Far too many easily disproved lies and false UK mantras.
Wee snippet from the Herald: part of a comment.
56 MP’s, One Labour, who must be pinching himself that he is in fact ‘Labour’ in Scotland, wee David Mundell who is Governor General of the colony and Mr Pickwick.
Is this the only way that Labour can have their voice heard? Book Festivals and Bring and Buy summer fetes?
———————————————————–
Referring to Brownie’s forthcoming speech:
Speaking at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose tomorrow, the former Labour Prime Minister will deliver a stark message, saying: “I fear that if Scotland has not yet written off Britain, the Conservative Party is starting to write off Scotland. Indeed, if the United Kingdom collapses, it will not be because a majority of Scots are hell-bent on leaving but because the UK Government is giving up on saving it.
————————————————————–
PS:
@Ian Brotherhood
I have had my say on the Baillie..earlier this morning. Please don’t tempt me to listen to her again. 🙂
I’m calmer now it’s pink walls don’t you know…Nurse! Nurse!
PPS:
Well played the Welsh. 1-0
@Scunterbunnet. Orwell spent time in Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride in a former TB ward where beds could be wheeled out under glass awnings so patients could take the cure and sample EK’s arctic winter air.
Although most people regard 1984 as an attack on Stalin’s Soviet Union, others see it as a response to his experience of extreme BBC censorship during WW2.
BBC?
Censorship?
Soviet Union?
Place your bets.
O/T: notice, according to BBC, that refugees are now migrants, migrants, migrants but definitely not people. That would never do.
And well done, James MacMillan, for your honour: Unionism obviously pays.
@Robert Peffers
I think there’s another angle to the Barnett Consequentials that hasn’t been explored, and that’s portionality. A project is deemed to be a UK infrastructure project, but has England only benefits as well. And / or it has private investment but public backing. Such as Crossrail.
If I have this right, this project which has slid in budget up to £17.2 billion is underwritten by the taxpayer which probably means we pick up the excess, and for all that, Scotland was “given” £500 million (start-up for the Forth crossing I think). A 10% (not 8.4%) of this would be £1.72 billion minus total of private funding.
I suspect the negotiations if any went like this: “It’s a UK infrastructure project so your trains can get across London too so you get nothing, and it’s privately funded so you get nothing, but out of the goodness of our hearts we’ll kindly give you £500 million. Now, do you want to take it, or leave it?”.
Robert Peffers 10:31
For goodness sake, keep posting. Sensible information like this it essential for us “cybernats” (aka Jock Average)to throw in the path of drivel.
Many thanks and yes, that info freaked me out a bit. I thought GERS was ‘from the mound’.
Robert Peffers
Are you giving it tight to my, as yet absent, date? 😉
Perhaps I’m too soft, by I’d rather like to think of Colin as misguided, rather than malicious.
@osakisushi
GERS is audited by Audit Scotland and is prepared by the Scottish Government, with figures of its own but indeed, also with figures from the UK Treasury. These aren’t completely broken down into splits between the “family of nations”, and in fairness, there’s no mechanism exists in some cases for that breakdown. There should be, of course.
Even in there though there’s a consistent mis-stating in the executive summary of Scotland’s deficit compared to the UK’s one. Three sets of figures are given for Scotland’s deficits, without oil, with er capita oil and with geographical oil, but in all cases the UK figures includes all oil. So though Scotland is compared to the UK as a whole, it’s not compared to the rUK, though Unionists seem to think it is, as in the actually poorly written and inaccurate infamous IFS report, and update. Which are very lazy pieces of work as well as being “poorly worded”.
Re. GERS. Does anyone know how it takes account of unidentified expenditure, a huge sum of which is spent on the MoD and nuclear research, largely located in the southern part of the UK?
@Scunterbunnet says: 12 June, 2015 at 9:35 pm:
” … Maybe George had been to a SLab meeting, or listened to BBC Radio Scotland, to come up with the idea!
Aw! Cummon, Scunterbunnet, wi didna hae ony BBC Scotland back then, Wi haed the BBC Light Programme and the BBC Home Service. Wi didna get the The Third Programme til aboot 1949 or 1950.
Jings! Wi could even get The McFlannels oan the Home Service way back then.
I’m thinking seriously of producing hard-hitting leaflets titled “Do you think we are fucking stupid?”
I’m not kidding. This oil stuff again means that they are again going for the stupid vote. Its time that we faced up to the fact that the best way to deal with stupid voters is to strongly expose their stupidity. There is nothing nobody likes less than to be shown up as stupid. And we can easily show them up.
I met one fairly recently.
“But what will we do when the oil runs out?” Snivel snivel
“Then we’d have to start paying tax”
“But I already tax!”
“Of course you do (you snivelling half wit). Where do you think the money you pay goes? Into a hole in the ground?
A sensible conversation then took place.
I repeat again. When we establish that we are self supporting we win.
All the rest is froth and diversion
Robert Peffers
Excellent clarification of the opaque machinations of the UK and how their agents operate to Scotlands detriment.
Whilst Colin Rippey makes the odd correct minor point we have essentially had this debate with him a couple of months back so he knows fine well we have every reason to have no faith in HM Treasury’s figures which are used in GERS,so,he is trolling I’m afraid.
I was watching the Daily Politics show today and I think I must have misunderstood Andrew Neil as seemed to be saying if Scotland had a deficit of £10B it would have the largest deficit in Europe.
The fall out at the BBC is starting to ripple outwards. Severin has a surprisingly fair and factual piece over on the Groaniard.
So the Graun crew of charming British delights, reports trouble at the BBC crew of equally delightful charmers via recordings of their top guys being rude about same crew that daily pisses on Scottish democracy?
They probably want a Westminster MP style pay rise, plus a car and driver and they did stop Scotland voting no so they’ll think they earned it. Knighthoods all round as their queen purrs.
dakk
I’m glad someone’s been paying attention. Cheers. 😉
Tinto Chiel: Well done James MacMillan for your honour: Unionism obviously pays.
It certainly wasn’t for the quality of his music.
Vaughan Williams was happy to be known as an ‘English national’ composer but he refused knighthoods.
MacMillan accepts a knighthood but refuses to be known as a ‘Scottish national’ composer.
@CameronB Brodie says: 12 June, 2015 at 10:55 pm:
“Perhaps I’m too soft, by I’d rather like to think of Colin as misguided, rather than malicious.”
I obviously do not really know what Colin is one way or the other but I have a very sensitive nose for the smell of Trolls and especially the Establishment Agent branch of that particularly obnoxious species.
However, in the case of some such trolling an opportunity arises to answer in a manner that not only shows their misdirection as wrong but to impart to regular commenters just how their claims are wrong.
It is, of course, part of the Establishment’s propaganda to not only propagate myths but to hide the true facts in the far too complex set-up they design to muddy the water.
Scunterbunnet says:
12 June, 2015 at 9:35 pm
Little known factoid: George Orwell started writing ‘1984’ near Eaglesham, and finished it on Jura (he was here seeking treatment for TB just after the war).
… so ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’, and the ‘Ministry of Truth’ were all invented here in Scotland, and so was the adage ‘Freedom is Slavery’.
Maybe George had been to a SLab meeting, or listened to BBC Radio Scotland, to come up with the idea!
Orwell worked at the BBC, which was indeed the inspiration for the “Ministry of Truth” — and I believe he worked in Room 101!
