We are close to a UK in which the Scottish and Welsh governments are both led by pro-independence parties and in Northern Ireland the devolved government is led by the pro-reunification Sinn Féin. Meanwhile in England the nakedly English nationalist hard right party of Nigel Farage is on current polling set to form the next Westminster government.

Despite calling itself Reform UK, Farage’s party has little interest in those parts of the UK which are not England as evidenced by the fact that the party failed to mention Scotland in its manifesto for the 2024 Westminster general election, and just seven months out from the Holyrood election it still has no clearly articulated Scottish policies. Many in Reform UK are known to be overtly hostile to the devolution settlement and some – such as former Reform MP Rupert Lowe – who left Reform in a huff after the party did not prove capable of containing both his and Farage’s massive egos, have openly called for the abolition of the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and a return to the situation as it was pre 1997.

Farage has not made his own position on devolution clear, but it’s a safe bet that his English nationalist instincts make him antipathetic to any elected body which competes with Westminster for national power. He is however intelligent enough to avoid saying out loud that he’d like to see the powers of Holyrood and the Senedd curtailed or the devolved parliaments abolished. He knows that would be electoral kryptonite in the hands of his opponents in the run up to Scottish and Welsh elections for his party to be seen to espouse the abolition of the Scottish Parliament or the rolling back of devolution. Outright abolition might play well with the staunch flute band brigade and some of the far right frothers who infest the comments sections of the anti-independence press but it repels most in Scotland.

It is certainly the case that Reform is first and foremost an English party without the same ideological commitment to the Union found in the Tories, the Lib Dems or Starmer’s Labour party. Reform members see Scotland as nothing more than a historic region of a unitary British state, a greater England in all but name in which Scotland has no more political relevance than Mercia or Wessex.

A Reform government in Westminster would be openly hostile to Edinburgh and Cardiff but a new opposition in England is coalescing around the English and Welsh Greens and the as yet unknown quantity of Corbyn and Sultana’s Your Party. Zack Polanski, the social media savvy new leader of the English and Welsh Greens has voiced his personal support for Scottish and Welsh independence while Corbyn’s party will at worst be neutral on independence and may even overtly support it.

The tipping point will come in May 2027 if Sinn Féin wins the Northern Irish election and sets in train the process for a reunification referendum. With Reform surging in England, the clamour for referendums from Scotland and Wales will be politically difficult for Starmer to ignore. I suspect he will try and ignore it which means the 2029 Westminster general election will consist of three de facto independence referendums running in parallel, one each in Scotland, Wales, and England. Northern Ireland will already be on a path to reunification with the rest of Ireland.

This all heralds a perfect storm for the UK as it is presently constituted. Farage will try to press English dominance and run roughshod over Edinburgh and Cardiff in a similar manner to the Tories, but on steroids. The opposition in Westminster will be far more sympathetic to Scottish and Welsh institutional resistance and disobedience than hitherto.

But between now and the next Westminster election there is work to be done.

Believe in Scotland has already agreed to collaborate with the SNP. Together they will start the process of bringing the whole independence movement together in an inclusive Scottish Independence Congress.

This month, they plan to set up the Scottish Constitutional Convention, a coalition of civic Scotland, trade unions, charities, other stakeholder bodies and political parties who believe in Scotland’s democratic right to decide its own constitutional future. This will be open to groups who do not necessarily support independence or have a position on it, but who agree that the choice should be made by the people of Scotland alone.

The best thing is for you to read Believe in Scotland’s proposal for yourselves. The link is here. The proposals are detailed and well thought through.

https://www.believeinscotland.org/the_road_to_independence_mapped_out

What all this will require as a vital condition of success is a Scottish Parliament with a pro-independence majority which is willing and able to disobey Farage and refuse to acquiesce to Westminster power . It will be aided and abetted by a strong contingent of SNP MPs, who after the next Westminster general election should make up a strong majority of Scotland’s MPs holding a mandate for independence. These MPs must be prepared to deploy every arcane rule in the Westminster rulebook to gum up the workings of the Commons and together with Holyrood make Scotland effectively ungovernable until the Westminster government recognises the mandates of Holyrood and Scotland’s MPs and facilitates a recognised and binding referendum. There is currently a majority for independence in Scotland but with the groundwork having been laid as per Believe in Scotland’s proposal and its well-being manifesto for Scotland and the alternative to independence being subordination to Farage’s ugly hard right English nationalism, a handsome victory for independence in the referendum is all but assured.

It is famously said that it is darkest before the dawn. Right now things look pretty dark, but there is a dawn coming, and it’s coming sooner than many of us have dared to allow ourselves to hope.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

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I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

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Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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In their unseemly haste to lump independence supporters in the same barrel of bad apples as Trump, we are now expected to believe that the Yes movement in Scotland supports a bid to push the BBC even further to the British nationalist right and hence make it far more hostile to Scottish independence than it already is.

