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It saddened me to read the very long trail of condemnation of a piece in the Times regarding Nicola Sturgeon’s response to the election of Donald Trump as the president of the USA in Wings Over Scotland

Now let me be plain that most of the comments regarding the hypocrisy of the paper involved and the hypocrisy of both the opposition in Holyrood and indeed the British government are in the main well deserved. However the one thing missing from all this vehement condemnation (and I admit I haven’t read all of it) is actual comment on the substance of the piece, which was critical on the advisability of a head of state making the comments that Nicola made.

Now let me be very clear that at no time during the American election process did I support Donald Trump and anyone who had read my blogs on the subject will have seen that and I in fact said much the same as Nicola did. (and probably a lot more)The difference is off course, that I am a private individual and Nicola is the elected leader of the Scottish people.

I have a great many American friends including some who are very close to the American political scene and indeed many who are republicans. I have had many debates with them regarding the suitability of Donald Trump as a candidate to the most powerful position on the planet. I predicted that if Trump became the candidate he would be humiliated and the republican movement would be virtually destroyed as a consequence.

Well I was wrong, I was 100% wrong and I have admitted it to the people I debated this with.

So what, you may ask does all of this have to do with Nicola Sturgeon? Well I will tell you, and it is very simple I am a nobody as far as politics go and she is the leader of the Scottish people and as such she has to look to the future when she speaks. Now her first mistake was in her endorsement of Hillary Clinton a few days before the election .In effect she made that unwise endorsement on behalf of the Scottish people. Well I for one was absolutely terrified of the prospect of Clinton ending up in the Whitehouse as there is nothing surer that before long we would have been dragged even further into the US/Israeli morass that is the Middle East and more than likely to war with Russia.

OK apart from that, Nicola backed a looser and instead of showing some diplomatic probity, she acted like a petulant child at first minister’s questions. This is not what I expect from a leader of Scotland.

Politics and diplomacy should go hand in hand and one of the tenets of good diplomacy I would suggest is that although it is sometimes right for a politician to speak well, there are times when a silence says even more.

Trump, to all intents and propose is an unknown entity. Yes he has made some awful comments regarding race and gender but he is a new kid on the block. How many presidents have there been who did not make these terrible statements before they were elected, but then went on to drag us into horrible wars , killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and many thousands of our young soldiers.

How many young men have you known who have been wild in their youth but changed when they had a family?

Well this guy has just been given one hell of a family, so give him the benefit of the doubt. There is absolutely nothing we can do  anyway.

I feel that there has been undue delay in addressing the issues we lost the last independence referendum on and up to now I really could not see the logic in it, as it is not possible to be too prepared. However last weekend at events in and surrounding the SNP conference it would seem that the emphasis of the SNP would seem to be for keeping Scotland in the EU at the same time as keeping us in the UK. Perhaps the logic is becoming clearer now.

However, in the faint hope that I am wrong and also realising that I have been banging on about the need to address the mistakes we made during the referendum campaign in 2013- 2014. There is another issue we must now face and assuming there is still a slim chance of going for another referendum, there is another issue that we must address and that is the fact that there were quite a few people who voted Yes in our referendum and actually voted no in the EU referendum.

I keep hearing that people believe that the EU is not democratic and the laws they bring in are unnecessary and in some cases silly. We need to address these misconceptions and as usual the SNP do not seem to be doing anything about it.

By way of shedding some light on this I would like to recount a personal experience I have had through business and in connection with the law making process in the EU, so here goes.

Now I am in the transport industry, I have a coach company. We rely, to a great deal on part time drivers to cover busy times and things like school contracts.

Some time ago the EU decided that there were potential safety issues in both the coach industry and the haulage industry and they decided to attempt to address this situation.

The way they did this was to introduce a driver qualification called the CPC (certificate of professional competence) This was to be paid for by the drivers themselves and without it they could not drive as a profession. (we paid for all our drivers to go through this process) The upshot of this legislation is that it has taken a large percentage of drivers out of the market and made it very difficult for some companies to operate. Bloody EU are the first words that come to mind,

The reality of the situation is not quite what it seems however and here is why.