But just to show there’s nae flies on us “cybernats”, I should point out that most of the “Orwellian” terms of 1984 can actually be traced back to his earlier novels, which addressed the same themes, only not with a *political* background. “Ingsoc” is the list of things to do the clergyman’s daughter drew up each morning, while landlords and landladies spied on their paying guests in “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”. Orwell does a gie good job at describing an election in “A Clergyman’s Daughter” and I always feel the coffee brigade there are his equivalent of our Better Together-Proud Scots But-Morningside Brigade…
Oops, not “Ingsoc”, should read “Newspeak”…
Doubleplusungood!
[Maybe that could be the new Labour Party manifesto? SNP — doubleplusungood?? So much more “robust” than the SNP Bad policy of the past forty years… and it could trick two or three offline pensioners…]
Chris @ 11.39
I too caught a bit of the AN’s lovely manner whilst trying to have a right go at Stewart Hosie / SNP FFA
I’m sure AN gabbed on about how wonderful the UK is doing and in Scotland FFA would have a deficit of £7.6Bn leading to £10Bn over the next 5 years.
I did think , well there you AN the UK is doing a roaring trade … best economic improvement in Europe whilst north o the border we are going backwards.
So much for the Union and BT . he just made the case for Indi Scotland.
Happy to be corrected but I’m sick othe “Black Hole” crap . bearing in mind the IFS figures are only speculative and by all accounts missing lots of Income to Scotland ( as discussed on previous threads)
As a rough guide ;
UK deficit £90Bn
Scotland approx 9% population
Scotland’s share £8.1Bn but IFS says its only £7.6Bn ie we are better off under FFA/R by £0.5BN
It also shows we DO subsidise the UK .
I appreciate it is not trhat simple but I’m merely using the figures that are being thrown up by MSM as SNP Bad etc.
Ian B ,
I had my share of torture for today thanks to your link to JBs show .
J Baillie needed Beatie’s protection was the main highlight.
The plus point is that a fair amount of the callers are awake and understand whats going on.
Sadly many still need educating on how WM operates and fail to grasp the time it takes for legislation to actually start to happen.
All the GERS-related stuff is fascinating, but it will never be resolved. There are too many ‘known unknowns’, ‘unknown knowns’, and whatever other Rumsfeldesque permutations.
But how does one go about determining the ‘value’ of self-respect and standing up for basic values? How can anyone know what the effects on the national psyche will be, as and when (not ‘if’) Scotland reclaims her independence?
I’m sorry if those questions sound hopelessly naïve, but they are at the very foundation of what motivates many of us to keep this movement going. ‘Canny’ Scots, according to BTUKOK mythology, are wise and should be respected – their canniness is a pragmatic approach to the Union, (i.e., nudge-nudge, wink-wink, we’re doing okay out of this, so – three cheers for Her Majesty!!! – we’re still onboard. Sorted!).
The ‘canny Scot’ narrative bears no more resemblance to reality than the Disney Uncle McScrooge character. The Scots whose votes made the crucial difference last September were the elderly, many of whom had been frightened witless by precisely targeted campaigns involving co-operation between the national Tory and Labour parties’ seniormost strategists, in cahoots with long-toothed civil servants and the usual suspects in the MSM.
If Jackie Baillie’s performance on this morning’s Beattie show is even remotely indicative of SLab’s strategy for maintaining whatever clout it still retains in Scotland, the whole lot of them would be as well handing in their notice first thing on Monday. They have nothing to offer, and can’t deliver on what they promised.
AS’s warning re non-delivery of The Vow is taking shape with every passing day – the wrath of those who voted ‘No’ under false pretences is something which even Jackie Baillie, clearly, cannot get her head around.
Never mind – she’ll have plenty of time to think about it, in the latter half of next year.
@yesindyref2 says: 12 June, 2015 at 10:55 pm:
Great post, yesindyref2 but one wee important point. You say, ” … So though Scotland is compared to the UK as a whole, it’s not compared to the rUK, though Unionists seem to think it is, as in the actually poorly written and inaccurate infamous IFS report, and update. Which are very lazy pieces of work as well as being “poorly worded”.
However, the truth is that the United Kingdom is legally a bipartite Union of Kingdoms and the Kingdom of England signed the Treaty of Union but it included the countries of Wales and Ireland.
So the concept we now have of four countries but with Westminster the de facto parliament of England knocks the whole thing out of kilter.
It makes a total nonsense of the concept of both the idea of a United Kingdom, (which in fact is NOT other than a Royal Realm). Westminster is legally, “The Parliament of the United Kingdom”, and that being so there cannot actually be such a thing as an rUK if the two original Kingdoms part company.
The legal Status Quo Ante of any bipartite agreement, (think for example a marriage), is that if one partner gets a divorce then the bipartite marriage ends for both partners. You cannot have one partner still united with the other after the other partner leaves.
So the whole set-up at present of four countries but with England as the master race at Westminster rather mucks up your statement of, “So though Scotland is compared to the UK as a whole, it’s not compared to the rUK,”
It’s that old, old scam of the Establishment propaganda confusing terms. A Kingdom is a royal realm and a country is a country but the UK is NOT a country – it is a union of two kingdoms one of which contains three countries.
True enough, GB.
I prefer to think of him as this kind of guy in an idiom he would abhor:
link to m.youtube.com
Incidentally, why can’t we institute a Wings Juke Box Jury with Thepnr, Paula Rose, Brian DTT and Michael McCabe?
Now, that’s what I call entertainment!
Well all things considered, I am pleased that the SNP have called the Brit Nats out on FFA or whatever folks want to call it.
It does mean that the Brit Nats are now between a rock and an even harder place. They vote it down and they will look like liars and if they vote for the SNP amendment then they will have to open up the books and we know they are never going to let that happen. The truth will bury their precious rotten corrupt Union.
Am I being cynical?
Robert Peffers
I did say “I’d like to think”. I generally try to get the absolute utility out of a resource, so I try to view any counter argument as an opportunity. Or to put it another way, I conform to stereotype. I’m tight. 😉
@Tinto Chiel
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors … though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.”
Aye, that’ll be East Kilbride fur sure.
Ian Brotherhood
Sorry Ian, I wasn’t arguing against you. In fact, I wasn’t aware of your post. Genuine coincidence. I was being tong-in-cheek, anyway. 😉
Spooooky.
@ Scunterbunnet.
Pretty much, but I don’t remember the old rag mats. Just lots of snow going down my wellies and red rings below my knees. As Ronnie Anderson would say, you are awful…..
And Ronnie, did you forget to lock up your wee hut earlier today? One of your wee pet trolls seems to have got out.
Stop moaning about the BBC and do something about it 31hours left
link to indiegogo.com
Or
http://Www.independencelive.net
£2,500 needed
@Graeme Doig says: 11 June, 2015 at 10:39 pm:
“SNP need to nail this FFR issue. If they have concerns over the effects of it’s implementation (and i’m sure they have) they need to find a way of explaining this properly.”
Whoa! There, Graeme. I think you may be missing the whole point there.
I may well be wrong but here is how I see it.
The three Party Leaders, (pre-GE), made a signed public vow in the Daily Record and it was backed up, and claimed by Gordon Brown, to be FFA. That was all things to Scotland except Defence & Foreign affairs. Not one of those leaders contradicted that vow nor did they dispute the use of their signatures as illegal.
Thus the Scottish Government can legally claim the vow stands as a legal promise by all three main unionist parties and thus what is now being offered is NOT what the vow had promised. So their claim for FFA is exactly what was vowed.
They rightly expect to get what was promised and if it is not provided they have every right to claim the GE results are bogus and the GE result gained illegally. Perhaps even taking their case to the EU, Council of Europe or even the UN or the International Courts.
