44 thoughts on “COME AND DEBATE”

  1. In 1707 the Tory’s where democracy deniers before 2014 the same and again in 2022 etc, now the real democracy deniers is the SG/SNP and its leadership who have handed Scottish sovereignty and democracy to Westminster by constantly asking for Section 30 order and asking the Supreme court to rule over the Treaty of Union which includes the claim of right. Make no mistakes from what we seen yesterday was England saying shut up and get in your box, you stupid Jocks.
    Three time the SNP has asked for a Section 30 order and three-time NS has been told NO and we meant it, the biggest mistake any of our politicians has in the last 300yrs was to take the Treaty Of Union to the British supreme court, what we witnessed yesterday wasn’t some arrogant tory scoring political points in order to get elected they knew that Sturgeon has blown Scotland’s chance of being Independent by way of allowing Westminster to take the sovereign right of Scottish people and placing it in the hands of England and its politicians. The only argument that Sturgeon can say is the same argument the SNP, The National and wegingerdug has been saying since 2015 is “Westminster and the Tory’s are democracy deniers and some more Scots has turn to want Independence”. Yesterday the SNP was told that its MSP would have to report to Westminster and that the Scottish parliament is all but dead.
    If what I’ve seen today is Nicola Sturgeon response to being told report to England and your parliament is now going to be ruled by England, please tell me my Scots what do we have left other than a small dream of freedom.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. 100%Yes

      An appreciation of the reality would perhaps cast more light and be more helpful to independence than a rant against NS/SNP. Scotland might have much to offer but is a small country, in all aspects. Only an attitude of English exceptionalism will say otherwise. You see evidence of this compare 2014 to now. The geopolitics of 2014 demonstrated our importance, remember the utterances of Barroso, China, Obama and others, we were a nonentity, an irrelevance. 2022 we still need to display the notion of democratic legitimacy. To whom? The Union state whose first words within hours of the 2014 vote, after beseeching us to lead them not leave them, nations of equals etc. just before the vote, announce English Votes for English Laws? Of course not. It is the EU, the international community, the UN that we display our democratic legitimacy. The runes are in our favour, they are ripe to listen.

      Geopolitics have changed massively since 2014, the EU has coalesced, Germany the financial engine of the EU needs energy, the Union state has displayed, to all, disregard for international agreements and is desperate for any deal. Covid would have been used against any move to campaign but Westminster has stated that covid is over. Hence, I think, we are now under starters orders.

      The Union state have longed for splits since 2014, splits once established need little to no maintenance from the union, human nature does the rest. The Union state are masters of this subterfuge, having been working at it for centuries. NB. The tory party are in power and despite the complete burach created by them the next GE (2024) may, unbelievably, be a close run thing. The tories although consisting of various factions that cannot stand each other, it is important to note that they manage to present a unified front for the voter when it matters.

      Alba, or any other party to gain democratic legitimacy, to achieve independence, I’m afraid we don’t have the luxury of time for that. Our vote for independence will come in 2023, not long and worth the wait. With positive campaigning it will fly by. If any of the virulent stuff being spoken of comes true and we don’t get the chance to vote on independence I will then heartily campaign for a change at Holyrood.

      Further to my ramblings, please read this thread;

      Liked by 1 person

  2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001b7jh

    Offshore money, huge fees, suspicious payments and a phantom head of the KGB – just some of what a group of ordinary British savers discovered when the ÂŁ46 million fund they had invested in collapsed. Each year, a billion pounds is lost in failed investment schemes. Panorama tells the story of one of them and follows investors as they try to unravel the truth about the Blackmore Bond, a Manchester-based scheme, and challenge the regulators they believe failed them.

    Chief Executive of the Financial Conduct Authority from 2016 to 2020.

    Andrew Bailey wank of England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 governor …

    Failing upwards real eye 👁 opener to his total lack of ability or morals ..
    No wonder he asked the poor downtrodden workers not to ask for any wage rise..

    Like

    1. I can’t watch that, Niko, with it being on the BBC for which I do not pay. But I get the idea from your explanation.

      Are any of them not corrupt, and clearly, the best way to get on in this union is to make a mess of stuff…

      As Mr B and Mrs T show.

      Liked by 1 person

  3. I understand and share the frustration and the feeling that somehow someone has sold the jerseys. That being said, I don’t think its fair to lay all the blame on NS.