The BBC is objectively biased against Scottish independence and the parties which support it, this bias has been copiously documented for over a decade and has been noted by figures outwith the Scottish independence movement such as former BBC editor Paul Mason, the environmental campaigner George Monbiot, and others. The BBC’s bias during the 2014 Scottish independence campaign was shockingly blatant with the Corporation paying lip service to the Yes side while acting as the propaganda wing of Better Together.

On the other hand, Donald Trump is engaged in a campaign of lawfare which has the twin aims of enriching him personally and cowing the press into obedience and submission, forcing it to preferentially platform extreme right wing views and to close down criticism of him personally and silence left wing voices. Both those things, the BBC’s anti-independence bias in its coverage of the Scottish constitutional debate, and Trump’s assault on the freedom of the press, can be true, and both are true.

What Yes supporters expect from the BBC is not deference and obedience, not the silencing of anti-independence opinions, what the Yes movement expects of the BBC is that the BBC really does adhere to the standards of objectivity and impartiality that it claims to uphold but which it objectively fails to deliver on in Scotland. Yes supporters demand a BBC which really does reflect and represent the true breadth and range of opinion in Scotland, a nation in which there is now sustained majority support for independence, not that you would know that from the print media or the BBC.

The print media in Scotland is ludicrously biased, with just one single paper supporting independence out of 38 daily and weekly publications. As privately owned and funded companies these papers reflect the right wing and anti-independence biases of their wealthy owners, as a publicly funded broadcaster, the job of the BBC ought to be to act as a corrective to the bias in the privately owned media, not to double down on it and reinforce it.

The ire of Yes supporters is directed at the BBC because we, along with the rest of the Scottish public, are obliged to pay for it. There is horrendous anti-independence bias, outright lies and scaremongering, in the Scottish editions of the Daily Mail and the Express, but independence supporters are not made to pay for these publications and they don’t post us aggressive letters or send their representatives to turn up on our doorsteps threatening court action if we refuse to buy them. If the BBC demands that independence supporters fund it, then it has an obligation to represent the views of independence supporters in proportion to their representation in the broader Scottish public. The BBC, and particularly BBC Scotland, does not come close to this. In fact it shows no awareness at all that it should even attempt to do so.

None of this is remotely similar to Trump’s assault on press freedom. What Trump wants is the silencing of his critics and to turn the entire media landscape into a copy of Musk’s social media sewer, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, and the even more far right cable news networks like One America News Network, the Daily Wire, and Newsmax which relentlessly peddle far right conspiracy theories and ring wing culture wars bullshit. Trump doesn’t want the media to hold up a mirror to the true range and diversity of views and opinions in the population which it purports to serve, which is what Scottish independence supporters are asking for. We want a media which is truly reflective of Scotland, not one which amplifies some political views while marginalising and excluding others. That is the opposite of what Trump is trying to do.

Of course it is entirely to be expected that supporters of Westminster rule in Scotland will seek to delegitimise the well founded and well documented allegations of BBC bias against the Scottish independence movement and the political parties associated with it. British domination and control of the media and the BBC is its strongest weapon in its increasingly desperate attempts to fend off the growing inevitability of Scottish independence. Yet despite that dominance, Westminster’s grasp on Scotland is still weakening. I’ve said this before but it is worth repeating. If Scotland had a truly representative media which accurately reflected a true picture of Scottish opinion on the constitutional question, Scotland would be independent already.

However as things stand Westminster jealously guards its control over broadcasting. It is nothing short of a scandal that Scotland does not have a national public service broadcaster of its own. Every other autonomous nation and territory in Europe does, Scotland is the outlier. It should not be up to advocates for greater media diversity in Scotland to argue for a Scottish national public service broadcaster, it should fall on opponents to prove why it’s unnecessary.

When plans for a Scottish Parliament were mooted in the 1980s and 1990s, it was envisaged that the new parliament would naturally have control over broadcasting. This proposal was stripped out of the Scotland bill by Labour MPs. There is now no chance of Westminster conceding to a Scottish broadcaster,it knows how valuable the BBC was to Better Together in 2014. It also knows that when the independence question is revisited, Scotland will opt for independence.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

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I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

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This is a challenge which is already causing the wheels to come off the Reform bandwagon, as we have seen with this week’s suspension of four Reform councillors in Kent amidst bad tempered internal disputes and chaos within the governing Reform group. There is also the looming cloud of suspicion of financial links between senior figures in Reform and the Putin regime. Reform’s former Welsh leader Nathan Gill has admitted to taking bribes from Russia in order to make statements favourable to Russia while serving as a Member of the European Parliament. Gill is now facing possible jail time.

While an MEP, Gill took money from Oleg Voloshyn, a former Russian MP who the US government describes as a “pawn” of Russian secret services, in return for making pro-Russian speeches in the European Parliament.

