He does look quite like Kim Jong Il (on the cover of the new statesman)
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
White Paper (THE #indyref thread)
(2915 posts)- Started 11 years ago by Morningsider
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Posted 10 years ago #
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All Scots born equal in our great Union.
But no, no, the leader of the party that won't have any truck with the house of 'lords' he's the one that is compared to a hereditary dictator.
More great news from the Democratic People's Republic of England.Posted 10 years ago # -
@IWRATS: aye, here's the poor wee page laddie's modest ancestral abode:
Posted 10 years ago # -
Nice, I bet Barack obama would like a holiday there. Big Eco should not have said he liked Putin.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I bet the lawns are a beggar to mow, mind.
Posted 10 years ago # -
New slogan -
Posted 10 years ago # -
Is that the No Thanks one?
Meadows fesitval so now raining
I just escaped the rain in wester hailes today where we were canvassing. Lot of people not in or not answering doors. Fair few not registered to vote. Some undecided. Anyway. Of the people. I Spoke to, 70 per cent No 30 per cent yes.
Some very well kept gardens and stairwells and some people struggling.
I thought it was interesting several miles back up stream in the thread where there was a bit of an assumption that Gembo wouldn't be canvassing in wester hailes. I must project an old fogey avatar on here or some such? I worked in the schools in wester hailes for over ten years so no big surprises for me just quite sombre feeling for some of the folk who have fallen through the net whilst others are coping.
Posted 10 years ago # -
There was a Yes stall on Porty Prom this morning: good location and great weather for it. All packed up and gone by the time we cycled homeward returned in this afternoon's downpour.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"
Ms Beattie-Smith said: “I don’t think people are that self-interested that money is the only thing that matters. There are more important things to be voting on.”
Ms Dugdale said she was “despairing” when she heard about the competing financial projections. She said: “No-one is going to run up and nick £1400 off you or stuff £1000 in your pocket. We need to get away from this kind of debate.”
"
http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/scottish-independence-pupils-hear-arguments-1-3447269Posted 10 years ago # -
Two sensible quotes in the Chipwrapper? That's a first! Wonder what they really said ;)
Posted 10 years ago # -
@gembo
I'm still not clear why someone like you - who obviously cares about the people living in Wester Hailes - wants to expose them to Westminster rule. All of the three political parties that might form a government are committed to moving resources from poor to rich in the process called variously 'austerity' or 'privatisation' by the media. I'm genuinely baffled as to why you want them to volunteer for this assault and why - if it's true - 70% of them would profess a desire for such torment.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@IWRATS
By it's mechanism of a currency union, an SNP-led Scottish Government would be committed to austerity too. In their review of SNP economic policy, nationalist economists Jim and Margaret Cuthbert noted:Another major power which the Scottish government does not possess is control over interest rates – and, the other side of the same coin, the ability to make strategic exchange rate decisions
That would still be true in a currency union. And fiscal policy would also be heavily constrained. Indeed, if you read that paper (you need to scroll to find it), what comes over for me, especially where they set out what an SNP economic strategy should look like, is how limited it all is, reflecting, I think, the limited room for manoeuvre any government has when it's funding is largely determined by financiers and speculators.
Add to that the SNP policies of council tax freeze and universal 'free' services, reducing corporation tax and you have an enhanced programme of moving resources to the rich at the expense of the well off. As far as I'm aware, they have also not supported proposals for a living wage to be written into public contracts (even though the claimed legal obstacles have been denied by EU officials), don't support freezing energy prices and I'm not sure where they are on a benefits cap these days. They were very much against it at one point but that seemed to have changed but then flipped back again. Maybe still sitting alongside their opposition to (or at least failure to support) reinstating the 50p tax rate. Last I knew, the plan was also to maintain the current benefits system for an unspecified (but "short") transitional period.
So, I don't disagree with your assessment of the three main Westminster parties, it's just that once you look past all the Common Weal and RIC stuff that hasn't a cat's chance in hell of being implemented, I'm struggling to see how an independent Scottish Government of any colour is going to be dramatically better.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Instography, I agree that in the short term things wouldn't be, to use your words, dramatically different. Though I would say that a little difference in policy can mean a big difference to some people's lives.
But the point is this - a vote for the status quo isn't a vote for the status quo. It's a vote to go with whatever UK governments do in future. How do swing voters in marginal seats see people reliant on benefits? How do the generation coming up behind them see it? Polling shows that the thing people on benefits deserve to be poor, it's their own fault, and they should be grateful for whatever crumbs fall from our tables. The wildly overestimate levels of benefit fraud and the numbers committing fraud.
