The world at this time is in a state of chaos. We have a live war in Europe that has every chance of escalating into a global conflict. Indeed, I would suggest that the chance of nuclear conflict has not been this high since the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. Ironically enough, the root cause of the crisis was the Soviets’ attempt to place missiles off the coast of the USA in Cuba.
The US said this threat to their security could be viewed as an act of war and warned the Soviets to remove their missiles forthwith, or in all likelihood, nuclear war would follow. The Soviets complied, and the threat to world peace was averted.
That was until the US and NATO rolled up to a neighbouring country to the Russian Federation, Ukraine and placed missiles and other offensive weapons there. They armed and trained the Ukrainian army and now pretend they cannot understand why Russia reacted in the manner it has done.
We are seeing every day a genocide unfolding before our very eyes. Mobile phones do the job western journalists are supposed to do so that the world can witness this atrocity that our Western Governments deny is happening.
In the UK, it is reported that approximately 4.5 million children are living in poverty, representing 30% of the child population. In Scotland, the figure is 6% lower. However, at 25%, it is still a totally unacceptable level. This shame is in the alleged 7th richest nation on the planet. It is not the lack of wealth of the nation, it is the distribution of that wealth that is and causes the problems we encounter every day!
Scotland’s drug-induced death rate is the highest in Europe based on the latest available data. At 27.7 per 100,000, it is almost three times higher than the next highest country, Ireland.
The UK pension is the lowest in the developed world, while our energy prices are the highest in all of Europe.
Homelessness is a significant issue in Scotland, with a high number of households assessed as being homeless or threatened with homelessness. The number of people in temporary accommodation has also reached record highs. A household becomes homeless in Scotland approximately every 16 minutes.
I am writing this preamble because this week, with all of the above and more happening in the world, our good and great at Holyrood decided to spend valuable time debating which toilets men posing as women and women posing as men should use in the Parliament building. Some MSPs apparently find the fact that there are only two sexes, and each has a toilet, too difficult for them to understand!
This was the opening discussion on this week’s Through A Scottish Prism podcast. My panel of Allan Petrie, Phil Boswell, Lloyd Quinan and Eva Comrie are in top form as they discuss this and other topics in the Scottish political world.
Other discussions included the SNP riding to the rescue of Anas Sarwar and the British Labour Party after an alleged racial abuse attack by the equally British Reform Ltd Party. (*British=English/ English=British*)We ask, why would the so-called leader of the Scottish Independence party involve himself in a squabble between two Brit political parties and personalities?
We also ask what possible reasoning could there be for the uber-loyalist British Daily Record to promote on their front page an endorsement of the alleged Scottish independence party for the upcoming Hamilton by-election? Becsuse these days the SNP perhaps poses no danger to the union?
As Swinney in full British mode praises Keir Starmer for his resolute stance in supporting the regime in Kiev, we ask why is the SNP leader endorsing British foreign policy and aligning the entire Scottish nation with another English imperial misadventure? Whatever happened to “Bairns not Bombs?”
To round off his week, our First Minister, on behalf of the British establishment, rolled out that old favourite slur used against anyone who threatens the London hegemony. He accused Nigel Farage of being a Pro- Putin Russian asset. You gotta love those Brits and their smears. However, again, we ask, what is the so-called leader of the independence party doing promoting British tropes?
All this and more on your favourite Scottish political review podcast.
Meanwhile, fly-boy, Fred-the-shred Goodwin of RBS infamy is enjoying, no doubt, his £600,000 annual pension from the bank that he all-but destroyed. And then there’s the £10.5bn outstanding from the £46bn bail-out of seventeen years ago that no Brit government will ever recoup. There’s every-chance too, that Goodwin is currently lobbying for a wee sinecure with the re-named and newly re-privatised entity Nat West.
I hope uber Brit war wanter Swinney has his family lined up to fight and very possibly die in the war that he and the establishment want.
The war machine, the industrial military complex is absolutely up for war. And Scotland, as Swinney shows will, at least under his watch play their part in the war to come.
The big reset and then the Marshal Plan version Two is the most probable plan.
Dulci et decorum est in pro patria mori can then be Swinney and his ilk’s source of pride going forward. .