At worse it will have two effects – it will turn many NO voters to YES voters as they will feel cheated and it will provide the conditions that our First Minister described in order to call another referendum on the grounds the first was won by cheating. That, of course, depends upon the electorate demanding a referendum.
Remember another fact. The SNP are a true democratic party. All members have equal rights to table motions to change party policy at branch level. If such motions are seconded and not opposed they go forward for National Conference. If opposed or amended they are debated at branch level and either dumped, amended or go forward to National conference.
So if a majority of SNP card carrying members demand a policy change, (including another referendum), then that will become party policy.
@CamB –
Hey mister, no offence taken, or even noticed!
Comments are appearing stagger-wise, and I often miss the new ones ‘twixt subbing new ones, as I’m sure we all do. The WOS ’20-min’ delay is becoming something of a leg-end, albeit one I’m sure we could all do without.
Having said that, over the past 36 hours or so I’ve noticed a couple of my own comments appearing within seconds of posting. Strange, but true…
🙂
@Robert Peffers
For the economic comparisons, the legal status of the UK and rUK don’t actually matter, we’re just looking at the comparative economies of the entity called Scotland, compared to the entity containing all four bits, and / or the entity containing the other three bits that aren’t Scotland. For the sake of making it easy, call them UK and rUK, though we might just as easily talk about Angus, John and Fred to avoid confusion.
But constitutionally there are a lot of issues with the term UK, and indeed rUK though a handy label, makes no sense at all. How call you have the “rest” of a United Kingodm which is no longer united, or, in the words of Conservative and ex Scotland Secretary Michael Forsyth “When Scotland leaves the UK, the UK ceases to exist”?
Practically though and not seemingly explored is that constitutionally after a YES vote, the UK Government would actually have had no mandate, no legality, no constitutional right to negotiate on behalf of the rUK as there is no legally existent rUK, and questionnably considering it’s impending non-existence, the UK itself.
There is a way around that as far as I can see, the Queen would have to dissolve the UK Parliament, and attempt to reconvene the English parliament which would be interesting as nobody was actually elected to the English parliament, only the UK parliament. Then taht parliament would ahve to remake its treaties with Northern Irealnd, and then it can talk for the “rUK” or whatever it would choose to call itself.
Curiously nobody on the unionist side ever got interested in that anomaly. Denial was always the problem for them, which is perhaps why there is still such a deep-rooted trauma, rooted as it is in forthcoming non-existence. Perhaps a few sessions on the couch with a qualified constitutional psychiatrist would do the job for them?
@Cadogan Enright … your first link to the Indy Live fundraisers seems to be deid. This should work…
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/going-forward–2#/story
… and if anybody else is still up reading websites at this ungodly hour, shame on baith the 2 of us.
@scunnertbunnet
Lol that’ll be me then 😉
re: the constitutional status of the three rumpUK countries.
I don’t think it’s as serious for the brit establishment as some here are making out.
The status quo ante 1707 (according to English Law) was that Ireland was subject to the English crown as expressed in the English Parliament, and that Wales was just part of the kingdom of England. So, when we leave, they just need to say that UK parliament was successor to the English Parliament, and that all it subsequent acts were assented to by the English crown. The English monarch can then convene a parliament, whose first act is to proclaim a United Kingdom of England(!)and (Northern) Ireland.
We can ride off into the sunset, and they can keep a “UK”. Lets not give the unionists more to worry about than just losing the right to steal our resources.
Many moons since anyone posted link to this one.
‘The Iraq Body Count’
‘From June 1st – June 10th: 433 civilians killed’
Huh? What?
That must’ve been on the news, eh?
Must’ve missed it…haven’t been buying papers lately, but it would’ve been in there. No-one mentioned anything about it.
Horribleness. Denial. New Labour, Tony, all that euphoria in ’97, Spitting Image days backthenabouts when Thatcher was a puppet we could laugh at.
Who’s the puppet now?
Who pays the puppet?
Who constructed the fucking puppet in the first place?
link to iraqbodycount.org
There are so many UK fiddles in regard to SE versus the rest of the UK it would require a book to itemise them. For example, the ‘invisible’ ‘infrastructure’ spend fiddle where London has been getting about £5000 per head per year but Geordieland, say, only around £200.
However to pick up on another one Bob mentioned.
Electrical power.
In particular, where generation distant from the South of England has a greater charge while those in the South have a negative charge (subsidy).
Many know about the rather strange transmission connection charge anomaly. Strange, because it runs counter to any normal supply and demand logic. Normally, those who have to import a product have to pay a price which covers any extra transportation cost incurred and usually with a premium on top as well.
It is analogous to, say, a mail order company not only absorbing the cost to deliver to more distant parts like the Scottish Highlands, but to pay the recipient a bonus for doing so. As I said, conceptually strange. And certainly, the opposite from that experienced by mail order recipients in the Highlands.
However, the rationale, such as it is, goes like this.
“We want to encourage electricity providers to do so close to the main centres of population”.
Remember that.
Even sounds reasonable in a way, provided you ignore the fact that transmission costs for electricity are not significant, it isn’t transported in diesel burning lorries with waged drivers, and distribution costs for electricity, which are rather more significant are largely down to the number of substations and mains distribution networks and are accrued where the population is based, not where it is generated.
So why should the more distant electricity generating companies, which really means their customer base, have to pick up the tab for this?
Now let us consider, the even stranger, but not nearly as well known, tolerated nimbyism of England, Southern England in particular, in regard to on shore wind production. The relevance will become apparent.
At the outset here, I have to say I am not blaming English nimbyists, every country, including Scotland, has wind turbine nimbyists. No, it is rather the degree to which that nimbyism in England has been not just tolerated but catered for at government level which is quite extraordinary.
England, like the rest of the British Isles, Denmark, Northern Germany and Southern Sweden, is slap bang in the middle of the most cost effective on shore wind corridor in Europe.
Yet while every other Western European country has embraced the need to support on shore wind power, even those well outside the optimum corridor, like Spain, England, especially Southern England, only has a token amount.
Some illustrative ball park figures. Scotland, Ireland, Denmark, Germany and Spain for example, have an installed on shore wind power capacity of around 500 megawatts, give or take, for every million of population, England is less than 20 (twenty) megawatts per million.
It has been described as a ‘Saudi Arabia that refuses to drill for oil’.
It is, in fact, an international disgrace.
Now there are two other countries on the Western seaboard of Europe who do produce significantly less than the average.
Norway, but being 100%+ for renewables produced electricity already courtesy of their enormous hydro electricity potential, can be excused.
France, well it has around 80% nuclear electricity production, but note that even so, France still has many times the on shore wind power generating capacity per head than does England and in fact exports electricity to England.
England has neither of these excuses, and indeed is a net electricity importer.
Now, and please bear with me, it is relevant. Regarding off shore as opposed to on shore.
Off shore wind turbines produces electricity which costs twice that of on shore.
Even Germany, which has had a very strong Green political presence for decades, did not look at going off shore until they had used up their on shore capacity. And even then, on discovering it would cost more than anticipated, they have reigned back considerably in favour of promoting cheaper solar panel electricity instead.
But England has taken the, to other countries perspective, mind boggling decision to go massively off shore before using anything like their on shore potential.
There is more off shore wind power capacity off the coast of England already, than the rest of the World put together.
But the off shore wind turbine generators off the coast of England need fear not, because the Government subsidy for off shore is twice that of on shore.
