SORRY, NO ONE IS AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW

WE ARE ALL DEFUSING MINES IN AFGHANISTAN WITH THE ARISTOCRATIC BARONESS LADYSHIP COLONEL

Image result for AFGHANISTAN RUTH DAVIDSON

To be fair to the Tories, Jackson Carlaw said that the SNP proposals for a separate system did have merit, and they were looking at them closely.

So why not take part in an interview?

Maybe because they have been told by Mr Cummings’ underlings to keep quiet?

60 thoughts on “SORRY, NO ONE IS AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEW”

  1. We seem to have a Westminster Government that cannot admit it’s own racism. If you must be a racist, then put it to a public test. See how it resonates with the electorate. Be open about it and see how it goes.

    Personally, it will go down a bit badly, but, heh ho! there are a lot of your electorate down south that absolutely love the politics of division.

    Just to be clear, who we let in, and who we exclude is the cutting edge of who we are.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. The resounding Tory victory in England based on a “get Brexit done” is indicative of racism, as far as I can see from the vox pops (and last night’s Question Time).

      There seems to be a hangover feeling of English superiority and a mistrust and in some cases outright hatred of foreigners.

      It makes me cringe.

      But there you go.

      I think that’s why Britain (England) was always uncomfortable in the EU, just as De Gaulle said they would be. They are fine in an international situation (Empire) as long as they are in charge.

      Liked by 3 people

  2. I had a look at the attendees at the parliament yesterday.
    The heading picture tells me why the untruthie wasn’t to be seen, off again spending more time with the wean, finding thinks on the beach.
    See the front bench of the tories in Scotland has had a wee change around.
    The murdo is now on the back benches along with ballantyne.
    As for the lack of visibility , carloss is just using the ruthie method, go to ground when difficult questions arrive.
    Woolly thinking that is much like Fuzzy Logic is the order of the day.
    The tory msps in Scotland seem to respect learning, provided they’ve not had the experience of using any they got in a sensible manner.
    The whole problem is that the wages haven’t kept up with inflation so the young don’t have the confidence or the money to have a normal life.
    Old carloss is Mr mumblemumblemumble, reads from the script given to him, a defiantly rebel without any ideas.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Oh Dave, “Carloss” – I love it – back in the 1970s we had the infamous Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (no idea who he might have been named after, none at all, oh no, no sirree Bob) aka Carlos the Jackal. Whereas here in sunny, romantic, palm-fringed Scotland we have the infamous Newton Mearns Tory Carloss the Jackass…

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Our man in Giffnock so to speak, Ed.
        A Wylies old bird, first ford over the Clyde.
        Now living the good life at our expense, £120,000 a year plus expenses, he gets extra as he’s a leader.
        Wish I had stuck into the reading at school, a career as a reader on the EBC or in the parliament.
        Great money for reading and it’s a short week.
        Only problem is the short career duration, even the EBC have a big turn over in not the news readers and weather girls.
        Fuzzy logic is used in digital electronics as you say in washing machines, cameras and anywhere a bit of hysteresis is required. Careful that’s not hysterics, see the picture today of the Forth bridge being closed is the OLD ROAD BRidge, a wee bit of confusion deliberately used I would think.

        Liked by 2 people

  3. Priti Patel has claimed staff shortages under the government’s new immigration system could be dealt with by training the 8.5 million who are economically inactive

    But
    @BBCRealityCheck
    finds that many of these people are students, carers, sick or retired

    So look out sick people, elderly people, students, disabled. The Tories really are coming for you.

    I wonder where they will get all the trainers and who will fund it.

    This imaginary £350 million a week is getting spread very thinly.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. if we are stopping low skilled immigration, why do the non-existent available folk replacing them need training? I mean it’s low skilled surely…

      Oh it’s actually low paid but with plenty of skills needed isn’t it. Just because the skills aren’t valued doesn’t mean everyone can do it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Well Patel should know about low skills. She clearly has them.

        She had to be sacked by her previous boss for doing an incredibly stupid and conceivably treasonous thing by meeting with ministers of a foreign regime without telling either her own department or the foreign office; with no security sweeps; with no officials present and (thus) agreeing to something which broke international law or at least UN Protocols, then lying to the Prime Minister about it.

        That she didn’t know that any of that was wrong suggests she didn’t have much in the way of skills.

        We should probably deport her.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Well, Jake, she is no stranger to illegal demands. I suspect that when she got back from Israel and demanded money be sent for the Overseas Aid budget to Israeli soldiers on the Golan Heights, someone will have tipped Downing Street the wink that she was about to do something illegal.

            She probably wants foreigners horsewhipped for not being English, which would probably be a step too far, even for her.

