Scotland isn't a one-party state. It's a nation administered by a party that regards itself as the embodiment of that nation & so struggles to tolerate opposition - which it sees as hostile to the nation. This is a recipe for degrading the norms of liberal democracy.
‘The Sunday Mail has obtained documents showing a firm – hired using public cash – demanded investigating committee members give written guarantees they wouldn’t ask a senior official crucial questions.’
Come again?
HMRC recommends regular self-employed folk, say a freelancer on 30K a year, keep business records going back at least 5 years. The idea
@scotgov
hasn't kept records from 2015 on a contract worth nearly £100 million of taxpayers money is simply not credible.
#ferriesfiasco
Can we all agree now that flag waving nationalist marches, demonising of the press, and the dismissal of facts and expertise are not good for democracy?
I'm all for paying more tax to create a fairer society, but in Scotland today it increasingly feels like we're paying more tax to fund SNP incompetence, be it the ferries fiasco, the census debacle, or broader industrial & economic management failures.
#ScotBudget
Looking forward to
@NicolaSturgeon
explaining today why Scotland becoming the first ever part of an advanced economy to cut itself off, overnight, from its treasury & associated deep tax base, as well as its central bank & currency base, will help with the cost of living crisis.
Note, Nicola Sturgeon is not launching an indyref2 campaign. She's launching yet another theatrical pretence that one is happening. It's fantasy. No serious person will buy the spin now.
Sturgeon's cold reaction when asked about the Royal visit to front-line medical staff looked pretty bad on News at Ten there, contrasting sharply with the warm response from the NHS staff themselves.
Second PR mishap within a week (other one being NHS bonus ploy backfiring).
The more I think about this the more disgusted I am. Tens of billions of £s has just come to Scotland to bail us out of Covid & give us life saving vaccines, all thanks to our being in the UK, & now there’s a tax on big oil to help struggling families across the UK & we get this.
“It feels very unfair that Scotland is having to pay for the entirety of the UK”
SNP’s Kirsty Blackman says 90% of the money raised by the energy profits levy will come from oil and gas “income made in Scotland”
#BBCSundayshow
Absolute car crash. And she’s wrong to present secession as normal - no part of any advanced economy anywhere has ever split from its monetary and fiscal base. It would be a world first. The people of Scotland need to wake up to how extreme the SNP and their plans are.
The ferries fiasco is the scandal that should have brought down the SNP long before we got to police raids and the seizing of a luxury campervan.
New from me
@spectator
✍️👇
Thing about Sturgeon & her colleagues constantly calling for another ref next year, they’re all on six-figure salaries & will be relatively asset/savings rich. They know they can largely protect themselves from the economic fallout. It’s regular folk who’ll suffer, as always.
Warning signs for any democracy:
- The party holding power assumes it is the embodiment of the nation
- Personality cult forming around a leader
- Political opponents of the party in power framed as being in opposition to the nation
- Flags, lots of flags
Scottish news these days (I'm watching it now on TV) is basically just as update on people trying to cope with SNP mis-management of our transport networks. Our country is grinding to a halt under Nicola Sturgeon.
As all income tax collected in Scotland goes to the Scottish Government, it has the power to make this effectively 'tax free' at no cost (just bump the payment up a bit so people get 500 after tax in their pocket) so isn't this the epitome of playing politics with the pandemic?
This is appalling.
The Tory treasury appears to be rejecting the Scottish Government's plea to lift its tax on
@NicolaSturgeon
's £500 'Thank You' payment to NHS & social care workers.
@BorisJohnson
must order an immediate U-turn on his bid to punish NHS and care workers
#SNP20
Does
@theSNP
have a problem with institutional anglophobia? This certainly flies in the face of the open, civic nationalism the party says it represents.
I’d settle for a one-point plan for a Forth bridge that can function in winter, or a children’s hospital that can treat patients, or new ferries that can actually go to sea, or an education system that isn’t reducing literacy & numeracy.
These. People. Are. A. Joke.
🚨 MAJOR INDYREF2 EXCLUSIVE 🚨
In Saturday’s National we can reveal the SNP’s plan should Boris Johnson refuse indyref2 – ask the Scottish people for a mandate, hold a legal referendum and dare Westminster to challenge it in court.
Pick up the paper to read our report first. 🏴
While every country in the world was putting all the resources they had into meeting the challenge of a global pandemic, Sturgeon’s lot were holding money back and budgeting for big pre-election giveaways. Incredible. Really the epitome of playing politics with a pandemic.