    Thinking back to the Thatcher era and before, the conventional wisdom then was that an elected majority of SNP MPs returned to Westminster would be enough in and of itself to trigger the process. That thinking changed. There’s much to be said about how and why that happened, who or what drove or directed it, but the wheels were in motion long before the Sturgeon era. What we have today is a system she inherited rather than crafted.
    There is a glimmer of light though. It simply isn’t sustainable for Unionists to maintain that independence can’t happen without a referendum and then refuse to allow one. Should the Supreme Court find that the Scottish Parliament ( note “Parliament” rather than “Government”) does not have the legal competence to enable such a process then we can abandon and back out of the referendum cul-de-sac and revert to the status quo ante…an elected majority of independence supporting Scottish MPs.

    Liked by 4 people

  4. Do you really have to be an adulter/ess to be quallified to lead the tory party even though any reference to adultery was attempted to be hidden in a wikkipedia entry?
    Gwyn

    Liked by 1 person

    1. May be a recent thing.

      I doubt Mrs May did much of that and I could almost certainly guarantee that Mrs Thatcher did NONE of it.

      But honestly, if you were going to have a affair and risk your marriage, you’d have though she might have gone for something a little more appealing than this oaf.

      Like

    2. Gwyn, I think its the early influence of Paisley on her life. It shouldn’t be under estimated.
      Great minds have pondered why God chose Bethlehem rather than Paisley for the birth of the only begotten son…its no great eschatological mystery really, its simply that he couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Apparently we do:

        What is considered an adulterer?
        An adulterer is someone who engages in adultery—a consensual sexual relationship or encounter between someone who’s married and a person they’re not married to (who may or may not be married to someone else). Typically, for something to be considered adultery, at least one of the partners must be married.

        I don’t know how common it is… I’d think Mr Bakker is rather past that sort of thing these days.

        I’d have doubted he would have been able to convince you to donate to his wee scam.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I just don’t like the idea that Johnson was a terrible PM because he had affairs. I don’t care if he had affairs because the saga of his love life is absolutely not the reason he was a terrible PM. He was a terrible PM because he made terrible political choices that damaged the lives of millions and poisoned the UK’s constitutional norms, not because he broke the bible’s code of marital monogamy.

          Sorry for the rant but, I don’t know, we won’t defeat populist authoritarians by co-opting their obsession with family values.

          Liked by 1 person

            1. He’s unsuited because of his love life? Seriously? His inability to uphold right-wing family values ought to be a problem only for people who think right-wing family values are a good thing.

              I don’t care if Truss and Kwasi were an item. Who cares about this? She has pledged to send vulnerable asylum seekers to Rwanda and to to make terrible policy choices that will irreparably harm the UK’s fragile economy and the people living there. Can’t we focus on that?

              Liked by 1 person

              1. For all his faults… and they were/are legion, at least Johnson was quite bright if inordinately lazy.

                I don’t think Truss is Lazy, but she is remarkably stupid.

                She’s a right wing Tory so of course she’s happy to send refugees who have fled god knows what horror, to a country that has been criticised for human rights violations.

                We are desperately short of labour, but we don’t want more of that sort here.

                If she had an ounce of decency she would have been trying to get something done about people not being able to afford food, because inflation is 13% and wages/benefits have increased by less than 3%.. People are desperate and she’s worrying about her next job.

                She never knows the answer to anything. She has been humiliated time and again in Committee or in public interviews with Eddie Mayer and Andrew Neil because she tried to bluff her way out of something… and was caught.

                “how many houses have you built?”
                “I can’t give you the figure off the top of my head”
                Can you not? I can tell you. YOU BUILT NONE!” (Andrew Neil).

                And her famous Brexit gaff: “You can’t change your mind about things like this, Eddie (Meyer)”

                “Why not? You did”

                “Well, yes, I did, but the other way.”

                FFS!

                She insulted, on social media, a man she was trying to do a trade deal with, seemingly forgetting that they had social media in Australia and that the spoke English there… “I’ll sit him on a hard seat in my office and not let him up till I get the deal I want.” and was then humiliated when he got the trade deal HE wanted and she stuffed British Farmers.

                She insulted the First Ministers of Scotland and Wales, and ran down Sinn Fein who won the Northern Irish election. She (the biggest attention seeker going) called Nicola an attention seeker and said she would ignore her. She compounded this by saying to journalists, when asked if she would, nonetheless, work with Nicola, that she would work closely with Douglas Ross.

                Seeming, she is unaware of how insulting that was to Scotland. Basically, you vote for who you want to, but I’m ignoring you.

                How would they have felt if Michel Barnier had said he wouldn’t talk to Theresa May, but would talk to Jeremy Corbyn?

                I think she will be a disaster.

                Somehow, we just need to get through the next year and she’ll have buried the UK.

