Scottish Independence

[Barrykearley]

What simply fantastic news today - Alex Salmond has launched a new party. Should split the vote just nice. 
 

would love to see see Jimmy’s face

[PaulCP]

Sorry Barry, suspicious me is a little suspicious about this.

Is his intention to take votes from Labour & Tories n Scotland then claim that between his party and the SNP they have a joint 70% or so mandate for independence 🤔

[machine7]

Will they be the National Party of Scotland? 

 

Splitters

[Barrykearley]

19 minutes ago, PaulCP said:

Sorry Barry, suspicious me is a little suspicious about this.

Is his intention to take votes from Labour & Tories n Scotland then claim that between his party and the SNP they have a joint 70% or so mandate for independence 🤔

Having seen the recent spats between him and Jimmy - the only splitting of the vote I would suspect would be of the snp. She’s done some serious damage to her political party.

[910Esprit]

Real life GoT - Looking forward to see how this pans out.  Is this the beginning of the end of NS?  Here's hoping.

[SFO]

If it serves as a proper check and balance on SNP's exercise of power, great.

I think however that Salmond is trying to scoop up Green Party votes .. making them irrelevant or removing their current kingmaker status 

[Barrykearley]

A man died and went to Heaven.  As he stood in front of the Pearly Gates, he saw a huge wall of clocks behind him.

He asked “ What are all these clocks?”.  St Peter answered “Those are Lie-clocks.  Everyone on Earth has a Lie-Clock.  Every time you lie, the hands on your clock move.”

“Oh” said the man, “ Whose clock is that?”

“That was Mother Teresa’s” replied St Peter.”The hands have never moved, indicating that she never told a lie”

“Incredible, said the man.

“And whose clock is that one?”

“That’s Abraham Lincoln’s clock.  The hands have moved twice, telling us that he only told two lies in his entire life”

“Where’s Nicola Sturgeon’s clock?” Asked the man.

St Peter replied “We’re using it as a ceiling fan.”

[SFO]

Jim Sillars, the former deputy leader of the SNP, said: “I was a long-term critic of Alex Salmond when he led the SNP, and he of me. I take back not a word, and I expect him to be the same.

“But Brexit, the pandemic, the failures of the SNP, the embarrassing stark lack of quality in its ranks in Holyrood, means we are in a new situation when old grievances need to be set aside. I welcome his return to frontline politics.”

He added: “People have seen a face of the Scottish government that is unacceptable. People are not stupid. They know the government has misbehaved and engaged in a gross misuse of power.

“This government is politically corrupt and the tentacles of political corruption have spread to institutions in civic society.”

[Alfa2Evora]

22 hours ago, Barrykearley said:

......the only splitting of the vote I would suspect would be of the snp. She’s done some serious damage to her political party.

The new party is not going to be contesting the constituency seats apparently, so sadly with our crazy 1st and 2nd vote system up here, what they (SNP/Alba) are hoping will happen is that people will cast their 1st (constituency) vote for the SNP and their 2nd (regional or 'list') vote for Alba so creating the situation suggested by Paul above, . It was this system that allowed the Greens at the last election to get 6 seats, and hold the balance of power, with a tiny percentage of the votes.

If we had some form of proportional representation, then it would be a whole different ball game as this chart of the results from the election in 2016 shows.

[PaulCP]

Good grief Nici, do you never look in the mirror 

 

[Bibs]

So engrossed in being a politician she's forgotten what it's like to be a human! 

[SFO]

From The Spectator

How Nicola Sturgeon lost the leaders’ debate

31 March 2021, 12:26pm

I’m not sure anyone won the first leaders debate of the Holyrood election but Nicola Sturgeon definitely lost it. The SNP leader spent more than an hour on the defensive, first from voters, who joined via Zoom to harangue her for prioritising a second independence referendum during a pandemic, and then by the opposition leaders, who tore into her record on health and education.

She has been running Scotland, either solo or in tandem with Alex Salmond, for 14 years now and there is the slimmest chance the public is starting to notice she's not very good at it.