🗳 👩💻 If
@theSNP
is re-elected in May, we will make sure every school pupil from P1 to S6 gets a laptop, Chromebook or tablet. In the digital age this should be as automatic as being given jotters and pencils was in years gone by.
#BothVotesSNP
The thing about this isn’t just the blatant Anglophobia but the snobbery: people eating fry ups! Beach holidays!
If you’ve spent the past year doing 12-hour shifts on a hospital ward & all you want is two weeks somewhere warm to recuperate, that doesn’t make you a bad person.
I see some are seeing posts like this and deploying the straw man "too wee, too poor" argument & saying Scotland would just be borrowing and furloughing workers like any other country right now if we had gone indy. Let me explain why that doesn't stand to reason. Thread 1/
If Scotland had become fiscally and monetarily independent in March 2016, as would have happened following a ‘Yes’ vote, this would simply not be possible.
#interdependence
I’ve seen incompetence from London during this pandemic but not naked attempts to politicise it as we saw yesterday from the SNP. There’s being clever in politics & then there’s being coldly opportunist & callous. This is the latter. It’s disgusting.
Tories, I understand, will always defend Boris Johnson. Labour and Lib Dems are intriguing - they'd rather attack the SNP, even if it costs Health and Social Care workers, than focus their ire on a UK Gov who just last week started to balance the books by freezing most pay.
We’re getting lectured about respecting democracy by people who are happy to go on the record expressing the view that they despise around a quarter of Scotland’s electorate.
The SNP seem to be under the delusion the UK is a confederacy of independent states; a mere supranational club. I mean, they’re welcome to campaign for that if they like, but can we stop pretending the UK is not a fully fledged sovereign state?
Imagine the gall (or is it a complete lack of self-awareness?) it takes to say this given the record of her and her party over the past 10 years. Amazing
“Populists are able to come in and whisper false promises in the ears of vulnerable people.”
Former SNP Deputy Westminster Leader Mhairi Black says the UK could face a right-wing rebellion in the future if public services are “on their knees”.
Postscript: please stop voting for nationalists who almost ruined our country once & are pushing to do so again. The loss of your livelihood & security will be taken as an acceptable price for achieving their outdated dream of purified sovereignty around a single nation.
I spoke with some of the world's most respected macroeconomics & currency experts on the implications of 'sterlingisation' for Scotland's economy. Thanks to
@spectator
for publishing the result. Please read and share.
Scotland is heading towards a notional deficit of >25% of GDP & we actually have supposedly serious people arguing that in the next few years we should cut ourselves off from our central bank, from UK borrowing capacity, & set up a whole new state.
It's zealotry. It really is.
There were 137 relevant WhatsApp groups across
@scotgov
. The messages of 70 individuals were asked for but were deleted.
Who organised the deletion effort? What instructions (from whom/when were they given) led to this industrial-scale cover-up?
Not true. As well as having significant powers over taxation, the Scottish government also has significant policy levers to grow the Scottish economy, which would deliver more spending power, and serial failure on industrial policy sits entirely with the Scottish government.
‘There’s no such thing as a de facto referendum’
Professor of public policy at Edinburgh University James Mitchell comments on the First Minister’s plan to fight the next UK General Election on the single issue of independence if a referendum is ruled out by the Supreme Court.
I can't work out why Sturgeon would walk away with no credible successor lined up and with a truncated process rushed into place to find a new leader when she must have known this would leave her party (and to some extent Scotland - see DRS!) in chaos. What are we not hearing?
It's fair to assume Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister signed off on the ferries contract given the size and importance of that contract, so when exactly did she do this, and why is there apparently no documentary evidence of it?
#SNPFerriesFiasco
New from me
@spectator
:
They can't build a ferry, organise a census or keep the railways operating, but when it comes to organising a grievance campaign, nobody does it better than the SNP.
✍️
Don't worry, islanders, the SNP has a plan: they will hold a referendum next year leading to Scotland cutting itself off from its currency & tax base in 2025, creating a nationwide economic catastrophe so you don't feel singled out.