Gill was not a marginal figure in Reform. He served as a UKIP, and later Brexit Party, MEP between 2014 and 2020 and was leader of UKIP Wales between 2014 and 2016. He was one of seven UKIP politicians elected to the Senedd in 2016 when the party was led by Farage. Gill was leader of Reform UK Wales between March and May 2021, and led the party’s Senedd/Welsh Parliament election campaign. Gill was a close associate of Nigel Farage, despite attempts by Reform’s head of policy Zia Yusuf attempting to distance the party from him, claiming – unconvincingly – that he didn’t know who Gill was.

Farage has now admitted that he has known Gill for a very long time but vehemently denies that he knew anything about the bribes Gill accepted from Russia. In 2016 Farage described Gill as “hard-working, honest and loyal”.

Farage has himself met with Voloshyn’s wife, Nadia Borodin, who worked as a presenter on the Ukrainian pro-Russia Channel 112, which was owned by one of Putin’s closest allies, Viktor Medvedchuk. Ukraine banned the channel in 2021.

Farage appeared in a photo with Borodin, after she had done an interview with Gill for Channel 112 at the European Parliament in Strasbourg.

Farage denies that his party has any financial links to the Putin regime. However questions about his finances continue to surface. The cash purchase of an £885,000 house in Farage’s constituency of Clacton by his partner Laure Ferrari has raised eyebrows and led to questions about the source of the funds. Farage denies that he has any financial stake in the property.

Farage has also denied avoiding more than £44,000 in additional stamp duty on the purchase of the house by putting it in his partner’s name, saying that she bought it with her own funds. Farage claims Ferrari was able to afford the four-bedroom home because she comes from a wealthy French family. However an investigation of French property and company records from the BBC failed to find evidence that Ferrari’s parents have the means to fund their daughter’s purchase of the home.

Now the Times newspaper reports that Ferrari has been embroiled in a fraud investigation in Belgium involving a Eurosceptic think tank she once led. Ferrari, 46, was the “day to day manager” of the Institute for Direct Democracy in Europe (IDDE), a think tank which promoted Eurosceptic ideas from its Brussels base before it was wound up in 2017. The EU’s anti-fraud office Olaf has been looking into IDDE’s funding for some time. Investigators have now reportedly uncovered what they describe as “serious” financial irregularities, including claims that some donors were awarded questionable contracts. The case has now been passed to the prosecuting authorities in Belgium who are expected to make a decision about whether to proceed with the case in November.

Ferrari has strongly denied any wrongdoing, calling the case “politically driven” and the claims against her “fake,” saying they stem from leaks by a hostile MEP.

There are plenty of ways in which Reform UK could implode before 2029, despite the fact that the British media seems to be markedly lacking in curiosity about the Nathan Gill case or about Farage’s partner’s finances.

However here in Scotland we don’t have the luxury of four years in which to hope that Reform eats itself. The Scottish elections are due in less than eight months. While Reform is performing more poorly in Scotland than in England, it is expected to gain representation in the Scottish Parliament, doubtless aided by a Scottish media which will platform the far right party at every turn, while turning a blind eye to the reality of Reform’s English nationalism.

As supporters of Scottish independence we cannot afford to dismiss or trivialise the threat to Scotland’s interests posed by Reform, and as campaigning gears up for next year’s Holyrood election, canvassers and campaigners for Scotland’s pro-independence parties need arguments to counter Reform’s misinformation on the doorstep.

Reform poses an existential threat to Scotland’s burgeoning renewable energy industry. Reform is not – at least in public – quite as crass as Donald Trump, who openly dismisses anthropogenic climate change as a ‘hoax’, but Reform’s Deputy leader Richard Tice continues to insist that climate change driven by human activity is not a threat.

The science behind climate change is very simple and incontrovertible. Certain atmospheric gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) being one of the most important, act as ‘heat traps’ in the atmosphere, creating a blanket over the surface of the earth which inhibits the escape into space of energy which arrives on Earth from the sun. This energy causes the atmosphere to heat up. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more efficient this blanket becomes and the warmer the atmosphere grows. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humanity has been pumping huge quantities of CO2 from fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

There are two main strands to Tice’s denialism of the threat posed by climate change. The first is to point out that in previous periods in the Earth’s history, average global temperatures were warmer than they are forecast to rise to over the next hundred years or so if no action is taken to combat carbon emissions. Tice points out that life on the planet survived these warm periods.

While it’s certainly true that there have been periods in Earth’s history when temperatures were warmer than they are now, Tice – deliberately perhaps – overlooks two key differences because they don’t suit his argument.