The first move in any proposed legislation is to hand the project to one of the 28 commissioners (one for each country in the EU) It is their job to investigate proposed legislation and report back to the parliament (there is not a single law made by any commissioner as commonly supposed)

The first step is to put the matter out to consultation and this is more often or not where the problem arises and it is because the various trade organisations and in deed the general public do nothing about it which means that the commissioners have to bring in their own “experts” who may or may not be up to the problems envisaged, as the actual trade organisations involved in the issue.

Now that is exactly what happened here as the Freight Transport Association and the Bus and Coach Council did very little to assist or object to the proposed legislation so we finished up with a dog’s breakfast initially with things like the five-day course made up of a possible five of the same, day course on a forklift, for drivers of coaches. That has now been addressed but again because of the ongoing ability to change legislation that is not doing what it is supposed to do.

During the run up to this legislation being put into place the EU through the commissioner was constantly asking for suggestions as to how this would work and the general attitude in the industry was “we don’t want this legislation so why should we help them to draft it” Well the result is that we now have a shortage of drivers in the industry but it wasn’t the fault of the EU but the fault of the industry for not realising the modern inclusive nature of the law making procedure of the EU.

I suspect that similar scenarios play themselves out in the process of the EU getting the blame for “bad legislation”

There is not a single law passed by any commissioner, they are merely the head of a department for suggesting new legislation or keeping present legislation up to date.

When a commissioner suggests a change or new legislation it first has to go the individual parliaments of the 28 country members and only after it as passed that hurdle is it put before the EU parliament for consideration.

There is no doubt that like every large organisation (and they do not come much larger than the EU) there are problems but there is also systems in place to address these problems.

I am of the opinion that we should be going for independence with a promises from all the parties that in the event of Scotland becoming independent, hopefully with a seamless transition in to the EU, that there would, within the first year, be a referendum on continued membership. That way we get independence with every one entitled to a say afterwards.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, well done but I feel he should have been awarded the Nobel prize for peace.

Think about his songs :- A hard rain’s gonna fall.

Blown in the wind

The times they are a changing

With God on our side

Masters of War

And so on, wonderful songs and absolutely timeless, timeless because we are still making the same mistakes we were making in the days when Dylan wrote these songs. Take any of his songs, songs of protest they were called, and you can fit them into today’s world without alteration. Yes, they would fit perfectly, they would fit perfectly because we never seem to learn, we keep electing politicians who take us to war.

They are at it again, we went to war in Syria to carry on a proxy war for Israel and their greater Israel ambitions along with their oil ventures in the occupied Golan Heights.

In Syria today there are several terrorist organisation operating and when I say terrorist organisations I mean military forces who are in the country operating against the legitimate government, against that governments wishes.

These terrorist organisations are in the main ISIS (sponsored by the US and Israel) Al Nustra (sponsored by the US Israel and the UK and called Al Quida until relatively recently) The US, The UK, France. The list is not exhaustive but these are the main protagonists.

Russia is there also, but they are there at the invitation of the Syrian government and they are the only military force that are actually fighting the terrorists.

So these are the situations that Dylan depicted in his songs, songs that he wrote and performed in the sixties but which are very relevant today and that is why I feel he should have been given the Nobel prize for peace.

When will we ever learn to live together?

“the answer is blown in the wind “

Well an interesting speech today from Nicola where she laid out plans to introduce a “draft” bill on a referendum to parliament. Not exactly a new initiative as it was first mentioned at the opening of Parliament a few weeks ago.

Firstly, I can’t understand why the term “draft bill” is being used because, if I understand the bill passage procedure properly, the draft stage is simply one of the steps along the road and not in itself completed step unless the intention is the halt the procedure at that stage, which would seem strange to me.

