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With just over one month of the year left to go, the 2025 Scot Goes Pop fundraiser is still short of its target figure. If you'd like to help keep the lights on during the several months it will take me to find out whether an alternative funding model is viable (realistically it could be a wait of around four months or more), card donations are welcome HERE. Or, if you prefer, direct donations can be made via PayPal. My PayPal email address is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.
Does Sarwar agree with Reeves ?
ReplyDeleteSarwar does what he is told to do by his London bosses!!!
DeleteSarwar agrees with those who can advance his career and bring in the money. Sarwar is a fine Labour gentleman following Labour's finest traditions of self-interest.
DeleteSarwar has no power and does what he is told. Nothing more than a lackey and a toady
DeleteBeing British means to Know Your Place.
Delete"What do I get out of it? I get a sore neck!"
Just on the "once in a generation" comment, Alex Salmond did define a generation as a "political" generation. He spelled out what he meant (and did say it was only his opinion); roughly the time between the various referendums (1979, 1997, 2014). So we are, in fact, entering the tail end of that political generation. This was only redefined by "once in a lifetime" by Unionists/British Nationalists after the event.
ReplyDeletePaul, until people like yourself realize that the SNP just isn't pursuing Independence, nothing will happen.
DeleteIn Northern Ireland a generation lasts 7 years.
DeleteThough we are yet to see the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland put on the spot, as the Good Friday Agreement puts them, where they alone determine whether there is sufficient interest in a border poll.
DeleteThey may yet find themselves stuck in the same old waiting room!
And Wales…
Anon at 5.20. You are correct, but not quite in the way you think. The problem is that over the last 5 years or so the SNP has allowed itself to be taken over by careerists and single agenda groups. As a direct consequence standards of governance have fallen significantly, and noticeably, in Health, Education and transportation infrastructure. Outwith the SNP and most importantly among present no voters the party is tarnished , associated with toxic minority views, and mired in a level of sleaze. A big part of the problem is SNP members not admitting to any of this. Unless SNP is restored to its pre 2014 make up, nothing will improve. Being better than the shitfest down south isn’t enough. Reform is presenting a serious challenge in Scotland. Think about that! And why did we get to this? Labour and Tory party both totally discredited and at an all time low. Did SNP leverage this to increase support? Nope. We all know what has occupied SNP for the past five years. And who has gained? Right wing populist racist liars. But hey, salaries and pension and toilets. So well done in getting your comment half right. SNP has matters other than Indy to attend to, and aren’t they doing well?
DeleteThe SNP is failing Scotland completely and its delibrately. Once again we now hearing vote for the SNP and only the SNP next year for Independence and once again in the small print we'll have to try again in the next Westminster election in 2028 and after the 2028 election it'll be groundhog again 2031 Holyrood election enough is enough. I'm sorry but I am just not going to vote for the promise again of Independence for only the next day after the election the SNP has sold Scotland down the river and then looking for another mandate.
ReplyDeleteOh, been a wee while since we have “ I am not going to vote “ individual on. Probably aged 13 3/4 with plooks.
DeleteI'm not going to vote. I'm going to stamp my feet and scream myself into a red-faced rage. Then I'm going to complain about the government.
DeleteIf I were a unionist—yeah, yeah, troll on whoever says to shut up supposing that I am, I voted Yes in 2014 and SNP for as long as Holyrood has been in existence—but if I were in their place instead of ours, I'd demand a demonstration that the majority of Scots want the referendum. (Which I'd be well feart to lose.)
ReplyDeleteIn other words: the Brits should set the bar at 50%+1 of the *vote*, not seats, nor polls, but actual people's ballots, and let that be the line that we must cross. It's a high bar, high indeed, but at least it exists.
Of course, they say no such thing because they don’t want to make Alex and Nicola's mistake of being held hostage to their words for years after the fact. Why even permit us the right to choose our own fate when, apparently, Scots are a meek lot who, in their quiet acceptance, will take whatever Master gives them?
It's once we get angry as a nation and won't take any more of this, that’s when we will go.
The anger will come eventually and in the ensuing chaos the Brit Nat unionists will claim that the denial of democracy was nothing to do with them and that the Scots are just unreasonable people who do not know how to behave properly.
Delete1. The dominant national party elite ( SNP leadership) is infiltrated by the colonial power ( Westminster).
ReplyDelete2. The party leadership take the people up and down the independence hill time and time again.
3. Lacking courage at the decisive moment, time after time, the SNP leadership end up delaying indepependence.
4. The SNP leadership's inaction and deceit ruptures the movement. SNP loses 50,000 members, new micro parties spring up and SNP plummets in the polls.
5. The leadership try to deflect from their inaction and deceit by policies that are weird and only serve to divide the independence movement even further.
