What happens if Scotland goes bankrupt?

Apropos the Smith Commission Report, what happens if Scotland goes bankrupt?

This is not so improbable - Liverpool effectively went bankrupt in the 1980s.

All the people likely to hold positions of power in the Scottish Executive are committed to big public spending.

Going bust can only be a matter of time.

https://www.smith-commission.scot/

A direct service Boston to London

If the government is serious about helping east coast towns can they please require Stagecoach and Virgin to run a direct service Boston to London with at least two trains a day in each direction.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30222458

An anti-social act

Extremely interesting and radical attack on divorce in the Spectator:  http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9382812/easy-divorce-has-been-catastrophic-for-british-children-and-i-say-this-as-a-divorcee/

Divorce is fundamentally a selfish act.

An anti-social act.

Why on earth are we letting so many South Africans in?

The immigration figures are ridiculously high:  http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/nov/27/immigration-eu-figures-uk-impossible-target-teresa-may

 



Jonathan Portes has produced these useful charts.

Why on earth are we letting so many South Africans in?

Can we have a drive please to reduce the number of South Africans in the country, including telling Matthew Paris and Peter Hain to piss off.

And please don't tell me they have a "right" to be here - take the fucking rights away.

Glorious front cover to The Sun

Glorious front cover to The Sun today - David Mellor's words thrown back in his own face.

David Mellor is a sort of male Emily Thornberry - just as fat, just as arrogant, just as smug.

And please don't tell me he's a Tory.  He's no more a Tory than Heseltine or Major or any of that group of self-serving second-rate turncoats who brought down Margaret.  Treachery with a smile on its face.

Back to basics indeed!

Yes of course we know who you are Mr Mellor.  You are the hypocrite who paraded your family at the garden gate to try and convince us you were a wholesome father and husband and son-in-law.  Instead of a disgusting cheat and hypocrite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY6_9Qvj8I4

It is not really an attack on private education it is a paean to it

In today's Guardian the Shadow Education Secretary Tristram Hunt throws the left some red meat by attacking private schools:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/24/private-schools-independent-sector-state-system

But look carefully!  It is not really an attack on private education it is a paean to it.  The state sector is to be subsumed by the private sector through "running", "sponsorship" and "assisting" (these are all code words for an attack on the bog standard comprehensives).

And what does he mean by "professional exchange"?

Is this code for lazy sub-standard unionised teachers needing to be colonised by hoity-toity la-di-da public school teachers who will show them how to teach properly?

And does this not confirm what we have always suspected - state school teachers are useless.

Dispatches on Channel 4 How to break into Britain

Appalled by Dispatches on Channel 4 How to break into Britain.

When the illegal immigrant they were following arrived here he was given 5 years leave to remain!

What civil servant took this decision, and on what grounds?

And can we please have to do-gooder people trafficker arrested and put away.

And I think we need to specify lorries that are designed not to have parts people can hang on to.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/on-demand/59665-002

Michael Crick posing as a White Van Man

On Channel 4 News Michael Crick posing as a White Van Man drove to Watford to ask people about immigration.

On the whole the answers he got were predictable ("All we seem to get over here is the rubbish").

http://www.channel4.com/news/catch-up/

The left has stopped believing in itself

Read this Sarah Ditum article in the New Statesman carefully:  http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/11/tweeting-picture-house-not-act-class-warfare-whatever-sun-says

Ostensibly she is talking about clown-bigot Emily Thornberry.

However notice the little freudian slips:

Labour are terrible...
Miliband’s Labour has managed to be abject, craven and totally unsuccessful...
Labour failed...

The left has stopped believing in itself.

To win elections politicians need to transfer their enthusiasm to the voter so that the voter is motivated to vote in their favour.

If the politicians do not believe in their party they will never feel enthusiastic, and if they do not feel enthusiastic they will have no enthusiasm to transfer.

That is why Labour is going to lose.

No-one wants to see those people back again

According to the Labour History Group there are still nine members of Tony Blair's Cabinet intending to stand at the next General Election.

This is why they will not win.

No-one wants to see those people back again, including a majority of Labour supporters.