It's the same on services for people born overseas - growing numbers think they should have to wait a long time to be eligible for any benefits, even if they've been paying taxes, and many think foreign-born people should never be eligible for benefits here. They also think healthcare tourism is a big problem and want the government to do something about it.
I see no prospect over coming decades that the lives of the hardest-pressed 20% of people in the UK will get any better. In fact I think they're going to continue to get worse.
I look at what's coming down the line and I think, at a minimum, we've got to protect ourselves from that. We've got to get out while we can.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Which would fair enough if the policy were to get out. But the policy is to stay shackled to the Treasury.
Posted 10 years ago # -
For me, the reasons for voting Yes aren't really about policy (although removing Trident would be great) but about structures. The UK is really centralised, with government spending focused on London, private sector jobs overwhelmingly being created in London, and very little local democracy or workplace democracy. I hope that we can move to a more normal, more distributed set up, like most of Europe has.
And if the currency union doesn't work for us, at least we can choose to change it.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Instography
I'm probably as unimpressed by SNP economic propositions as you are. In an independent Scotland, there is little chance that I will vote for them. So reference to those policies does little to change my mind. The point of independence is, for me, to run the country in a radically different way from the way it is run now. Instead of arguing about income tax rates for instance, I'd like to see us arguing about what to tax. Like the unimproved value of land;
As a student of political economy you may be as surprised as I am by the global alliance of Western capitalists with the Chinese communist party. Seems like the Chinese are willing to say they are against Scottish self-determination (in reality I don't suppose they give a monkey's one way or the other);
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-27894257
Anyway, I'd be keen to hear why anyone would wish to be governed by people who stoop to pleading with Chinese autocrats in search of the authority they so patently lack.
Posted 10 years ago # -
iwrats I don't understand why you expect things to be radically different? If anything I expect we'd get closer to rUK once the SNP breaks down into more traditional alignments and the (new Scottish) Conservatives gain some traction.
Anyway, I'd be keen to hear why anyone would wish to be governed by people who stoop to pleading with Chinese autocrats in search of the authority they so patently lack.
Sorry this made me laugh. As though some how Scottish politicians will stand Braveheart stylee and aloofly ignore those who are offering to pony up for their vanity projects.
Posted 10 years ago # -
You think Scotland would get into a currency union that had a get-out-easily clause?
I wasn't really debating whether Scotland should be independent. I can understand that some would prefer everything to be centralised in Edinburgh, around Holyrood rather than centralised around Westminster and the South East. I was questioning the basis of IWRATS bafflement at Gembo - his counterposing of three austerity-obsessed Westminster parties with what might be in Scotland under independence. My skewed and jaundiced view is that Yes campaigners have been encouraged to see independence as a blank sheet of paper, albeit with some 'interim', 'short term', even tactically advantageous nods in the direction of continuity so as to not scare people.
But the realistic alternative to the three main parties (it's quite sweet to think that the Libdems are still main) under independence is the SNP. And while the SNP and Yes Scotland have been happy to let all of the fringe groupings make the case for a socialist independent Scotland, there's nothing remotely socialist about the SNP's policies. So we can hope for some radical new dawn on 19 September just like we can hope for a good summer and segregated infrastructure but the reality will be austerity, smirr, paint on the road and shared use.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Here's another interesting idea that is impossible to even imagine being considered in Westminster;
Change is possible.
Glad I'm giving some of you a laugh!
Posted 10 years ago # -
As a student of the school of political economy that described both the Soviet Union and China as state capitalist, I'm not in the least surprised. I'd be disappointed if you were.
I'm assuming that the SNP would be as keen as any unionist to see investment from China in Scotland and would remain tactically silent on Tibet and anything else to secure those kinds of deals. So, I might ask you that same question: why would you wish to be governed by people who would stoop to pleading with Chinese autocrats?
I have no real wish to be governed by any of them, although I accept it as my fate to be governed by them regardless of how I scratch my cross on 18 September. But then I'm not the one arguing that it offers the prospect of being governed differently.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Michael Forsyth... Malcolm Rifkind... "Sir" John Major...
Which 1990s Tory, now rehabilitated as a grandee, will be wheeled out next to lecture on the perils of inependence? Edwina Curry on how it will lead to a collapse in family values?
once you look past all the Common Weal and RIC stuff that hasn't a cat's chance in hell of being implemented
I disagree on that point. If one was to put an "X" in the no box, then one is assured it will never happen. The cat, as it were, has no chances. In fact it's stone dead. However, an "X" in the yes box means that the cat is still alive and does actually have a chance in hell.
As I see it, No really does mean no. Yes means perhaps, maybe and - if enough people want it - yes.