            Liked by 1 person

      2. Yeah, absolutely right, PP. As I was just saying somewhere or other just now, how much money they earn is not acceptable as a gauge of how much a person is worth. There are many people who get paid more just by working in London and receiving “London weighting”, i.e., earning more for doing the same job as someone who lives outwith London. If the Westminster regime then imposes a national, sorry, UK-wide earning threshold to qualify for your spouse to immigrate – which it has – at a level higher than, say, the entry level salary for a career in the NHS in Giggleswick but lower than for doing the same job in Tooting, it is ipso facto discriminating against non-Londoners. It is also breaching people’s right to marry the person of their choice.

        Worth and value… Devout believers in the free market believe that it purely economic / monetary worth equates to personal worth, and that hard work means well-paid work. They are, of course, wrong. Nevertheless, it helps justify their own satisfaction with being relatively well paid and economically privileged, in the circular argument that being economically privileged and well paid mean that you are self-evidently worth more as a person, more entitled, superior, better than those who earn less, and because of that you therefore deserve it.

        I have noticed, by the way, that the same people who act as if economic worth were a proxy for personal worth often believe that human rights too are for the rich / people like them because they deserve them more, and even that the law – particularly economic laws – do not apply to them, but only to the “poor”. We can reflect for a moment on the phrase “deserving poor” and see where that leads us… oh, and “hardworking families”.

        Telltales of that kind of psychopathy are statements as Leona Helmsley’s “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” I remember Leona Helmsley (aka the Queen of Mean) vividly because I was living in New York at the time she was finally done for tax evasion. Here’s a link to a paragraph about her in Time magazine: https://is.gd/y6x65L. And here’s a charming photo of the woman from the same web page (will it show as an inline image? We can but hope):

        One reflex of the economic worth = personal worth bit of conservative dogma is that higher taxes on the wealthy will discourage “hard work” – Murdo Fraser said something like relatively recently, but I haven’t been able to source a quote. All it means is that rich people will pay more. The idea that they shouldn’t have to because they are worth more is bunkum, bonkers and nakedly self-serving. Munguinites, I am sure, will have a hard time trying to remember Murdo Fraser doing any kind of work that could ever be described as hard … not like, say, a friend of mine who lost her deadbeat, abusive partner to bring up her two boys on her own, got the older one through university (thank heavens for the Scottish Government and no tuition fees!) on her own, will maybe have to do the same for the younger one (we’ll see), and works every hour God sends, at minimum wage or not much more. If anyone is worth more than Murdo Fraser, I’d say it was her.

        A significant implication of the principle that net income and net “worth” do not equate to personal worth is that people in countries with a high GDP per capita are not, individually, more valuable than people born in societies which are materially poor. The attitude that they are is based on really unacceptable and repugnant attitudes of cultural / racial / ethnic / etc. exceptionalism – with a faux “economic” underpinning.

        Maybe we Scots – we independentista Scots of independent mind – can come up with something better than behaving in the same, tired and pernicious old ways, better than believing in tired and pernicious old economic and social axioms and dogmas… not forgetting that egalitarianism per se can be grindingly unpleasant (as well as a lie) unless it’s shot through with kindness and compassion.

        I hope so, but we won’t really know until we are able to try in earnest.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. The taxation law such that wealthier people can easily avoid paying taxes , I know some who do and their chief gripe is that to avoid paying tax they often have to not spend the money tie it up in investment etc if they do decide to spend it they moan like hell that the government is harshly taxing them, these are people with hundreds of thousands or millions I just say to them that ordinary working people are treated worse than they are so stop moaning , they ask in what way ?
          I tell them that ordinary working people can’t put money away in investment to avoid paying tax because the tax gets taken from their pay before they get their pay PAYE .
          I also point out that they don’t get to put Ltd after their name either.

          Liked by 1 person

  4. It seems the Border Agency have staff at London Railways and subways and question those who are ‘acting suspiciously’. According to civil service unions 90% of those questioned are, of look like, foreigners…They also claim that over a thousand Border Agency jobs were lost under May’s instructions. Will there be a huge recruitment drive now that borders are going to be controlled?
    Incidentally, Tris, thank you for your previous kind words. Give my regards and best wishes to your Mum – the inspiration for a lot of my blogging nonsense! Looking back how could you forget the mad Grahamski and FiFi La bon bon. Did she become a ‘celebrity’ or not?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. It seems to me, John, that they are going to creating hundreds of thousands of jobs with this Brexit thingy. The only problem is that they won’t have anyone to do them, so they’ll have to bring in, erm, foreigners. Ew er.