Conclusion: Scotland is a de facto colony and Westminster is working the strings of the puppet SNP leadership. All colonies are prisons but no prison is inescapable. Plenty of people's around the world have escaped from Westminster. The current Swinney plan is just point 2 above run again.
Solution: replace the current SNP leadership with a genuine independence leadership and carry out a de facto referendum asap.
I agree with your assessment, IfS, but doesn’t your solution require us to join the failing party and ensure its next elected leader (Swinney wasn't) isn't just another handpicked Useless loyalist?
DeleteIfs is back. Been hiding after Scotlands win. Most have decanted him.
DeleteBut who are the genuine independence leaders, and how do we put them into positions of power?
DeleteWhat a load of tosh dribbles out of your rabid hateful mouth IFS
DeleteIFS The conspiracy theorist nutter on the block, avoid at all times, he really doesn’t want Scottish Independence, he is a fake and a troll working for the Westminster English pound!!!
Delete"We" is fooling no one, daftie. You haven't got one opinion of your own amongst the "lot" of you.
DeleteIt's not just the SNP leadership.
DeleteThe party membership endorsed Swinney's 'strategy' en masse at their recent conference.
7.51pm it requires the SNP membership to pick a leader who wants independence. Previously they picked Yousaf - leaving politics - some independence leader. Runner up Kate Forbes - leaving politics. Third place with only 10% Regan - now an independent and the only one of the three who wanted independence.
DeleteNext up is Swinney the Redactor who was there for all the phoney marches up and down the independence hill. A failure when party leader in the past and a well known devolutionist. Swinney with this track record " becomes " leader unopposed.
The blame for the current situation lies squarely with the supine SNP membership.
7.58pm - an ignorant troll.
10.05pm - the most important question.
11.10pm an ignorant troll. Probably David Francis.
1.58am the troll David Francis strikes again. He advises readers to ignore my posts while he is doing the exact opposite. Francis is an obnoxious lowlife who combines this characteristic with being not very bright.
2.57am - should have gone to bed.
7.57am - correct and I have laid the blame at the feet of the membership on many many occasions on SGP. That's why they don't like me and tell lies about me. The SNP membership are to blame. They turn a blind eye to multiple wrong doings - where is the missing £600k? - and vote for stupid non plans for independence.
The way forward is a de facto referendum and that option has been there for the SNP since the Holyrood election of 2021.
Is Rachel Reeves Lisa Nandy's granny? Asking for a friend.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, Lisa Nandy looks just like my granny.
DeleteEven more weird, my Nan looks just like Mani, who died last week.
DeleteDoes your granny call for violent suppression of Indy supporters? Probably not.
DeleteSpooky! Because Nandy looks like the sort of person who kicks the sh*t out of grannies outside post offices on pension day.
DeleteWhat is the response of Shona Robison to Reeves saying you Scots can take a hike with your indyref2 stuff. It can’t hold says Robison. That’s it. The same old stuff the SNP have been churning out for too many years to remember. No wait since Theresa May said now is not the time. That must be about 10 years. 10years of it’s unsustainable and all that rubbish.
ReplyDeleteSNP what a waste of space.
I'm surprised by this video. Why are you trying to rationalise all of this within the framework set by WM and the confidence tricks of the SNP? You say half way through 'It literarly is a prison we're in.' so why are you suggesting we shilly shally around with BIS ideas and SNP cons for another handful of years? All the scenarios you discuss are within a framework that in any eventuality will always end up with WM being able to say NO at the end of it: wait for Holyrood election Answer NO wait for the WM election Answer NO blah blah balh wait for election in 2066 Answer NO. The answer to a request for a referendum is always going to be NO. Doesn't matter whether all the planets align the Answer is NO. They've been telling us that since 'Now is not the time.' This is not a surprise, they are not going to let us go and they keep telling us that, we don't seem to listen. We need a different approach, one that does not include begging and begging, nor accepting rules set by our Imperial Masters. Sometimes you have to get up off your knees and make things work.
ReplyDeleteAnd sometimes you have to tack towards the real world. What's your alternative to the SNP being the main vehicle for independence? Barcelona Roddy and Liberate Scotland? If so, I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.
DeleteWe need confident, determined and bold leadership to break out of this purgatory. Which is to say the SNP needs to have such a leader again.
DeleteThat’s what worked before and brought us to 2014. Not just an alignment of the stars in 2011, but the right man at the top to seize the moment and force the opportunity.
How we miss him. And how we'll rue all this time wasting come the staunch Brit Nat premiership of Farage.
Well that's all very poetic but, it's a bit prissy petticoat and doesn't pass the sniff test of authenticity in terms of independence being the motivation to have a new placeman leader of the SNP. The disingenuous last sentence does you no credit.
