On Friday Scotland will be infested with the presence of Donald Trump, a convicted criminal, abuser of women and best friend of deceased child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein – and those are his best qualities. The orange skinned authoritarian is coming here to play golf, taking yet another publicly funded holiday from his day job of subverting democracy, opening concentration camps, and cosying up to the dictators whose club he so desperately wants to join.

I live just a couple of miles away from his Turnberry golf course, which he rebranded Trump Turnberry with a tacky gold paint sign when he acquired it in 2014 with US$60 million in funds whose source has never been fully explained, which is why the course is known locally as Russian Mafia Turnberry. The Trump Organization claims to have spent about US $200 million on renovating the course. The true figure seems to be less than a tenth of this, only $18 million was accounted for in 2016.

The financing for Trump’s Scottish golf courses came under scrutiny in the Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. American journalist Glenn Simpson, who worked for the Wall Street Journal until 2009, testified before Congress that “enormous amounts of capital [was] flowing into these projects from unknown sources and – or at least on paper it says it’s from the Trump Organisation, but it’s hundreds of millions of dollars. And these golf courses are just, you know, they’re sinks. They don’t actually make any money.”

In February 2023, the company managing the golf course, SLC Turnberry Ltd., reported pre-tax losses of £3.7 million in 2021.

Trump is currently suing the Wall Street Journal for US$10 billion because the paper published details of a letter allegedly containing a lewd drawing, claimed to have been written by Trump to Jeffrey Epstein on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday. In the letter, which Trump calls a ‘fake’, he alludes to Epstein’s “secret”, which the letter writer claims to share. Trump’s closeness to Epstein is well documented. Having stirred up his base prior to the election about the revelations of high profile paedophiles supposedly contained in the Epstein files, and promising to release the documents in full, Trump has reneged on his former promise and is claiming it’s all a hoax made up by Barack Obama.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Justice Department said Epstein did indeed die by suicide and that there was no Epstein “client list” and announced it wouldn’t release any more documents related to the case. This infuriated an influential contingent of Trump supporters who had believed the administration would make all of the Epstein files public. There are reports that a dedicated team of hundreds of FBI officers have been tasked with combing through the large archive of documents in order to redact Trump’s name.

This week, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Trump ally Mike Johnson, announced an early adjournment of the chamber, in order to stall efforts to force the release of documents related to Epstein. Republicans need to learn the message from this. If your political party just shut down the entire government in order to protect a man suspected of sexually abusing under age girls, you are not in a political party that is concerned about protecting women and girls from abuse, so spare us your diversionary cant about trans people.

Trump is not due to land in Scotland until Friday, and he’s expected to spend time at his course in Aberdeenshire – the one with the lovely view of the off-shore windfarm – as well as coming to Turnberry, but already on Tuesday Police Scotland had closed the A719 road linking the village of Maidens to the A77, this road passes through the golf resort, right in front of the imposing whitewashed Edwardian era hotel designed by renowned Scottish architect James Miller, who also designed Wemyss Bay train station and the 1905 extensions to Glasgow Central Station including its hotel. Trump had no hand in creating the hotel or course but these examples of Scottish architectural heritage now bear the stain of his name. There are road closures, diversions, speed restrictions, and police checkpoints. The public coastal path which goes in front of the course has been closed. Maidens is now only accessible from the north and getting there from Girvan involves a long detour. The village is effectively a cul de sac, residents of the old folks home to the south of the village must now negotiate a police checkpoint.

All this is to facilitate the golfing holiday of a vain, lying criminal abuser who loves to boast about how rich he is. Police Scotland has estimated that the policing costs alone are in excess of £5 million. Police Scotland have asked the Police Service of Northern Ireland to send officers to assist in police operations in South Ayrshire, at Trump’s other Scottish golf course in Aberdeenshire as well as in Glasgow and Edinburgh where anti-Trump demonstrations are expected to take place. As well as the financial cost to the Scottish public purse, there’s also the cost in inconvenience and disruption to otherwise quiet Scottish communities which have to bear the brunt of the Trump circus coming to town with its clown in chief and his orange pancake makeup.

The truly galling thing is that Trump won’t appreciate any of it, and none of it will have any lasting effect on his behaviour. He’s not about to do Scotland any favours, his addled brain will be soon be back to ranting about windmills or spouting his latest nonsensical conspiracy bollocks.

Trump loves to tell himself and his acolytes that he’s loved in Scotland, the country his immigrant mother was from. In 2025, she’d be rounded up by Trump’s masked ICE goons and forced to sleep on the cold concrete floor of one of his brutal concentration camps before being deported. The truth is that Scots have an even less favourable view of Trump than people elsewhere in the UK, and he’s not exactly popular there either. A poll in February by IPSOS found that 71% of Scots disapprove of Trump, compared to 57% in the UK as a whole. His last visits to our country have been marked by mass protests, this time will be no different.

Trump will certainly receive a very special Scottish welcome. He’ll be greeted by thousands channelling the sentiments of the late great Janey Godley and her iconic Trump is a c**t sign.

We can’t stop Trump coming here, but the people of Scotland can at least make it clear to the rest of the world what we think of him. Police Scotland will do their utmost to insulate Trump from the sight or sounds of the protests against him and even if they do manage to percolate through into what passes for his brain he’ll just tell himself that Obama had paid the protestors. The protests will send a message to decent Americans who are feeling besieged and beleaguered by the assaults of Trump and his sycophants on democracy and decency and let them know that they are not alone.

I’m off next week, we are going on a trip to England to meet my baby granddaughter. This is the trip we had to postpone to to my mum’s final illness and her passing away. I’ll be back the first week of August.

