Dear Richard Leonard

Image result for richard leonard

Donald Trump’s visit to Scotland on Friday is unwanted. Nicola Sturgeon must ensure the Scottish Government-owned Prestwick Airport is not used to facilitate his trip. We can send a message around the world that neither he nor his politics are welcome here.

In the first weeks of your term as Temporary Branch Supervisor (Scotland) of the British Labour Party, it wasn’t unreasonable that you made some mistakes and mixed up what powers were available to Scotland, the Scottish Parliament, and the Scottish Government. New shoes need wearing in and all that.

But you must be at least halfway through your tenure now, and it seems that you are still unsure and unclear about the powers that Edinburgh has.

Don’t misunderstand me, all here at Munguin’s New Republic would love to see this awful man barred from spending holiday time in Scotland. Our police have better things to do that protect people like him, and it’s not like he will spend any of his alleged billions here… but there are facts to consider.

Firstly, if the president of the United States has been invited to the UK by the British Prime Minister and the head of state, and May and the queen have raised no objection to him spending some holiday time (or business time) at his golf resort in Scotland during that visit, the First Minister is in no position to stop him from doing so.

Secondly, even if she did have the power to stop Trump from Landing a the civilian airport at Prestwick (and she doesn’t because relations with foreign heads of government are largely a reserved responsibility, as is, as far as I know, air traffic control), she most assuredly wouldn’t have the power to stop him being greeted by HM Secretary of State for Scotland in HMS Gannet, the military part of the airport, which is run by the UK government.

Your party knows this part of the airport well, as it would have been the part used by your senior colleague, Jack Straw, when he was organising rendition flights. Remember that?

Now, aren’t you glad you are not the First Minister?

What an ass you would have made of yourself, and of Scotland, had you been.

Yours sincerely

Munguin

Munguin’s New Republic.

54 thoughts on “Dear Richard Leonard”

      1. I think the ‘G kiss’ for T Rump who puts little kids in cages 1000 miles away from mum, probably is nowhere near sufficient. Set them loose!

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        1. I can’t even… as they say.

          These people do despicable things, but I saw the videos of some of these little children being taken to court and put in front of a judge. No one with them. Being questioned in a foreign language in a courtroom… It brought tears to my eyes.

          Who on earth does that kind of thing?

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  4. tris

    Your anti Scottish Labour diatribe disregards the fact that any privately owned airport can refuse landing to any and all aircraft if they do choose .
    And seeing as the snp own prestwick they best get on the
    Dog 🐕 and bone 🍖 and ban
    Trumps plane ✈️ asap .

    Apparently the membership of
    Trumps golf 🏌️‍♀️ club has a large
    Contingent of snp members.

    So seems not all nats take the same dislike to Trump

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    2. The government cannot stop the President of the United States’ plane landing at a military airport in Prestwick.

      Nor cold they have stopped the rendition flights.

      I don’t think you have to like the owner of a golf course to be a member of it.

      I don;t like the owner of Virgin Trains, but I travel on them. Come to that, I don’t like the current owner of the East Coast line, but I travel on it.

      But of course some “nats” may like Mr Trump. Just as some of them probably like rice pudding (shudder).

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  5. Ah yes,the leader of the pretendy Scottish Labour party.
    Head quartered,funded and directed from London.
    Just because they sell Volkswagons in Scotland,that doesn’t make them Scottish.
    Some people may be fooled into thinking that he is here to represent Scotland’s best interests but in reality,along with all the other representatives of the London based parties,just there to keep Scots in line.
    You can fool some of the people…….

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          1. Oops! I forgot he was “leader”. Then wasn’t he followed by the ever-odious Sardar for a while?

            So, Dugdale was worst branch organiser since Sardar.

            Now, whatever his name is is even worse.

            That’s an accomplishment.

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            1. To be fair, it’s easy to forget Murphy. He wasn’t exactly a long term holder of the post.

              You can always commit him to memory as the person who was put in to put the fear of god into the SNP, and who swore that he wouldn’t lose 1 seat to the SNP.

              It turned out to be true. There was one seat (out of 41) that he didn’t lose to the SNP.

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  6. As you know Tris Humza was asking the Westminster government for an itinerary for Mr Tangerine man whilst he is in Scotland and as far as I know he might still be waiting.

