Holyrood and Westminster returned after their long summer break. The same people that cite school teachers having too many holidays finally returned to their overpaid private clubs. I hesitate to call them Parliaments as those that attend both these institutions treat them like private members clubs.
They have their little foibles like the Rt. Hon Member, they cannot call a fellow MP by their name, they must take an oath to a Germanic Monarch. They even have their own acceptable ‘parliamentary language’ and customs. They are so divorced from reality and the people they are supposed to serve it is incredible.
The imperial masters at Westminster have deemed that the public purse cannot afford to retain the payment of the Winter Fuel Payment to our pensioners. However, they have retained the right to pay their own heating and lighting bills in their homes and we the taxpayers pay for that! Freeze the pensioners and heat the MPs I don’t recall that being shouted during the election campaign!
While not only our pensioners struggle to put food on the table our Members of Parliament will continue to enjoy subsidised food and alcohol in the various bars and restaurants at the Palace of Westminster.
In the second chamber the elite pensioners get £332 a day just for turning up at the Westminster Club. That does not include the perks either! Our pensioners are supposed to exist for less than half of this amount per week and there are no perks to being old in UK!
The basic annual salary of a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons is £91,346, plus expenses, from April 2024. In addition, MPs are able to claim allowances to cover the costs of running an office and employing staff, and maintaining a constituency residence or a residence in London. How many other jobs offer such tax free perks?
Some of them including our new Chancellor tell us they struggle to get by on this ‘pittance.’ She also warns us that things will be worse after her October Budget when she raises the taxes (on the poor) and no doubt subsidises the corporations so that neoliberal ‘trickle down economics’ will work! All this pain will be blamed on the previous government in England and the SNP in Scotland.The reality is all of this is merely a continuation of the same neoliberal austerity policies of the past 16 years. The real cause of our financial mess will never be mentioned in the House or by our corrupt media. Everyone and everything else will be blamed except the elite and spivs that gorge on the public purse.
Meanwhile, in Scotland the SNP Government have put forward their budget for the upcoming year. Once again in real terms the Scottish Block Grant has been reduced by our English Imperial masters at Westminster. It is something they have done every year since the SNP came to power in 2007.Just a coincidence I am sure!
As expected the English Unionist Parties and their tame, corrupt media in Scotland were squealing at how terrible the SNP budget is. They want you to believe that the SNP in 17 years has caused a £22 Billion black hole in Scotland’s finances. How that is even possible when Holyrood has to operate a balanced budget on an amount set by Westminster and is forbidden to borrow to make up for any overspend is never explained, nor will it ever be!
Equally our so-called media never question this Unionist trope. Indeedm they amplify the lie and give it greater credibility. Worse still our SNP Government never question it either! Where is that much vaunted SNP rebuttal unit anyway?
There is no doubt that the SNP in some areas has been unwise with their budget choices. The ferries are a classical example of massive overspend. Here on TASP we brought you Stuart Ballantyne who offered a fleet of his designed catamarans for the cost of the two overspend ferries of Caledonia MacBrayne.He even offered to run the service for no profit! The SNP didn’t take him up on his offer they preferred listening to UK civil servants rather than a ferries expert and master builder!
Sending money to arm Ukraine, the funding of Stonewall and Gender lobby groups. The DRS, the action against Alex Salmond and the cost of taking the Referendum Bill to the Supreme Court, all were a terrible waste of finite resources that could have been better deployed elsewhere tackling poverty or drug deaths!
Without doubt the SNP deserves to take some blame for state of Scottish finances. However, the lies emanating particularly from the Labour Party is truly dishonest, almost criminal in its exaggeration and blatant falsehoods.
Typically our elected representatives are playing party politics while the public struggle to survive their incompetence and games!
It is with this backdrop that today’s Through A Scottish Prism finds itself. The panel this week is joined by Alex Neil who served as Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing from 2012 to 2014 and Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights from 2014 to 2016.
Alex has been at the heart of many budgets and gives us his expertise and knowledge today. We analyse the Scottish Budget and offer some alternative suggestions as to how the SNP could perhaps navigate it’s way through this self-inflicted morass.
All this and more on your favourite Scottish Political review podcast.
Phil is right, with colonialism nothing will or can change until a people are liberated. Alex and the SNP elite still do not understand that independence means decolonization, and requires a complete end to what is a racist colonial system of exploitation.
https://wp.towson.edu/iajournal/the-socio-political-determinants-of-scottish-independence/
Cracking Prism, Roddy. I have never voted for a Unionist party of any hue because they are basically the same with tweaks here and there. The fundamental philosophy they all share, apart from being anti independence, is that they will follow a neoliberal economic set of ‘principles’. The SNP shares the neoliberal aspects and almost shares the anti independence ‘principle’. In other words, they are all coming from Thatcherism to the present day via Blairism. Austerity will be a given because they are all too cowardly and lacking in original thought to try anything else; that austerity will hurt the poorest and ‘just getting by’ more than an others i society, and that, too, is deliberate.
The late 1940s and 1950s were also called ‘austerity years’, yet nothing then has any relevance to today’s form of the ‘austerity’ parcel. Slowly, even as things were tough, as working-class people had little to call their own, there existed a post war consensus that things had to get better for the poorest. I’m not sure that the Tories ever believed that in quite the same way that Labour did, but they knew better than to make it too obvious. Social housing was built was built at unprecedented levels, which, in turn, gave people work. Gradually, the shops started filling up with better goods and the very poorest were afforded a measure of social security.
However, and it was also gradual, people lost their class consciousness – at least, the working-class did – and they came to expect more than was wise. Consumerism took over and expectations rose, totally mismanaged. Economic growth at all costs, was the clarion call. The unions flexed their industrial; muscle sensibly in some cases and stupidly, in others, giving the Tories the excuse they needed to start to reverse the ‘good times’ that everyone, more less, shared, even though compared to today, they fell far short but far more manageable..
Thatcherism became to cry de coeur of the middle-class and government. Oil exploration led to a short-term bonanza that was squandered by Thatcherism while it systematically dismantled British and Scottish industry, forcing people into low-paid and soul-destroying service industries that offered no working-class solidarity.
Communities turned to drugs and drink to dull the pain of the industrial upheaval, just as they had in the 1800s, as a mass exodus from the land into the cities took place – the Industrial Revolution.
This latest was a kind of reverse industrial revolution, and the working-class opted out big time. Mass Immigration was touted as the answer (and still is) because the politicians are scared to do what needs to be done to give the working-class the kind of support it needs: to spend and build and create real jobs and real communities again. It will never be the same again, but it could come close to that post war consensus if only the politicians would understand. However, the universities spewed out hundreds of thousands of ‘business graduates’ and ‘middle management’ during the 1970s and 1980s, into the 1990s, just as ‘human resource’ departments are staffed now by the latest model, many of them ‘woke’ zealots. The resulting authoritarianism is destroying the country whilst doing nothing to reverse the neoliberal trend. Both Tories and Labour represent this manifestation of doing exactly that which requires to be put into reverse and returned to the sanity of earlier days. The Tories reversed the social consensus because they wanted the country to serve their interests only. Now, their form of Thatcherite austerity requires to be reversed, and has become an existential necessity. Human beings become ill psychologically when either they have too little or too much, as we saw from the distant past and as we are now seeing from the present, and, in their desperation to find answers, they throw the door open to all manner of psychopaths, sociopaths, narcissists, sadists.