Astonishing. Takes it upon himself to invite the highly controversial Turkish head of state, President Erdogan, on a visit to Scotland because "Turkey is a Nato ally." What is he thinking? Is he thinking at all? 😬
NEW: FM Humza Yousaf quizzed on his Cop28 conversation with Turkey’s President Erdogan says he would raise human rights abuses with him should he visit Scotland and denies it was to do with getting extended family out of Gaza
@LBC
@LBCNewsScot
Worth noting that Scotland's implicit budget deficit is currently estimated at over 25% of Scottish GDP. This kind of increase is only possible because of a massive UK borrowing programme made possible by quantitative easing.
@NicolaSturgeon
's policy is to turn that tap off
That's that then. In the next general election the SNP will ignore health, education, the economy, as they campaign purely for secession. What a preposterous position the FM has put herself in. Will she cling to power and be humiliated then, or move sooner for a dignified exit?
As complex as it might seem, one thing has been clarified: Scotland separating from the UK puts state pensions at risk as Sturgeon & co. plan to use them in a game of bargaining - which they're likely to lose. How dare they play fast and loose with older people's welfare.
“It will be for the
@scotgov
to fund Scottish pensions”
@NicolaSturgeon
says SNP position on state pension after independence not changed since 2014
But she says pensions would be part of initial negotiation with UK over assets and liabilities
Ardern is a social democrat, not a nationalist. Sturgeon’s politics has the single aim of dividing a nation because she can’t tolerate multiple overlapping nationhood. Hers is quite literally the politics of division.
Congratulations on your resounding re-election
@jacindaardern
. In a fine victory speech, these words resonate and perhaps they hold a lesson for Scotland too -
“As a nation, we can listen, we can debate...we are too small to lose sight of other people’s perspective”
An extraordinary interview:
- Advocates being open-minded to a direct Nato/Russia confrontation
- Advocates unilateral nuclear disarmament by the West as it would apparently put us (Nato/Western alliance) in a stronger position to confront Russia
Is this for real?
NEW: Nicola Sturgeon says NATO shouldn't rule out No Fly Zone over Ukraine.
FM 'shares concerns' about risk of direct military confrontation, but says should be considered on 'day to day basis'.
'Perhaps only thing' nuclear weapons are deterring is 'proper help' for Ukraine
When I was growing up in Airdrie people weren’t split into ‘real Scots’ and not real Scots. Don’t ever tell me the rise of the SNP and the nationalist movement has been positive for Scotland.
Thank you to everyone who came along to West End Park in
#Airdrie
today to help lay out one of Scotland's largest flags - Scotia.
The "Friends of West End Park" replaced our national flag with the union flag.
Ask yourself why...
Real Scots stand up
#ForScotland
not against it.
Summary of SNP's current secession pitch:
- No BBC
- Hard border with England
- Economy unofficially using a foreign currency, with effectively no central bank support
- End of fiscal transfers that support the public sector
Who's buying this, other than fringe zoomers?
There are reasonable conversations to be had on how devolved funding works and how it can be improved, but the SNP's approach of constant grievance and political point scoring during a time of national emergency is both shameful and extremely counterproductive.
What is the procedure for replacing the chair of a Holyrood committee if the committee members believe the chair is actively blocking the asking of questions that might be uncomfortable for a particular political party but are clearly in line with the remit of the committee?
From Brian Wilson, written in Feb 2021:
'One of Charles’s constituency staff had to work full-time on deleting social media abuse. There were vile anonymous messages attached to Charles’s car and pushed through his letter-box.'
When did Nicola Sturgeon become a president? The Scottish people didn’t elect her. They elected MSPs to a parliament, and that parliament transcends any individual ego.
This is nonsense. The key component of the cost of living crisis is inflation. Secession would create new supply-side issues that would act as an additional force pushing inflation in Scotland up even more.
@NicolaSturgeon
@BBCJamesCook
There are two things you can do that would really help. One is to stop using inflammatory language such as labelling political opponents ‘democracy deniers’. The other is to actively eject people from your party who call people ‘traitors’.
I see
@NikitaBassi123
, who works directly for Nicola Sturgeon, has quickly deleted her tweet suggesting Scotland is colonised and subject to ‘British rule’ just like India was.
These views are abhorrent and I hope the ignorance on display in that tweet is reflected on.
Some really nauseating fake solidarity-with-the-workers stuff coming from SNP MPs and MSPs at the moment amid council worker strikes, when their party has been responsible for hacking away at council budgets and power for years. Cosplaying as socialists. 🤮
Dear
@ScotGovFM
: Please stop using the pandemic for constitutional grievance. We live in a country with one of the world's most respected central banks & a treasury with exceptional borrowing power, which it is using for 🏴 benefit.