The first is that previous periods of global warming occurred over hundreds or thousands of years. That’s a blink of the eye in geological terms, but it’s slow enough to allow ecosystems to adapt. One of the most recent of these warm periods was the Middle Pliocene Warm Period which lasted from about 3.3 million to 3 million years ago. During this period the average global temperature was 2 to 3 C higher than it is today and sea levels were 10 to 30 meters higher.

This brings us to the second key difference which Tice ignores – from a human point of view the more important one. 3.3 million years ago modern humans had yet to evolve. Our ancestors were primarily represented by species like Australopithecus afarensis (the famous ‘Lucy’ fossil). These were bipedal apes with brains the size of those of modern chimpanzees who may have been experimenting with the use of crude stone tools. They were relatively few in number and most likely lived in small and mobile family groups, foraging for roots, fruits, insects, small animals, and carrion. If climate change caused water or food to become harder to obtain, they could migrate to a new territory.

Modern humanity lives in a complex sedentary civilisation with high population density requiring the reliable production and distribution of enormous amounts of food, energy, and raw materials. This necessitates devoting huge tracts of fertile land to agriculture, much of this land is flat low lying alluvial plains lying close to sea level. Additionally, since our modern civilisation depends upon international trade, most of the world’s largest cities grew up around sea ports and are highly vulnerable to sea level rise. If sea levels were to rise to the level of the Middle Pliocene Warm Period, most of London and South East England would be under water as would the Netherlands, much of Belgium, most of Bangladesh, the fertile Nile Delta where most of Egypt’s 110 million population live. Much of the US seaboard and most of New York City and Florida would be drowned. If Farage and Tice think that the numbers of refugees are excessive now, they would be dwarfed by the tens of millions forced to seek new homes due to sea level rise.

But a warming climate does not just create a rise in sea levels. The more energy that is put into the atmosphere, the more energy there is for devastating storms and hurricanes. Torrential downpours and wild fires would all increase in frequency and create ever greater damage and disruption, further stressing the already stressed production of humanity’s food and energy. What Tice with his net zero stupity ignores is that the most immediate threat posed by climate change is not to the planet. It’s to the survival of human civilisation.

The collapse of ecosystems threatened by rapid climate change is not just a threat to biodiversity and to the survival of exotic species that most of us have never heard about, it’s a threat to humanity too. Our survival depends on the survival of these complex ecosystems. We do not stand apart from nature, we are a part of it.

Tice also argues that since the UK only contributes around 1% of global carbon emissions then the UK achieving net zero would make little difference to the global picture, so why bother?

This is a deeply short sighted and irresponsible argument. It’s like saying that my dog only craps once a day so why should I bother cleaning up its mess from the pavement. If everyone did that we’d soon be wading knee deep in doggy doo on the way to the shops. We all need to play our part and if the UK abandons efforts to attain net zero then it has no moral standing when it comes to persuading larger polluters. But short sighted selfishness is Reform’s stock in trade.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

______________________________________________

I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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However what Starmer and his North Sea oil slick really said were anodyne content free responses to a question they don’t want to answer, answers which don’t actually commit them to anything at all. After all it’s not like Wee Dougie could say that the UK Government isn’t going to take the outcome of next May’s Scottish election seriously, even though we all know that’s the reality. What Starmer said was nothing at all. An SNP majority being “Looked at in Westminster” more plausibly means that Starmer will pronounce that an SNP majority in Westminster means there shouldn’t be another independence referendum for the same spurious, gaslighting, and goalpost shifting reasons that were trotted out after the May 2021 Holyrood election when we learned that a Scottish election campaign which had centred on the question of a second independence referendum hadn’t been about a second independence referendum after all.

Just a few weeks ago, Starmer ruled out another Scottish independence referendum, saying: “We’re not having an independence referendum. It is a distraction. It won’t happen. It is a distraction from the record of the SNP.”

The truth is that the outcomes of democratic events in Scotland are only accepted and respected by Westminster when the people of Scotland give the British parties a result which is to their liking. I remain convinced that had the result of the 2014 independence referendum gone the other way and been 55% Yes and 45% No, Westminster would not have accepted the result and the BBC, which described 2014’s 55% No result as “decisive” would have said that Scotland was pretty evenly split on the issue.

The only way that Scotland will be respected by Westminster is by playing hard-ball, and adopting a far more assertive and bold attitude. For starters, the Scottish Government must show a willingness to push back and a refusal to accept and implement Westminster’s constant attempts to undermine, sideline or by-pass the devolution settlement.

Just today, it has come to light that the British Government is refusing to reimburse Scotland for the £24.5 million cost of policing Donald Trump and JD Vance’s recent visits to Scotland. These visits were ostensibly private, despite the fact that both Trump and Vance met with senior British Government figures during their time in the UK. Starmer had a meeting with Trump at Trump’s Turnberry golf course in South Ayrshire, while Vance met with Foreign Secretary David Lammy in England. So it’s disingenuous of Westminster to claim that since the visits were private the policing costs should be shouldered by the Scottish public purse. Foreign relations, and diplomacy are jealously reserved to Westminster. The Scottish Government neither sought these visits nor initiated them and was not in any position to refuse the pair of corrupt wannabe dictators visas.