But the point is this - a vote for the status quo isn't a vote for the status quo.
Indeed. This message needs to get out to people. The UK is in a constitutional mess (and has been for a long time) even if its largely ignored / denied. A "No" vote doesn't mean that the day after the referendum that everything goes back to comfortable normality, it is just as much the "unknown" as a yes vote. Personally I think it's more the unknown as all we really have to go on are the half-hearted and contradictory promises and statements of a bunch of disparate politicians, some offering more powers that a year or so ago they were fighting hard to get kept off the referendum ballot papers and others who are on record baying for punishment for "our" temerity and obstreperousness and for Scotland to be brought to heel.
I for one do not think that a Westminster government will be all that warm and rewarding to Scottish voters for their loyalty in voting No on independence... After all, nobody is actually being asked if they want to stay in the UK, they're being asked if they want to leave.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"Which would fair enough if the policy were to get out. But the policy is to stay shackled to the Treasury."
1) Eurozone countries have widely varying welfare and social policies. I think you're overstating the effect of a currency union.
2) If the currency union seriously doesn't work for us, we can always walk. You talk about an agreement that we couldn't get out of - but the whole point of sovereign nations is that they decide what they do and don't join. Assuming parliamentary sovereignty applied to a Scottish Parliament after independence, all they have to do is a pass a bill to quit, and that's how it would be. It's exactly the same with EU law - people say we couldn't leave without permission or whatever, and that the EU is in charge, but the UK parliament could quit with immediate effect through a one-page Act repealing the EC Act 1972.
IMO nobody in the SNP is wedded to the idea of a currency union, they're only advocating it because it's the currency policy that least frightens the horses. Most economic opinion seems to be that a Scottish currency would be best. I don't think CU would last more than 10 years.
Steveo - "Sorry this made me laugh. As though some how Scottish politicians will stand Braveheart stylee and aloofly ignore those who are offering to pony up for their vanity projects."
Did you forget Megrahi? It feels clever and grown-up to suggest that all politicians are the same, and that they'll all bow before power. That is clearly not the case.
We won't rock the boat with China because it serves literally no purpose. There's a strong case to be made that engagement is best for the Chinese people. But if it came do it and we had to decide to compromise or p*ss them off, I have confidence after Megrahi that the current Scottish Government have the balls to do the right thing.
Instography - "I can understand that some would prefer everything to be centralised in Edinburgh, around Holyrood rather than centralised around Westminster and the South East."
Who, namely, has said they prefer that?
"But the realistic alternative to the three main parties (it's quite sweet to think that the Libdems are still main) under independence is the SNP."
I think you're misrepresenting what people have said. What's been said here is that we expect Labour to change once it is freed from London control and can actually find the policy positions its members want. I don't have any doubt that a Scottish Labour party would take an immediate skip to the left - and so too would the Libs and the Tories. Being dragged right by their London HQs has poisoned them in Scotland and opened a massive door through which Salmond walked to straddle the middle ground of Scottish politics.
So the alternative isn't the three UK parties, but Scottish versions of them.
I'd also suggest the Greens would get a serious uptick in support - many people in the SNP openly talk about joining them after independence. I'm one of them. I'd vote SNP one last time so they could do the hard yards of building the institutions, and it would be Green after that.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"while the SNP and Yes Scotland have been happy to let all of the fringe groupings make the case for a socialist independent Scotland, there's nothing remotely socialist about the SNP's policies. So we can hope for some radical new dawn on 19 September just like we can hope for a good summer and segregated infrastructure but the reality will be austerity, smirr, paint on the road and shared use."
Yes, but, and.
I think it's perfectly reasonably to be cautious/sceptical and downright pessimistic. Different people want independence for difference reasons. Some would rather have a republic, some a genuinely independent currency (Greens).
A yes vote in September (events of the past week make this look almost likely) will alter things. Now that the SNP (as Government) has outlined the plan for 'civic Scotland' to develop a constitution, it's clearer how the next stage might work.
Devolution came about because of a 'civic process' involving a lot of individuals and organisations coming up with a credible blueprint. This included a voting system that 'guaranteed' that there would be no party with a majority at Holyrood..
The fact that enough people voted for the SNP to be (currently) a majority government shows a mixture of confidence in its competence and a desire for 'more devolution' and - perhaps - 'independence'.
Even arch anti-devolutionists (eg Major) now promise 'more devo if you vote No'.
Things can change, things do change, change happens.
Some good, some less so.