_________________________________________________

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.

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £8 P&P within the UK. P&P to the USA or Canada is £18 and P&P to Europe is £14. P&P to Australia and New Zealand is £20. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £23 to weegingerbook@yahoo.com (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £8 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA or Canada is £18 and P&P to Europe is £14. P&P to Australia and New Zealand is £20. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to weegingerbook@yahoo.com  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for other means to pay.

Within Cornwall the map is available at Kowsva, 6 Artists Muse, Heartlands, Poll/Pool – The Kowethas shop. They are also available from The Cornish Store in Aberfala/Falmouth. Other outlets in Cornwall will follow soon.

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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

Go to Source

The inevitable has happened. On Friday evening my mum lost her battle with cancer. The past three weeks have been really tough on her and on my whole family. As I sit here trying to wrap my head around the new reality in which I find myself, with my mother, confidante, and biggest fan and supporter gone, the dominant feeling is relief. Relief that she’s no longer suffering and struggling, relief that she’s no longer losing her independence, her health, her vigour, all those things she prized and were such a big part of who she was. I’m sure the grief will strike later, but right now I feel relief, not just for my mum, but also for everyone in my family, all of whom have been living these past few weeks with the dread expectation that the centre and linchpin of our family would soon be gone. My mum is at peace now, her children, her husband -my dad – her grandchildren, great grandchildren, and her sister and brother are bereft and lost.

My mum never let her cancer diagnosis get her down. She was diagnosed with ocular melanoma early in 2023, a particularly aggressive type of cancer which does not respond to chemotherapy. She was determined to fight it, determined not to let it stop her living her life. She was always a formidable woman, and she resolved to face down the cancer with the sheer force of her personality. For the first couple of years she succeeded, and succeeded in style, even after the cancer cost her her left eye. But the surgery and radiotherapy did not succeed in halting the spread of the cancer and she underwent a course of immunotherapy. Unfortunately she had a very bad reaction to the immunotherapy drugs, which caused her to suffer inflammation of her brain and internal organs. Just before Christmas 2023 we thought that she was going to die. We were called to the hospital twice because they thought the end was approaching, but my mum defied all expectations and pulled through.

Even though the immunotherapy almost killed her, it did work, and succeeded in shrinking the lesions and slowing down their spread. My mum sailed on regardless. She was always a formidable woman, a force of nature. Her own mother died young – I was only 6 months old when my grandmother died so don’t remember her – and my mum stepped in to look after her younger siblings, who always saw her as much as their other mum as their big sister. The four of them remained tight knit and all of them looked to Martha for support and love, which she always gave in abundance.

My mum had four kids in the space of five years (I’m the second) but decided when she was pregnant with her fourth, my younger sister, that being a stay at home housewife was not for her. With three kids under 5 in tow and pregnant with her fourth, she went to night school and got the O grades and Highers she needed to study for a qualification as a primary school teacher. She had a long and successful career in teaching, eventually becoming a deputy head, she never wanted to become a headmistress. Throughout her career, she touched the lives of hundreds of kids who knew that Mrs Mosson was not to be messed with. But to me, she was just my mum, and she fiercely defended and protected me, like the time when I was assaulted by a PE teacher in secondary school, and she marched into the head’s office demanding that the teacher apologise and that he was to be kept well away from me in future.

She had an unremittingly positive outlook on life, always seeing some good in any situation. You could give that woman a bag of shite and she’d say: “Oh that will be useful to fertilise the garden!” I’m not going to lie, it could get wearing at times, but you could always rely on my mum to make you realise that nothing was ever as bad as you feared it might be.

My mum was a huge supporter of independence, and now she joins the ranks of those who believed that a better Scotland is possible but who didn’t live to see it.

Our family now has lost its centre, the warming and nurturing star around whom we all revolved. Life will never be the same any more. I’ll miss her. I’ll miss speaking to her every other day, I’ll miss her telling me not to worry when things get me down. I’ll miss her smile and her sense of humour.

I’m going to step away from the blog and The National for a couple of weeks, to allow myself to grieve and to come to grips with this new life without my mum.

Martha Mosson (née McDonnell) 18 September 1939 to 20 June 2025

Go to Source

I’ve been preoccupied with a family emergency involving my mother’s health, which has taken a sharp turn for the worse, so I’ve been too distracted to sit down and write a piece about recent political developments. However, on the basis that the best thing to do right now is find something else to focus on, as there is absolutely nothing I can do about my mum’s situation except to wait for news, I’m writing this now.

You may have heard that an opinion poll asking about Scottish independence was published over the weekend which showed 54% in favour of independence, a figure which rose to 58% when respondents were asked how they would vote on the independence question if Nigel Farage was the next Prime Minister. The poll, carried out by Norstat for the Sunday Times, is especially significant as Norstat is one of the polling companies which weights its Scottish samples by the outcome of the 2014 independence referendum eleven years ago. As I and others have previously explained, this increasingly unjustifiable methodological practice has the effect of artificially boosting the No responses and reducing those for yes.

With that in mind the Yes result would have been even more impressive if this methodological practice had not been used. It is quite likely that more than 60% would support independence if we are faced with the deeply unpalatable prospect of Prime Minister Farage. It’s also likely that without 2014 weighting, the result for the SNP in the poll’s question on Holyrood voting intention would have been even better.