On previous supposedly private visits such as Trump’s visit to Scotland in 2018, the UK Government reimbursed the policing costs to Scotland. That Starmer’s government is not doing so now is very obviously a power move, an attempt to tell Holyrood who the boss is. The Scottish Government needs to respond with much more than a stern letter from the Finance Secretary Shona Robison.

The great bulk of the policing costs were incurred in an attempt to spare the British Government the diplomatic embarrassment of Trump being confronted by the sight of large numbers of pissed off Scottish people telling him exactly what they thought of him.

The Scottish Government should tell Westminster in no uncertain terms that should the mango Mussolini and his little helper ever return to Scotland, Police Scotland will strictly limit itself to protecting the Scottish public, will not provide any additional resources over and above what it would normally provide to ensure public order and safety at a large demonstration, and will make no effort whatsoever to protect the feelings of the thin skinned Trump, nor to insulate him and his entourage from the people of Scotland.

Police Scotland will not close down public highways, will not restrict access to public beaches, and will not prevent legal and peaceful demonstrators from coming within sight or earshot of Trump and his minions. Police Scotland will also ensure that Trump and his entourage obey all laws while in Scotland, his vehicles will not be permitted to break the speed limit on the A77, which will not be closed down for him. Nor will they be allowed to go the wrong way round the roundabout at the end of the Maybole by-pass as they did this summer while Police Scotland looked the other way.

Trump has his own security detail, he can pay for and organise his own protection. It is not the business of the Scottish Government to go along with Starmer’s desire to suck up to Trump and prevent him from being confronted with evidence of his very real and deep unpopularity in Scotland. Westminster can deal with the diplomatic fall out as Westminster has made it very clear that diplomatic matters are not Holyrood’s concern. Starmer’s government needs to learn that if it plays stupid games with Holyrood, it’s going to win stupid prizes. It’s only by keeping up the pressure on the Labour government on all issues that it’s going to learn that the Scottish Government will not be pushed around.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

______________________________________________

I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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Some great news from Wales today. Plaid Cymru has smashed over 100 years of Labour domination and swept its way to victory in the Caerffili Senedd by election, taking 47% of votes cast. Although pollsters and bookies had fancied Reform UK to take the seat, in the end, Plaid left Reform in the dust, far behind in second place on 36%. The result was an utter humiliation for Labour, whose vote collapsed to just 11%, and this remember in a seat where Labour’s vote had traditionally been weighed not counted. Labour has held the corresponding Westminster constituency since its creation in 1918 and has held the Senedd seat since the first elections to the Welsh Parliament in 1999.

This is a seismic result for Wales, the first big crack in the traditional stranglehold that Labour has held over Welsh politics for a century. The result was if anything even worse for the Tories, whose vote was almost entirely obliterated, leaving them with a risible 2% of votes cast. The Tories are the party of the walking dead, a party without meaning or purpose, and may be swallowed up by Reform before the next Westminster general election.

The voters of South Wales have delivered their verdict on Keir Starmer, and they don’t like what they’ve been seeing. A Labour party which moves into the political territory vacated by the Tories as that party descends into far right lunacy is not a Labour party at all, and it’s a party which will be roundly rejected by Labour’s traditional voters.

But this result also tells us that the rise of Reform and its far right nostrums is not an inevitability. Reform threw everything at this campaign. Voters were much more likely to see Nigel Farage on the streets of Caerffili than the streets of Clacton. It remains a fact that there are more people who despise Farage and his migrant baiting fear-mongering than there are those who have lapped it up. That gives us hope that the English nationalist far right can be defeated. In Scotland and Wales by progressive pro-independence parties, and in England by left wing parties like the Greens and Corbyn’s new party.

The Caerffili result also gives us hope that the next Westminster general election could see the victory of pro-independence parties in Scotland and Wales and parties of Irish reunification in the north of Ireland. It’s hard to see how the UK survives this scenario with an election win in England by either far right English nationalists or leftist parties which support the principle of self-determination for the Celtic countries. Either way it will be game over for the UK as it is currently constituted.

Of course, the political and cultural/historical landscape of Wales is very different from that of Scotland and we cannot read too much into this heartening result in terms of what it tells us about next year’s Holyrood election. Unlike the SNP, Plaid is not weighed down by the baggage of over a decade and a half in government. Labour has been the governing party in Wales since devolution was introduced and have presided over the worst performing NHS in Britain. That’s an important difference.