Anyway, any steps towards a future referendum is to be welcomed. However, it would have been nice to see an announcement regarding addressing the issues we lost the last referendum on as any future referendum will be hopeless without a reasonable time to get people convinced of the inaccuracies that were being put about by project fear with regards to pensions and monetary union.

Now regarding the bill to be published, one of the steps is that any interested parties can object and in fact mount a legal challenge and this is bound to happen because one of the people who can mount such a challenge is the Scottish secretary and the grounds on which that legal challenge will no doubt happen is that a referendum is a reserved matter.

A way of subverting this would have been to have included the intention to wrest control of calling and arranging referendums from Westminster to the Scottish parliament, in either the Westminster general election in 2015 or the Scottish elections last May.

I and others have been warning about this for quite some time and indeed I went into some detail in my blog “letter to Nicola” written a few days before the Scottish elections in May. At the very least it would have given the SNP a focused mandate for a referendum bill, which they do not have at the moment and this will be made very plain by Westminster in coming weeks.

The thing which most concerns me most is that when you analyse Nicolas speech today It gives me the uncomfortable impression that she is intent on doing everything to keep us in the UK and indeed giving the British Government every possible way out to prevent Scotland becoming independent. Now I know there is the argument that The SNP are governing for the whole of Scotland and not just for yes voters but I would put it to you that this does not necessarily mean giving up prime opportunities to go for independence and here is my reasoning.

Nicola Sturgeon is the leader of the SNP and the sole purpose of the SNP is to gain independence for Scotland. Now she is also the first minister of Scotland because she is the leader of the party (the SNP) who are the largest party in the Scottish parliament which by the way has a pro independence majority. Now I think it is fair to say that there is no one who voted for the SNP and therefore made them the largest party in the parliament (last time they had an overall majority before they messed it up this time )  Therefore they have a mandate to strive towards independence so therefore there is no need to sacrifice golden opportunities ( which they have done constantly over the last two years) in the spurious interest of governing for all the people, because that will always be impossible to do and they should instead concentrate on governing according to the mandate they have been given by the Scottish people and that is to achieve independence.

There is no doubt that the most advantages set of circumstances for going for another referendum which will ever likely present themselves was present the day after the EU referendum result and that was missed because Theresa May hotfooted it up to Scotland and persuaded Nicola that she had some sort of veto over EU negotiations.

No more carrots Nicola, please just get on with the job you have been given by the Scottish people.

This week the Dundee Tele conducted a poll to ascertain the views of the people of Dundee and district on how they voted two years ago on the 18th September 2014 in the independence referendum.

The propose of the poll was to see if there had been any change of heart in voters from two years ago ,till today and the result was very satisfying ,to say the least .

More than 7,000 people took the poll and out of that 5,978 said they voted yes making the vote for Yes ,89% as against 12% who would vote No again. A truly spectacular outcome.

However being realistic I suppose there would naturally be a larger amount of people  wanting change would actually vote as against the people who have no real reason to vote because their position is the status quo, but the real significance is in the percentage of people who have decided to change their minds and who would vote yes in the event of another referendum.

The number of people who took the poll and voted no the last time was 851 , of these people there was 686 who would still vote no in another referendum, which means that there were 165 people who have changed their minds which means that there is a shift in voting intentions of just over 19% to yes .

This swing has came about through a natural shift mainly at dissatisfaction with how the Tories and Labour colluded and conspired to deprive us of our independence together with the attitude coming from Westminster in connection with things like “English votes for English laws” and the out come of the “Smith commission” on additional powers for the Scottish Parliament which in effect made us unpaid tax collectors. So in other words there has been a very definite shift in opinion towards yes without much actual input from the SNP as we still do not have any guidance on the issues we lost the last referendum on. Therefore ,one can only imagine what would happen during another campaign with all of these questions answered.