    However I have a short cut he can use …

    http://notaminfo.com/ukmap

    This confirms that the Great Orange one is visiting Turnberry. He is NOT visiting his Aberdeenshire course. I can’t think why he wouldn’t want to visit … surely can’t be a wind farm thingy. Anyway as you can see, hopefully, the C.A.A. (Civil Aviation Authority) who have control over ALL airspace in the U.K. have issued a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) giving advance notice of closure of airspace around Prestwick and Turnberry.

    As far as closing Prestwick to Air Force One others have pretty much covered it. I’d just add that the C.A.A. and N.A.T.S. (National Air Traffic Services) are the organisations that enforce the rules of the air and control all air traffic in the UK air space and are based in England. Their services are not devolved to Scotland therefore no one can realistically/legally shut an airport in Scotland unless there is an emergency involving the airport.

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  7. What that air headed eejit Leonard and Patrick Harvie seem to forget is that Trump is visiting in his position as POTUS. He’s representing the people of the US. Good diplomacy is required by the Scottish Government.

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    1. Yes, he is the American president and I think he’s been insulted enough by sending Fluffy to met him at the airport. I have a wee picture in my head of Fluffy sanding there at arrivals with a placard and Trump’s name on it.

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    2. Well, he’s visiting the UK as POTUS. In fairness, he is visiting Scotland either as a private citizen on holiday, or as a private citizen visiting companies he owns.

      |He has no business with the Scottish government and there were never any plans on either side for him to meet them.

      The Brits have sent their Viceroy up to meet him in Prestwick, in a part of the airport that it owned by the military, and therefore nothing to do with the Scottish government.

      What Leonard and Paddy seem to misunderstand is that the Scottish government could ban him from using the airport and the Brits would simply (and legally) ignore it.

      I can imagine Leonard knowing this and hoping that Nicola is too stupid not to know that she would simply be humiliated by Westminster.

      I can’t imagine Paddy being that daft.

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      1. Mental image of Fluffy standing with a happy meal clutched in his hand. Hope the toy will keep them entertained for a wee while.

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      2. Nicola is being a diplomat and that’s the right thing to do. Curiously enough I also asked some of my pals on the other of the pond why they voted for Trump and they all gave the same answer. “Because he’s not Hillary”.

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  8. Richard Leonard was an MSP before he became Scottish leader. He knows very well what powers are devolved but his tactic is to demand the Scottish government do things they have no control over to put them in a negative light. It is the kind of cynical politics that characterises Scottish Labour.

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    1. I suspect it must be a tactic. Even if he didn’t know, his advisers should know.

      It’s cheap and shoddy.

      The Daily Express says that Trump has snubbed Nicola by refusing to meet her.

      Has anyone heard that Nicola wanted to meet him, made any overtures in that direction, or indicated in any way that it would be agreeable to her to do so?

      I doubt it.

      But people see the headline, assume she begged for a photo-op )like Brown did) and Trump has humiliated her (as Obama did with Brown) by refusing.

      Job done. Scotland made to look small and pathetic.

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  9. tris and other Scottish Labour
    Hating nats

    If you wuz in accident or in Conan’s case a knife fight .
    Leading to a massive lose if blood and requiring a blood transfusion.

    But unfortunately the only blood available was provided
    By Scottish Labour supporters.

    Would you take the blood or rather choose to die ???

    Just wondering given your almost insane hatred of all things Scottish and Labour

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    3. Niko Niko Niko…

      Of course I’d take your blood.

      I used to be a Labour supporter.

      I stopped being when Blair made them Tories.

      I want Scotland to be free of Tory Britain.

      I have to try hard to think of any single thing that I like about Britain.

      Richard Leonard knows, or should know, that The First Minister couldn’t stop this visit no matter what she did. She has no power to do so. Mrs May would overrule her.

      He sis it for cheap political gain.

      He needs to grow up.

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      1. I last voted Labour in 1992. I didn’t actually mind Tony Blair at the time but I couldn’t vote for Labour in 1997 because of Jack Straw. Jack Straw was nobody’s idea of a liberal. He seemed an odd choice of Home Secretary in a government that billed itself as progressive. The subsequent stories of his involvement in rendition are quite shocking but in keeping with his pronouncements pre-1997 about his attitude to the rule of law. Maybe he was doing Blair’s work for him, maybe not, but he did it all the same. I hope he is brought to trial.