This now leaves YouGov as the only polling company which consistently returns a No majority on the independence question. Independent Voices @indyvoices.bsky.social‬ on Blue Sky, has produced this very interesting graph and argues that we may now be at the point where Scotland’s demographic changes since 2014 are such that not even weighting a poll by the outcome of that year’s referendum will be sufficient to produce an artificial No majority. All that 2014 can do now is to reduce the size of the Yes majority which is the real underlying truth.

Graph courtesy of @indyvoices.bsky.social

We got a glimpse of the likely horrors of a Nigel Farage government on Monday when he appeared at a press conference in Aberdeen to introduce the latest Tory councillor who has defected to Reform. Farage then proceeded to lie in a manner that would make even Keir Starmer blush. He doubled down on the racist attack ad against Anas Sarwar that his party had published on social media, targeting people living in Hamilton and Larkhall. In Aberdeen, Farage out and out lied, asserting entirely baselessly that Anas Sarwar had made a speech in which he claimed the South Asian community are “going to take over the country and take over the world”.

As evidence of Sarwar’s supposed “obsession” with race, Farage referred to a speech made in Holyrood by Sarwar in 2020 in which he claimed that Sarwar had complained that all positions of power in Scotland are held by white people. Like in the speech made by Humza Yousaf during the same Holyrood debate, Sarwar was highlighting the paucity of minority ethnic representation in positions of authority in Scotland. The speech to which Farage was referring made no references to how the South Asian community are “going to take over the country and take over the world”. Farage made all that up. For once, BBC Scotland actually called out Farage’s lies, but he predictably continued to double down. Farage doesn’t let trivial matters like truth get in the way of his race-baiting, and it only shows he’s the real victim when he gets called out for it.

This isn’t a dog whistle to the racist far right. It’s a fog horn.

Without any evidence – because who needs evidence when you have a far right English nationalist victimhood complex – Farage then went on to blame The Herald newspaper for tipping off the anti-racism protestors who had greeted him outside the Aberdeen venue where he was speaking. That would be the same Herald newspaper which has recently published a couple of opinion pieces favourable to Reform.

Farage’s speech was the usual grade A bollocks peddled by the snake oil salesman. All that ails Britain is the fault of immigrants, wokeness, net-zero, and the elite that the millionaire privately educated Farage mysteriously doesn’t belong to.

After saying that the Barnett formula, which is how funding for the Scottish Parliament is calculated, needs to be “looked at,” Farage swept off to Hamilton supposedly for another press conference where he was due to introduce yet another defector to his party, this time a Labour councillor from East Renfrewshire. It speaks volumes about the current state of the Labour party that it contains councillors who are happy to defect to a party that is even more right wing than a Tory party which is itself now very far to the right of where it was under Boris Johnson and Theresa May. The Labour chancer who defected can see that the writing is on the wall for Labour under Starmer and Sarwar, but to leave a Labour party which has abandoned all its former left wing principles in favour of right wing British nationalist populism for a party which is even more right wing British nationalist smacks of desperate opportunism.

Farage’s planned Hamilton press conference descended into chaos and was hurriedly cancelled with Farage publishing a photo of himself with party workers hiding behind the back of the campaign office, out of sight of the protestors outside the front of the building. Farage then slunk away without answering any questions from the press.

Scotland needs to make its own plans for Nigel. No one should be under any illusions about Reform. A vote for Reform is not a vote for anything new, disruptive, or ground changing. It’s not a vote for working class representation. It’s a vote for Thatcherism on steroids and for Tories who left the Tory party because it wasn’t chaotic, cruel, and nasty enough. Farage may appeal to a minority in Scotland, but many more are repulsed by him and his far right grifting and racist politics. There is no future for devolution in Farage’s greater England. The good news is that the prospect of a Farage government might shift Scotland to the tipping point when support for independence becomes the settled will of the people of this country.

Update 7.15 pm

@indyvoices.bsky.social Has reweighted the Norstat poll with 2014 weighting removed.  Here is their graph

With no weighting, Yes has a stupendous majority of 21% which with don’t knows removed translates into a Yes vote of 61.3% in a referendum and a No vote of 38.7%. With 2025 weighting, the Yes vote (with don’t knows removed) is 57.4% and the No vote is 42.6%.

_________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

I need to step away from the blog for a while. As regular readers may be aware, my mum is battling stage four cancer – ocular melanoma. My mum told me many months ago that she was happy for me to discuss her health on the blog.

The latest news is not good. Despite having to have her left eye removed and undergoing a course of radiotherapy, the cancer continued to spread. This type of cancer is notoriously aggressive and does not respond to chemotherapy. We thought we were about to lose her just before Christmas 2023 when she suffered a bad reaction to her immunotherapy treatment which almost killed her. But thankfully she pulled through. Even though she nearly died due to the treatment, it was successful in holding the cancer at bay for a while.

The cancer has been spreading again and early this year we learned that it had spread to her brain. She had a short course of radiotherapy a couple of weeks ago in an effort to slow down the spread of the lesions. Unfortunately on Monday she was admitted to hospital after falling. It transpired that she had suffered a significant haemorrhage on her brain.

I saw her doctor yesterday, but she is continuing to deteriorate and there is nothing more that they can do.They are giving her painkillers and sedatives to keep her comfortable but we’ve been told this is not survivable.

They can’t tell us how much longer she’s got, but it’s not likely to be too much longer. She is no longer responsive or conscious.

She may stabilise, or she may just slip away, there’s no way of telling, but until we know one way or the other, my head is not really in the politics game. I will keep you posted.