Perhaps ,in the euphoria which will no doubt follow the results of this poll , the most significant positive element of this exercise might escape some and that is the attitude of a DC Thomson news paper , The Tele , in reporting this poll in the fair way they did . Up to now DC Thomson have always been looked upon as a stridently Unionist publisher and ,goodness knows I have had my share of being on the wrong end of their reporting , on several occasions leading to an exchange of letters with the editor of the Courier in which I stated my opinion that Dundee had at one time been the City of Jute ,Jam and Journalism. We had lost the Jute and the Jam and I was of the opinion at the time, that we were about to loose the Journalism.

The Courier and the Tele lost a lot of their circulation soon after the referendum and since then have been battling to get this back. They have tried various things among which was employing Alex Salmond to do a Weekly column. I would like to think that they have now begun to listen to the ordinary people of Dundee and this latest piece on the polling they have carried out together with the fair reporting and coverage they gave to the recent attempt by the Yes Bus team to organise  an independence related rally in the city Square, a rally that was disgracefully thwarted by the SNP led Dundee Council, leads me to believe that they are now reflecting the views of the majority of Dundee folk.

I think this possible change of heart in DC Thomson’s is far more important than the actual results of the poll itself . We in the yes movement are not asking for and favours or special treatment from the press , only a level playing field to compete on ., We have the arguments and we have the moral right to pursue independence for our country. Whether it is next year or the following year we stand ready to continue on that road to independence. It will make that journey more pleasant if we have the ear of our local media outlets.

So a good article today in the Tele and as I said before ,Dundee was once the city of Jute ,Jam and Journalism we lost the Jute and the Jam but there is hope for the journalism and perhaps it is time for the Yes family to show that we hold no grudges and once again start reading our local papers .

Our road

I was at the annual Business for Scotland Dinner in Glasgow on Thursday. It was a well-attended gathering of likeminded people from a broad spectrum of business owners, directors and employees, from the business community in Scotland. There was also a fair contingent from the national press and quite a few politicians.

Nicola Sturgeon was the key note speaker and she gave a very forthright and inspiring speech outlining the various issues we have had in the last two years since the independence referendum and more especially the latest disaster which was the Brexit vote, where it would appear, Scotland is to be torn from the EU, very much against its will.

The speech contained reference to the GERS figures and indeed made mention that the GERS figures represented the situation where Scotland remained a part of the UK as opposed to being independent, which is absolutely correct but kind of spoiled it by mentioning “Scotland’s Deficit “which the GERS figures definitely do not represent and I have not seen alternative figures which would actually show the true position assuming Scotland to be independent.

The speech in general was very good but what it highlighted was why we should be campaigning for another vote on independence right now, and not at some unspecified time in the future when the circumstances could, and very possibly will be completely different from the circumstances which have presented themselves like manna from heaven at the moment. There is of course every possibility that the British government will continue to add to the confusion over Brexit, as there is also every possibility that the Labour party will continue to tear itself apart, but and it is a very big but, there is also the possibility that these two parties might just get their act together and actually start acting like mature political parties.

The one thing that concerns me the most is that the Tories will call another referendum on exit from the EU, which would almost certainly have a different outcome from the most recent one and this would sweep the carpet right from under us as far as another referendum goes.

I am off the opinion that we have missed the best opportunity we are ever likely to have had presented to us than we had the day after the EU referendum. That was when a campaign for another independence referendum should have been announced and I think history will judge that as one of the worst political decisions ever.

We are still on the road to independence but I feel there are unnecessary diversions in place.

Dear ,dear , I have to shake my head in wonder and frustration. We are (or at least the SNP are ) going to have a conversation. They are going to have a conversation about voting intentions . They are going to ask how you voted the last time there was an independence referendum and they are going to ask how you voted in the EU referendum .

Well I can save them the paper and the sore feet because in the independence referendum ,there were 45% of us voted Yes and there were 55% of us voted no, In the EU referendum there was 62% of us voted to stay and 38% of us voted to leave.