      Anyway, how dare people hang around Piccadilly Underground looking like they are foreign. I hope Prince Philip doesn’t go down there anymore looking for the favours of a high class lady… He’ll be off with the marbles if Patel’s men get hold of him.

      Mum sends he best wishes to you and hopes you are happy in the sun… as do all of us, even Munguin, who rarely wishes anyone well.

      Oh dear lord, yes, Grahamski… and dear old Fifi. I’d forgotten them.

      I remember trying to explain to Fifs that even though she was a female she couldn’t be LA Bonbon, because bonbon was masculine.

      I suppose that sort of remark was bound to get me off on a bad footing with her.

      That, of course, was when she was the Noble Red Baron’s assistant, before she became his replacement (although not elevated to the aristocracy. and then… the great leader.

      Serves me right for getting chiding her about her French grammar that she rose to the dizzy heights, and I remain Munguin’s faithful factotum.

      Such is life… C’est la vie, or as Fifi would probably have it: C’est LE vie.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Oh, I’m sure she could, but even the leader of Scottish Labour can’t change the rules of the Académie Française! Bon bon is masculine, and that’s how it will stay!

          Like

    2. John, this sounds to me very like Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk policy in New York City back in the day. I was listening to an American programme earlier today which was talking about it, and they fact-checked Mayor Bloomberg’s statement at the candidates’ debate in the Democratic primaries just now, which was to the effect that though Giuliani had introduced it, he had toned it down. Oh yes – it was actually a podcast by Michael Moore of Bowling for Columbine fame.

      The reverse was true. Bloomberg ramped stop-and-frisk up. By the time the practice was stopped – I believe it was ruled unconstitutional – there had been over 5 million instances of stop-and-frisk carried out well-nigh exclusively on teenagers and young men, from about 15 to 25, with black and brown skins. As the number of black and brown males in the age group over the period was about 200,000, you can calculate that on average black and brown kids and young men had been stopped and frisked about 25 times. A lot of black and brown kids dropped out of school because they were afraid to go out… being stopped and frisked, by the way, was not nearly as innocuous as it sounds, because it usually included being thrown against a wall or down on the ground and having your hands tied behind you with those plastic tie things – and possibly being beaten up into the bargain for “resisting arrest”.

      A colleague of mine at the UN – an Englishwoman – had two sons by an Ethiopian guy she married (but dumped not very long after) – I was very fond of both kids, and their sister – and they came into NYC one day in their school holidays to do something perfectly ordinary, buy books for school, I think, and they got stopped and frisked… the cops actually had an excuse that time, which was pretty unusual, even though there was no real basis to it. The two boys got off the bus at the Port Authority bus terminal on 8th at 41st in Manhattan – as they would, coming in by bus from New Jersey where they lived – and got stopped. The cops claimed they were truants from school, and the other problem was that the Port Authority bus terminal is a well-known haunt for rent boys.

      So Micky and Danny (14 and 16) end up in the slammer downtown – the infamous Tombs. The truancy thing was only an issue because the New York schools had their end of term a week later than the New Jersey ones, which the cops almost certainly knew, but then there was the allegation of soliciting… So the poor kids ended up in a crowded cell with male prostitutes and druggies going cold turkey, with some of the crack and / or heroin addicts financing their habits through prostitution, so being both at the same time, and my colleague had to be wheeched out of a meeting she was covering at the UN to go downtown to bail them out.

      They never came into the city again unaccompanied by an adult White person while stop-and-frisk was still in force. My own boy Sam could well have been stopped and frisked, as he is still in the age group, and even with an official Kenyan Government diplomatic passport with a special US visa in it…

      Nowadays in America they have the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, aka ICE, which has a horrible reputation now. Family separations at the Mexican border, putting kids in cages – huge abuses of human rights, and a significant number of deaths can be laid at their door caused by their negligence, ignoring calls for help, refusing to get doctors out, failing to take kids to hospital. ICE agents are also going round checking people’s papers if they look Latino, particularly, or otherwise foreign; descending on families and taking the parents away in front of their young children and leaving the kids traumatised and alone with no adult supervision or assistance…

      When you have a sh*ite like Trump at the top, it brings out the worst in all the wannabe Little Hitlers in the ranks… as they say, the fish rots from the head.

      Getting through Brit customs and immigration under Thatcher could be a pretty horrible experience; I suffered it a number of times myself. Their cut-off point seemed to be age-related: after the age of 33, I never got stopped again. It was so bad that the last time I went through, having just had my 33rd birthday, I wired myself for sound (having recordings on your own device of meetings you’re covering can be handy) to try to get some dirt on them – and if they had treated me the way they had before, often, it would have been very good dirt indeed. Of course, the customs and immigration people – they weren’t called the Border Agency then – seemed to think I had some sort of attitude problem. As if!