Neither do the anti-independence parties and their supporters in Wales have the same existential dread of an independence referendum as their counterparts in Scotland. In Scotland another independence referendum will unquestionably result in a victory for supporters of independence. The outcome of an independence referendum in Wales is far less certain. One consequence of this is anti-SNP tactical voting will absolutely be a significant factor in the next Scottish elections but it’s hard to say whether anti-Plaid tactical voting will occur at all in next year’s Senedd elections.

What we can say from this result is that the Labour party in Scotland and Wales cannot escape the massive unpopularity of Starmer’s government, while the Conservatives are dying as a significant political force. Both these factors bode well for hopes of Scottish and Welsh independence.

The catastrophe for Labour in Wales is all the more significant because Labour’s Welsh branch office has tried to distance itself from Starmer in a way that the spineless nepo-baby Anas Sarwar has not. Sarwar has not spoken out against Starmer’s shameless betrayal of the workers at Grangemouth. He is also keeping quiet about Labour’s disgusting decision to shaft the Scottish fishing industry by awarding it only a 7.8% share of the £360 million Coastal Growth Fund (CGF) despite the fact that Scottish fisheries are responsible for landing 64% of all fish in the UK by value in 2023. Scotland landed more than three times as much fish as England by weight in 2023 (318,000 tonnes vs 91,200). By value, Scotland more than doubled England’s catch (£523.7m vs £249.3m). However, England will get 11 times more funding than Scotland (£304m vs £28m) to revitalise its fleet and train new fishers.

This decision is because Labour wants to plough the cash into English coastal communities where Reform UK is polling well. You could not ask for a clearer example of the UK sacrificing Scotland’s interests in order to benefit England. That will always happen as long as Scotland remains a part of this dysfunctional political construct that calls itself a union.

Despite attempts by Labour’s Scottish branch office to shrug off the Caerffili result as being of no relevance to next year’s Holyrood election – attempts which we can file under – they would say that wouldn’t they? – less partisan observers beg to differ.

Ailsa Henderson, a professor of political science based at the University of Edinburgh, said the result in Caerffili has “obvious significance and resonance” for the Holyrood election next May, as it showed Welsh Labour being deeply affected by the unpopularity of UK Labour.

This result gives us hope that Farage’s frothers can be locked out of the constituency vote entirely in Scotland, leading to them failing to win a single Scottish seat in the next Westminster general election and minimising their impact in Holyrood after next year’s election.

For the Labour party and Keir Starmer, this result ought to be a wake up call. Starmer’s pursuit of right wing policies is a vote loser. Labour either returns to its traditional left of centre position or it dies, and in Scotland that means Labour must return to an overt acceptance of the right of the people of Scotland to determine Scotland’s constitutional future for themselves. For the Tories it’s probably too late already. For the time being the Tories will limp on on the inertia of their history and name recognition, but their engine has broken irretrievably. For the SNP, this result tells us that a clear leftist position can cut through with the electorate. It was by Alex Salmond taking the SNP to the left in the early 2000s that secured SNP victory and it’s by moving to the left now that can secure victory in 2026.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

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I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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It remains to be seen whether Jeremy Corbyn’s party, as yet unnamed, will adopt a platform in support of Scottish independence or not, and the extent to which its Scottish branch will be autonomous. A number of independence supporters, including three Scottish Green councillors from Glasgow, the Scottish Green candidate Ellie Gommersall and the erstwhile Alba members Craig Murray and Hugh Kerr have all jumped ship to join the new party. Given Corbyn’s previous statements that he believes the matter of an independence referendum should be for Scotland to decide, it seems that at worst, the new party will not be hostile to Scottish independence even if it doesn’t overtly espouse independence.

It also remains to be seen whether the new party will garner sufficient support to get its Holyrood candidates elected and if so, where that support will come from. I’d imagine that a good part of it could come from that large segment of Labour’s support in Scotland which is neutral to or supportive of independence and which is in despair over Starmer’s move to the right.

For independence supporters this leaves us with the question of who to vote for in the regional list vote. Voting SNP in the constituency vote should be a given. There are a number of points to consider here. Firstly the topic of gaming the d’Hondt system in order to maximise pro-independence representation comes up every time a Holyrood election is in the offing. No one has ever come up with a fool proof method of doing so. There’s a reason for that. It’s next to impossible to vote tactically in the list successfully as to do so requires accurate advance knowledge of the results in all the constituency seats in the region. which you can only do with a Tardis. The simple fact is – however unpalatable it may be to independence supporters – anti-independence parties get elected on the regional list because people vote for them. The anti-independence groups focus their tactical voting campaigns on the constituency vote.

The other important point to bear in mind is that the only time the SNP ever secured a majority it did so on the back of regional list seats and a campaign which centred on persuading independence supporters to give both their votes to the party. Given the current state of polling, the SNP will need regional list seats more than ever in 2026.

