the party's over

You know well that the neocon economic era did not start with Thatcher, but with her predecessor Callaghan in 1976. His government swung to bankers' cuts and bankers' rule. In the face of bankers' games with the pound it failed to sustain financial independence even for Britain. Tony Crosland said of underwriting council budgets "The party's over." In the present, how much harder was it supposed to be to sustain financial independence for Scotland, and without it even having its own currency at all? The oil price plummeting.

Now for the SNP the party's over. The end of the council tax freeze won't bite jn time for the election, because it's put off for a year, so you are supposed to think it's never coming. But as you have seen across the front pages today, all except the National of course, the SNP budget has set a bomb of hammering rises beyond inflation, 3%, next year, to hit you like a released spring.

This instead of using Scotland's national tax power redistributively as Labour is standing for, and in a narrower single issue way the Lib Dems are too. SNP position is an embarrassment in contrast to them. So that SNP policy is austerity, and Labour's policy is redistribute and spend on need.

Scotland's much-claimed progressive voters have had a crappy history of taking several elections to make culture shifts when the progressive ground moves away from where their voting habits are. They stayed with Labour throughout the New Labour period then moved away from Labour on grounds of the memory of New Labour but aftet it was actually over. That was absurd. It's time to catch up. There is nothing progressive in voting SNP this time.

no caviar thanks to Sturgeon

On Ed Miliband's Facebook page, a nat has written, about this devastating election:

- "You sealed your fate when you joined forces with Cameron and sent an army of MPs up to Scotland to bully,coerce and scare the Scots into voting no in the Indy Ref, that fate was further sealed when you treated the SNP as the enemy in the election. You are an idiot that has let the whole nation down."

My reply does not come from a voice who was always unionist, it comes from a voice who went into the ref open minded to see which side would be more liberal on keeping Scotland open to its diaspora, and suspected the nats might pander to racist voters by not being generous towards the broader diaspora gut never imagined they would actually taint our history with the fascism of betraying citizenship of their own country for the first generation diaspora. here is what I said on the economic issue, to the Tory near future we have all been slammed with, and remembering that the propsect of "no more Tory gvoernments we didn't vote fro" was the best sounding line in Yes's campaign:

- "The SNP made themselves an enemy and forced Ed's hand to do that, because they bragged so hubristically that they were going to dictate all his govt's actions. It's their fault. They cheated Ed of the win he was heading for, destroyed the govt they wanted to get, took away from us at the brink of reality the most progressive govt since before Thatcher and gave us another 80s-like trauma. They knew they were frightening voters in England and that the Tories were seizing on it.

Sturgeon said they were going to force CND disarmament. Any surprise at an 80s-like result to saying that? They were going to force a highly austere and absurd fiscal independence for Scotland, and force what Labour's economic policy would be - and talking so dictatorially made it credible for the Tories also to stick on them that they would force another referendum. In fact they were on a carried away ego trip, campaign publicity was their only means of leverage on Ed's govt towards even the more meritorious of their ideas - their anti-austerity line which only stood up if they did not get fiscal indy! - the SNP would not have had any means to force Ed's govt to do fiscal indy or CND, for their only threat was to put him out and Tories back in, electorally impossible for them to do hence already pledged not to. But only the minority of voters who take enough serious interest in politics to understand the system's workings realised this. The tragedy of this election is it has been swung on irrational feeling, that could not have happened if more humans were disposed to think.

We would still be worse off if Yes had won the ref, and if this election still had the same outcome in rUK despite no nationalist scare to cause it. As a so-called independent state avoiding the austerity burden of creating currency reserves by instead choosing to keep our spending and economic policy dictated to us by the Bank of England, we would now be under this Tory govt which would have a stable big majority instead of a precariously tiny one. We would have no future prospect either of voting it out or of having a leftward leverage in parlt if they lose their majority mid term. That's the difference if you take Scotland out of the election, last time we made the difference of the Tories not getting a majority, this time we made the difference of keeping it tiny enough to be unstable. "

What a way to run a railroad to London

Oh no they don't mean anything they say, they mean what I want them to say. Whatever I want it to be that they said, of course really they said it, just TRUUUST me and take it from me, you don't need to actually listen to their words saying the opposite.

You can't go through life communicating like that. It's unconvincing and silly. it's wishful thinking. I don't like what someone said so really they meant the opposite, really they meant what I wanted them to say - consider how that works out - no more toys means more toys, no consent to sex means consent to sex, we voted Yes but it means No. IT DOESN'T WORK. Would you buy a used car on that basis?

The referendum has become a shambles and tragedy. Alex Salmond, who called it, has determined on the following tragicomic place in history. He will go right up to poll asking you to vote for a statement of faith that his silly unionist idea that contradicts independence, currency union with the country you are leaving, you can ignore the No clearly given to by the entire political class of Britain and believe what the cheery salesman wants them to say. He's not going to railroad them.

This is the Yes campaign that is so caring about our ordinary lives it has not answered about the issue in the last post, the citizenship of Scottish exiles who can't return before indy day. On the Facebook Yes pages you can read yeards and yards of emotionalism about a great natiomnal moment to seize.

