This past week was dominated by Rachel Reeves and her Spring Budget.At least it removed any last doubt anyone had that Labour was in any way a left of centre party. Slightly left of the Reform Party is about the only left you can now tag alongside the British Labour Party.
It was a slash and burn budget when it came to Welfare. The only item apparently affordable is weaponry and propping up foreign extreme regimes in Kiev and Tel Aviv.
Rachel from Accounts and Keir Starmer have a cunning plan. They think they can MEGA ‘Make England Great Again’ by stimulating the English MIC. The problem being there really isn’t an English/British Military Industrial Complex.
Our tanks, armoured cars and artillery are easily being destroyed in the Donbass. Our aircraft carriers with no planes or sufficient escort vessels can barely get out of British territorial waters without breaking down and returning to port.
Our frigates cannot handle the warm waters of the East Mediterranean and we no longer produce war planes, we buy them in from overseas, and besides the unmanned drone warfare we are witnessing in Ukraine shows us that both aircraft carriers and manned planes are obsolete in modern warfare!
Like successive English/British politicians thinking things through never seems an option.The 24-hour news cycle demands instant headlines and soundbites.Every single policy is decided by how the newsrooms will react to the soundbite.The soundness of the policy is never a consideration!
Labour thinks that making weapons to kill foreign pensioners and civilians is better policy than supporting home grown pensioners and civilians with decent homes, heating, transport, clean water, social security benefits or pensions!
The OBR has said this Budget will not create a single extra job and that our economic outlook is bleak.
https://obr.uk/economic-and-fiscal-outlooks/#chapter-1
Reuters reported that by the government’s own estimates things will get worse for UK subjects of the crown.
LONDON, March 26 (Reuters) – Welfare cuts announced by Britain on Wednesday will drive 250,000 into relative poverty by the end of the decade and leave millions of families with less cash, according to the government’s own estimates.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-governments-own-estimate-says-welfare-cuts-push-250000-into-poverty-2025-03-26/
What sort of government introduces policies that they know will make the lives of so many of its people worse off? Not just worse off, but drive them into poverty? The answer, of course, is ALL British neoliberal governments since 1979 have acted this way. Starmer’s Labour Party have just taken it to a higher level of cruelty!
The only people in the Union that the Westminster elite care about are the 1%. They always tell us there is no other alternative except for the poorest in our society to feel the pain of austerity. That, like most everything else they tell us is untrue.
We have a perfect example of how the exact opposite is true. In 2022, Norway increased their wealth tax to 1.1%. Some millionaires and billionaires moved out of Norway, According to the usual suspects this would result in a loss of revenue. The reality was the exact opposite! Over the next two years, wealth tax revenue soared to all time highs.
It is all about choices and our Westminster Governments always choose attacking the most vulnerable rather than asking the richest to pay their fair share. Several organisations are calling for a 2% wealth tax on those with net assets of over £10 million, which could raise an estimated £24 billion tax revenue each year – £460 million every week and would only apply to 0.04 per cent of the population – around 20,000 people. Instead, Labour want 250,000 British citizens pushed into poverty!
https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/three-quarters-of-british-public-would-back-government-tax-increases-on-very-richest-versus-spending-cuts/
That is the backdrop for this weeks Through A Scottish Prism. My panel of Lloyd Quinan, Eva Comrie, Allan Petrie and Phil Boswell give us their unique slant on the events of the week.
We also highlight how Anas watch my lips Sarwar and his band of Scots born English Nationalist MPs and MSPs back the English government’s policy to make the poorest pay so that the richest do not need to pay! Colour us shocked!
This week we also noted that the UK’s last steel plant at Scunthorpe is in danger of closing. This event didn’t get much news coverage.This is quite surprising considering that Rachel’s big idea is to revitalise the British economy by building weapons to sell overseas. So will UK have to import its steel from countries like China and Russia so that we can make weapons that can be used to attack them? I see a big problem with that strategy!
Maybe Starmers other big announcement this week that he was outlawing Ninja swords in England is part of the plan. That could be the steel source for all these new weapons that Rachel wants to make!
The Union gets worse every day we remain inside it! It is a clear and present danger to our nation and its citizens. We once more call for unity within the independence movement. It is the only way Scotland can escape the madness of the Union.