The other unpalatable truth for certain independence supporters is that if you give your list vote to a party with no chance of getting elected, you are effectively increasing the chances of an anti-independence candidate getting elected. Alba, ISP, Liberate Scotland, and other minor independence parties have no realistic chance of getting any of their candidates elected. Alba is currently looking as though it may not survive, as it is plagued by defections and its internal disputes mean that it may not even be able to field candidates as the only person able to sign their candidates off is their former general secretary Chris McEleny with whom Alba’s leadership is embroiled in a bitter dispute.

I know I will be deeply unpopular with certain people for pointing this out but it needs to be said. You may feel warmly self-righteous by voting for one of these smaller parties, but all that will happen is that the Labour, Tory, Reform, or Lib Dem candidate will thank you. Self-righteousness counts for nothing in politics, all that counts is winning elections.

As things stand the only pro-independence parties which can get their candidates elected are the SNP and the Scottish Greens and if independence is your priority you should vote SNP in the constituency and SNP or Green in the regional list. That advice may change if Corbyn’s party comes out in support of independence and performs well in the polls, but at the moment a vote for any other pro-independence party is a wasted vote.

The good news is that support for independence remains high. An opinion poll published on Monday gave support for independence a ten point lead 55% Yes to 45% No once don’t knows are removed. All this remember is in the absence of an independence referendum in whose campaign Better Together Mk II will be dragged down by the lies and deceit of Better Together Mk I. All that opponents of independence can offer next time round is a UK led by Nigel Farage, racism, further alienation from Europe, and the devastation of public services, human and employment rights and environmental protections and the neutering of the Scottish Parliament. Support for independence will certainly increase even further once a proper referendum campaign gets underway. 60% plus is achievable.

Make no mistake, unless Scotland returns a Parliament with a strong pro-independence majority in May next year, that is the bleak future that is in store for us. The good news is that we can avoid that fate, and if we focus on achieving what is good instead of chasing the chimera of the perfect, we will avoid that fate.

Getting that referendum will require a two pronged strategy. We need a pro-independence majority in Holyrood after May 2026. Then we need the SNP to handsomely win the next Westminster general election in Scotland.

British politics are in a state of flux. Labour is vulnerable to the rise of the English Greens, whose new leader Zack Polanski has voiced his support for Scottish and Welsh independence. There’s also the still unkown quantity of the new left wing party of Corbyn which could hoover up Labour votes. Corbyn’s party is unlikely to share the visceral opposition to independence of Starmer’s Labour and may even be supportive of it. Meanwhile the Tories are rapidly tail-spinning to irrelevance and the right has been captured by a far right party of nostalgic and self-pitying English nationalism.

Following the next Westminster general election, we could have pro-independence governments in Scotland and Wales, a Sinn Fein government at Stormont, an overtly racist English nationalist government in Westminster which is rejected in Scotland and Wales, and a powerful left wing Westminster opposition which is at best supportive of Scottish and Welsh independence and Irish reunification, or at worst neutral on the issue. It’s difficult to see how the UK could survive this, particularly with pro-independence Scottish and Welsh Governments which refuse to co-operate in the undermining of the devolution settlement and which constantly push back against Westminster. Under such circumstances the collapse of the UK could happen very quickly, as predicted by the late Tom Nairn in his book The Break up of Britain published way back in the 1970s.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

______________________________________________

I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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The far right is on the rise, and it’s on the rise due to an artificial panic manufactured by rich and powerful interests in order to distract public attention from the greed and avarice of the wealthiest in society, a tiny segment which has hoarded ever greater wealth over the past few decades even as public services crumble under the stress of austerity, decent housing becomes unaffordable for millions, the cost of living soars, and daily life becomes ever more of a struggle for most.

Meanwhile the super rich jet about the globe in their private jets, pumping out more carbon in a single journey than the average family does in a year. No matter how much obscene wealth they have accumulated, it’s never enough. The super rich fund an ecosystem of right wing ‘think tanks’, pressure groups, media outlets and political donations, all aimed at subverting the democratic process in order to shape it to their liking. They have been wildly successful. Currently public discourse is dominated by the so called “migration crisis” while you will never hear any mention of the crisis of the greed of the super-rich.

But it’s not migrants who are responsible for the devastation of public services, that’s down to politicians in the pocket of the rich who push privatisation and tax cuts instead of taxing the rich and investing in the public sector. It’s not migrants who put affordable housing out of reach of an entire generation, it’s not migrants who are responsible for soaring utilities bills, it’s not migrants who are to blame for job insecurity and the ever increasing need for foodbanks in a wealthy country. All these things are the fault of the rich who have deformed and bent the democratic process and traditional and social media into instruments of their will.

The current immigration hysteria is a creation of a right wing media which is owned and controlled by the super-rich in whose interests it operates. It’s a distraction technique, a means of scapegoating a vulnerable minority in order to protect those who are really responsible for the ails of modern society, the greedy billionaires. The current immigration crisis is a massive con perpetrated on the public by right wing media outlets and politicians.