_________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

The Guardian newspaper has reported that Labour’s “flagship child poverty policy” has been delayed until at least the autumn, pushing tens of thousands more children into poverty in the meantime. It was because this policy was supposed to be unveiled in a few months that the Labour party justified voting against an SNP motion in the House of Commons in the early weeks of Starmer’s government to abolish the two child cap on benefits. It can’t be that much of a flagship then.

The paper reports that the decision to push back the strategy comes amid Treasury concerns about the cost implications of ending the two-child limit on benefits and questions inside No 10 over the political benefits of scrapping it. The policy had been expected to be published in spring and was supposed to have included a recommendation to abolish the two child cap on benefits. However Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and main advisor, Morgan McSweeney, is said to be opposing moves to abolish the two child cap on benefits on the grounds that doing so would not deliver enough political capital to the Labour party with the wider public.

Saying that the cost of lifting children out of poverty outweighs the political benefit, and so you’re not going to lift children out of poverty, is a sentiment that is so cruel and pathological that it beggars belief.

And yet someone in the Labour Party is deliberately leaking it to the press because they think it reflects well on them to present themselves as cruelly condemning children to misery, reduced opportunity and chances of educational success. The performative cruelty is precisely the point. It’s a way that they can tell their multi-millionaire donors and backers that they are more than willing to be vile and nasty in order to protect the wealth and interests of the rich.

If you will only lift children out of poverty if there’s a political benefit in it for you, you don’t care about child poverty, you only care about your own political career. It makes you a narcissist and a sociopath. We are governed by people who believe that normal human standards of compassion, empathy, and care do not apply to them.

Doing the right and moral thing is not a question of political accountancy. Only a sociopath thinks it should be. Morgan Mc Sweeney seems to think that a child poverty policy should be a policy for creating child poverty.

Experts and anti-poverty advocates all agree that abolishing the the two child cap on benefits, which was introduced in 2016 under Theresa May, would be the single most effective measure to tackle child poverty, which is continuing to rise in every part of the UK, except Scotland thanks to the Scottish Child Payment. 24% of children in Scotland are living in poverty, a decrease from 26% in the previous year. The Scottish Government is spending millions on trying to mitigate the UK’s impoverishment of children and families, through measures such as housing support and the Scottish Child Payment. That contributes to child poverty in Scotland now being significantly lower than in England or Wales

In England the equivalent figure was 31%, and in Wales 28%. It is projected to rise even higher in those countries. According to anti-poverty campaigners, about 100 children are pushed into poverty every day by the two child cap, meaning up to 20,000 more children could could be affected by the six-month delay to the UK Government’s child poverty policy.

Anas Sarwar, who prior to the Westminster general election claimed to be opposed to the two child benefit cap, has defended his party’s refusal to abolish the cap saying that abolishing the cap alone will not get rid of child poverty, an intelligence insulting obtuse argument if ever there was one.

How is that country before party thing going again?

Labour’s equivocation on child poverty is a compelling argument for Scottish independence. Comparing rates of child poverty across different developed economies is fraught with difficulty due to differing statistical methods and definitions, child poverty is often defined as being when a child lives in a household whose income is under 60% of the national median. It should be noted that median income in Scandinavian countries is considerably higher than it is in the UK. However whichever definition of child poverty is used, there is widespread agreement that the rate of child poverty is considerably higher in the UK than it is in comparable European economies.

According to a UNICEF report published in 2024, child poverty increased by far most in the United Kingdom (almost 20%) than in any other developed European economy. This means that around half a million more children were in poverty in 2019–2021 in the UK than seven years earlier.

Recent decisions by the Labour Government will push thousands more children into poverty. The DWP itself estimates that between 50,000-100,000 more children will be pushed into poverty as a result of the cuts to disability benefits announced earlier this year. Anti-poverty group the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that without substantive action to change course on the part of the UK Government, 4.7 million children will be in poverty by the end of this parliament, 300,000 more than when the Labour government came to power.

The Scottish Government’s attempts to tackle child poverty are laudable and have had significant success, although the reduction in child poverty in Scotland still lags behind the Scottish Government’s target. The Scottish Parliament lacks the full range of powers necessary to tackle child poverty effectively and to reduce it to the much lower prevalence found in Scandinavia. Operating as it does largely within the constraints of a fixed budget determined by Westminster and without full control of macroeconomic, tax, and benefit powers, the Scottish Government can only mitigate the harm caused by Westminster policies. It cannot tackle the root causes.

All too often the funds needed to tackle child poverty in Scotland must come out of other areas of the Scottish budget, leading Anas Sarwar to stand up at FMQs and make his sneery face about ‘SNP cuts’. Only with independence could the Scottish Government have the powers over the Scottish economy needed to reduce child poverty to nominal levels.

Independence would also give the people of Scotland the power to vote out of office a political party which refused to tackle child poverty as it felt there would not be enough of a political benefit in doing so. If we want to live in a nation where compassion, empathy and human decency are not regarded as political weakness, we can only do so with independence. Given the current political trajectory of the UK, things are only set to get much much worse if we remain shackled to Westminster and the hard right vandals of Reform take power.

Scotland’s funding is determined as a consequence of decisions made in Westminster. Those decisions made are not based on what Scotland needs or what her people vote for. They are based upon what another country chooses, or rather what another country chooses as refracted and distorted by the unfair first past the post system so beloved of the Labour and Conservative parties.

The appalling rates of child poverty in Scotland, as in the UK as a whole, are the result of political choices, They are choices Scotland’s people did not make and they are not inevitable. An independent Scotland will be free to make different choices and to learn from the example of other nations which are tackling child poverty far more successfully and effectively.