Now there are ,no doubt many people who have changed their minds regarding how they will vote in another independence referendum but they will have changed their mind because of events not because of any initiative that the party of independence have undertaken. Events like the way the Scottish labour party threw their lot in with the Tories during the referendum campaign and lied quite openly to the Scottish electorate , the debacle that was the debate in Westminster on Scotland’s future , there was the in introduction of English votes for English laws , there was the decision to go to war in Syria and of course there was Scotland’s forced exit from the EU.

Now you might have noticed that none of these issues were anything to do with the SNP ,apart from the fact that they were innocent bystanders at most of them. I have been racking my brain over the weekend to find a solidary initiative that the SNP have undertaken since the independence referendum to actually promote independence. Instead we have had a series of carrots dangled at opportune times in the lead up to elections, but we have not had a single rally ,a single event or parade sponsored by the SNP to promote independence. In fact my personal experience has been that here in Dundee ( the yes City ) we have had the local SNP actively engaged in trying to thwart our efforts to actually have independence related events.

There has been a distinct lack of attempts to address the issues we lost the last referendum on such as Pensions . monitory union , borders etc., etc.

So what are we getting now as the new “Independence initiative ” we are getting a conversation, a conversation without answers , because that is what it will be and I give you a possible scenario of one of these conversations.

SNP activist :- Knock knock.

Potential voter :- Hullo.

SNP :- I am from the SNP and we are interested in your opinion’s on a future independence referendum.

Voter:- Good I have been waiting two years on you calling.

SNP :- how did you vote in the independence referendum.

Voter :- I voted no.

SNP :- And why did you vote no

Voter :- Because there was confusion over pensions, monetary union , borders  and so on and so forth

SNP :- And how would you vote now

Voter :- I would vote no.

SNP :- Why

Voter :- Because there is still confusion over pensions, monetary union, borders and so on

SNP :-  Oh, I see , well thank you for having a conversation with me and I will get back to Nicola with your answers .

Voter:- No problem but seeing as you are here ,can you tell me the official position as regards to Pensions, monitory union plan B etc.

SNP :- Er , actually no , Nicola hasn’t actually told me yet .

Voter :- Well can you tell her to stop wasting peoples time by having one way conversations , bye.

This is what will happen with this conversation , the answers to which we have wasted two years in coming up with . The SNP have risen in popularity ( apart from the last scottish election) but they have achieved this ,not through any independence initiative but because they have been the beneficiaries of circumstance, and both an acute sense of disappointment that we lost the last referendum and  a willingness to see the SNP as the best conduit to independence .

The SNP must start giving people what it says on the tin and that is a road map to independence , not endless initiatives ,like the Summer initiative which was made up on the back of a fag packet when the SNP saw the response on social media ,to their disappointing manifesto for the last Scottish election, an election in which they lost 6 seats and facilitated a more than doubling of Tory seats .

Stop dangling carrots , give us a proper road map to independence and stop treating the electorate like fools.

This is OUR country and this is OUR road to independence

Ok we are now in the silly season of the GERS figures ,presented by the Scottish government ( by order of the Westminster Government) in order to show that we are to  wee and indeed to stupid to govern an independent Scotland.

Yes believe it or not that is the sole propose of these statistics brought out once a year purportedly to show an accurate presentation of income and expenditure attributable to Scotland as it would be if we were independent.

Thing is that the initial propose  of GERS was in fact the exact opposite and this, and was in fact designed to  deceive ,rather than inform . The first GERS figures came out in 1992 and was the brain child of Scottish secretary ,Ian Lang ( now residing in the House of Lords ). In a memo leaked at the time he said this “I judge that it is just what is needed at present in our campaign to maintain the initiative and undermine the other parties. This initiative could score against all of them”  

So lets have a look these latest figures , which of course are a year old and many of these figures are of unreliable source as some of them are compiled from block figures from which there seems to be no proper accounting, and for the split ,a population share is used. It might be a coincidence but the population share statistics seem to be from areas such as tourism  where a higher than 8.3% ( population share ) would be expected.