Naturally politicians and the media will claim that migration is a major issue for the public, citing opinion polling which puts immigration amongst the issues of most concern to voters. Well. Duh, of course it is, the media never stops banging on about it. The media never discusses the economic, social, and cultural benefits of immigration, it never pushes back and points out that the number of people who cross the Channel in small boats is trivial in comparison to the number of refugees in much poorer countries. It never points out that these migrants could easily be absorbed if public services had not been devastated over decades in order to give tax cuts to the billionaire media barons who own the broadcasters and press. Of course it doesn’t.

Yet there is evidence that migrant panic is media driven. A YouGov poll this week has found that only 26% of people said immigration and asylum was one of the three most important issues facing their community. This was half the 52% who said it was one of the biggest issues facing the country as a whole. A report published by the Best of Britain campaign group shows that, while immigration comes second in the list of issues that people say matter nationally, it is only seventh in the list when people are asked about what matters in the places where they live.

People get their sense of what is nationally important from the media, they get their sense of what is locally important from the realities of their daily lives, which will in part be refracted through what the media tells them is nationally important. It is telling indeed that immigration does not figure strongly to most people as a local issue for them.

The far right blames migrants for everything. They started by demonising “illegal” migrants, but have now moved on to attacking people who moved to the UK through legally approved routes, and have faithfully obeyed all laws and immigration rules in order to be granted Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK (ILR). The Tories and Reform are now talking about stripping ILR from hundreds of thousands of people who have settled in the UK, are raising families here, are law abiding, employed, and paying taxes.

Full disclosure. My husband is a US citizen who in 2024 was granted Indefinite Leave to Remain in the UK following a long, expensive and intrusive process which took over five years and cost a total of over £15,000 in Home Office and immigration lawyer fees. At every stage he was employed and paying UK taxes. Throughout this process a condition of his visa was that he had no recourse to public funds, meaning he, like the great majority of immigrants to the UK, was prohibited from claiming benefits or accessing social housing. He also had to prove that he had not broken any laws.

Due to the current migrant hysteria we have now paid an additional £2755 to get him British citizenship and to give us peace of mind. We are immensely grateful to a good friend who has helped us to do this. While this gives us security, we are conscious that it’s not possible for everyone. Not everyone can afford the ruinous fees charged by the Home Office, which mount up if you have to make multiple applications for a spouse and children. The Home Office fee for citizenship is £1735. We paid an additional £1020 to an immigration lawyer. While you don’t need a lawyer and can tackle the complex paperwork yourself, if you make a mistake you lose your Home Office fee and are back to square one. Not everyone is on a five year route to ILR and citizenship like my husband, some are on a ten year pathway which could leave them vulnerable after the next Westminster general election due in 2029.

Others cannot apply for British citizenship as to do so means renouncing citizenship of their original country, which might not be feasible for family or other reasons. Thousands of people who are law abiding and contributing members of society are now living in fear of the future, due to an entirely invented migrant panic and the deceit of British politicians and the press.

Farage and the Tories have now weaponised migrant panic in order to attack the European Convention on Human Rights. You can be quite certain that they are not doing this in order to improve the quality of life and living and working conditions of ordinary people.

It is, like migrant panic, all based on a lie. While a precise total is unavailable, statistics indicate that successful deportation appeals based on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) are very rare. For instance, one report showed that between April 2016 and June 2021, human rights grounds were the reason for only about 2.5% of successful appeals against deportation for foreign national offenders in the UK. Another analysis of media coverage and academic reports indicates that fewer than 1% of cases in the UK have been won on human rights grounds, and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has only halted 13 deportations against the UK since 1980, according to the College Green Group. These cases have prevented the removal of a foreign national from the UK, on average, once every 4.5 years.

But in order to tackle this non-issue, Farage and the Tories propose to make a bonfire of the employment, civil, consumer, family and environmental rights of everyone in the UK. They want to do this in order to further enrich their wealthy backers and donors. Migrant panic is destroying lives, it’s destroying democracy, and it’s paving the way to the rise of the far right. In Scotland we have a chance to stop them in their tracks in May next year by voting for progressive pro-independence parties.

I am considering starting a new premium subscription service to the blog. All blog articles will continue to be freely available to everyone, as now, but should there be sufficient interest I am thinking of sending out an additional premium subscriber only email piece once per week to everyone who pays a regular monthly subscription fee of £5. Everyone who currently makes a regular monthly PayPal donation to the blog would automatically be added to the premium email list. Please let me know in the comments if you’d be interested.

______________________________________________

I’ve added a new method to make supporting my work easier, you can now donate via Ko-fi

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

Having abandoned Twitter I will be actively posting on BlueSky from now on. You can find me at https://bsky.app/profile/weegingerdug.bsky.social follow me there and I will generally follow back.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
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