In money terms, on shore is around 8p per unit and off shore is about 15p a unit. Note that is a difference of 7p per unit of electricity which either tax payers or leccy bill payers will have to pick up.
Note also that that 15p is even more than the recent historical cost of a unit to the consumer (about 10p).
So, at last, to get to the point.
If there is a rationale which says subsidy can be used to encourage electricity companies to make electricity close to population centres, how can there also be a subsidy which encourages the exact opposite by making it possible for electricity companies to site wind turbines away from the population centres, off shore? Hmmmm?
Britain, which was around the middle of the European league re electricity cost, is in the process of going right to the very top. Not helped by the Hinkley point farce.
It is a huge price that UK tax payers and electricity bill payers are going to have to pay for indulged English nimbyism and Government hubris.
British electricity generation policy is ludicrously illogical.
But will that ever see the light of day in the establishment controlled media or will they continue instead to whinge about far smaller subsidies to Scotland’s on shore capacity?
I guess that question was rhetorical.
@Chic McG (2.15) –
I hope your comment doesn’t get ‘lost’ just because it’s the middle of the night.
I’m not qualified to provide any meaningful response, but someone will have to.
More power to ye mister.
🙂
@Chic McGregor
Thanks for that. I swear I’ve read more fact-based, well reasoned explanations of how things work in a year on WoS than I did in the previous 20 years of getting my information from MSM. Keep it up.
Also thanks to Robert Peffers for the taxation/statistics info.
CameronB @10.55pm
“Robert Peffers
Are you giving it tight to my, as yet absent, date? 😉
Perhaps I’m too soft, by I’d rather like to think of Colin as misguided, rather than malicious.”
Im with you on that Cameron, its people like Colin Rippey we need on side if we’re to win this, I think he’s real as well.
And to a degree he knows what he’s talking about, he just needs the scales taken from his eyes to see that what Westminster say is not necessarily the truth or even in the same room as the truth!
Keep it up Colin, yer a great wee sparrin partner fur oor champion boxers, (and we have a few)
____________________________________________________________
Chris @11.39pm
“I was watching the Daily Politics show today and I think I must have misunderstood Andrew Neil as seemed to be saying if Scotland had a deficit of £10B it would have the largest deficit in Europe.”
Well he’s wrong because Jackie Ballie who is well known as the font of all knowledge says it will be 14billion and every hospital in Scotland would be closed,
so there!
____________________________________________________________
Brilliant post Chic,
from a young man I always held that Ted Heaths illogical and (in my view) criminal energy policy was the reason England is in the position its in today, his laissez faire policies led to the state British energy production is in today where they are subject to the whims of other (not necessarily) friendly countries,
The perceived wisdom is that because we don’t buy power from Gazprom we are not subject to Russian financial warfare,
Good luck with that one, if Russia closed the pipeline though the Ukraine to the west just watch companies like EDF take advantage of that and the UK would be hostage to the French,
ps the whole reason for the policies Heath took was to take on the coal miners, a policy Thatcher so ruthlessly completed 10 years later, because in their mind it was better to be held hostage by foreign power suppliers than the men who powered the UK through two world wars, way to go with that kind of loyalty Tories.
NOT (nor ever will be) FORGIVEN!
link to goodenergy.co.uk
Just been catching up.
Some great posts thanks to all.
One of my hobby horses has been mentioned a few times – the independent IFS.
I encourage you to take 5 mins on their web site to check their funding and management executive.
They are 64.1% indirectly funded by Dept Business, Inovation and Skills thro Economic Social Research Council headed by an establishment figure Rachal Lomax and the executive committee and council have people from HMRC, HM Treasury, Department of Work and Pensions, Bank of England and even Vicky Pryce. KPMG and Pricewaterhousecoopers for good measure.
Follow the money.
Independent?
In the recent claims that the oil in Scottish waters was worth perhaps only a total of £2 billion, much was made of the cost of decommissioning redundant oil platforms, which it was claimed would practically wipe out the value of the oil being produced over the next thirty years. This cost would fall in its entirety on an independent Scotland.
Surely those who benefitted over forty years from the oil production from the redundant platforms, ie the UK Treasury, must be responsible for decommissioning costs, and, at most Scotland would be responsible for less than 10%.
Just another fear story. These people are already cranking up their arguments for the next referendum. Too poor, too wee, too stupid etc. let’s hope the No voters are not so gullible next time.
By the way instead of removing the platforms there is a good case for many of them to be toppled in situ and left as artificial reefs. Where this has been tried in ite Gulf of Mexico it has resulted in a great increase of fish catches as it creates areas where destructive trawling is impossible and fish can find shelter and food.
Wow, the Unionists are out in force pushing the Daisley ‘essay’ on the SNP. Has he overtaken David Torrance now nobody bothers with his obsessive writings?
History re-written
This morning by Ian Gray On Reporting Scotland
“If it wasn’t for the Labour Party in Scotland we wouldn’t have things like Free Tuition Fees, Free Personal Care for the Elderly and Free Prescriptions”
“If it wasn’t for Scottish Labour we wouldn’t have a Scottish Parliament because we Introduced it”
Now call me silly and slap me on the Bum but I thought the SNP did the aforementioned stuff and the Scottish Parliament was brought about out of fear by The UK Labour Party that the SNP were becoming a threat
Although if you read carefully what he said he didn’t claim those policies for himself he just claimed they wouldn’t have happened without Labour (Sneaky That)
The programme was about how Scottish Labour could manipulate the List Vote to get back in
Tom Greatrex was also on the show wonder what that means
Ian Gray went on to explain how Nicola Sturgeon had failed three times to win her seat (She’s definitely not good enough)
Then praised Ruth Davidson for being such a talent for the Conservative Party
Now I thought Labour lost because they’re pretty rubbish but not only that I thought they lost because they keep getting caught telling big fat porkies and lastly because they’re Total Effing Amateurs
Now we look forward to the Great and Powerful Murphs re-writing of “The Advice Tablet of Scottish Labour things to get us back in” suggestiony ruley thingy’s
Which we will all have to go away and Digest, Ingest think about throw up about and then Abandon
Aah, Roll on Holyrood…I wonder what’s going to happen
Today is the day that Jim Murphy resigns.
Whatever else happens today that wee thought will put a right joyous spring in my step
Result
Fireproofjim @ 9.42
There will no doubt be costs involved in the decommissioning of North Sea oil platforms but there will also be opportunities to create jobs and build up expertise in what will become a global activity.
link to theguardian.com
Where there is muck there is brass – as the saying goes.
Oh and by the way-
FUCK PROJECT FEAR 3/4/5 and 6
I’m going with reasons to cheerful instead cos there’s so many to choose from lol!
You lucky lucky people!
O/T
I just had a look at the essay (as highlighted by REV (on thon twitter nonsense)) by Stephen Daisley over on STV, and whilst some of it is patent rubbish, he totally nails the failure of the unionists both here in Scotland and especially at Westminster (as seen very clearly this week);
“Unionists have no one to blame but themselves. Ten words saved their hide on September 18, 2014: “Nothing else than a modern form of Scottish Home Rule”. Ten words they had to redeem, ten words they reneged on. The Union was lost for ten words.”
On that, if nothing else, Stephen is bang on target. It should be inscribed on the tombstone of this disreputable, unwanted, dysfunctional and wholly undemocratic union. Time for the end of London rule over Scotland.
Source: link to news.stv.tv
Call me confused dot com I,ve listened to that Jackie Baillie interview if we get FFA 1, we,ll have a black hole deficit of £7 billion.If we get FFA 2 that £7 billion will double to £14 billion.