Sadly, we heard from Angus Robertson, MSP, this week at the Scottish Cabinet Roadshow in Kirkintilloch that the SNP is stuck in their Section 30 malaise, one more mandate is the cry it seems. What the SNP leadership fails to grasp or just ignore is that never again will any English government ever agree to a referendum on Scottish independence!
It seems everyone in the Union with the exception of the SNP leadership knows this fact. Either that or they know and are not interested in independence except as an electoral soundbite. You have to choose which it is. It also points to the likelihood of a SNP 1-2 policy for Holyrood 2026.That like a Section 30 it is a failed tactic and only helps elect Unionist MSPs not independence!
This SNP thinking needs to change immediately. We need a Constitutional Convention now! We need a new independence plan. Salvo/Liberation have given us something to unite around the SNP needs to join our Coalition of the Willing or perish!
We can be free by May 2026 if there is political will!
All this and more on your favourite Scottish Political review podcast.e
Putting aside all the grifting, all the troughing and all the performative nonsense, it is all but impossible for anyone with even half a brain not to understand that all the ‘missed opportunities’ have been deliberately sabotaged by those at the top of the SNP. Therefore, it is all but impossible not to come to the conclusion that at least a few of them will be state agents working to undermine independence.
In 2014, even Mr Salmond was of the opinion that no other route bar the S30 route was possible or desirable. I believe he changed his mind in the interim, convinced that something was amiss – which was why he was removed from public life. That he was removed quite deliberately is also all but impossible not to believe now, or who those were who organized it. It will all come out, but those responsible will be far into retirement, cushioned by golden pensions and/or other life chances afforded them by their previous time in public office.
The swapping of the ballot boxes, if that happened, would not surprise me and would not surprise a lot more folk because the potential to do so was always there and ignored in order to facilitate such an outcome if the need arose – which, of course, it did. The fact that spokespeople for both the Tories and Labour gleefully told us – four days in advance of the referendum, in Labour’s case – that we had lost was enough to confirm the worst. Sampling would never have told them that at the stage because they would have needed the sampling from the polling station vote to add to it to get a rough picture, not even a detailed one.
The postal vote did not outnumber the polling station vote. In 2022, it was just over a million. In 2014, it would have been very much fewer. They might have been trying to dampen people’s spirits, but, as I recall, we pushed even harder to get people out to vote. Those who debunk any postal vote fraud – and I’m not saying there was any, just that it was actually possible – do not know how the security services work.
The fact that the polling station and postal votes were kept separately, and no record was kept of the postal vote, which was destroyed very quickly, also tells its own story. There are people who know and, one day, they might well open up, as might the Alphabet women eventually.
I can’t say I have ever been enthusiastic about the drug suites, although they will offer a clean environment to do drugs, so that’s something in their favour. The methadone hasn’t worked either because many just take it and take drugs, too. In the end, it has to come down to education, and that will have to start very early, at primary school. I think the children should be shown the realities of drug-taking because wagging the finger will not work either. They should also be shown the butchered bodies of those who have ‘transitioned’, too, so that they get the real picture, not the delusion they are having forced on them.
It is not for the British government to accept our independence or otherwise. The only agreement – because of the Treaty and its aftermath – that is required of the UKG is that pertaining to the negotiations following our independence. That is why it has to be declared and why it will have to be a declaration of UDI. It was never going to be anything other than that. Mr Salmond believed we could do it with a referendum, and, yes, he was right in that the UKG would have had to accept the result had we won (had we been allowed to win?) and we would have moved straight into the negotiation phase.
That will never be allowed to happen again and a unilateral referendum will be ignored unless we have something else to back it – which could be the SALVO/Liberation initiative, if it succeeds. It must be done legally/politically or we will be in conflict. Those are the two choices. Another UKG approved referendum will never, ever happen again except in Angus’s dreams, but Holyrood can order another referendum based on the results of the SALVO/Liberation initiative. He knows that, which is why he looks so uncomfortable. He always supported Swinney and leaned towards devolution rather than independence, as does Swinney. The SNP is no longer the party of independence, but of diminishing devolution. That is as clear as day.