                And we don’t have a proper head of state to do anything about it. Instead we have a tourist attraction, and not a particularly good one, unless there’s a marriage, death or a coronation.

                (Now, who’s sorry for the rant!!)

                And I don’t give a damn who she sleeps with. To be hones it’s not somewhere my mind would ever go.

                Liked by 1 person

          1. I think that Johnson’s affairs are just another indicator of his rather self centred lifestyle. I totally agree with you that it was not that that made him a dreadful choice for prime minister.

            It would be fair to say that John Major, a much more sensible prime minister, had affairs. Wilson was thought to have had an affair too, I think.

            It’s just a part of his character to have what he wants when he wants it regardless of the consequences. Johnson was serially unfaithful to wives (even when they were in hospital being treated for cancer). Maybe that’s not too unusual, I suppose, although certainly when someone was really ill, I’d have found it difficult to be with someone else.

            He added to it by using public funds to pay for his affairs. and by (presumably in agreement with whichever woman it was) aborting his children.

            In itself it doesn’t make him unsuitable for the job… (Although it probably made him a most unsuitable convert to the Roman Catholic Church of which he is now a member.)
            These days you can’t be blackmailed about that sort of thing, so it wasn’t a security risk. Although other things were.

            But it was typical of his “the rules don’t apply to me” attitude he took to everything. He lied about one of his affairs to his then boss, Michael Howard (of something of the night fame).

            And got the sack for it when Howard found out.

            But Howard should have known he would lie. He lied at school, he lied at uni, he lied at work and was from time to time sacked for it and he lied at home and recently he lied over and over again to parliament… and who knows, to the police too. But he always got another job and indeed another wife and another affair. As he will now that he has been effectively sacked from another job.

            He was a bad prime minister because… well everything. There was nothing he did right.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. I know he lied to Michael Howard but the problem here is that Michael Howard was a right-wing family values guy who wanted everyone to live by right-wing family values. When we criticise Johnson for his personal life, we’re just doing the same as Michael Howard.

              Johnson helped an old friend who wanted to assault a journalist, he lied to parliament about his covid parties, he lied to the Queen about prorogation, he messed up the government’s covid response by encouraging us to “take it on the chin”, he did nothing about the looming energy crisis, he overrode advice about House of Lords appointments so as not to disappoint a Tory donor, he presided over a government that engaged in all manner of corrupt activities, he has a history of making racist, xenophobic and homophobic remarks. I could go on and on like this but it’s bedtime.

              We don’t know the details of his personal life or what his partners thought about the situation or if he was open or secretive about his activities with his partners. This isn’t for us to know. There are no hard and fast rules that we should expect of anyone when it comes to their love life because their love lives are as much our business as ours is to them.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Yes, I accept that, but his love life just follows the same pattern as everything else about him.

                That is that it is all about him.

                The support for Brexit was all about him possibly being prime minister, because there probably wouldn’t have been a vacancy if the vote had gone the other way.

                He, as head of the leave campaign, with Cummings and Carrie, allowed people to make all sorts of ridiculous promises about what Brexit would bring… and never challenged them.

                If he had told the truth … about the money, the deals, the cards that we didn’t hold, etc, David Cameron might still be PM. Bad though that was, this lot are English Nationalists, and Fascists and much much worse.

                I’m not in the least interested in who he… is with… in whatever way.

                I do to an extent care about his morality.

                Because a decent, moral person wouldn’t send refugees to Rwanda… or allow pensioners to fear for their lives because of poverty, cold, not enough food… or presumably have an affair with someone while his wife was being treated for cancer. It’s the ensemble that makes him so awful. Having random sex means absolutely nothing on its own.

                A[part for him overall lack of decency, I couldn’t care less who he has sex with… god, what a ghastly thought!

                Anyway, you are right. Even here it’s getting late and I have an early start… so… night night, all!

                Like

              2. We are talking about Michael Howard here aren’t we? The same Michael Howard who was named as co-respondent in the high-profile divorce case of 1960s model Sandra Paul?

                According to no less an authority than the BBC, “Mr Howard wooed her by sending her a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night.” *

                I can only assume that this was before his purported “family values guy who wanted everyone to live by right-wing family values” thing kicked in.

                * http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3226769.stm

                Liked by 1 person

                1. LOL. I didn’t know any of that. Dark horse or what!

                  All I can remember about him was that Anne Widdecombe, no less, said there was something of the night about him,… and he certainly had a creepy voice.; that when he was leader of the opposition and Tony Blair announced the war with Iraq, he was positively salivating and he proposed war with Spain over Gibraltar.

                  Ghastly man.