Michele Bachmann talks a lot of sense:  http://www.startribune.com/blogs/283527041.html

Jonathan Freedland about nationalism and "culture war"

Interesting article by Jonathan Freedland about nationalism and "culture war":  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/21/emily-thornberry-tweet-us-style-culture-wars-identity

Not sure I entirely agree with it - the United Kingdom is not America.

And if there is to be a culture war in this country there is no question about which side has got the numbers and who is going to win.

No taxpayer is going to want to pay

Although I agree with Tom King that higher education should be free (and free maintenance grants, and unlimited number of years you can stay at university), I am appalled at some of the behaviour on this demonstration:  http://newint.org/blog/2014/11/21/free-education-march/

"Somewhere amid the ‘black bloc’ of masked, balaclava-wearing anarchists, a red smoke bomb was let off and minutes later a small group had charged at the barriers fencing off the green at the centre of Parliament Square and torn them down.  A throng of people flooded in, dancing and chanting with a samba band, while the remaining demonstrators marched on to the rally, as planned. As student activists and politicians addressed the assembled crowd, a few dozen broke away to converge on the offices of the Department for Business, Industry and Skills, which is responsible for universities, and paint was thrown at its glass façade.  It was among this minority of breakaways that arrests took place in running scuffles with the police."

No taxpayer is going to want to pay to educate people like this.

South Sudan

Interesting book on South Sudan:  http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/09/12/book-reviewa-poisonous-thorn-in-our-hearts-sudan-and-south-sudans-bitter-and-incomplete-divorce-by-james-copnall/

South Sudan is in the process of joining the Commonwealth.

Welcome to my readers in France!

Emily chav-hate Thornberry

The real damage done by Emily chav-hate Thornberry is that she has handed the media a narrative they can return to again and again (and narratives sell newspapers).

And it is no use Ed Miliband trying to distance himself:  http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ed-miliband-furious-emily-thornberry-4671545

The Thornberry suspicion will fall upon the whole party, and Labour candidates are now going to be subjected to a humiliating white van test, one that most of them are doomed to fail since we all know they do not like the demographic.

The moment Labour lost all chance of winning

The Labour Party is at war with itself:  http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/nov/22/labour-war-emily-thornberry-tweet-rochester-strood

This is the Guardian talking.

The Emily Thornberry tweet may have been the moment Labour lost all chance of winning the General Election.

And is it not typical of the arrogance of the woman that she thinks she can stand in 2015 as if nothing had happened.

He indulges in name calling

"For years now, I and others have been waiting for Miliband to launch a sustained attack on Ukip..." says Nick Cohen in the Observer.

And yet he writes a thousand-word article in which he makes no attempt to engage with UKIP policy:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/22/nigel-farage-is-a-coward-and-cameron-and-miliband-are-too-gutless

Instead he indulges in name calling.



“…rabble-rouser and a coward”

“He plays with racism…”

“…pockets the money of the hardworking taxpayers"

“…an alliance of the septic and the geriatric…”

“…a movement of the empty-headed led by the foul-minded.”

“…a foul stain in national life.”

This is the language of the student union circa 1978.

I am looking forward to Newsnight this evening - Michael Gove will be talking about prejudice against White Van Man.

In this context Emily Thornberry is the "bigoted woman" to use a phase made famous by Gordon Brown.

Labour and the working class

This article in the New Statesman by James Bloodworth on Labour and the working class is very good:  http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/08/working-class-voters-and-progressive-left-widening-chasm

“…it isn’t representative of working class opinion in the sense it once was.”

“…the values of the traditional working class are increasingly at odds with those of the liberal or 'progressive' left.”

“…migration is all too often interpreted as meaning stiffer competition for wages and the loss of the sense of community in the places where one grew up.”

“…white working class men, however much they are struggling financially, absurdly register as 'privileged' on the identity politics totem due to their whiteness and what is between their legs.”

“…thanks to identity politics, many progressives appear willing to dismiss the white working class as socially backwards and not worth listening to…”

“…the left is comfortable becoming a movement of upper middle class liberals and ethnic minorities (no shame in that of course).”