Salmond fishing and the Yes men
In response to Alex Salmond gambled Scotland’s future on a collapsing oil price – 13th January 2016
From the land that gave the world the inventors of radar, penicillin, steam engines, television and the telephone, football legends Dave McKay, Charlie Cooke and Frank McLintock, the creators of the King James Bible version, Sherlock Holmes, Ivanhoe, Peter Pan, Rebus and Auld Lang Syne – not forgetting David Livingstone, Adam Smith, Annie Lennox and Andy Murray – I give you the Right Honourable Alex Salmond.
Here is a man who in the past 8 years of failed devolved government has split his country in a vicious referendum and wants another one soon.
A man who whips up support by blaming “Westmonster” for all our perceived ills, whose untrue claim “there’s a vast overwhelming majority of people in Scotland who rather like the idea of a Westminster parliament hung by a Scottish rope” was only thwarted by English voters who, spooked by the idea, voted in a majority Tory government.
A man whose favourite poet, the impenetrable fascist Hugh McDiarmid, said in 1940,
“Now when London is threatened
With devastation from the air
I realise, horror atrophying me,
That I hardly care.”
Please don’t be taken in, only 30% of Scots voted for him!
Allan Sutherland, Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire
As someone who campaigned for the YES vote I can say that the only people making an issue of the oil during the referendum were the No campaigners. The YES campaign always said that an independent Scotland could be viable without the oil – that the oil revenues were considered as a welcome extra for our revenue.
I am sick of being ruled by Tories who are using the poor, disabled and disadvantaged as fall guys in their bid to create more wealth for the rich. I hope to God that there will be another referendum in my lifetime (I’m in my seventies) and I will campaign even harder for Independence for Scotland.
Deirdre Murray , Ayrshire, Scotland
Some evidence exists that Salmond didn’t actually have much input into the White Paper himself and that it was actually ALL Nicola Sturgeon’s doing, which if true i think should mean she isn’t fit to run Scotland and should resign. This is also the woman who nearly resigned previously over her support in Holyrood for a twice convicted fraudster.
Back to the White Paper – the evidence can be seen here where it says “The book reveals how Miss Sturgeon took almost full control of the referendum campaign plans and preparing the independence White Paper.
“That was her baby she was in charge of the whole thing,” recalls one ministerial colleague.
The normally controlling Mr Salmond was happy with this according to another insider, who also claimed he increasingly came to view his deputy as “material to his own success”.”
The text can be found here .
We also should not forget that it was Sturgeon who was the Holyrood Infrastructure Minister who signed off a 58% cut in the Maintenance Budget for the Forth Road Bridge that delayed the replacement of the Truss Link for years before its final failure recently. Perhaps Sturgeon’s suitability on being able to make the right decisions for Scotland is a fatally flawed one ?
Jock Tamson, Edinburgh, Scotland
No ref-EU-ge
Julia Hartley Brewer is quite correct in her article British voters will decide on the EU, not you Mr Osborne – 15th January 2016.
Something as important as this is not to be left to career politicians. Just the thought of them putting their self-interest before the welfare of their country is galling in the extreme.
Not that this is new – it’s the modus operandi of the political elite. Blair’s utterly disgusting ambition drove him to side-step the piecemeal immigration that other countries adopted and opened the floodgates by stealth. Germany’s disaster now puts all this into full focus and there’s absolutely no confidence in europhile politicians.
Hartley Brewer gets one thing wrong though: her opinion that Cameron called a referendum to win voters back from UKIP. I posit that it was/is UKIP who are presenting the most cogent argument for a Brexit.
While mainstream politicians and newspaper columnists in UK have been mumbling for years incoherently over lunch about it, Nigel Farage has been conducting an unrelenting and fierce battle with those in EUParliament who are right now wrecking the continent.
Leave your prejudices aside and Google Nigel Farage at the EUParliament, and try to catch where he takes on Blair…and watch Blair huff and puff himself up from the dais alongside the other traitors.
This country has survived a lot over the centuries but honestly if left to these political carpetbaggers it will cease to exist as we know it.
Pete Dunn, Bristol, UK
Osborne seems to have forgotten the treaty lock legislation that provides for a referendum in the event of a proposal for further powers to be transferred from Westminster to Brussels.
It’s possible further EU integration measures will bring the treaty lock into play and a further referendum will have to be held.
Geoffrey Adlam , Brighton, UK
Good article but I’ve never understood why we should do other than vote ‘out’ and then negotiate for what we mostly want – a free trade deal similar to that between US and the EU with our fisheries regained nil net contributions to be wasted by the Brussels mafia and control of our borders and laws.
Of course we’d need to beef up democratic accountability and ensure regulators or monopolies or quasi-monopolies are actually competent (does anyone think OFCOM OFWAT OFGEN etc are other than next to useless at protecting the consumer?) and very likely spend much more on real expertise for Parliamentary Committees and leading (working!) MPs to replace the lobbyist near control of both EU and our Parliament – but we’d all be better off wouldn’t we?
John Andrews, London, UK
Team GB
Iain Martin alleges that Eurosceptic Tories in Westminster prevaricate about Brexit because they have no backbone (The Cabinet’s Eurosceptics are a bunch of careerist scaredy cats – 15th January 2016). I believe that they will suffer severe back strain once they start to row in the direction that future opinion polls indicate.
John Morgan, Larnaca, Cyprus | @jhmorgan54
At long last a journalist asks the question, what is it to be career or country, the so called euro sceptic ministers cannot hide behind the result of a renegotiation based on almost nothing as a change in our relationship with the EU.
Vote leave for our sovereignty and security back.
Tony Gibney, Bournemouth, U.K
BBC bash
In response to Why does America celebrate the best whilst Britain celebrates the brash? – 15th January.
The left wing of politics in this country, of which the BBC is such an important part, want to impose views on people. Letting us ordinary people listen to the real intellectuals then making our own minds up might lead us to reactionary thought. Better to let our minds rot listening to the repeated platitudes of soft left entertainers plugging the book/film/pop music that will make them their next million. All presided over by a host who considers a million little more than the price of his next car.
What ever charter is imposed on the BBC it will remain a tax funded monolith it will continue to promote the benefits of the state it is a part of and the ideology of the left especially immigration multiculturalism and the superiority of others over the British.
Ronald Todd , Gloucestershire, UK