___________________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

You may have seen that a poll on support for Scottish independence was published this week. The headline figures on the poll, carried out by Survation, put No ahead on 44%, with Yes on 43% and undecided on 12%. When the undecideds were stripped out, this gave a result of 50.57% (rounded up to 51%) No, and 49.42% Yes (rounded to 49%), cue the usual jeering on social media by the staunch brigade and gnashing of teeth by pro-independence opponents of the SNP that John Swinney is throwing away Scotland’s chances of independence.

However Survation is one of those polling companies which maintains the increasingly indefensible methodological practice of weighting its results according to the outcome of the 2014 independence referendum. As I explained in a previous blog piece, this methodology has the effect of artificially inflating the result for No while depressing the result for Yes. You can read that piece here. I explain why poll weighting according to the outcome of a vote held eleven years ago effectively undoes the demographic changes which have occurred in Scotland over the past eleven years, and produces a misleading result.

Scotland is on the threshold of real change when Yes has a double digit lead

Now the person behind the Independent Voices BlueSky account @indyvoices.bsky.social has very helpfully calculated the effects of weighting according to the outcome of the 2014 referendum on Survation’s results and showed how in so doing the polling company turned a poll which had a Yes majority into a poll with a No majority. Independent Voices produced the following graph, which I publish here.

Thankyou to @indyvoices.bsky.social for the graph

As you can see from the graph, Survation’s raw data, its unweighted sample in the first set of columns, actually showed a Yes majority of 7%. However when the numbers were crunched and the 2014 weighting was applied, this 7% Yes majority vanished and was replaced by a 1% lead for No, the second set of columns. Those are the figures which were splashed all over the newspapers, figures which give the misleading impression that opposition to independence maintains a narrow lead.

This skewed result is what happens when you employ the fiction of pretending that 550,000 predominantly older people who disproportionately would have voted No hadn’t passed away and been replaced in the electorate by younger people who are more likely to support independence. That’s effectively what a polling company is doing when it weighs its results according to the 2014 referendum. But back in the real world those 550,000 predominantly older people who would disproportionately have supported No really have passed away.

The third set of columns in Independent Voices’ very useful graph shows the raw sample weighted by the current demographics of Scotland, This too produces a majority for independence, this time of 4%.

Polling for Scottish independence that is weighted by the outcome of the 2014 referendum produces results which inflate the headline figures for No and which are ever less a true reflection of the real state of Scottish public opinion as the years go by. The Grim Reaper has a big effect on the oldest age cohorts, a demographic group which numerous polls have told us are far more likely to oppose independence. Further studies have demonstrated that the younger independence supporters who replace older No voters in the electorate do not tend to morph into No supporters as they age. A very real change is taking place in Scotland, as the years go by, Scots are increasingly supporting independence. Polls which weight by the outcome of the 2014 referendum discard these real changes and present a fictitious picture of a Scotland that’s eleven years out of date.

We are now at the stage where independence polls which continue to deploy this methodology should be dismissed out of hand. This includes polls by Survation and polls by YouGov, both of which use this by now indefensible methodology.

Why do polling companies keep doing this, you might reasonably ask. It’s not some Unionist conspiracy designed to keep independence down and burst the bubble of the independence campaign’s morale, although it certainly has that effect. It has more to do with inertia and the natural reluctance of people to change their habits. Weighting by the results of the 2014 referendum made good methodological sense in the months and first couple of years after the independence referendum, but as the years have passed it produces results which are increasingly out of kilter with the true demographic make up of Scotland in 2025. Approximately 14% of the total electorate in 2014 has passed away, overwhelmingly older people who predominantly voted No.

There is also the not inconsequential matter of the deeply distorted nature of Scotland’s media landscape. As is well known by any independence supporter, only one of Scotland’s newspapers supports Scottish independence, the rest are universally hostile to the idea, sometimes hysterically so. Opinion polls on the independence question are typically commissioned by a newspaper editor. Do you honestly think that when they commission a poll on independence, the editor of the viscerally anti-independence Scotsman or the Herald whose comments section is stuffed to the gills with outright British nationalist fascists, is going to tell YouGov or Survation not to use a methodology which is more likely to produce a result which panders to the anti-independence prejudices of their readers? Of course they won’t. It suits them to have a poll to publish which puts No in the lead, even if, as is the case with this latest Survation poll, that apparent No lead is entirely an artefact of the methodology used by the polling company and with different and arguably more accurate and up to date weighting, the exact same poll would have shown a majority for Yes.

Given our media landscape, Scotland is going to keep getting polling on the independence question which artificially wrests Scotland back to a country which no longer exists, undoing the demographic changes of the past eleven years, and which give the false impression that support for independence is lower that it really is.

The first thing any independence supporter needs to do when confronted with a poll on independence, irrespective of whether it puts Yes or No ahead, is to check its methodology. If the poll weights by the outcome of the 2014 referendum then you can be certain that it is underreporting the Yes figures and they are most likely to be higher, it will also be overstating the No figures, which in reality will be lower. If the poll shows a narrow lead for No then in reality this will probably reflect an actual lead for Yes.

___________________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

Just a quick update on the progress of this year’s blog fundraiser. The fundraiser has now been running for just seven days and of its target of £6000, a total of £4957 has so far been donated either on my GoFundMe page, via PayPal, or through Ko-Fi. That’s an amazing 82.6% of the target figure in just a few days. Thank you so much to everyone who has supported the blog with a donation, or by sharing blog posts, or by liking online. I’ll keep the fundraiser running for another couple of weeks, but at this rate of progress I have every confidence that the target will be reached, and who knows, even surpassed.