Am I in need of ah rubber room ?.
@Chic
Enjoyed the post at 2.15. Well worth folk having a looksee.
@Alastair
Oh its not just where the money comes from or their political affiliations, its their participation in the big lie. Their aid in creating it, selling it and perpetuating its existence.
Beginning of course with their ability to see Scotland’s fiscal future based on static economic models… yeah, apparently mystic Meg is consulted on a regular basis and Russell Grant is on speed dial in case of emergency. In a world where budgets and circumstances change on a daily basis for the average businessman and success or failure is based on choices made, or not and a hundred other factors, Scotland’s future is static and unremittingly black.
Their insistence that a debt and deficit brought about by governmental and establishment incompetence, not to mention a fair dose of corporate self interest is beyond the wit and application of Jock and Jeannie public to either understand or have a differing opinion on solutions. That not only are we well aware of the causes of our current situation, but that we may not be willing to trust those who caused such carnage with the charge of navigating a safe course forward.
In short their ego needs deflating and the media hype and reverence surrounding every bloody sound bite needs to be viewed through more sceptical glasses. We need to place less baseless trust in these ‘respected’ institutions and think tanks.
Dr Jim (history re-written) Ian Gray was clearly talking rubbish with all these free things Wullie Rennie claimed it first, ask Jackie Baillie
Creepy Jim is going to formally resign as Scottish Labour leader later today.
Lots of posts here indicate clearly how non-productive it is arguing about figures provided by our enemies
This is their chosen battle ground. They can throw up figures daily and watch us getting swamped going round in circles combatting them
The figures,accurate, partial, distorted or whatever are essentially irrelevant.
They are figures produced out of a Scottish economy trapped in a bust British economy and provided to us on the assumption that we would run a Scottish economy the same way.
Why would we want to independent?
Whatever the true figures of how much export duty is collected from whiskey, there’s also the ‘balance of payments’ issue to consider.
This has a big impact on a nations credit rating, and without the generous rating that the UK enjoys right now, Westminster would be in serious trouble.
Take the Oil, Gas, Whiskey Salmon Food products, etc etc, most of which are currently recorded as exported from England…
(because Scotland’s infrastructure has been so badly underfunded we are unable to export them from our own ports)
…Now remove these Billions of exports from the RUK (when Scotland is independent) and hey presto, The rUK has a big financial black hole in it’s balance of payments.
Scotland on the other hand has a huge bonanza, as out balance of payments mean that we will have a Gold plated Triple A credit rating and will be able to borrow at tiny % rates.
That’s before we enjoy the jobs bonanza from building and then maintaining the infrastructure needed to export our own hugely popular food and drink products, as well as the jobs required to collect taxes etc.
Scotland has the potential to be a very rich country if we run things ourselves, or even with FFA, so expect to see Westminster flap around crazy and perform a complete U-turn as the SNP call their FFA bluff.
@starlaw
Damn!!
@yesindyref2 says: 13 June, 2015 at 1:13 am:
” … For the sake of making it easy, call them UK and rUK, though we might just as easily talk about Angus, John and Fred to avoid confusion.”
Well, yesindyref2, you can call me pedantic if you wish but to me it is far simpler, and highlights the Establishment’s propaganda, if we just call it what it is. The Establishment has played this game since 1603 but there is no good reason we should conform to it nor to accept it.
Their game is to make the public conform to their mantra and that mantra was condensed by David Mundell when he quoted from the government commissioned paper they had their, “Independent”, legal experts produce during the referendum. Mundell quoted it as, “The Treaty of Union extinguished the Kingdom of Scotland and renamed the Kingdom od England as The United Kingdom”.
Now that is utter claptrap legally, logically and actually. The southern Establishment are, as they have since historic records began, continue to re-write history and if we comply with it we do their propaganda for them.
We now have in effect what their propaganda has been aiming for since written history began. They now have Westminster as the parliament of England that has devolved, (devolved power being power retained), England’s power to the other three countries of the United Kingdom. (Note the misuse of the terms Kingdoms and countries in that statement).
Now look at the rewritten historic facts :-
In 1603 the law in England, Wales & Ireland was, “The Divine Right Of Kings”, and the Kingdom of England used that law to annex Wales, (in 1284), and Ireland, (in 1542). In Scotland it had been established, (in 1320), that the monarchy were not legally sovereign as the people were. Under English Law therefore, when James I of Scotland inherited the English crown the correct legal action was for him to just tag on the Kingdom of England to his existing realm and that English Kingdom included the countries of both Wales & Ireland. It did not happen as the Scottish King was not appointed under Divine Right of Kings. Which is why his title became James I of England & VI of Scotland instead of James I of Great Britain & Ireland.
There was no Union of the crowns in 1603 but now watch what happened thereafter. First of all James moved to the Kingdom of England where he was sovereign over the countries of England, Wales & Ireland and continued to attempt to become sovereign over Scotland as well. He started up the use of the term United Kingdom but never had a united kingdom.
However the Establishment continued to assume there was a United Kingdom but wanted shot of their Scottish monarch and they did so in 1688 in what they called, “The Glorious Revolution”. This threw out their rightful king, (now James II), and imported the foreign King Billy & Queen Mary as their joint monarchs and they assumed that this also applied to the still independent Kingdom of Scotland. Thus began what the Establishment still calls, “The Jacobite rebellions”, but, as the Scottish Kingdom was still independent, the Scots could not rebel against a monarch not their own. It was thus Jacobite uprisings and continued even after the 1706/7 Act Of Union until 1745.
It was also the real reason that the English forced the Scottish parliamentarians to sign the Treaty of Union. This was no friendly freely signed treaty. The English Kingdom had operated the English Navigation Acts, (These were a series of laws restricting use of foreign ships for trade between Britain and its colonies & they included Scotland as a foreign country).This had Scots paying whatever the English Mercantile Marine dictated for imports and also paying whatever England dictated for exports to both England and English colonies.
Next up William Paterson, (a London Scot), who began the Bank of England was in Scotland and had headed the disastrous Darien Expedition as the Scottish landowners, (who were also the parliamentarians), tried to establish a Scottish colony of their own. Paterson was aided by his friend, Daniel Defoe, operating as an English undercover agent in Edinburgh. This was designed to bankrupt the Scottish Landowners and force the m to accept the Treaty of Union but there was also an English army massed across the borders and an English fleet standing off Berwick.
Now do you see that the misuse of the terms Country, Kingdom, UK, Britain, Great Britain and United Kingdom has been a long standing Establishment tactic to force us all to be English? How else can we translate the statement, “The Treaty of Union extinguished the Kingdom of Scotland and renamed the Kingdom of England as The United Kingdom”?
So why, Oh! Why are those who claim to be supporters of independence sit meekly by while the Establishment abuse such terms but even worse do the Establishment’s propaganda for the m by adopting their wrong usage of these terms?
Call it what it is – Westminster is indeed the unelected as such, De Facto Parliament of England. There is no other parliament of England and Westminster runs England as the United Kingdom, it finances England directly as The United Kingdom with United Kingdom money. It legislates for England under English Law and tags wee bits onto English legislation to accommodate the other UK countries.
If it walks like an English Parliament, talks as an English Parliament, legislates as an English Parliament, funds itself as an English Parliament and devolves English Powers to the rest of the United Kingdom Countries why are we calling it a United Kingdom Parliament?
