Taxi Driver Online

Playing the anti-Scotland card is Cameron’s desperate last resort

So now we know the last Tory trick in their book. They’ve tried all the standard pre-election routines. We’ve had promises of tax cuts, naturally. They’ve offered a discounted right to buy on housing association homes they don’t own. The party of austerity has sprayed around spending pledges, while ridiculing Labour as incompetent spendthrifts. A cabal of City-funded multimillionaires has tried to paint them as the “party of working people”. They’ve claimed to be presiding over a great economic revival.

But the numbers won’t budge. They dismissed Ed Miliband as hopeless, but his ratings are climbing.

So now they’ve fallen back on a brazen attempt to inflame English nationalism and turn Britain’s peoples against one another. Cheerled by a Conservative press largely owned by tax-dodging overseas plutocrats, the Tories claim the English would be held to ransom under a Miliband government dependent on SNP support. The Scots, who were begged to stay in the union during last year’s referendum, are now portrayed as some kind of foreign menace.

The former prime minister John Major, who was himself held to ransom by Ulster Unionists and Eurosceptic MPs, has claimed an SNP-backed Labour government would face “blackmail”. The SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, is denounced as “the most dangerous woman in Britain”. There’s even talk of an SNP “coup” and “fascist intimidation”.

This is all fantastical and anti-democratic nonsense. Some of it is no doubt rubbing off south of the border, where the Tory tactic is specifically aimed at winning back English nationalist Ukip voters. But those who claim to treasure a united Britain can’t have it both ways. Either Scotland is part of the union or it isn’t. If it is, whoever Scottish voters elect has the same right to play a part in Westminster politics as any other party.

No wonder the Tories themselves have fallen out over the issue, with genuine unionists such as the former Scottish secretary Lord Forsyth accusing the prime minister of playing a dangerous game. If the game is successful, and the Tories are returned to Downing Street, that will provide by far the most fertile ground for a new referendum on Scottish independence to be held and won.

The reality is that, on current polling, either Miliband will become prime minister with SNP support – or there will be five more years of Cameron. That’s a bitter pill for Labour in Scotland to swallow, and if the party can pull back a few seats from the expected SNP landslide, it will strengthen Miliband’s hand. But the rise of the SNP, which has determinedly positioned itself to Labour’s left, is the product of 20 years of New Labour politics and an anti-establishment tide across Europe that has swelled since the 2008 crash. The Sun’s claim that the SNP is “hard left” is crazed. Sturgeon has understandably been taken to task over privatisations and spending squeezes in Scotland.

But the SNP ship has sailed. And the idea that nationalist support would make a minority Labour government “illegitimate” – let alone that this would be the first time such a thing has happened, as Cameron claimed at the weekend – is ridiculous. Minority and coalition governments dominated the first half of 20th-century Britain. Governments dependent on Irish nationalist support were common in the years leading up to the first world war. And Labour governments have regularly relied on the Irish nationalist SDLP, even though the party wants to “break up the UK”.

You’d never know from the anti-Scottish fearmongers that Sturgeon is now the most popular party leader in Britain – when English and Welsh voters were exposed to her in the leadership debates, many liked what they heard. Nor would the SNP’s negotiating hand in a hung parliament be as strong as claimed, given the party’s commitment to vote down a Tory administration in any circumstances. And Cameron’s Conservatives would themselves very probably have to rely on Ukip and Northern Irish DUP votes, as well as his own right wing, if their scaremongering were to take them over the line on 7 May.

But all this is a diversion from the fundamental choice at the election. That is between a Cameron-led government, which has presided over the deepest cuts in the living standards of the poorest for over a century while slashing taxes for the rich, and which now wants, in his own words, to make small-state austerity “permanent”. The only alternative is a government led by Miliband, committed to ditching the bedroom tax, clamping down on zero-hours contracts and non-dom tax status, abolishing the House of Lords, introducing mansion and bankers’ bonus taxes, and raising the top rate to 50%.

For all Miliband’s compromises over austerity, the distance between the main parties is wider than is often understood. That’s partly Labour’s own doing. As the Institute of Fiscal Studies points out, there is little difference between the SNP’s “anti-austerity” spending pledges and Labour’s “triple lock budget responsibility” plans, which in fact would allow Miliband to avoid almost all cuts.

But Labour leaders give the opposite impression, to appease the City and potential swing voters fed years of economic mumbo-jumbo by politicians and the media. The danger is, that message alienates Green voters and others Labour needs to win back to be able to form a government – just as Cameron is fighting to deflate Ukip support. On the doorstep in Nick Clegg’s Sheffield Hallam constituency on Friday, no one raised the Caledonian menace with me. But police employees who a generation ago would have been solid Tory voters were enthusiastically backing the Labour challenger.

Which underlines Cameron’s problem: however much he trumpets recovery, the reality of cuts, job insecurity and years of falling living standards have taken their toll. Against that background, the prospect of a minority government dependent on other parties committed to change is hardly so terrifying, let alone illegitimate.