Once again, my heartfelt thanks to everyone who supports this blog and enables me to keep on working.

___________________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

A guest post by Jason Baird

The grassroots #GetCounted for Independence campaign goes public today (April 12^th)

Campaign aims

• Break out of the activist bubble and engage the ordinary YES supporter.

• Count and network as many of Scotland’s already convinced YES majority as possible.

• Make the currently ignored YES majority permanently visible again through a grassroots run National YES Count.

Origins

#GetCounted has been created by individual members of different YES groups from all over Scotland, working together to devise a simple way to unite YES supporters, irrespective of our different parties, political outlooks and personal loyalties.

#GetCounted in our own words (or some of us at least)

Sheena (YES Pentlands), ‘our appeal is to everyone and anyone who supports Scottish Independence. ‘All parties and none!’

Andy (YES Stonehaven & the Mearns), ‘the question is simple: Do you support Scottish independence? If the answer is YES, then it’s time, as ordinary supporters, to get ourselves counted, combine in huge numbers again and make ourselves visible.’

Lynn (Yes Haddington and District), ‘Independence is already Scotland’s majority view, so for now at least, this is not about convincing soft NOs or even arguing the case for YES. This is about encouraging our own circles of Indy supporting family, friends and workmates who would vote YES in a heartbeat, to get counted and refuse to be ignored.’

Len (Salvo Northeast), ‘we’ve been working with the National Yes Registry (NYR) on the best way to make getting counted as easy and secure as possible. All that is needed is your name, postcode and email. Nothing is shared and all information is yours to change or remove at any time. So, to #GetCounted just search ‘IndyApp for YES’ on Google play or the App Store and download.’

Jason (NYR, developers of the IndyApp), ‘The new version of IndyApp makes getting counted simple and provides you with easy ways to pre-register others to get themselves counted for Yes too. It’s all GDPR compliant and being a native app on individual devices provides the Yes Count with inherent security advantages.’

Peter (Yes Merchiston), ‘When you register on IndyApp you sign a personal declaration of support for Scottish Independence and are given your unique supporter number. This is displayed in your app alongside the running total of every other person already counted for YES. The running total updates with every refresh, making #GetCounted decentralised, totally transparent and live!’

Carole (Yes Skye and Lochalsh) finished by saying, ‘IndyApp is the tool for everyone to #GetCounted, but it is still just a tool… For the Yes Count to grow, it requires ordinary supporters to get themselves Counted and then, help get the word out to encourage others to do the same. That is the #GetCounted message and what this campaign is all about!’

Refuse to be Divided. Refuse to be ignored. #GetCounted and then get every Independence supporter you know counted for Yes too! Visit https://www.nationalyesregistry.scot/ and use the #GetCounted links for Android and iOS, or search ‘IndyApp for Yes’ on Google Play or your AppStore.

___________________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

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

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

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

Some months ago I published a piece on Scotland’s severed tongues, Pictish and Cumbric, languages which used to be spoken in Scotland but which became extinct centuries ago.

Nevertheless, these lost languages remain an important part of the linguistic heritage and history of Scotland. However there is yet another extinct language which used to be spoken in Scotland, which became extinct at the dawn of the modern era, and whose remains are more substantial than the meagre remnants of Cumbric or Pictish. This is the Norn language, the Norse language of Orkney and Shetland, which was also once spoken in the north of Caithness, and also in the Gaelic milieu of the Western Isles – although here it is not usually referred to as Norn, but simply as Norse.

Norse was introduced into Scotland during the Viking invasions which began in the early 800s. Prior to this, Orkney and Shetland had been inhabited by a Celtic speaking population whose language appears to have been Pictish. This population was completely absorbed and replaced by the Norse incomers leaving very little linguistic traces. Old Irish texts preserve the name Innse Cat “the cat islands” for Shetland, which is likely to be a Gaelic form of the islands’ original Pictish name. The oldest known version of the modern name Shetland is Hetland; this may represent “Catland” with a Norse corruption of the Pictish tribal name. By the 1500s the islands were being referred to in Norse sources as Hjaltland. In older Scots Hjaltland became Ȝetland. The initial letter is the Middle Scots letter, yogh, the pronunciation of which is almost identical to the original Norn sound, /hj/. When the use of the letter yogh was discontinued, it was often replaced by the similar-looking letter z (which at the time was usually rendered with a curled tail: ⟨ʒ⟩ hence Zetland, the form used in the name of the pre-1975 county council. This is the source of the ZE postcode used for Shetland. The hj, pronounced like h followed by a y sound as in human or huge, eventually became corrupted into sh.

The same Pictish tribal name lies behind the name Caithness, which was formed by suffixing the Norse word ness – headland – to the Pictish tribal name. Orkney’s name is a Norse adaptation of the islands’ original Celtic name, Arcaibh in modern Gaelic. Speakers of Old Irish referred to the islands as Innse Orc “islands of the young pigs”

The Shetland islands of Yell, Unst, and Fetlar have names which seem to be pre-Norse in origin, but apart from these traces the place names of Shetland and Orkney have been almost completely replaced by Norse names. The same holds true for Caithness north and east of a line drawn roughly from Lybster to west of Thurso, however it seems that up until the 1500s this area of Caithness was inhabited by a bilingual Gaelic-Norse population.