Sturgeon handled neither the interrogations from the audience nor those from her opponents with anything like her customary self-assurance. When one voter, Selwyn, objected to her having put a referendum Bill through Holyrood in recent weeks, she tried to argue the point with him, saying the draft legislation had been published but not yet passed.

Challenged to shelve independence until after the Covid recovery, Sturgeon recalled how she had been told the same in the wake of the global financial crash. The leader of the SNP could hardly be expected to concede that there are crises to which independence is not the answer, but going out of her way to suggest that Scotland could or should have left the UK while the world economy was bungee-jumping without a rope is an odd way to reassure middle-ground voters.

What might cause her more difficulty over the next few weeks is her evident lack of an answer to the question I posed on Monday: if Sturgeon is so concerned about poverty, as her election positioning suggests, why has it taken her 14 years to get round to doing something about it? The question came up in the debate in various forms, not least her pledge to give every school pupil in Scotland a laptop or tablet.

Asked why she had waited until five weeks before polling day to unveil this policy, rather than the start of the pandemic, she suggested that the original focus was those pupils most in need. Were all the other pupils not in need? Are they still not in need? If so, why are they getting an iPad? Wouldn't a real social democrat focus resources on those most in need instead of handing out Chromebooks to the offspring of accountants and orthodontists? This is what happens when your every policy is designed with bagging votes for independence in mind.

Anas Sarwar confirmed that Scottish Labour members made the right choice when they selected him as leader last month. He was calm, measured and empathetic. He shared the story of a woman named Mary, diagnosed with tertiary cancer who has been told she'll have to go to England for treatment because the Scottish NHS is only operating on first occurrences of cancer during the pandemic. In his strongest moment of the debate, Sarwar said:

'That is what should be getting us exercised in this debate today. That is what we should be obsessing about... These are the things that matter to people across the country. They don't care about the badges or the name calling. They care about having services that work for them.'

This is exactly what I had in mind when I made the case for him to be Scottish Labour leader: 'He knows what gets headlines, what tugs heart-strings, what makes Sturgeon squirm.' Last night, he did all three.

There is still room for improvement. He is too eager to please and too eager to agree and, if he's not careful, his attempts to glide above the fray might start to look sophistic – even aloof. Even in centre-left politics, the hopey, changey stuff only carries you so far. At some point, you need dividing lines, especially against an opponent like Nicola Sturgeon. She didn't go on the attack quickly enough last night. She won't make that mistake again.

Lorna Slater is one of several dozen leaders of the Scottish Greens and the debate will have been the first time most Scots were exposed to the Canadian-born engineer. She benefits from a smooth, blended accent (75 per cent Edinburgh, 25 per cent Alberta) that made everything she said sound sweetly reasonable, even when it was prelapsarian druidical mush about sinking the entire North Sea energy sector so we could all live in yurts.

Greens are the most backward-looking mob in politics but are gushed over as 'progressives'. Socialists want to undo the 1980s and conservatives the1960s but greens want to uninvent the industrial revolution and get spoken about as though they were only slightly impatient Lib Dems.

Speaking of Lib Dems, Willie Rennie is not your average one of those. He doesn't believe in apologising for being a liberal, nor is he a simp for Nicola Sturgeon in the way that so many London liberals are. He proved again last night that he can both oppose the SNP and make a positive case for a more compassionate Scotland. 'I've seen a window into the next five years in the last few weeks,' he remarked. 'Arguments over the constitution, strategy about independence, arguments between Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond which have been poisonous and unpleasant.' Instead, the focus should be on improving mental health, beginning with the 1,500 youngsters waiting more than a year for treatment.

Sturgeon was the worst performer by some distance but she had lively competition in the form of Douglas Ross, the Scottish Conservative leader. No matter the question, he referendum-ed the answer. In Friends, David Schwimmer's character acquired the nickname 'Red Ross' for his propensity to become irrationally angry and scarlet-cheeked at the most minor annoyance. Referendum Ross is much the same: he can't modulate his indignation and so reacts to the mere suggestion of a second indyref as though it is a proposal to catapult Princess Anne into a piranha tank.