Maybe ask why you wish to cut us off from that.
Scottish politics is so instinctively binary that non-SNP folk are falling into the trap of thinking they need to be in the Team Sturgeon or Team Salmond camp, but they don't. The massive egos, political zealotry & ruthless ambition of both characters has damaged our country.
Why is
@scotgov
putting out constitutionally illiterate documents centred on the false premise that the UK is a supranational organisation of independent states like the EU? Our civil service should really not be used for these purposes.
The many billions of pounds needed to fund Scotland's bailout came automatically, when needed, thanks to Scotland's place within the UK monetary and fiscal union.👇
via
@spectator
I read this earlier and couldn't believe what I was reading. Returned to it a few hours later and it seems even worse. It's like she's seen the most vile comments from this weekend and tried to up the ante. That this person sits in Scotland's parliament shames us all.
The most interesting takeaway from this weekend (the FM's 'detest' quote is a distraction) is how preposterous the SNP leadership now appears when confronted with the economic realities of secession.
Lots of mistruths on
@bbcdebatenight
:
- 'Almost 100% of Scottish energy comes from renewables.' Nope, it's a bit over 50%:
- 'Scotland has a fixed budget.' Nope, it has significant tax raising powers.
A reminder that if we had followed Ian's advice in 2014 we would, in March 2016, have cut ourselves off, overnight, from central bank currency support, leading to an economic crisis that would have made anything we're living through today seem like a walk in the park.
It brings to mind the false promises of the Better Together campaign in 2014 and the nonsense of a stable UK. The UK cut adrift from the EU and not being able to deliver a US trade deal. Time for Scotland to escape this madness and find a route back to the EU with independence.
It is of course possible to be pro-EU while acknowledging the EU was out of order yesterday with its lurch towards vaccine nationalism, which makes
@NicolaSturgeon
's - usually v-quick off the mark - silence on the issue very odd.
Pete Wishart has just said in the Commons that Scotland has a 'water supply that is the envy of the world'. I hear they talk of little else in the corridors of the UN.
The SNP’s week in summary:
- Scotland having the 3rd highest Covid-19 death rate in Europe doesn’t matter because we did good PR & remain popular
- Lots of people who don’t support us are dying, which is progress
- Let’s have Indy at any cost, including national bankruptcy
🤦♂️
I've put a lot of effort into
@spectator
pieces these last 12 months to show how the fiscal autonomy that would come with secession would be disastrous, but here's the Finance Secretary, with just a single tweet, more effectively making the case for our UK fiscal union.
#upstaged
Interesting development in Budget debate as Labour suggest hiking taxes in Scotland to raise an additional *£12bn* to deliver their Budget asks. That’s the eye-watering equivalent of doubling income tax revenues in Scotland from every income tax payer.
All journos attending tomorrow should agree with each other that they will all ask this question and nothing else, one after the other, until they get an answer.
What on earth is a Minister for Independence meant to do? Like, really, on a day-to-day basis what will Jamie Hepburn be doing to meet his brief?
'Oh hi, it's the Minister for Independence here. Just wondering if any independence stuff is happening? No? Okay, cheerio.'
The really disturbing aspect of this is the chauvinism; the framing of an international NGO as unworthy outsiders to be denigrated because they're not Scottish enough. It's really sickening.
Responding to criticism of Green Party co-leader Patrick Harvie - who’s been accused of being an “apologist” for Nicola Sturgeon -
@Ross_Greer
says “it’s fair to say that Greenpeace don’t really understand Scotland”.
#COP26
@LBC
@LBCNews
If you’re still a member of
@scottishgreens
after this then you no longer get to consider yourself an environmentalist. Whatever Harvie, Slater, Greer and their colleagues priorities are, it sure as hell isn’t the environment.
Responding to criticism of Green Party co-leader Patrick Harvie - who’s been accused of being an “apologist” for Nicola Sturgeon -
@Ross_Greer
says “it’s fair to say that Greenpeace don’t really understand Scotland”.
#COP26
@LBC
@LBCNews
'In 2016, the Scottish government also provided Gupta with a three-year, £7 million loan on commercial terms to prop up the Dalzell steelworks. As of last December, not a cent of the principal had been repaid.'
