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.

time to vote In

Although Cameron's EU deal brings in some inevitable nasty Tory economic barriers, which a future Labour led government can easily enough drop, yet there is also a surprising strand of good in Cameron's deal.

He has drawn some red lines that protect member countries' democratic sovereignty and stop the growth of centralised commission power to tell them to do things. This has actually made the EU more democratic in a way that folks have been saying ever since the 80s is needed. It has shown that members can reform the institution in more democratic ways and put their foot down to halt undemocratic drifts. It's a milestone of democratisation in the EU's development.

Time to vote In, or Stay, or Remain, on Jun 23, whatever they will call it. They will have to avoid calling it Yes when there are still stubborn blue Yes window posters around referring to leaving another union.

AND MEANWHILE?OH MY GUUÀAAAAARDD !!!

George Galloway!!! He was a massive asset for the indy No campaign. He was the most prominent name among radical leaders to support the British union, he showed decisively to many that you could be unionist and left wing. So, now, WHY THE HELL ISN'T HE UNIONIST FOR THIS UNION TOO? He is anti-EU and has already been photoed alongside Farage !!! campaigning for out !!! After in the indyref he wouldn't be seen alongside the Tories.

How totally Gordon Bennett is that? What a jerk particularly because leaving the EU keeps the British union unstable and there is continuing argument for independence on that trigger. Present polls don't make the nat leaders keen to call a second indyref, but the constitutional argument and threat of it is always there, an EU Out vote could still help to lead to it eventually.

How will Galloway then argue against it, when at the Out rally which the Daily Telegraph site showed a clip of, he calls lifetime important "the demand that Britain shall be an independent sovereign and democratic country", exactly the pointless nationalist sentiment he condemned for Scotland saying that creating national barriers is bad! Work Galloway out !!! eh? What he said is nonsense because Britain is already perpetually sovereign, Cameron's deal has clearly established that, with the EU treaties now formally exempting us from the aim of "ever closer union."

in a little box with nasty barricades

For the anti-outsider racism against Scotland's diaspora which made it morally necessary to vote No, the worst of the leading nats was Jim Sillars. He it was who actually proposed that the Scots born in diaspora as the offspring of our emigrants - whose emigration itself was supposed to be a nat issue - should be filtered for desirable skills the same as migrants with no roots here, before they can live in their own country. He took this line of xenophobic hate speech towards a section of his own nation, in his campaign dialogue with George Galloway and to the Yes meeting on 7 May 2014 at Liberton school, Edinburgh. SSP leader Colin Fox was sitting beside him and continued to do a campaigning tour with him calling him a friend.

I saw it because it was my question on citizenship by descent that he was answering. He told the same meeting that he was a Eurosceptic who would rather Scotland be like Norway and join EFTA, he retains from 70s nationalism its anti-EU strain, the idea of sacrosanct national sovereignty not getting pooled and united with anyone. Anti-Europeanism is now another racist anti-immigration position, because it means, and at British level much of it is motivated by, ending the union of free movement and travel. Going back to having nasty barricades up to the rest of the world outside your little box of global apartheid.

It fits him perfectly that he has now announced he's campaigning for an Out vote in the referendum, and splitting with the SNP mainstream by it, as he has ranted against the party control created by Salmond. The nats are better off without him, but will they realise it and break with his sick level of anti-diaspora bigotry?

Sillars will have no claim to moan or to claim any crisis if Scotland votes In and Britain votes Out. It is a matter of record that he wants the opposite.

term time

Green leader Patrick Harvie to wrote a column in yesterday's National, accepting as routine and uncontroversial across all oarties the bill to put off the 2020 Scottish election to 2021. He writes that he anticipates our electoral term becoming 5 years from now on to fit with the British and European terms and avoid clashes.

What's so wrong with clashes then? What is wrong with simply having an election at some other date than May when you want to avoid a clash? What, only since 1997, is suddenly so magic about May for elections?

Why the hell do the Greens, on the whole the most reformist party, want to go along with a consensus to make elections less frequent? How does that help reform anything?

Why would they, or indeed a nationalist government, want to change for worse Scotland's election cycle to acommodate Britain's, when there is no need to? Especially when there is much discontent by British-level political journalists that the term is too long. This 5 year term, this reduction in elections now presented as permanent, originated entirely from the party interests only for the 2010 parliament in making a right wing coalition deal of despised memory!

It rather looks like the Greens have succumbed to temptation to accept the gravy train giving them a free ride of holding their seats for the extra year, between having to see how they as small party perform in elections.

abridged

It was the SNP government who chose in 2010 not to go ahead with maintenance work on stressed joints on the Forth road bridge. They had engineering reports that it was needed to avert the present closure crisis. It has been uncovered here.

Some nats on Facebook are arguing that other parties who were reluctant to support building the new bridge (arguments should it be bridge or tunnel, etc) should be blamed. Regardless of what views on the new bridge were right or wrong, they are not causes of the present situation - because the new bridge is not yet completed so it has not yet taken any traffic off the old bridge. It's entirely the choices made about the old bridge that lead to the old bridge's situation. Including, to the engineer of the Skye bridge, who lives in Queensferry, telling the Daily Record it may never be reopenable to heavy lorries.

When they were consulting the public on starting the new bridge, some of us pointed out that the known overstress wear on the old bridge, from the heavy freight beyond what it was designed to take, was continuing all the time and they could stop it by diverting the heavy freight onto a ferry. Did they? They may now have to do that, but it will take them time to arrange it and obtain appropriate vessels, and meanwhile the lorries can't cross or have to clog up the Clackmannanshire bridge. If they had arranged a freight ferry back c2010, as an outcome of studying the situation towards needing the new bridge,they would have had time to plan and work it out properly.

You notice we are getting help from the union with extra train rolling stock sent from England, because Scotrail is not already have it, either for emergencies or for relieving the overcrowded too short commuter trains in the Central Belt that have been suffered for years.

Nats not wanting budgetary home rule!

No there should not be a devolving of the power to call a repeat of a ref you've already had recently, away from the British polity having any say in it. It would be a dumb thing for them to vote for that ib the Scotland Bill, vote away any power to stop the fanatics from keeping us voting and never accepting any result until it's their way. It is totally constitutionally right to dismiss Salmond's nerve in proposing this. His own predecessor Gordon Wilson has already told him, talk of a second ref annoys No voters and gives false hope to Yes voters, earning the votes of neither.

No it is not a unionist trick to devolve lots of strong income tax powers, as some tricky jerk was just arguing on Radio Scotland. The argument was that income tax is a power no government electorally likes to exercise, so that it's not real home rule to give us a power we won't want to use. AND IT'S NOT REAL BELIEF IN SELF-GOVERNMENT TO BE UNWILLING TO USE IT! It's a total contradiction of nationalism, it's what you would have to do in your own state. What happened to saying we have a more left wing culture more eager to vote for tax and redistribution? What price every moan the SNP government makes about supposed budget cuts, when it has never chosen to use the devolved tax power of 3p that has existed ever since the 1997 referendum? Was it worth devolving that power? To sustain the claim of a left wing culture you have to say it was.SO WHY HAVE YOU NEVER USED IT, innit?

Stop England's health service axeing a cancer medicine

www.change.org/p/don-t-stop-funding-only-drug-for-pancreatic-cancer/u/13957786?tk=ipmzOUAMrMpWKhe2T_Escn4IpgywbqdXjdjiwWKrh1Q&utm_source=petition_update&utm_medium=email

Ordinary folks of neighbouring countries should care for each other, should use each other's facilities as precedents for the other country to have parity of important facilities like this. It's solidarity.