Another hugely eventful week on both sides of the border. The floodgates have been opened regarding Labour politicians on the take and on the make. It was the week of the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. It was their first get together since their huge election victory in July. It should have been a time of great joy, a time for the leadership to bask in glory from the membership as well as a grateful nation relieved of the real Tories and their corruption.It didn’t go to plan!
Sadly, it was not to be, as so many of us had warned before and during the election campaign, electing Labour is no different than electing the Tories. They are both neoliberal extremist, capitalist, metropolitan spiv parties.It is in their DNA to disappoint us every time!
Orwell described it best,The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which!
They are only in it for themselves, their pals and donors.The only difference is the real Tories have a bit more class and practise when it comes to filling their pockets and their offshore bank accounts without getting caught. Labour are just a little too crass and greedy for their own good.
Pre-election Starmer, Reeves and Rayner were ever so pious about Tory sleaze and corruption.They assured the nation they were going to be different. They were going to be more ethical, more honest, more compassionate. Greed and slurping at the public trough would be a thing of the past.
It was no surprise to anyone that the right-wing presstitutes had been going through the Labour bins in anticipation of the Tories losing in July.
This week we were drip fed the extent of Labour hypocrisy. £76,000 to Starmer for clothing for him and his wife. The tabloids managed to tell us Lord Alli even buys Mrs Starmers knickers! Rachel Reeves and Angela Rayner have received substantial clothing allowances and to keep within the rules our rancid MPs wrote up for themselves, they were able to call it ‘office support!’
Some of the Labour apologists tried to justify it all by saying “well we all want our MPs to look good” and “other countries pay a clothing allowance” Yeah and other countries pay a decent pension to their old folk! All other countries have lower fuel bills.
Starmer has even taken as a gift designer spectacles at £2,400, no Specs average Specials for him! An executive box at Arsenal priced at £100,000 a season. A £20,000 a week use of a flat so his son could study for his GCSEs! We were treated to numerous Labour toadies assuring us that this was all ‘within the rules.’ Our answer to this is simple, if that is the rules then they are as corrupt as our politicians!
Meanwhile, in Scotland the Labour branch office found itself in the eye of the corruption storm. It seems Sarwar who was so honoured to take the salute at the Edinburgh Tattoo had in return taken a £5,000 hospitality package for himself and seven of his mates at the event. He has also accepted multiple free hospitality at both Murrayfield and Hampden. I had one Labour daftie on X attacking me calling me a liar because Sarwar didn’t actually get £5,000 in cash in a brown envelope. They just don’t get it do they?
The same hypocrites that rightly maligned Michael Matheson and the £11,000 football matches assured us that Branch Manager Sarwar had taken all this payola ‘within the rules.’
It is a pathetic defence and it amplifies that our elected officials North and South of the border are so far removed from the public that they do not seem to realise the disgust that their actions have caused. Their self-entitlement and belief that they are somehow special is truly nauseating.
The general population has really struggled during these past 16 years of constant neoliberal austerity. Ever since the City of London bank crash in 2008 we, the public have been asked to tighten our belts notch by notch year by year! Our politicians, on the other hand, are gorging on the public purse and grasping all the freebies they can.
They have withdrawn the Winter Fuel Payment from pensioners and told the nation that if pensioners have an income of £12,000 they are not entitled to the payment. Meanwhile, the Labour leaders can take £5,000 of hospitality in one day! They get 100% of their energy bills paid, and it’s all within the rules. You arrive late for a DHS appointment, and the rules say you can be sanctioned! Be a single mum on Housing benefit and have a boyfriend stay over you can go to jail. It is all ‘within the rules.’
A series of by-elections this week sent a message to the Labour Government that the British public are less than pleased with them. However, experience tells us that just like their predecessors and the SNP in Scotland Starmer and his crew will ignore the proletariat, they always do, that self-belief of being ‘special’ breeds an arrogant we know best attitude in British politicians.
The same as the government will most certainly ignore the Labour Conference vote to reverse the cruel WFP cancellation. Our politicians hold the public in such contempt we should not be surprised.