There are plenty of downsides, including the risk of spatchcocked policies and endless haggling. But multiparty alliances, informal or otherwise, also offer the prospect of opening up politics to pressure from those who have been locked out of the system – inside and outside parliament. In any case, some such arrangement now looks almost certain. The only question is which party and prime minister will be at the centre of it.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... um=twitter

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http://wingsoverscotland.com/ http://www.newsnetscotland.com/

It's not perfect at present, but had we still been under a labour Government we would have been going to hell in a hand cart and god forbid soon, along with the potential threat of a Labour/SNP coalition government we will be going to hell in the same hand cart twice as fast with the extra grunt of the two Lefty spend, spend, spend and borrow even more Parties pushing it.

Aye, that Wummins a political horror.

Thieves and Beggars

By bellacaledonia on April 29, 2015

By Mike Cullen

A scapegoat is a very handy thing. Hitler understood that. It gives you someone to blame, for everything, a direction for your pointy finger and probably even somewhere to park your bike.



So far, in this increasingly panic-stricken election campaign, us Scots have had to take “smelly jocks, subsidy junkies, leeches, racists, clear and present dangers, the enemy, English haters, lefties on steroids, baby killers to rival King Herod”, and now…”thieves”.

Wait a minute, that doesn’t seem quite so bad, does it? Thieves. We’ve gone from genocidal infant slaughterers to petty thieves. Watch out, middle-England, the jocks are here to steal your money, ha ha ha.

So goes the Tory’s latest poster campaign, on billboards throughout London, depicting a sneaky Alex Salmond creeping up behind some poor unfortunate middle Englander, his bony, pointy, crooked fingers reaching out like an arcade grabby thing to steal the poor hard-working tax-payer’s selfies of the Queen from his back pocket.

The slogan says “Don’t let the SNP grab your cash”. The political tactic is, on the surface, obvious: attack Labour’s weakness, which they see as SNP puppet masters, while appealing to those disenchanted Tories hiding up the back of the Ukip bus. But here’s the thing…appealing how? By utilising the Scottish stereotype, and solidifying it from vague smear of meanness into crystal clear out and out street thief.

Depending on your position, you’ll smile or shake your head at these hyperbolic slurs. Even the most dedicated Ukip flag-breeder doesn’t seriously believe that the Scots eat babies, (well, not raw, at least). But thieves…hmmm, maybe there might just be something in that…



All’s fair in war and elections, you might say, but hang on a minute, this poster is not being broadcast to viewers in Scotland, the targets are Londoners. For whom the SNP is much the same thing as the Scottish. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I have this vague notion that there is a slight shortage of SNP candidates standing for election in London.

And there you have the problem. Peel away the veneer of electioneering, and underlyingly, you’ll find something much, much darker, a thing we’ve seen repeated throughout history. By accident or design, there lies underneath the insidious demonisation of a people. The chilling thrust of this campaign takes that old chestnut, the mean Scotsman, and turns it into a nut roast of royal proportions. I’ve posted on Facebook about this, and various excuses have emerged…”the SNP doesn’t represent the entire Scottish nation”. Do Londoners really make that distinction? “Oh, oh, it’s an election, everybody’s at it, it’s just the way elections work”. Well, it’s the first election I’ve lived through where every major party is involved in demonising an entire people, that’s true.

“By blaming a minority racial group for all of the country’s ills, the Nazis created a set of scapegoats who could be blamed at every opportunity for almost anything. In posters, art, cartoons and film, the Jews were equated with rats and caricatured as hook nosed misers, stealing money from the honest ‘Aryan’ German workers”. (brainz.org)

Yip, the tactic has been used before, to great effect, and all’s fair in war and elections, right? I can hear some of you now, grumbling that I’m over-reacting, taking this too far, and taken in isolation, you would probably be right. But next on the agenda come the cries of illegitimacy. You know this story. “You’re all greedy thieves, you’re trying to destabilise our country, you have no rights in our eyes, we refuse to recognise your right to vote, or to participate in our precious democracy, we will not allow it, we refuse to recognise your representatives, we’ll cast you out”. That happened in 30’s Germany to the Jews, and the threat of it rears it’s terrible head again, in the form of Tories and Libdems threatening to demote the Scots to second-class citizens by removing their democratic rights within the UK.

Scots voting for the SNP has been described by the Tories as an attempt to “sabotage the democratic will of the British people”. Em…we are the British people. We decided that last year, that we would remain a part of Britain, as British citizens. Which means we can vote for who we like, right?

I’m not going to even start discussing this absurd, idiotic notion that because you don’t agree with a certain party’s policies, you consider them to have less rights than you, nor will I discuss the obvious fear driving all of this – that the political awakening happening in Scotland might, gasp, spread to the rest of the UK.

I am going to say, however, that these tactics, going under the guise of happy electioneering, are incredibly dangerous. Not because they threaten the union, (which they do), but because they threaten to unleash that dark force that demonises a minority race within the country, that seeks to deny their rights, redact them from society, that turns them into scapegoats, to be feared, and ulimately, to be hated, with all the terrible consequence that brings.

http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2015/04/29 ... d-beggars/

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http://wingsoverscotland.com/ http://www.newsnetscotland.com/

Stirring up Anti Scottish seems to be the order of this campaign, they're all doing it, bad press is good publicity up here

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Alway's been about Tightening the Grip!

You have to admit - the lady is a gem.

The best twitter exchange so far:

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Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
George Carlin