Whatever happens in September some things have changed (there's already more "segregated infrastructure"!. The laws of physics won't change, things like 'economics' (particularly how much people in Scotland want to be involved in City of London style 'turbo-capitalism') can be changed. Though with a lot of pre-referendum debate being around 'will you be better off (financially)' it won't be easy!
There won't be a paradise on Alex Salmond's chosen "Independence Day", or 5 years later or ever, but some things could be noticeable different from what would be after a No. (Obviously the absolute truth of that is unknowable, but after independent there would be constant comparisons with rUK and plenty of 'if only we had voted No' and 'see it was worth it'.)
Unless it's a catastrophe (self-inflicted or due to 'external circumstances') it's likely that an independent Scotland will inspire (some people in) rUK to 'want better'.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"I don't have any doubt that a Scottish Labour party would take an immediate skip to the left"
I know what you mean, but actually I think there is a lot of doubt!
Would probably be easier for key people to leave and try to attract similar SNP people to form a new centrish 'social democratish' party.
Not sure Labour has such key people who would (some must be planning to??) More likely it would be some of the (many) people who have already left the Labour Party. Whether any new party would 'work' or mirror histories of the SDP and SLP remains to be seen!
Posted 10 years ago # -
Did you forget Megrahi? It feels clever and grown-up to suggest that all politicians are the same, and that they'll all bow before power. That is clearly not the case.
Nope, and if that was done for the right reasons then it was a very honourable thing to do.
If however it was done for the reason of avoiding an appeal and then a public enquiry into why a man who was likely not guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned in a fabulously expensive trial then its no better than sending someone to gitmo and shows no more spine than we've all come to expect from politicians.
The fact is that all politicians are the same because they are the ones the public want and once there is no more Westminster bogey man and the SNP goes its separate ways the politicians Scotland elect will likely be the same.
Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss...Posted 10 years ago # -
"If however it was done for the reason of avoiding an appeal and then a public enquiry into why a man who was likely not guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned in a fabulously expensive trial..."
But the SNP had nothing to lose from such an enquiry. The original trial and appeal weren't on their watch. And the parties most likely to be embarrassed by an enquiry aren't even in Scotland, so the SNP could even have gained from it.
I can't see how avoiding an appeal was more in the SNP's interests than avoiding getting up America's nose and p*ssing off a big proportion of their own electorate.
Posted 10 years ago # -
We won't rock the boat with China because it serves literally no purpose.
Thats a cop out of the highest order, either you have your principles or you don't.
There's a strong case to be made that engagement is best for the Chinese people. But if it came do it and we had to decide to compromise or p*ss them off, I have confidence after Megrahi that the current Scottish Government have the balls to do the right thing.Its one thing to upset the Americans with little or no repercussions and potentially cover our blushes its quite another to "compromise" when the result would be losing a lot of much needed inward investment.
I don't like the Chinese government any more than you do, I am realistic enough to recognise there is never a purpose to rock that particular boat when you're a wee country with a limited scope to influence the direction of a very much larger country. That applies equally to iScot or the current UK.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I can't see how avoiding an appeal was more in the SNP's interests than avoiding getting up America's nose and p*ssing off a big proportion of their own electorate.
Then why was it conditional on him dropping his appeal?
Was there ever a real risk of losing voters? I doubt it really. Bloody nose to Westminster and upsetting the US all vote winners for SNP supporters, no? Plus it has the added advantage of being the right thing to do.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Even arch anti-devolutionists (eg Major) now promise 'more devo if you vote No'.
He's in an easy position to make promises, given he has no power, mandadate or authority to deliver anything for Scotland (or the UK!)
(Largely the same goes for Johann Thingumajig, Willie Whatshischops and Ruth Whatsurface too)
The fact is that all politicians are the same because they are the ones the public want and once there is no more Westminster bogey man and the SNP goes its separate ways the politicians Scotland elect will likely be the same
I think you have to give Holyrood a little bit of credit. It has a 15 year record of being (in my opinion anyway) much better behaved and more accountable, open and honest than Westminster. Yes, all politicians are politicians, but they're hardly all the same - at least (Eric Joyce excepted) they don't end up swinging punches at eachother like they do in plenty of other parliaments.
I really don't think that if/when Independence were to come along they will all start flipping their mortgage and filing for duck houses and moat clearing on expenses...
My own belief is that you get the politicians you vote for and they will get away with what you let them get away with. If you really do approach the referendum with an opinion of "all politicians are rubbish anyway, so we might as well stick with the rubbish bunch we've got because the next lot will probably be just as rubbish, even if they've not yet been as rubbish as the other lot" then we're guarunteed to end up with nothing but rubbish politicians.
I for one will be voting with optimism!
Posted 10 years ago #
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