Then, of course, if you have any remaining doubts, why do you conclude the 533 elected as United Kingdom members of that, “United Kingdom”, parliament from English constituencies are now attempting to prevent the, elected as United Kingdom Members, from the other three United Kingdom countries from voting upon what those 533, unelected as English Parliamentarians, dictate as being English Only Matters in their Parliament of England.
Cut through all the bullshit that we are being fed.
The Scots have been promised home rule. For decades parties and individuals have attempted to determine or shape what home rule means in pursuit of one agenda or another.
It means exactly what it says on the tin ‘HOME RULE’. Its not for politicians to determine its meaning, its for the people to determine and its for the politicians to deliver. We send our representation forward with our proposal and Westminster, as in any negotiation, will have their counter proposal. If neither come to an agreement for the sake of carrying the whole forward, then effectively the game is a’bogey. That’s when things get interesting.
A bill of goods was sold to the Scottish electorate during the election. BT, Westminster and their media played fast and loose with the terms home rule and devo max without a. promising a damn thing and b. defining what they considered either to be. They allowed the Scottish electorate to conjure images of what they considered those terms to mean and led them to believe that pain free delivery was possible. Its not and never was as we are now seeing demonstrated in editorial after editorial and debate after debate in chambers. Concessions can be won by our current representation, but I doubt that all powers barring foreign affairs and defence will be the end product.
The question for those who were convinced delivery of such home rule was possible is this, how do you feel about the actions of Westminster during and post both referendum and election now? More importantly, what are you going to do about it?
As many have said on here OIL is a bonus not a burden and Scotland’s economy is not dependent on it but does benefit from it. Whatever the tax revenue obtained from oil is , as has been pointed out elsewhere on this site , Scotland’s share is 8.1% of it. If we have FFA it would be 100% of it. Similarly with the “BLACKHOLE” we would inherit only 8.1% of it. Seems a win /win to me. Roll on the next Indyref!!
@ Tinto Chiel am ah Troll free zone.
Robert Peffers,
Superb, thanks for that.
I now loathe unionists even more though.
Overheard a conversation between a couple of cringers on Friday, my god they are so avaricious, shallow and servile.
Meanwhile, with each new raid against Scotland, Westminster’s unbroken list of hostility and dishonesty toward Scotland these past few years grows longer. It is a modern history of systematic abuse, exploitation and oppression, to match the atrocities of Scotland’s past at the hands of the English.
Against this pattern of behaviour, for Westminster to administer a truly clean Referendum in 2014, increasingly becomes ever harder to believe, because it was completely out of character.
In the Smith Commission, we see the true character of Westminster revealed. Devious and mean spirited. Had Indy14 been clean, then Smith would have been done clean as well. Instead, Westminster has sought to cheat Scotland out of the ‘next best thing to Home Rule’ as was promised in the Vow. In the way that Cameron and crew have dealt with Smith is the biggest clue to the IndyRef robbery.
It is one thing to lose the opportunity for freedom fair and square, but to have it stolen behind your back, as is looking more and more likely, as Westminster shows us through Smith, a fresh glimpse daily of it’s true feelings toward Scotland, is enough to fire up an entire electorate.
Which is why the Establishment regularly reinforces the myth with assurances that IndyRef must be accepted completely – and forgotten about, while unaware that in the failure to implement honestly the Smith devolution proposals, the integrity of the Referendum is seriously undermined.
The Vow was an integral part of the Referendum. The same intention applies to both inseparably. Cameron has no intention of allowing the Smith Proposals to be implemented; just as he had no intention of allowing the Referendum producing Independence for Scotland.
In the unfolding of Smith through parliament, we see Westminster in it’s true colours and can draw the obvious conclusion about Indy14.
IndyRef14 – The biggest robbery in history – and still Britain’s best kept secret.
For now.
The biggest adversary Scotland has, and indeed always had, is the Westminster run “Treasury”. From this all the manipulation of Scotland’s real earnings stem from.
They are experts at hiding things, manipulating everything.
This makes the hiding of the real facts on Scotland layered in lies and deceit. They have their sticky fingers in every statistic produced to make us feel poorer, less worthy.
They are our biggest enemy, and it is they that should be under an independent investigation of how Scotland has been abused from day one of this occupation, sorry, “Union”.
The true facts that concern all of us in Scotland need to be exposed.
While it is unlikely anyone would know where to start, it is a knowledge that wee Scots should all want to know. It would be the END of this corrupt “Union”.
@Scunterbunnet says: 13 June, 2015 at 2:05 am:
” … United Kingdom of England(!)and (Northern) Ireland.
We can ride off into the sunset, and they can keep a “UK”. Lets not give the unionists more to worry about than just losing the right to steal our resources.”
Actually it isn’t quite so simple, Scunterbunnet.
In fact the legal situation is quite different as there clearly is a difference in terms not addressed by the Establishment’s abuses of simple terms they have sought to change by their centuries old propaganda.
I refer to the still extant in the English Language as stated by the World’s accepted English Language experts of the Oxford Dictionary. And I quote : –
Kingdom – 1 – an organized community headed by a king.
2 – the territory subject to a king.
United Kingdom n. – Great Britain and Northern Ireland (until 1922, Great Britain and Ireland).
monarchy n. – 1 – a form of government with a monarch at the head.
2 – a state with this.
Constitutional monarchy :- is a form of government in which a king or queen acts as Head of State. The ability to make and pass legislation resides with an elected Parliament, not with the Monarch.
Country – an area of land that has, or used to have, its own government and laws.
So the definition of what constitutes a Kingdom is not necessarily the same thing as that which can be defined as a country.
Thereby hangs the tale. The United Kingdom is not the same entity as the Government of the United Kingdom. Let us make this quite clear for upon these definitions is the reality of what the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom Government legally are.
The United Kingdom, (and a kingdom is a royal realm), is a bipartite union of only two former independent kingdoms, (realms), and those two Kingdoms, (realms), are Scotland & England. This takes no account of the countries contained in those Royal Realms as the signatory, “Kingdom of England”, that signed the Treaty of Union of 1706/7 contained the three distinct countries of England, Wales and Ireland. Note that the country of Ireland partitioned as two different legislatures but Ireland remains a partitioned country.
Now we come to the next wrong Establishment claim. The United Kingdom is the bipartite realm of the monarch but it contains four countries and one of those four countries has partitioned into two distinct legislatures one of which can no longer be part of a kingdom as it became a republic.
Thus there is also a difference between the two constituent Kingdoms of the United Kingdom as only one of them is a Constitutional monarchy while the other does not have the monarchy as legally sovereign.
The legal status of the Parliament at Westminster is NOT The United Kingdom as that term, “United Kingdom”, refers to the joint realm of the Monarchy. Westminster is thus, “The Parliament of the United Kingdom”, that is the Parliament of the joint royal realm.
It is quite legally feasible that the two kingdoms agree to remain joint parts of the Royal realm and retain the joint monarchy but do not remain joint members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom and that parliament’s status quo Ante is a return to being the Parliament of the three country Kingdom of England.
That’s a lot more difficult to explain than it is to understand and all due to the centuries old Establishment propaganda that continues to abuse the English Language in its desperation for the Country of England to also annex the country an d kingdom of Scotland as it did with the princedom of Wales by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 and all Ireland by the Crown of Ireland Act of 1542.