There is only one reliable aspect of GERS figures and that is to show what Scotland’s finances are like as part of the UK. There is no reliable way of using them to reflect what Scotland’s finances would be , as an independent country, therefore to put it simply the GERS figures show quite clearly that ,in every way, Scotland has to do better as an independent country than be a part of a union that is so inefficient that only  by being part of it could lead to a deficit situation almost every year.

There are two sets of figures ,income and expenditure. The income consists of taxes and revenue , payable in Scotland and  collected by and on behalf of Scotland ,mainly by the inland revenue service of the UK.

Expenditure is split into two sections , the first section is expenditure carried out  in Scotland by the Scottish government and the other section is expenditure carried out and apportioned to Scotland by Westminster and this is where the problem lies ,because Westminster would like you to believe that this expenditure would be carried out in Scotland regardless of whether it was independent or not and therein lies the deception, because it patently wouldn’t.

It would take far to long to go into all the ins and outs of the expenditure con, but to bring a few of the more glaring deceptions and save you falling asleep in the process of reading it here are a few things to chew on .

We presently pay the UK three billion pounds for the armed forces . Now two points here . Firstly it is expected that if we decide to have a full blown Army ,Navy and Air force, we could do it for two billion pounds , We also might decide not to have armed forces at all , in which case there would be no expenditure on this item. However  the thing about our present contribution is that very little is actually spent in Scotland as there is a small proportion of our armed forces based in Scotland and so most of this money is spent in England and of course in other places pursuing wars that not many people in Scotland supported. In an independent Scotland the two billion pounds spent on a defense force ,would in the main be spent within Scotland . So in other words an independent Scotland would ,compared to these figures, be the beneficiary of almost 3.5 Billion pounds more than at present in connection with the armed forces

A considerable amount of money spent on our behalf is spent on the upkeep of the Westminster parliament and of course the house of lords and apart  from our MP’s salaries none of this is spent in Scotland.

There are projects  which are deemed to be of advantage to Scotland, such as the proposed extension to Heathrow , London cross rail, the greater London sewer extension , the electric rail which will leave London and terminate at Leeds and of course, a few years ago  the Olympic games, which are also proportionally charged on a population basis (8.3%) to Scotland

We also of course pay our share of the huge foreign services budget together with the infrastructure and buildings both in London and all over the World which we would not need as we would enter into embassy sharing arrangements with other countries as do many small countries.

Then ,of course there is the national debt, which more accurately should be called the UK debt, because that is what it is, and an independent Scotland would have no legal responsibility for any of it as it was built up by successive incompetent governments ,both Tory and Labour and there is absolutely no reason why we should pay a penny of this. Ireland did not pay any  of this debt when they became independent in the early thirties so why should Scotland ? . Would you expect your kids to take on part of your mortgage when they leave home to start a new life ? Scotland also pays £2.7 Billion in UK debt interest each year

Ok so what about the actual figures and this fictitious “black Hole ”

Current revenues in Scotland                                £53.443 Billion

Current expenditure within Scotland                 £40.363 Billion

Credit Balance                                                             £13.080 Billion

Then comes the dodgy bit

Amounts charged to Scotland

by Westminster for items mentioned above

most of which we would not need in an

independent Scotland                                                   £28.014 Billion

This is where this fictitious black hole appears

And this leaves a theoretical deficit of                   14.934 Billion

which can only happen if Scotland remains part of the UK, in fact this is exactly WHY Scotland remains part of the UK.

Now the Scottish government must know this , so my question is this , why do they continually fudge the truth about this fictitious deficit ? I have heard Nicola Sturgeon actually say in relation to the GERS figures that “many small countries have deficits and an independent Scotland would manage a deficit quite well ”

Now an independent Scotland , in all probability would not have a budgetary deficit ( a deficit is different from debt) or at least a very small and manageable one , but one thing is certain and that is that it would bear absolutely no relation to the one that the UK government would lead you to believe and the Scottish government for some strange reason seem to blithely accept.

The GERS figures are certainly an unnecessary millstone that the SNP willingly seem to carry around their neck , why?