      I was not alone. I heard similar stories from my (Brit) colleagues in Geneva and Vienna too, who were also heartily sick of the way they were being treated at the UK border, to the point of dreading it. Actually knowing a goodly amount of stuff about human rights makes people less accepting of that sort of crap, I’m sure. I also had a number of Black folk I knew from places like St. Vincent and the Grenadines – and they had it a lot worse. Very much worse. I once drove my pal from St. Vincent – I hope he won’t mind my mentioning his full name, which is Alan Black, which was kinda nominatively determinative really, and I’d love to see him again – back from Vienna to the UK. There were another couple of people with me too, one from the US and one from New Zealand.

      Alan was going to see family in London, and he was in a sweat of fear when we got to Dover. I mean that literally: he was terrified, quivering and sweating. I handed everybody’s passports to the immigration guy and, as if by accident, included my United Nations laissez-passer inside my regular Brit passport. So one New Zealander, one American and Alan from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and me, got waved through. Alan was utterly dumbfounded. He’d never got into the UK so easily. Ever. He could hardly get over it.

      So – Border Agency people stopping people on the London Underground who are “acting suspiciously”, of whom 90% have brown or black skin? Sounds awfully like Giuliani and Bloomberg’s stop-and-frisk, doesn’t it? It looks very much like being both alive and non-white – and male, I expect – constitutes “acting suspiciously”. It’s not new, of course: I’m thinking in particular of the shooting of the (somewhat Latin-looking) Brazilian guy Jean Charles da Silva e de Menezes at Stockwell station on 22 July 2005. Yet another horrible, senseless murder. And so on back and back.

      F*ucking racists.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. It would make you weep, Ed.

        As you say, if the people at the top are racist bigots, like Trump and Cummings, what hope do you have? The people farther down the pole are eager to please, and if they are already inclined that way, it’s easy for them to read “carte blanche” into the directions from above.

        If I felt in the slightest bit British, they would make me ashamed.

        As it is, I’m just grateful I’m not British.

        BTW, I note that the daft old fool who oversaw the killing of Mr De Menezes is now the head of their police.

        Amazing, don’t you think?

        Liked by 1 person

  5. 100% agin a Scottish visa
    Why you have all the immigrants claiming all kind
    Spurious reasons to gain entry
    To Scotland 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿.

    Outrageous things such as being persecuted in whatever place they come from .

    Yes persecution like wot happened (so she claims🤥)
    To Priti Patel .

    Liked by 2 people

    1. There’s something very strange about people who happily put their names to laws or regulations that would have been directly harmful to themselves – I first noticed it with Jack Straw as Home Secretary, when he put his name to legislation which would, I believe, have kept his own parents out of the UK (and led to their deaths as well, most likely).

      Liked by 1 person

  6. I live in Kilmarnock.

    You know I’ve come to call it a “useless Eater Reservation”.

    It’s not alone, lot’s of Scotland looks just like it.

    Full of demoralised, dummed down, ill educated, virtually unemployable, drug and alcohol dependents.

    Created by a political class.

    A fucking tragedy.

    I am an SNP member and a life long Independence supporter, yet I am ashamed of my party and it’s leader, they have become part of the political class.

    Scots of vision and integrity would want to lift their people out of this swamp.

    But no.

    Too much hard work.

    Let’s import cheap labour to work the fish factories, the hotels. the hospitals, the care homes, the building sites….

    And LET OUR PEOPLE ROT.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I agree it would be good if drugs policy were controlled by Holyrood and not reserved to Westminster. Likewise welfare benefits. I hope the minimum alcohol pricing is helping; I don’t think it could hurt, but I don’t know how much good it is doing. Tris is quite right to make the point that with unemployment as low as it is (which is good – as far as it goes), pretty much everybody who is able to work is doing so.

      Thatcher has a lot to answer for by closing down whole industries and condemning a generation to poverty and despair. The damage she did will be felt for a good long while yet, I fear.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. Yes, I’ve seen some of these towns, abandoned by Mrs Thatcher’s transformation of the UK, and concentration of most resources in the South East of England…the death of engineering and manufacturing and a concentration on finance, insurance, money making.

      The same thing is true all over the UK. I remember going to somewhere in Lancs a few years ago and the place is worn out, washed out.

      A new Labour government in 1997 might have addressed these matters, but in fact it mainly stoked up the financial boom for London and the south east, which ended in the UK being hit by the crash of 2008.

      Followed by ten years of austerity with Cameron/Clegg, Cameron, May and now Cummings.

