Eck and the Currant Bun

Today the Scottish Sun has come out in favour of the SNP. It's not a surprise, they've been edging towards the nats for weeks now, and have been soft on Eck and his colleagues for months.

The reason is obvious: the Tories want to damage Labour, the Sun wants to do what the Tories want and Rupert Murdoch wants David Cameron, his boy, to stay in power.

Rup wants Cameron and Cameron wants cuts. So, just like his UK buddy and his AmerAusie mentor, Eck wants cuts. It's as simple as that.

Today's Sun Editorial gave the game away, the Sun supports the SNP because the SNP is:

" ......  tackling the economic crisis head-on by cutting public spending faster than anywhere else in the UK...."

Tory cuts. SNP cuts. Whatever and whoever, it's the man in the street that suffers, whether the cuts are made by the Tartan Tories or the real Tories.

Is Government Debt "too high"?

Listen to any Tory (including those Tories that used be known as The Lib Dems) talking about the economy, and they are bound to mention the "horrendous cost of paying off our debt..."..."simply horrendous old boy, never seen anything like it since Lord Poodlebody had to sell of the country pile top pay orff his gaming debts at Boodles...". ... "historic...".

But is it "historic"?

LabourList has a interesting graph showing Debt Interest as a % of Government Spending since 1997/98. 
 

The figures are compiled from the Government's own statistics, from the Red Books for the chosen years. As you can see, debt interest on that calculation was considerably higher in 1997/8, when Labour took over from the Tories, than it is now.

So why the shock-horror? More germeine, why the cut-fast-and-quick strategy of the ToryDems? The debt burden is not "unprecedented", nothing like it. It has been higher for much longer and, more often than not, the Tories were to blame (if blame is he word).....

The cuts are being implemented "fast-and-deep",  not just to pay off the debt, but to to achieve the idealogical aims of the Conservatives: they have always wanted to privatise the NHS and other public services. If they can fool the country that the situation is more desperate than it really is (and it is bad, no doubt about it), they can make their cuts and pretend that, in the immortal words of their patron saint, Margaret Hilda Thatcher, There Is No Alternative....

...obfuscate, prestidigitate, bloviate...

The Daily Telegraph has received leaked information on the SNP's Local Income Tax policy that indicates that there is a £360-£400 million gap in what they say can be raised by a 3p levy and what the SNP's own Chief Economic Adviser says will be raised. The gap increases to £740-£770 million if the Westminster Government does not divert the money spent on Council Tax Benefit towards the LIT.

The document contains analysis from the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser to the Scottish government. It projects that around £2.2bn would be raised by council tax in this financial year, while local income tax at the 3p rate would raise between £1.46bn and £1.49bn, showing that the shortfall would sit between £366m and £396m if UK ministers gave Holyrood the £374m paid out in council tax benefit in Scotland. However, without this, the shortfall would increase to between £740m and £770m.

The Daily Telegraph has been trying to get the report released under an FOI Request, but the SNP has used public money to block the release in court, on the pretext that civil service advice must be secret in all cases.

Strangely enough, during the Iraq Inquiry, Alex Salmond demanded that such "secret" information from civil servants should be released "in the public interest".

Anyway, it's all part of the pattern: the SNP thinks up a super wheeze...LIT, SFT, abolish PPP, abolish Student debt.. whatever, it gets a few votes.

But in power, the chickens come home to roost... no policy exists behind the promise. So. Bluster, obfuscate, prestidigitate, bloviate. And spend public money to hide your embarrassment.

Surely the Scottish public will be intelligent enough to see through this nonsensical do-nothing party and government on May 5th...?

p.s.1 ... the Telegraph online had no copy of the doc, but you can see it here, at Nationalist Mythbusting... it's clear enough, the Nats have not put any thought into how they would have (but will not now) deliver yet another major promise, and now they want to hide the evidence

p.s. 2.... Must hat-tip Lalland Peat Worrier for the excellent "bloviate", a word coined 100 years ago that has been waiting around to meet up with and describe the pompous windbaggery of our esteemed Fat First Minister......

A Party Political Broadcast with hope and no lies!!!

 Pretty good after the SNP's bogus claims to have built 330 new schools and other guff...



I like it, what about you?

Ah Luv Ma Cuuntry...

I was standing with a lady nationalist at the polling station a few years ago. I knew her slightly, and we got on quite well. We agreed on almost all policy areas: housing, schools, health etc. After a while I ventured the suggestion that, as we agreed on so much, it was silly that we were on different sides of the argument, and that we should be in the same party, cooperating to deliver the solutions we both evidently wanted. To which my new nationalist friend replied: "But ah luv ma cuuntry". The implication being that anyone who is not an nationalist doesn't love his or her country, and that somehow disqualifies the rest of us, the actual majority of Scots, from any political legitimacy.

Anyone who blogs on politics in Scotland has seen, may even have suffered from, the malignancy of the cybernats, those self appointed "luvvers o' ma cuuntry" who think if you don't agree with them you're a "quisling" (quisling is one of their favourite words). It's at its most blatant online, where the cloak of annonymity allows the vitriol to flow against traitorous unionists and other scum who don't think "independence" is the ideal solution to the problems of the people of Scotland. If you don't agree with them no insult is too extreme.

But the same attitude not unknown among terrestrial nationalists, if less honestly expressed. Prominent nationalists frequently imply that only they have care and concern for "Scotland". "Scotland's Party" is a common slogan from the SNP leadership and has been used for years, on and off.

Today I got my hands on the above SNP leaflet from the current Scottish Parliamentary Election campaign, and it continues the theme: "There's only one party that cares about Scotland" it says. The implication being that all the rest are traitors and quislings.

Is there any more graphic illustration of the arrogance of the minority SNP Party. At the last election they got less than 17% of the possible vote, but that's no barrier to their arrogance. If you are not with them, you don't have "Scotland" "at your heart", you are not a real Scot and your opinion is negligble and easly dismissed.
 
Heaven help us if they ever get round to actually running the country rather than living off the Union that they pretend to hate.

Apologies to my reader.......

If you're still there, I have to apologise. For that last three weeks my time has increasingly been eaten up by the election campaign and I have been unable to blog with my previous regularity.....

Will try to get a few blogs out, but really stretched.....     :(