This week the panel of Eva Comrie, Lloyd Quinan and Phil Boswell had plenty to discuss. See if you agree or disagree with their opinions.
Excellent prism again, Roddy and panel.
Sometimes, I have to shake myself to understand what I’m seeing and hearing in Scotland today – and I still don’t manage it. The SNP is utterly devoid of ideas, but it is no different at Westminster. You don’t have to tax the wealthier till their pips squeak, because they will just leave. Where the loophole should be closed, or, at least, tightened considerably, is in taking money out of the economy and out of the country into tax-havens where it is hoarded and does absolutely nothing for our economy. To some extent, in a global context, you have to invest to recoup in an international marketplace, but the river of profits leaving the UK is now a flood. If you do something to prevent that flood out of the economy, you will force them to invest here. Oh, and don’t fawn over corrupt foreign oligarchs.
With capitalism and its beneficiaries, it is no good using the stick, but always use the carrot. Encourage investment in domestic industries and make it difficult to invest too much in foreign economies. That, in turn, will encourage production of products in the UK and Scotland. Very few things are made here now, but it is not because people are any less entrepreneurial; it is because there is so little incentive to do so. Same goes for population: if you want people to have bigger families, give them the incentive to have more children by rewarding them and allowing them to keep more of their own taxes and award them with child benefits and career breaks that will make a real difference. At the moment, we penalise young people for having families.
I think this is where mass immigration and population decrease actually collide because I think that mass immigration is government policy and has been for a long time, to the detriment of the population already here. I’m not advocating the expulsion of people already here because that would be racist and unnecessary, but, when you look at the kinds of policies that have been encouraged lately – the ‘trans’ thing, especially – it is not hard to see a pattern in the decimation of fecundity in the indigenous population. Politicians have pushed this vigorously, and we need to start asking why. It seems, now, that every policy is aimed at reducing the indigenous populations in each of the UK parts, even as we are being told that we are short of labour. It makes no sense unless they are trying to drive down wages and conditions instead of encouraging them upwards.
Scotland is being de industrialised all over again. We can all see it. You would have to be very stupid not to see it. Again, this can only be a deliberate policy, and the SNP is playing along. Eventually, England will have all the energy it needs to keep the lights on, but we will be denuded of any hope of being able to do the same if all our resources are shipped south and/or abroad. Where are we to get our supplies from except from imports at exorbitant costs. We already pay far more per unit for electricity/gas than the South-east of England, and it is not because transmission costs can be kept lower in highly-populated areas, although that is part of it, but because we are not tapping into energy sources here, but export them only for them to be re exported back to us at extra cost.
Politicians are either not able or not willing to make good decisions for their own people; it is all about the profits for the global corporates who own them. No due diligence. No short-term and long-term impact assessments for any policies made. The GB Energy being sited in Aberdeen is a sop to the gullible who believe it means something. It means absolutely nothing. It is all smoke and mirrors. It would make you weep.
Had Russia not sacrificed what it did during WW II – and it was way beyond anything we can imagine – the Allies would have bombed Germany off the map. Carpet bombing, night bombing was already at full tilt, but it would have had to be stepped up because we did not have the armies and equipment that could be sacrificed to the extent that the Russians sacrificed theirs. That is just simple fact. Many more civilians would have died. We would also have had to have been far more strategic in targeting the German High Command, those around Hitler, because he would not accept unconditional surrender, and neither did Japan until the atomic bomb were dropped. Most of the top notchers were in underground bunkers while the population were blown to smithereens.
Yes, Eva, the statistics for female everything – offending, especially, but literally everything – has been skewed out of all recognition in the past few years. Police Scotland is obfuscating. They did record men as women, as the Isla Bryson case proves. He was considered a ‘she’ until fairly late in the day. The recording of sexual offences according to sex would be fine until you think that this is the law anyway, because women cannot commit rape except in the situation where art and part is involved, and it has been breached by the police, the courts and the entire legal system. They have broken the law. It would be laughable if it were not so serious. The harm that these men do is incalculable: it starts with a tiny ‘trans’ stone in a pond and it ripples outwards to affect everything in that pond. All for what?