Following the Norse settlement, Old Norse became the language of every stratum of society in Orkney and Shetland and would remain so for a thousand years. Old Norse is abundantly attested. One of the Norse sagas the Orkneyinga saga, is a narrative of the history of the Orkney and Shetland islands and their relationship with Norway and Scotland. The saga was written in the late12th century but comes down to us in a 13th century copy written in Iceland. At this time there was no significant difference between the Norse language of Orkney and Shetland, or the Faroes for that matter, and that of Iceland. The Orkneyinga saga tells of the lives and deeds of the Norse jarls who ruled the islands between the 9th and 13th centuries. The saga as it comes down to us is written in contemporary Old Icelandic.

As the centuries passed, the islanders continued to speak their Norse tongue but gradually their language began to evolve along lines of its own. This process was accelerated when Orkney and Shetland became a part of Scotland in 1472, however Scottish influence was strong even before this, in 1379 the Scottish earl Henry Sinclair took control of Orkney on behalf of the Norwegian king Håkon VI Magnusson. Norway was severely weakened by the Black Death in the 1300s and Norway and all its possessions, including Orkney, Shetland, Faroe, Iceland, and Greenland passed under the control of the Danish crown.

Being a Germanic language closely related to Norse, Scots began to exert an influence on the Norse speech of the islands. The complex noun case system of Old Norse began to decay, as it also did in Norwegian and Danish.

The Norse speech of the islands came under increasing influence from Scots as Scots speakers from mainland Scotland moved to the islands following their absorption into Scotland. The language became known as Norn, from the Old Norse word norrǿnn ‘northern’. It was rarely written down, the main literary languages of the islands being Danish or, increasingly, Scots. The last document written in Danish was produced in Shetland in 1670.

By the 1500s Norn had died out in Caithness and would soon come under pressure in Orkney and Shetland. In 1582, George Buchanan, in his “History of Scotland wrote “the old Gothic tongue (vetus gothica longua) was still used in Orkney.” But the language was already under pressure.

One report from from 1670 states that there are “only three or four parishes” in Orkney where people speak “Noords or rude Danish” and that they do so “chiefly when they are at their own houses, but all speak the Scots language.” . It is believed that Norn died out in Orkney by the end of the 18th century. In 1750 Murdoch Mackenzie wrote: “The Language is English in the Scotch Dialect, with more of the Norwegian than any other Accent; these Islands having formerly been a Province of Norway, of which they still retain some of the Customs, and a little of the Language, which they call Noren, much the same with what is presently spoken in Iceland and the Faro Islands. Thirty or Forty years ago this (Norn) was the language of two parishes in Pomona Island; since which, by the Means of Charity-Schools, it is so much wore out, as to be understood by none by old People; and in thirty years more, it is probably, will not be understood there at all’.

The language survived somewhat better in Shetland. Another report from 1701 indicates that there were still a few “Norse” speakers in Orkney who were capable of speaking “no other thing”, and notes that there were more speakers of the language in Shetland than in Orkney.

Some reports indicate that by 1703 Scots was already widespread in Shetland, but Norn continued to be spoken for a few generations more.

In 1894 the Faroese linguist and scholar Jakob Jakobsen, who researched a dictionary of the many Norn words which survived in the Shetland dialect of Scots wrote: 1894, Jakob Jakobsen: “Even in 1600 the knowledge of English seems to have been very meagre in Shetland; for, according to the “Fasti Ecclesiæ Scotticanæ”, Magnus, surnamed “Norsk”, minister of Unst (the most northerly of the Islands), made a voyage to Norway to learn the language spoken there, because his congregation did not undersand any other language than Norse.

“The Shetland Norn was still a living language in the middle of the 18th century even rather late in the 18th century, Norn songs and ballads survived in the mouths of the common people. In several parts of Shetland, especially Foula and the North Isles, the present generation of old people remember their grandparents speaking a language they could hardly understand, and which was called Norn or Norse. As late as 1894, there were people in Foula who could repeat sentences in Norn, as I myself had the opportunity of hearing. The last man in Unst who is said to have been able to speak Norn, Walter Sutherland from Skaw, died about 1850. In Foula, on the other hand, men who were living very much later than the middle of the present century are said to have been able to speak Norn’.”

Norn survives in a handful of short texts collected before the language died out. The longest and most important of these is a traditional poem called the Hildina ballad. The ballad was recorded on Foula in 1774 from an old farmer called William Henry. Henry was not a fluent speaker of Norn but had memorised 35 stanzas of the ballad as a child.

For example this is the Lord’s Prayer in Shetland Norn, recorded in the 1770s
Fy vor or er i Chimeri. / Halaght vara nam dit.
La Konungdum din cumma. / La vill din vera guerde
i vrildin sindaeri chimeri. / Gav vus dagh u dagloght brau.
Forgive sindorwara / sin vi forgiva gem ao sinda gainst wus.
Lia wus ik? o vera tempa, / but delivra wus fro adlu idlu.
For do i ir Kongungdum, u puri, u glori, Amen

An important source of Norn material is the Etymological dictionary of the Norn language of Shetland by Jakob Jakobsen, published in 1928. This dictionary lists Norn words which have survived in Shetland Scots and which give that variety of Scots its distinctive character.

The dictionary is available online here
https://archive.org/details/anetymodictofthenornlanginshet/01%20An%20Etymological%20Dictionary%20of%20the%20Norn%20Language%20in%20Shetland%20Part%20I/

There has been an attempt to revive Norn, called Nynorn ‘New Norn’, not to be confused with Nynorsk, which is one of the two standard varieties of the modern Norwegian language.