To continue the Clearances' logic by the moral obscenity of taking automatic citizenship away from some Scots, to make indy a way of shutting our door in some of our own people's faces, to want to tie us to the austerity programme through servitude to the Bank of England without a say over it, to call for an extra year of Tory government instead of the next British election on time during the indy process, to shut his eyes and make this ridiculous spivvy assertion that we can take his word that 3 parties don't really mean they won't do what he wants, and what he wants is unionist anyway.... WHAT WAY IS THIS TO RUN A YES CAMPAIGN?? A unionist, implausible, ludicrous, people betraying, spivvy way. AAAAAAAAAAH. If there was any national opportunity moment it's this SNP leadership who threw it away.

The sensible non-SNP wings of the Yes campaign who never wanted a currency union now need to split with Salmond and his train crash of nonsense.

Yes the united savages

Jim Sillars fought the SNP from a labour inclined angle in the 70s, then became Salmond's deputy in the 90s. Now he is quick to voice common sense, that proposing to be a separate state that still shares the British benefits system is nuts, change with no change at a time when the Yes idea's most practical voter appeal is against the British savage policy on cuts and austerity.

It's just right. Nothing needs adding to the Scotsman's story. It could be the item that blows any chance of a Yes vote.

Be part of silly

Gordon Bennett. Just blimey and gasps. When is SNP unionism ever going to stop?

The lagging polls show folks already need more imaginative inspiring motivating to vote Yes than they are getting. The campaign has already made itself sound silly with the whole palaver of we are going to keep a currency union with the country seceded from, on demand and even though they say they won't agree to it. The strongest reason the Yes folks have held onto, have not toed the British line on, have kept rightly telling us is where there could be a big difference to be gained from going our own way, has been on social conscience standards of welfare and escape from the British austerity agenda.

The reason why real folks in Scotland have to continue to suffer trashed disability benefits, unemployment sanctions lasting 3 years, the bedroom tax, and pension worries, for over a year to come, has always been so that we will be convinced to vote against continuing to suffer them. (Hasn't it?)

And now, when we are already in the middle of a mood of hollow scepticism that independence is really intended to mean it at all - Sturgeon turns round and accepts a naff proposal, FROM HER GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADVISORY GROUP EVEN, that we should stay in a union of welfare systems with Tory Britain for a so-called "transitional period" whose length is not even defined, that is open ended. A Guardian story places it at at least to 2019 !!! where it far exceeds the Cameron government's full term so still inflicts its whole austerity programme on us. Through it, we would still get the social wrongs that most practically of all we are being asked to vote against still getting.

Silly silly silly. Who conceivably has been increased in belief in the whole Yes offer by this? In the Scottish National Party having the confidence to separate our state from the British state, which is supposed to be the whole point innit? "Be part of better", they told us. The Silly No Party, who just want to throw every last strand of our statehood away!!

See, folks might conclude this is a handy way for the SNP to make sure they can keep us neocon, the same as every major party wants to do. Just the same as Labour about this. So what do the other Yes supporting parties have to say? Are they going to be part of silly?

What to party for?

The partiers in Glasgow are right emotionally but they miss the point. We all pop our clogs, and unlike many folks, including for reasons of avoidable economic hardship under all governments in the neocon era she started, Thatcher lived to a full age anyone would be well satisfied with. That was a win for her. It is hardly a circumstance of death that there is anything in to celebrate. What's more, she took her leave of us with the huge satisfaction of being surrounded by disability welfare cuts and the media tough-talking us through a major depression, pushing the line that austerity is necessary and still on her side over economics even after the crash of 2008.

They are not pushing the voices who remind us that this is contrary to history and has a history of not working, which we are repeating. They only occasionally get heard buried long into the most serious radio current affairs slots when only the most intelligent and politically caring listeners are still istening, when the audience is lowest. Her death with neocon ideas still ruling and still pushed with a heavy hand by the tabloids, takes away the possibility that she would ever have to answer to the neocon system's end and a full properly complete exposing of all its human costs. That is a loss, not a gain. There would have been value against her ideas in her continued life until the neocon consensus ever ends.

The clear rebuttal to all the hard left voices whose regrets for her survival have gone as far as to sound sympathetic to terrorism, is that if she had been assassinated her ghost and supporters could always claim she would have gone on successfully for as long as she wished and never have fallen. Far better was scored against her ideas by her living to fall as she did at her own party's hands in 1990. Further to which, we all have our safety very ill served by those morally unscrupulous leading media voices who wrongly give the murder of Ian Gow any credit towards Thatcher's fall because they don't want ordinary people in the form of the anti-poll tax campaign to be seen to have achieved anything. Those media voices should be pursued criminally by the powers against encouraging terrorism.

We must not be conned by Salmond to read voting Yes as a vote against the neocon path originating from Thatcher. Without anywhere near enough public attention on it, he is sneaking in a measure against civil liberties that she never did, a charge for criminal defence even when you come out innocent. From his side too comes the tragedy of Thatcher's send off being the whole political class hammering us with money injustices. This measure of justice regression by Macaskill totally takes away the prospect that independence would end that.

At a time of austerity and with new measures against disability benefit starting from the same day as Thatcher died, there will be a public spending of £5 million on her funeral. Some very sensible folks have already pointed out that her biggest fans could afford to pay for this privately and her funeral should be privatised. If it angers you, contrast it not only with the British economic policy but with Macaskill undermining your democratic liberties and securities in pursuit of saving less than the political class routinely accept should be spent on Thatcher's funeral.