DeleteNow will never be the time, apparently.
ReplyDeleteThe only positive is that Swinney has been told six months early rather than one day after HR26.
He has to show us his hand. What is his secret plan? What is the process to break the log jam and force WM to negotiate because the suspicion is that he has no plan at all and we would be knowingly voting for a certain dead end.
Show us your working John. What possible reason would there be to hide it from us now.
He is so worried. Never play your hand too early.
DeleteDoesn't change the answer to the 'who to vote for' question at all.
ReplyDeleteFor forty years I lived in England until coming home in 2012. All that time I voted Labour as slightly less bad than the others (which ain't the case now).
For me that's what it's now become in Scotland - the SNP is slightly less bad than any other party with any chance at all of forming a government at Holyrood.
I'm still a member of the SNP, as I was of the then Labour Party in England, beccause the SNP is where many of those who want independence can be found and we get a chance to explain to them that it has made itself a Parnellite dead end.
Effectively, we're back to 'entryism' as it was for socialists in Labour decades ago.
The ideological power of the capitalist establishment remains massively strong even though it's economics and politics are in such severe crises that it is considering human dregs like Farage.
First post Budget, Westminster voting intention, BMG Research, field work 26 - 27 Nov, small population sample (1,548).
ReplyDeleteUK headlines: RefUK 8% lead, Labour on an improbably high 22%, details behind paywall, but SNP on 2% of UK vote.
Has Rachel from Customer Services pulled off a blinder?
A lot of anti-SNP posts, the Bath mob are getting desperate.
ReplyDeleteBack in the 70s when everyone smoked, the fag packets came with vouchers; you could save up these vouchers (let's call them "mandates", you will get the point later on) and you could trade these vouchers in for something. NB if you collected vouchers it made you loyal to one brand (which most people were anyway).
ReplyDeleteThe gifts you could exchange for were described in e.g. "The Embassy Catalogue", a big glossy production; I always remember one had a yacht - a fucking yacht on the front cover ! - and yes, you could get a yacht (by smoking yourself to death) inside. The amount of cigarettes you needed to smoke would have been around 10 packets a day for 10 lifetimes, and the amount spent on the ciggies would have bought 10 yachts outright.
A con, in other words.
- so "IF YOU WANT A FUCKING YACHT" then "collecting mandates" is not the way to do it
it's all just campervans with the SNP, campervans all the way down
stinking of fish
Sturgeon’s approach to the Supreme Court was politically inept. All judges there are unionist or they would not be there. The Westminster Government should have been forced to block a referendum as that would have riled people in Scotland much more. The effect has been to allow the Brit Nat unionist parties to move from now is not the time to never. Salmond and others used the term once in a generation gifting that terminology to the unionists. Now Swinney says only an SNP majority and not a pro independence majority justifies a referendum. One idiotic misstep after another. Brit Nat politicians cannot believe their luck!
ReplyDeleteSo James poses the question that in the light of Reeves saying no to Indyref2, no matter what happens, will the SNP leadership revisit and reconsider its independence strategy. Based on Robison saying once again that this approach is unsustainable it would appear the SNP approach is carry on regardless. Yes it really is like one of these old Carry on films - farcical comedy.
ReplyDeleteThe other question to ask is whether the SNP members, SNP leadership loyalists, nicophants and SNP ultra trolls still believe Westminster will some day cave in and grant a sec 30 referendum. My guess is that they will believe that until the leadership tell them otherwise. After all most of this lot think a man can just be a woman by saying so. Believing in the unbelievable is not much of a challenge for this lot.
Ach there's always the ISP.
DeleteComing soon at the next SNP conference the SNP's hit movie - Carry on Regardless. A modern Scottish take on the original film from 1961. The Wandering Hands Agency employs some very strange people to perform some very strange jobs. Even the simplest tasks get bungled by the incompetent staff.
DeleteAs the great leader takes pride in steadying the ship the next film due after the 2026 election is Carry on Cruising starring John Swinney in his career defining role cruising on his way to retirement somewhere over the horizon.
Zara Sultana seems to have finally realised that although Jeremy Corbyn is decent, honest man, some of his political entourage are among the most obnoxious, unhinged and spiteful people in politics.
ReplyDeleteStupid question. Say SNP don’t get a majority however pro independence parties are in the majority. Is there any scenario where members of other pro independence parties could cross the floor and join the SNP to give the SNP a majority?
ReplyDeleteThere's no legal bar on them doing that, but they wouldn't do it. Green MSPs may support independence but they are first and foremost Greens.
DeleteWas a majority of SNP MPs (a majority of Scottish seats) at Westminster not considered a mandate for independence back in the 1970s?
ReplyDeleteYes 532am by no less than Thatcher & Co but the rules change to suit circumstance.
ReplyDelete