Details about Nynorn, and other information about the overlooked Norn language which is an important symbol of Scotland’s cultural and historic links to Scandinavia, can be found here

https://nornlanguage.x10.mx/index.php?intro

________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source

The steel works in Scunthorpe were in the news this week as the plant is threatened with closure and the Labour government is in talks with Jingye, the Chinese owners of British Steel in an attempt to keep the plant’s two blast furnaces running and save the jobs at the steel mill. Jingye had said in March that keeping the blast furnaces going was no longer financially viable as the company is running short of the raw materials needed to keep them operational. UK Government ministers were expected to make a formal offer on Thursday to Jingye executives, for a deal which would provide taxpayer funding for the purchase of raw materials such as iron ore and coking coal for the blast furnaces in the company’s Scunthorpe plant.

The deal is a short term stop-gap aimed at keeping the steel plant open while discussions continue about its long-term future. However Jingye has already turned down an offer from the UK Government of £500 million of public money to help convert the furnaces to electric operation, a rejection which has dampened hopes that Jingye will agree to this latest deal.

The Labour government is coming under increasing pressure to renationalise British Steel should the talks on its long term future fail to save the company. British Steel was formerly in public ownership but was privatised in 1988 by Margaret Thatcher, leading to the loss of many thousands of jobs and the closure of the company’s Ravenscraig and Gartcosh plants which devastated working-class communities in Lanarkshire and brought about the end of steel manufacturing in Scotland.

No one least of all me, is going to begrudge the efforts made to keep the steel mill open and to save the 3000 jobs which depend on the mill, such efforts are precisely what the government ought to be doing. This leads me to the point of this blog piece, if the Labour government is willing to go to these lengths in order to save steel making in Scunthorpe, why is it not willing to go to similar lengths to save the Grangemouth oil refinery in Scotland?

Back in February, Labour’s Scottish branch manager, who had campaigned in the run up to the Westminster general election on a platform of Vote Labour to save the jobs at Grangemouth, told STV’s Colin Mackay on the day after redundancy notices had gone out to hundreds of Grangemouth workers that the Labour government could not in fact save the jobs at Grangemouth because the plant is privately owned.

During a debate in June last year, ahead of the Westminster General Election, Sarwar said that a Labour government “would step in and put our money where our mouth is and invest … and step in to save the jobs at the refinery”.

During that debate Sarwar also said, “Read my lips, no austerity under Labour,” and to the surprise of absolutely no one by now, that was a lie as well.

So the Labour government was unable to step in and save the jobs at Grangemouth because it’s run and owned by a private company, information that apparently was unavailable to Anas Sarwar when he vowed before the general election that a Labour government would step in and save the jobs at the refinery, but the fact that the British Steel plant in Scunthorpe is run and owned by a private company is no barrier to the Labour government stepping in to save the jobs there.

There are now calls for the UK government to renationalise British Steel, something which is supposedly impossible for it to do with Grangemouth, on account of it being too socialist for Keir Starmer.

Last month Brian Leishman, the Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth, in whose constituency the refinery sits, accused Anas Sarwar of being very quiet on the issue of saving the Grangemouth jobs. In an interview with Holyrood magazine he said: He’s [Sarwar] been very quiet on the issue.

“I’ve been down here and for eight months I have been trying to push it to the top of the agenda. I have managed to move the party a bit on it. But do I think we’ve done enough? No.”

Asked if he felt alone in his his fight to save the complex, he said he doesn’t want to speak about his colleagues and that they have “their own constituencies, campaigns and fights.” So that would be a Yes, then.

This is all very different from the government’s efforts to save Scunthorpe. Earlier this week the BBC reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has sought to reassure workers at the Lincolnshire plant that the government would consider nationalisation if necessary. Nationalisation was never on the table for Grangemouth, yet it too is a strategically vital industry. The Labour government’s promised £200 million investment in Grangemouth is now also in doubt.

So why the difference? The bottom line is that Scottish jobs and Scottish votes are simply not as important to a British government as jobs and votes in England. The closure of Scunthorpe and the loss of its jobs risks giving a political boost to the far right vultures of Nigel Farage, who are already circling around a Labour party that has shot itself in both feet. The closure of Grangemouth and the loss of its jobs is politically far less of a threat to Starmer. Labour MPs from Scotland only make a difference to the electoral arithmetic of the Commons when the parties are fairly evenly balanced in England.

There is also the consideration, which has no doubt not escaped the right wing British flag waving ghouls who have captured the Labour party, that the loss of an important piece of Scottish industrial infrastructure merely gives the UK Government more leverage in a future Scottish independence referendum campaign. Oh no Scotland, you can’t become independent, not when you rely on England for all your petrol and diesel.

Grangemouth has been abandoned by this Labour government, there’s no guarantee that Scunthorpe will be saved, but if Starmer and his cronies had put even half the effort and public money into saving Grangemouth as they have with Scunthorpe, Scotland might have been able to keep Grangemouth open.

Remaining a part of this so-called union keeps Scotland second class politically and economically.The difference in the Labour government’s responses to the threats to Scunthorpe and Grangemouth make that starkly apparent. We’re being taken for mugs and fobbed off with intelligence insulting excuses.

___________________________________________________

A reminder that I am currently running the annual fundraiser for the blog. You can donate to my GoFundMe fundraiser, the link is here. Please consider making a donation.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-crowdfunder-2025

Alternatively you can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. I hope that you will consider making a regular monthly donation, there is an option on PayPal which permits that. It’s an immense help to me when it comes to budgeting. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address weegingerbook@yahoo.com. Or click the Pay Pal 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
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

If you would like an alternative method of donation, please email me at weegingerbook@yahoo.com for details of how to donate by direct bank transfer or cheque.

Thank you all very much, whether you support this blog by donating, or by reading and sharing my work. It means more than you know.

Go to Source