How Sturgeon, Swinney etc can tell people they’ll set up a new central bank, army, navy, airforce, treasury, a plethora of regulatory and other agencies, all within 2 years and it’ll all be gravy, and keep a straight face saying it, is beyond me.
SNP spinners are successfully getting the messaging out that the ScotGov has 'started work' on a minimum income guarantee as if it has any chance of happening. All they're doing is consulting on the idea; a bit like how they started work on scrapping council tax over 10 years ago
- Danny Alexander was never Chancellor
- No money was 'pinched' from Police Scotland (SNP insistence on central funding automatically moved budget out of VAT rebate remit as per Section 33 of 1994 VAT act)
- SNP policing policy has been disastrous
- Trust?!
What a brass neck
@willie_rennie
has. Says we aren't funding Police Scot adequately, was a LibDem Chancellor Danny Alexander who unfairly pinched £125m of VAT from Police Scot while taking not a penny from English regional forces! No wonder noone trusts LibDems on Public Services
Precisely the correct facial expression to use when the First Minister degrades herself, her party and our democracy (and I guess by some folk's reckoning 'insults Scotland!') by calling you a 'pathetic attention seeker' in response to an entirely reasonable question.
Surely Flynn's behaviour on the show is a clear-cut example of the intolerance that is creating the toxic political environment
@NicolaSturgeon
complained of recently? If she's serious then this is precisely the behaviour she should be prepared to call out publicly.
On BBC Debate Night,
@StephenFlynnSNP
was asked a question he didn't like. He turned on the audience member, outing them as a conservative activist, inviting online harassment of the young man in question by nationalist keyboard warriors.
Enough of these bullyboy tactics. 👇
When the First Minister insists her opponents must 'respect democracy' what she means is opponents must comply with her self-serving, narrow - and very nationalist - concept of democracy. Her instincts here are authoritarian, not democratic.
I want answers from
@NicolaSturgeon
on practical questions. How many border guards will she employ to police the Anglo-Scottish border after she’s partitioned our island? And what currency will their wages be paid in?
What a waste of time, energy and resources separatism has been. It's holding Scotland back. Isn't it time those still clinging to Salmond and Sturgeon's failed ideology get on board with the will of the people and make Scotland the best it can be within the UK?
Watching Ian Blackford on the BBC worrying about UK's current account deficit while at the same time promoting secession for Scotland, which would create a new state with a similarly very large current account deficit but with no national currency to keep the economy working🤷♂️
‘Can you guarantee to the bereaved families that you will disclose emails, WhatsApps, private emails if you’ve been using them. Whatever. That nothing will be off limits in this inquiry?’
My question to
@NicolaSturgeon
August 2021
Goodness.
@Ianblackford_MP
interviewed there by
@petermacmahon
confirming the SNP's latest wheeze to get around the reality of fiscal autonomy is to repudiate the 2014 position that an indy Scotland would look after its pensioners. Full on ex-pat fallacy stuff too. Madness 🤦♂️
‘When Nicola Sturgeon was told about Professor Pennington’s comments on the infective level of care homes, she brusquely dismissed them. “I don’t know where he got that figure,” she said. Might it not have been sensible to ask the professor himself?’
Seems a good day to share again👇
A minority party going into coalition with another minority party to take control of a devolved, sub-state legislature does not automatically have the power to re-write the constitution of the state. That's not democracy.
People who say all politics is divisive and Scotland is no different are the ones who aren’t subject to political opponents placing them in a box marked ‘anti-Scottish’. They haven’t experienced their national identity being used as a weapon against them.
Whatever Cambo twists and turns we see from Sturgeon in coming days we can be sure of one thing: her positioning will have nothing to do with the climate emergency or the economy and everything to do with personal and party popularity.
Let me save National Records of Scotland a lot of time and effort: it failed because the SNP decoupled from the rest of the UK for ideological reasons without thinking through the consequences, thus providing more evidence that their setting up of a new state would be disastrous.
NEW: National Records of Scotland chief exec tells
@SkyNews
“lots of lessons to learn” amid claims the £140m census was ‘botched’.
🏴Boss Janet Egdell can’t tell me what went wrong after 89% of Scots eventually participated compared to 97% of English & Welsh households.
The SNP has today conceded that an indy Scotland will need its own currency before acceding to the EU and a hard border with England.
I wonder if supporters of Scottish secession appreciate how significant that is for their cause.