        The 1990s seem like a lifetime ago. Ideology seemed to have come to an end and party messages were about their management skills. Say what you like about Blair, he knew how to build consensus, he had an eye for detail, and he knew how to get things done. What we have now is ideologues good at sloganeering but dreadful at governance and even worse at the politics of governance. They believe they need no governance skills because they aim to sweep away the institutions and laws that will act to constrain their behaviour. We need another Blair figure more than ever. The prevailing wind of ideology makes it less likely than ever that we’ll get one but also heightens the needs for one.

        If we take Iraq and Afghanistan out of Blair’s record, was it actually a bad record? I’d say that domestically he is by far the best PM we’ve had in my lifetime. Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, are unforgivable. The suffering he initiated continues to this day. Imagine a world in which none of these had happened. I’m sure we’d look back fondly on his tenure if he had exercised the quality of judgement on his foreign policy as he had on his his domestic affairs.

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        1. I last voted Labour in 1997. I, too, liked the idea of Blair. He was young, enthusiastic, relevant, unlike some who had gone before.

          He, Brown and Mandelson worked on the principle (laid out Mandelson’s autobiography) that you can have great policies for the people but you can’t get elected, then your policies are of no use. To get elected he/they reckoned you had to appeal to Thatcher’s children. Many of them now resident in the very prosperous south east of England.

          Old Labour had been killed by Thatcherism. New Labour was the way forward. I bought into that at the time. That and the fact he wasn’t Major or Thatcher.

          As you said, he brought in some good policies, not least of which (although this was not of his own volition) the devolution settlements on the Celtic nations. In my opinion, he made a grave error by NOT giving England a parliament. But that’s another matter altogether.

          His huge errors were, in my opinion, letting Brown run the economy the way he did. His ‘end to boom and bust’ was a fantasy. Surely any economist could have told him that.

          Indeed it turned out to be an end to boom. The irresponsibility of allowing banks completely free reign to do whatever they wanted was madness, as was the fantastical housing boom and the remortgaging to buy cars and take holidays. The debt built up was unmanageable. And in the end he gave the Tories an excuse for never-ending austerity.

          I was dubious about their social security policies too. Although the worst of the excewsses came under Brown.

          Cosying up to Bush. Maybe Afghanistan was, to an extent, understandable, although Bin Laden and his team were Saudi, not Afghan. But Iraq was without question, unforgivable. I still believe that between them and the leaders of Spain and Italy, they gave rise to ISIS and the current massive unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere. That’s before you look at the number of people they killed in their search for non-existent WMDs.

          Both of them seemed to be fixated on Saudi Arabia and Isreal to see what kind of problems THEY were responsible for. At least Boris Johnson admitted that Saudi was behind a vast amount of the trouble in the Middle East.

          Straw is unspeakable. I hope he ends up inside for the rest of his life.

          I don’t see how Labour can make its way back in the near future. Too many of the people who run it are on the right of the party. Miliband failed and I thought that Corbyn might have provided a solution, but I see I was far from correct about that.

          Now, for me, the United (?) Kingdom is a dead duck croaking towards the inevitable end.

          I’m instinctively anti royalty. It seems to me to belong to a bygone age. Even if Charles or William modernise it after the queen dies, it’s still wrong that we have a hereditary head of state. But I doubt that the English will ever vote it out.

          We’re not really united any more, England and Scotland. We don’t vote for the same things. We’re not really the same people. We have different priorities. We need to be our own country. So, until we are independent, I’ll vote SNP.

          I agree with you that Blair wasn’t a bad prime minister in many ways. By comparison with Brown, Cameron or this joke that they ahve at the moment, he was progressive and clever.

          His big problem seems to have been being seduced by the power of the American presidency. The desire to be the second most important person in the Western world without anything behind him to justify that.

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  10. I still find myself wondering how a (branch) party goes from Donald Dewar to Richard Leonard in 18 years – with a plethora of utterly useless tossers in between.

    Its almost as if anyone talented in SLAB had gone “elsewhere” isn’t it? 😉

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    1. *strokes beard* Hmm, it can’t have been the House of Lords… another political party perhaps? (We’ll have to spell it out for Niko)

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    2. That’s exactly it.