Referendum Ross is what happens when you frog-march an inexperienced MP into the leadership of a political party at a moment of crisis. The man himself is perfectly charming in person and his life doesn't revolve around politics. This should make him come across better than he does, but something happens when he gets in front of a camera. They say TV adds ten pounds but in Douglas Ross's case it sheds every last ounce of likability. This was especially so during a question about personal abuse in politics. Sarwar alluded to the bigotry he has faced and something somewhere in Ross’s mind advised him to suggest ‘it all goes back to the distraction of a referendum’.

There was a telling moment when a transwoman talked about her 14-month wait for a gender identity clinic and asked the leaders how they would improve services for trans people. Almost everyone on the stage was a #TransWomenAreWomen ideologue but here was a trans rights issue that called for more than a hashtag and the half-frightened recitation of dogma. Those of us who believe people are defined by sex rather than gender are accused of being 'trans-exclusionary' but ostentatiously using someone's preferred pronouns while failing to fund and deliver their services is hardly trans-inclusionary.

Who knows whether these debates have any impact but anyone tuning in last night will have seen Sarwar and Rennie give a decent accounting of themselves, Ross bang on about a referendum he doesn't want to happen, and an uncanny sight: Nicola Sturgeon on the wrong side of public opinion.

[910Esprit]

Yeah, I watched it and thought the Labour and Lib Dem guys were much better than their London equivalents.  Even the Green woman didn't come across as a complete loon!   Tory was reasonably solid but a bit dull.  Listening to the questions, you would not have guessed that the SNP are the incumbent. 

[red vtec]

On 10/02/2021 at 01:29, Mysterae said:

^  

We used to have Gary Gritter they got rid of that for some reason 🤣

[pete]

BYE Scotland

[C8RKH]

36 minutes ago, pete said:

BYE Scotland

Sorry, will never happen. When push comes to shove the safety of the BoE and the ability to blame everything on Westminster will win through.

[pete]

So Sturgeon is all hot air?

[C8RKH]

15 minutes ago, pete said:

So Sturgeon is all hot air?

Yes. It comes out of her bum and mouth.

One trick pony. Independence at any cost. Damn the consequences. Not that it matters as it'll still be Westminsters fault.

[pete]

Doesn't seem a view shared by a large percentage of Scots

[910Esprit]

That's true, but still less than 50% of votes cast were for pro-independence parties  (according to somebody or other being interviewed on TV)

[PaulCP]

Voting SNP in local elections is one thing but, when push comes to shove, would all of the same people vote for all out independence?

If I was Boris I would tell her that I would approve another independence vote subject to the SNP firstly providing a robustly tested initial 5 year and longer term 20 year funding plan as to how the SNP would seek to finance an independent Scotland with no cash from Westminster or the EU. Unless they get confirmation of being able to join the EU beforehand they cannot rely on a source of income from there.

After all, no one gets bank or investment support before providing a robustly tested business plan.

She has already demonstrated to the Scottish electorate that the SNP are incapable of governing Scotland, all they have to offer is the desire to be independent of the U.K. and she conveniently forgets that the EU grants in the past have come out of the income that the U.K. paid in to the EU. It was simply Westminster cash redirected. Why on earth does she believe that the EU will want to support a future independent Scotland

[Barrykearley]

Frankly - she’s a bloody terrorist 

[exeterjeep]

6 minutes ago, Barrykearley said:

Frankly - she’s a bloody terrorist 

Do we all remember the headlines from the Daily Mail.

 

[C8RKH]

12 hours ago, pete said:

Doesn't seem a view shared by a large percentage of Scots

Let's see how the voting goes when the facts of the future are spelt out.

Yes, a large group of Scots want independence. A reasonably sized group are sat on the fence and a large group don't want it.

Also remember Brexit divided SNP voters as much as any party.

But if you wanna keep it to 4/5 word statements/questions then fine.

Just remember though Pete. When it all goes tits up it'll be the English fault. The rhetoric won't change.

[Neal H]

In England, why do we even care?