Does anyone still believe that their abuses of the terms Kingdom and Country are just accidental? Always remember the obnoxiously sudo-superiority of the despicable David Mundell who quoted the claims of two Establishment bought and paid for professors who produced for the Establishment a very long paper as , “The Treaty of Union extinguished the Kingdom of Scotland and renamed the Kingdom of England as the United Kingdom”. The Treaty of Union, nor even either Act of Union did no such thing. If you have never already done so here is a link to the Scottish Act of Union : –
link to rahbarnes.demon.co.uk
@Robert Peffers
I wouldn’t call you pedantic Robert, in fact I commend your sticking to the facts, and highlighting the nature of the UK. A couple of years ago in the Herald I took great delight in quoting the treaty of union to some including Michael McKeown of the West Midlands, every time he or they tried to say that the UK wasn’t formed until 1801 so would keep going when Scotland “left the UK”, or that in any case it would keep going when Scotland “left the UK”.
The UK government commissioned that legal advice paper, but its mandate as the two authors put in the preamble, was to examine the rUK’s claim to be the continuing UK, and the conclusion they came to to support this, was that Scotland was subsumed into an enlarged England which then renamed itself the UK of GB. That was their mandate. To get there they rode roughshod over the Treaty of Union, and decided it was extinct, even though specifically mentioned via the Acts of Union in the Scotland Act 1998 – a fact they didn’t even consider. In 1998, the Treaty of Union was still extant (not extinct) in the eyes of the Westminster UK Government, after 295 years, yet Crawford & Boyle concluded it was extinct and non-exigent 16 years after that 295 years. Well blow me down with stupidity and being directed to reach a conclusion whatever the evidence against. Or quite simply, receiving instructions as like a QC, to argue one side of a case.
So no, please do keep talking about the bipartite agreement, because quite simply we nearly all fall into that trap, of repeating the insidious propaganda that pours forth from that UK establishment which wishes to suborn the legality of Scotland, and our rights.
In the words of Michael Forsyth, Tory, ex-Scottish Secretary in the House of Lords: “If Scotland leaves the United Kingodm, the United Kingdom ceases to exist“.
@Robert Peffers
Oh the irony.
We have you stating:
Dependant upon how many installations in the Scottish Territorial Waters, (and including the several thousand Sq Mls stolen by the UK), are under maintenance or other shut downs at the time the answer is around 95% on a geographic basis of whatever the present reported Extra-Regio Territories is credited with earning.
Now, unless you do your own proper research first, just stop wasting our collective time with these spurious points for you know, as well as I do, that if Scots were actually being subsidised by England, or even if we were just getting our fair share, we would have been thrown out of your evil Union hundreds of years ago.
So you have deftly suggested that “somehow” we are to take at face value that you are correct and that I have “not done my own proper research”. My research is nothing more than GERS itself.
GERS estimates Scotland’s share of North Sea revenue to be 83.8%. How has GERS come up with their estimate. From GERS methodology:
An alternative approach is to apportion a geographic share of North Sea revenue to Scotland. In order to estimate this share, GERS draws upon academic research carried out by Professor Alex Kemp and Linda Stephen from the University of Aberdeen. Professor Kemp is Professor of Petroleum Economics and Director of Aberdeen Centre for Research in Energy Economics and Finance (ACREEF) at the University of Aberdeen. Professor Kemp and Linda Stephen have published extensively on licensing and taxation issues on the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS). Professor Kemp is the author of “The Official History of North Sea Oil and Gas”, and is considered to be a leading expert in UK petroleum economics.
We have your estimate of 95% and GERS estimate of 83.8%. GERS makes use of academics with decades of experience in the field. You have? What was it you said again:
Now, unless you do your own proper research first, just stop wasting our collective time with these spurious points
Here’s a snippet of what I wrote earlier in this thread with regards to the attitudes of people on this site to GERS:
Now, if you’d rather accept “the opinions of some people on the Internet who have nothing to back up their figures” as opposed to the Scottish Government themselves (you know, the same Scottish Government that has been run by the SNP since 2007) then that is entirely up to you.
I put it to you that you are nothing more than “some guy on the Internet”.
I put it to you that you have “guessed” what the % share would be.
I put it to you that you are in denial about the content of GERS.
But…actually you’re more than that. You appear to have credence on this site with the other contributors who occasionally chuck in a pejorative statement or two and resort to bizarre conclusions about the attitudes of anyone who disagrees with them.
This to me is the problem with this site and indeed the growing ever larger collective of “grievance seeking separatists” that are consuming all before them in the Scottish political world.
It is akin to the type of mindset that people in religious cults have, they are unable mentally to contemplate that their own belief systems are wrong to any degree.
Now lets move onto your other points made in a comment later on the Bank of England.
I will preface this by stating that I do not for one minute believe that if Scotland becomes independent that “what is left over from what was the UK (as I believe there’s no appropriate description that you will accept)” will turn round and say to Scotland “sorry, we’re not interested in entering into any form of currency union with you, feel free to do whatever you want in terms of whatever you want for a currency”.
I don’t believe that is what would happen but given that the Tories are back in (and look like they’ll be back in for at least the next election too as Labour are in turmoil) and if anyone was going to deny iScotland a currency union it’s the Tories.
So we have to consider that iScotland would be faced with a challenge on currency.
But you somehow think that The Bank of England would be “shared” in whatever scenario arose.
If there was no currency union, the Bank of England is fundamentally the taxpayers of “”what is left over from what was the UK”.
There’s no asset as such, there’s no “see that mahogany meeting table in meeting room 4 on the fourth floor, we’d like that sent up to Edinburgh as part of our share please”.
The currency *is* The Bank of England as the Central Bank, and the taxpayers who are effectively the guarantor acting as The Lender of Last Resort.
For an iScotland to use the £, fine, of course it could. It’s just a currency isn’t it? Or is it?
But…what would be the situation when an iScotland was faced with the scenario of having expenditure greater than revenue? (or to be less euphemistic, how would iScotland cope with a deficit).
They would require to raise funds by selling bonds. And note this is how nations fund deficits, they sell bonds, they don’t borrow. The only time a nation borrows is when they have to go cap in hand to the IMF.
How would they be able to sell bonds? How would the buyer of the bond have any confidence? The buyer of bonds would be asking “who is the backer of this bond”. Who is the lender of last resort they would want to know? It wouldn’t be the Bank of England because there’s no currency union.
Who would it be? It would be “the iScottish taxpayer” who would have to have some sort of institution behind them – a Central Bank – wait what?
You can argue all you want about what the technical nature of the Bank of England is, but the fundamentals are that the Bank of England is co-joined with the tax payers of the citizens in the country it is in, and the currency it backs is the £.
And once again this is another of the questions that there was no answer to last year, it is in fact the most fundamental question of all. The only way for iScotland is truely be independent is to have it’s own currency or be in a formal currency union.
If an iScotland went on it’s own and had no formal currency union it would have no relationship with The Bank of England, none whatsoever. None, nada (oh I forgot, the works of art hanging in the main foyer, iScotland would get half of them I suppose).
Wuffing Dug 12.52
“Avaricious, shallow and servile” – sums up most no voters/unionists so aptly.
Ahm nickin it
@Colin Rippey
As far as the discrepancy between revenue and oil share is concrerned, the revenue is oil & gas, not just oil, and a substantial amount of that gas is off the English coast not the Scottish one, perhaps 40% perhaps 60% I forget, I guess you or I could find out if we could be bothered.
But 95% of the oil is off the Scottish coast, and the oil fields straddling the border are the older mature fields, so that 95% is going to grow, not decrease, as the new Shetland (and perhaps West coast fields) come on line.
Hence the difference between 83% and 95%.
Bank of England and currency, sorry too busy cutting the grass before it rains.
@Colin Rippey says: 13 June, 2015 at 4:51 pm:
“So you have deftly suggested that “somehow” we are to take at face value that you are correct and that I have “not done my own proper research”. My research is nothing more than GERS itself.”