      And the SNP has almost no power over any of this.

      Blair’s devolution was completely messed up. The idea that the Celtic nations should have home parliaments, assemblies, senads and that England would not was quite mad.

      The powers are small, and even when they seem big, law and order, health, education… they are constrained by a tax system run by the English government for England.

      We don’t get extra money for health if WE need it. We get extra money for health when THEY need it.

      We don’t control employment legislation or social security, nor do we control our borders. THEY do all that.

      I think the SNP, only in semi-power for 10 years out of the 40 years since Thatcher descended upon us, has done a cracking job.

      Nope, they haven’t dealt with the drugs problems, but that’s becasue they have no powers to do so.

      They have reduced the amount of alcohol and a Scottish government under Labour did something about smoking in enclosed public spaces so we are not all forced to smoke, like it or not. And they did it several years before the English government did it.

      They are far from perfect. But then even governments in advanced nations aren’t perfect. Administrations in Iceland, Greenland,Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmake, Switzerland, etc, make mistakes too.

      What, with the very limited powers that our government has, would you do?

      Liked by 2 people

      1. You’ve hit the nail on the head – they have very limited powers.

        So they’ve been tempted to use these limited powers to impose a litter of pettifogging nanny state regulations, they have the power to annoy and by God they’ve used it!

        Let’s look at their big success – minimum alcohol pricing. A miniscule drop in sales and it’s back slapping all round.

        Let’s think about the morality of it – a self satisfied political elite, most of them on umpty grand a year, whose bottle of Bowmore 15 year old is not affected by the way, imposing extra cost on poor minimum wage earners buying their 8 pack of cheap lager at the weekend to escape for an hour or two the miserable conditions created by the same political class – hypocrisy.

        However round here it’s only effect has been to push more and more young people at cheap hash.

        Mind you that suits a lot of well off people, the drug “problem” feathers many thousands of comfortable middle class nests in Scotland.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The idea was not to discourage older people from having a drink, but to discourage 14 year olds from buying cider that was cheaper than a can of lemonade.

          It certainly pissed off my Tory supporting, Britain is Best neighbour.

          What would you do with the limited powers and even more limited pocket money given to the Scottish government?

          There are many good things that they have done, but of course, as time goes on, they, like every other long-term government tend to run out of steam (and in this case, money).

          What is the alternative. Jackass, Leonard, Paddy, Wee Willie?

          What would you do?

          Liked by 1 person

          1. As little as possible.

            I mean as little social engineering as possible – the SNP requires a broad spectrum of support for Independence – it’s raison d’etre.

            Support from left and right and the middle, therefore avoid annoying as many people as possible.

            Balance the budget and look after the infrastructure as much as possible (starting with the ferries which are in a an absolute mess).

            Visit the farmers and tell them the advantages of Independence for them, visit manufacturers and their workers ditto and most importantly constantly visit our depressed towns and cities and scream about the advantages for them, the pensioners, the unemployed, the youth.

            Be in Holyrood as little as possible. It is merely a means to an end.

            Independence morning noon and night.

            Stop thinking that importing cheap labour and leaving the vast working age underclass to rot is a good idea, it’s not and it’s lazy.

            Stop the social engineering, because if you don’t there’s a crash coming for the SNP even if as you say the alternatives are useless.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Have you written to the SNP to suggest it?

              Why not stand as a candidate and try to do something?

              I can agree that our first priority should be to escape the madness that is Britain and the particular madness that is Johnson/Patel/Raab… and much more importantly, Cummings’ Britain.

              But there is the day job argument too. And these issues are presenting themselves. Someone has to react to them.

              I’m tired of the carping both inside and outside the party, but I’m even more tired of being a part of this hideous and positively repulsive country that the UK has become.

              Like

                  1. What? You don’t think so, Tris?? And here’s me thinking the First Minister and her Cabinet are hanging on my every word! I am appalled, nay, heartbroken!! They must mend their ways, instanter!!!

                    Or I shall resign my Party membership in a snit, or even wearing my normal evening dress, top hat and monocle!!!!

                    Liked by 1 person

            2. Dr Marc Aitken
              @drmarcaitken
              ·
              20h
              Warning signAlarming WM Govt are pushing the idea that a citizen only has economic value. It started with the points system/salary threshold, and ends with Patels ‘economically inactive’ elderly and disabled people.

              What happens when we no longer carry an economic value in Boris’ Britain?

              This is what the Uk has become. Makes me want to vomit.

              If you aren’t economically viable, what will they do with you?

              That government in England seems to comprise sub humans, Patel in particular, but she wound’t be saying that if she thought that Cummings would have her sacked for it.

              Liked by 1 person

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