                  Like

          2. Agreed, but the affairs are an indicator as to his general attitude. If something doesn’t benefit him, or one of his friends, then he’s not interested. He’s a bit like Trump in that all all he ever wanted was that little plaque in front of him – whilst being on TV – that read, “Donald Trump – President of The United States Of America”.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. I have th4e impression that he almost felt it was his right.

              “I went to Eton and Oxford so obviously I should be prime minister one day, and then go to the Lords and be a knight of the Garter.

              Like

  5. Politicians extra marital affairs…Hmm.

    Well I would say three things related to Boris Johnson and this….

    One….having an extra marital affair before he became PM when it was reported his wife was suffering from cancer does kind of make you wonder at his character and suitability as someone FIT to be a politician that represents people …..never mind a PM…bit of a Sc*mbag IMO.

    Two….also with the BJ /Jennifer Arcuri affair when he was Mayor of London….where she was given ÂŁ126,000 of public money in the form of grants for her technology business and event sponsorship is kinda relevant and very much something the public should have been concerned about…which also questions whether he is FIT to be a politician that represents people…never mind a PM…..I would also say a tad corrupt too ?

    Current wife Carrie Symonds was his girlfriend while he was still married to second wife….bit of a Sc*mbag IMO.

    Not expecting politicians to be saints….they are after all human (I think !……. however…though some act human others perhaps may NOT be as perhaps David Icke is correct and under their masks they are truly extra-terrestrial Lizard humanoids…some certainly ACT like it))….BUT….they do as politicians many a time sit on their moral high horse and condemn many of us who they think do not comply with STANDARDS they SAY they seek to uphold…..double STANDARDS obvs…..which is hypocritical and makes them appear a tad duplicitous when they themselves are indulging in what to many people is not seen as upholding standards of decency…..Do as I say not as I do…..

    Affairs…..the weakness of the flesh…..many reasons people have affairs…..but you know it is a betrayal of your partner and many a man and woman are left devastated when it happens to them….some can forgive some cannot….politicians are no different to you or I in the sense that they too can become ‘involved’ in extra marital affairs…..but the distinction is that I and other ordinary souls do not preach that we seek to maintain REAL family values as some political parties do…whose politicians, member of their party that is, are the VERY ones NOT maintaining those same ‘Family Values’ ……but yes politicians affairs aside…. I agree tis the actual politics together with all of the rest of the current sh*tshow we have to endure that should give us the impetus to strive for something better …say like independence.

    Humans are so complicated……some more than others…..where as some are clearly transparent (pun intended for emphasis)…..say like Tories.

    Like

      1. Agree….”judge not lest ye be judged”…..anyway that aside….let’s go down the Tory judgement path…where, in their judgement, Sunak and Truss pledge to FIX our ‘failing’ NHS…..and let us judge them as they judge those who govern us in Scotland………..

        On Twitter today the political editor who writes for the RAG The Daily Mail tweeted this :

        ” Caller on BBC Radio Cornwall says their 90-year-old mother had fall on Sunday evening…

        After being told by 111 to ring 999, it took 9 minutes for call to be answered…

        And *40 hours* for ambulance to arrive…

        This morning she’s still in ambulance outside hospital waiting”……….

        I rest my JUDGEMENT and my CASE against the Tories…(but I do have other judgements and cases to present AGAINST them) M’lud……….

        Have a nice day

        🙂

        Liked by 1 person

        1. OMG. That is abominable.

          The poor woman.

          I understand that the hospital in Truss’s own constituency is falling, quite literally to pieces, with the roof in a dangerous condition.

          Proud Britannia. World beating…

          How can a country as pompous and self important as Britain, be in such a diabolical state.

          Like

          1. A few days ago I was driven (usual slating of Scotland’s NHS) to find out the hospital statistics. The results gave better than expected information, it was displayed by hospital and constituency.

            The 4 hour AE target; Liz Truss’ constituency managed 43% within the 4hr.
            Nicola Sturgeon’s 73%
            English NHS, same 4hr target, 58%
            Scotland 72%

            The moment has passed to reply to 100% Yes but I decided to reply anyway if she or he reads it I hope they take away something positive.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Yes, quite amazing that after all that has happened in the NHS in all the countries, that we should be doing so well.

              We lost a lot of people to COVI; we lost people who returned to Europe after being treated to Patel’s nightmare immigration…

              People were exhauster after the pandemic and some took early retirement.

              But you comparison figures show that for all Jackie Baillie’s and Douglas Ross’s whining about NHSS, they are far out performing the other services.

              I believe that Truss’s local hospital is quite literally crumbling.

              Like

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