Indeed so, Colin, that was the point. Your figures use the GERS figures. So I suggested you do your own research. I was around when the first set of GERS figures were trotted out by the Tory Government to convince the Scottish people that Scotland was too wee, too poor and too bloody stupid to run their own country.
“We have your estimate of 95%”
That is not an estimate, Colin, that is the actual figures for oil & gas taken from the figures for Extra-Regio Territories. Then the proportion subtracted for what lies in English territorial waters. The remainder can only be from Scottish waters. The small variations are due to there always being a percentage of installations off-line for some reason or other. Note I quoted a percentage of the whole and not a monetary value.
Now, unless you do your own proper research first, just stop wasting our collective time with these spurious points
“I put it to you that you are in denial about the content of GERS.”
In that assumption you are 100% correct for the very good reason that I’ve been around a lot longer that the GERS figures and know their history and original purpose. You do know what that purpose was – or am I wrong and you don’t know?
” … and resort to bizarre conclusions about the attitudes of anyone who disagrees with them.”
Not so, Colin, the folks on here will listen and judge the commenter upon their input. They tend to be very fair in their assessments and most are quite adept at picking up they not infrequent planted troll by the way these trolls seen to follow exactly the same scripts and agendas. As do you.
Yep! and right there is that mantra and you even placed it in quotes for us “grievance seeking separatists” . Yet you seem to think we are the ones with the grievances. You use such pejorative terms but cannot accept we are the electorate of one equally sovereign Kingdom in a bipartite agreement between Kingdoms who are being treated as if we were an enemy.
We are partners in this so called, “United Kingdom”, who now find ourselves treated as just another part of our partner’s kingdom. The United Kingdom is not a legal union of four countries, It is a Union of two Kingdoms of which Scotland is one partner. Wales became part of the Kingdom of England by the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 and Ireland became a part of the Kingdom of England in 1542 by the Crown Of Ireland Act and all three of the countries of the Kingdom of England were part of the Kingdom of England that Signed the Treaty of Union in 1706/7.
Yet today we find ourselves treated as just one other part of the Kingdom Of England by an Establishment parliament at Westminster that actually has no elected members in a parliament of England. There is no Parliament of England, Colin. No one is elected to run England as an Elected member of the parliament of England.
That means the United Kingdom is no longer a united Kingdom for that parliament at Westminster has no one elected to run England all 533 of those members from English constituencies are elected to run the United Kingdom, (a bipartite union of Kingdoms).
We have read the report produced for the Establishment that attempts to say the Kingdom of Scotland no longer exists. If that were the case then there is no United Kingdom, no Kingdom of England but there is still a Kingdom of Scotland.
Now let’s see you wiggle out of this one Colin.
When the old parliament of England ended the parliament at Westminster met and dissolved itself. However, in Edinburgh, the old Scottish parliament never met but was prorogued and a proclamation shouted around the streets of the capital to that effect. Then when the new parliament was officially opened in the presence of her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of Scots, it was declared reconvened by Winnie Ewing and you can watch the ceremony here : –
link to news.bbc.co.uk
Now I’ve had enough of your insults to both my country and my intelligence. Take yourself off for it is you and your kind who are the ones ending this union and I’ll leave you with the words of David Mundell who quoted from a UK government funded paper and written by two English Professors –
“The Treaty of Union extinguished The Kingdom of Scotland and renamed the Kingdom of England as The United Kingdom”.
How dare the English Establishment treat my Kingdom and country in this manner? That, Colin, is what has separated the two kingdoms. Westminster is now the de facto parliament of England attempting to lord it over the three devolved countries and their former Kingdom partner. Yet you wonder why we are about to end the union.
@Robert Peffers a wonderful,wise Scot with the knowledge of Scottish history I am in awe of!!!
Well done Robert you lay our history out in front of us with wonderful ease,you are part of the story that makes our country’s heart beat. Power to your pen…I just love reading your wise and honest words.
I think you should put ALL of your Truths in a pdf file for all of us to use. Keep it up, we’re getting there! 😉
@Robert Peffers
When you trot out your “blasts from the past” all I see in my head is David Starkey, the nutcase historian who seems to believe “he was there”, he knew what was going on in whatever King’s head.
What has anything you’ve just said got to do with the future?
Take last year’s referendum. There was uncertainty that a referendum result would be legal so a law was written to clarify beyond any doubt to ensure no nutjobs tried to challenge the result in court.
That’s what happens, time moves on, laws are written and treaties are signed that override and supersede what was there in the past.
What has the events of hundred’s of years ago got to do with the current time and the future? Other than being an interesting period of history, it is history and the state of what was Scotland in the late 17th century bears absolutely no comparison to the present day.
Here’s a snippet from the wikipedia article on The Darien Scheme:
The late 17th century was a difficult period for Scotland. The country’s economy was relatively small, its range of exports very limited and it was in a weak position in relation to England, its powerful neighbour (which it was in personal union with, but not yet in political union). In an era of economic rivalry in Europe, Scotland was incapable of protecting itself from the effects of English competition and legislation.[2] The kingdom had no reciprocal export trade and its once thriving industries such as shipbuilding were in deep decline; goods that were in demand had to be bought from England for sterling. Moreover, the Navigation Acts further increased economic dependence on England by limiting Scotland’s shipping, and the Royal Scots Navy was tiny.[2]
Better go and check the edits because this is not the picture you paint is it?
Maybe you should get on there and start editing eh.
Or…do you think “project fear” has been surreptitiously editing wikipedia?
@Colin
The Treaty of Union is still a ‘live’ legally recognised document. Even if it is 300 years old.
Scotland was not in great shape financially at the time, much of that to do with English embargoes of one form or another, but also because of the then still fairly recent atrocities stemming from Cromwell’s invasion. There was also a period of seven years poor crops due to a ‘mini ice age’.
The failed Darien scheme was an entirely private enterprise, resulting in losses for those who invested, but not adding to National debt.
However, at the time of Union England had the largest national debt in the World. Around £30 million, a huge sum in those days. Scotland, with about 1/5th the population of England, had virtually none.
The ‘compensation’ England agreed to pay to Scotland for it and its taxpayers taking on a share of the English debt was never anything like fully paid. What was paid was largely in dubious promissory notes from the English treasury rather than the promised gold.
The current value of that unpaid sum comes to many tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of pounds in today’s money.
The ‘benefits of Union’ too, were a helluva long time coming. Things got markedly worse in Scotland before they got better.
An almost immediate example, the South Sea bubble, which we seldom hear about and never in a Scottish context, was a quite criminal scam which occurred just after union. It completely and utterly dwarfed the losses to investors compared to the earlier Darien Scheme.
Plus the Darien Scheme at least made potential commercial sense whereas the creators of the South Sea Bubble knew that was a scam from the outset. And of course, Scots, as part of the Union, were given a second chance to lose their money.
Indeed the SSB is the first big example of government working corruptly with criminals to rip off the public and re-launder National debt.
Oh, and BTW, attacking the messenger doesn’t really cut it on this forum.
@Chic McGregor
The current value of that unpaid sum comes to many tens, possibly hundreds, of billions of pounds in today’s money.
Actually the £388k adjusted for inflation at 2% per year only comes to about £180 million.
Your argument should be that Scotland was given £388k to take on a share of English debt, so can we please pay back £388k adjusted for inflation, £180 million, and we no longer have a share of English debt.
(total oversimplification but still)
*£398k
Oops.