      Dewar was a man with some vision. It wasn’t necessarily my vision, but we would have a greed on a lot of things.

      MacLeish too. Even McConnell.

      Then it heads downhill at a rate of knots, till you come to this bloke.

      As you say, for a country full of socialists, surely this isn’t the best they have?

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  11. Tris
    Like most people I would prefer that Trump wasn’t coming to Scotland and kept his right wing free market and bullying down South where he will sadly find a welcoming home from many. However, I wouldn’t ban him from coming as he is the President of the United States and we should I believe respect the office but not the man. We also want to take our place back in the international relations world as an independent country and we will have to deal with far worse than Trump, we should show that Scotland is a professional country with a top class Government who know how to act, we don’t have to welcome him and to be honest while I am all for protest and marches I think in this case absolute silence would send an even stronger message. The protests for him will be something he will enjoy and will assume that he is doing something right if everyone is against, America first and all that guff. But silence, no crowds, no flags, no reporting, no pomp sends a far clearer message that he is not wanted here and we will respect your office but that’s as far as it goes. Richard Leonard is a clown, I actually think Dugdale was better, the mans a bit thick and I hate how he plays the English card when challenged by his opponents, hope he stays branch manager for years to come. Out of his depth and even worse out of his time, the people have moved on from Labour in Scotland but Labour refuse to accept it believing they are still relevant.

    Bruce

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    2. I think, Bruce, that the Scottish government has probably done more or less what you proposed.

      I’m sure Nicola knows that it’s absolutely nothing to do with her whether he comes here or not.

      I think, however, that Humza was right to demand that the UK pay for the policing.

      I wouldn’t want to disrespect the USA. It is in many ways a great country and, much more importantly, the Americans I know have been, without exception, lovely kind generous people. I’m lucky never to have met any of the nutters!

      Trump makes my flesh creep. If there are two things I can’t stand it is cruelty to animals and to kids.

      I watched some videos the other night of little kids being interviewed in a count by judges about their deportation.

      Kids didn’t go to America illegally or otherwise. If he wants to hound illegal immigrants then he should stick to the adults. The ones who made the decision to come.

      Of course that’s just one of the man’s failings in my book. But it’s the one that does it for me. A man that can order that I would pee on if he was on fire. Despicable low life.

      I certainly see that, in a way perhaps it would have been more disconcerting for him if no one turned out in any way at all to greet him, but we need to remember that there are many who would have (and will) turn out to cheer him. He has a fan base here among the ultra right racist scum like Farage, Morgan, Boris, and that failed apprentice female who was too racist for the Sun… And rememebr he would have imagined that the thousands who turned out to cheer him were (like his inauguration crowd) more people than actually live ion the planet. He’s already said that he knows the British people like him, and think that he’s taking the right line with immigrants.

      Peaceful protest is OK.

      Scotland should make it clear that it has a respect for the USA, but not for this travesty of a man.

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      1. Tris
        I totally understand that he is a repugnant human being and from having my Trump supporting relatives here in the summer from the states I understand a little more of why people voted for him. Like the Brexit vote many voted for him because they feel left behind, let down and sick of the establishment. Not unlike many here. Many in the USA feel that their Christian values are being eroded, that they were sending their sons and daughters on wars about oil for people like Clinton who they hate with a vengeance. They know that Trump will do nothing for the USA standing in the world but many believe America has given enough, spending billions on war while Americans go hungry, having low tariffs in the USA while the EU imposes very high taxes, the list is a long one. I know you would never disrespect the office and I understand that he has supporters but as we saw today he plays up to the protesters and gets a kick from it, I wouldn’t want to give the clown the satisfaction.

        Bruce

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        1. Cool Bruce.

          I think you are right.

          People are getting fed up (for different reasons) of the kind of governments they have had.

          They have voted for something different.

          And now they are getting it.

          I expect some of them will like it. Some of them won’t.

          I don’t particularly “respect” any office or office holder. I’ve always made a habit of treating everyone equally. I certainly never defer in any way to any of them. They are as much one of Jock Tamson’s bairns as I am.

          I’d treat Nicola Sturgeon in exactly the same way as I’d treat the lad who was begging at the railway station yesterday. Decently.

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