Scottish Nazi Party – certainly describes Swinney and his team.
I don’t think John Swinney and his crew will enjoy TASP this week
Willie: the last time the elites sent their own sons to fight for their country was in WW I. Since then, they have always managed to find desk jobs for them where they are able to send the sons of the working-class to die on foreign battle fields while they saw out the war – any war – without a scratch. That is why they are able to beat the drum for war: they are, largely, unaffected; but always thirsting for war which they live through the unfortunates they send out to die. It is disgusting but, oh, so predictable.
General Sir Richard Sherrif last year warned that Britain has less than two years before it goes to war. On present form and in the light of the multi targeted attacks deep into Russia this weekend this most certainly looks increasingly likely,
With a country like Ukraine heavily supported by a UK who are providing not just weaponty but troops on the ground, this weekend’s attack deep across Russia must now make war more likely. The Evening Standard in fact headlined the attacks as Russia’s Pearl Harbour moment.
You don’t mount operations like this, and destroy hundreds of billions of Russian military assets and expect no response. No wonder the the government is now considering formally sanctioning the deployment of RAF fighter planes to be armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
Russia will have to decide what its response to this is going to be. It as this weekend has shown is under threat and it will respond. Of that there is no doubt.
Will the warship building BAE facility on the Clyde be hit. Or will the huge weapons complex at Beith that arms and readies missiles for planes and submarines be hit. Or even the Coulport or Faslane military industrial complex be hit. It”s a good question frontline Scotland should be asking. But no, Swinney supports war and the Parliament debates toilets.
The Clydebank Blitz will be but a walk in the park compared to what could be heading our way given modern armaments. No wonder Trump has headed for the exit door to let the Europeans and Britain get on with it. Marshal plan Trump and America can always step in later after the destruction for the re-build and reconstruction. Business after all is business – war is business, rebuilding is business. Like Gaza it could be the ultimate real estate business deal,
Anyway, Britain’s up for it. We are ramping up military production, assisting strikes deep into Russia, and really from a re-set perspective, andcsave for save for the potential huge slaughter, what not to like?
Me, I’m off to fret about male and female toilets now , safe in the knowledge that all is under control and that there is a plan in place.
Good prism this weekend.
Absolutely, Willie. When Zelenskyy was cock-a-hoop on the news about the destruction of Russia’s planes by the use of drones, I had this horrible feeling that they might be drones we had sent, and I knew that Putin would not let it lie.
I expect Kyiv to be flattened this week/weekend. The tub-thumping rhetoric is so utterly ridiculous that you either have to laugh or cry. In a conventional war, we would be steamrollered in a day; in a nuclear exchange, it would be a better of minutes. Scotland, of course, would be obliterated first.
The SNP makes me want to throw up these days. Have they forgotten WW II? How the Germans cut through Europe like a knife through butter in months? The Soviet Union was a different kettle of fish, and it wasn’t so much equipment – although that was vital, of course and why the convoys shipped it to Murmansk and Archangel – that halted the Germans there, as it was sheer manpower numbers.
In any confrontation against us, nuclear weapons are going to be deployed, even if only strategically. One or two hits would obliterate us. Not so much Russia, if we were to deploy ours, and the Americans would have to sanction that first, putting them square in Russia’s sights, too, not to mention potential damage to China from fall-out. These people are insane. Clinically insane. Has the SG been promised a bunker, by any chance, while the rest of us fry?
Tactical nuclear weapons do I hear you say Lorn? They make so much sense.
Partiies to a conflict can have a right good go with them. Much bigger bangs than conventional explosives, capable of much more extensive damage, but less so than the strategic wipe the world out ones.
Clearly that thinking is what drives the British government being asked to consider authorising RAF jets to be able to carry tactical or theatre nuclear weapons.
Flattening Beith or facilities on the Clyde without wiping out the entire West of Scotland to cast an example makes so much sense.
It’s very much a war game below Armageddon. But maybe I miss the point. Russia took a hammering deep and wide across its territory and maybe they will just accept it and roll over.
After all in WW2 we won the war, and as many a recent Tory minister have been want to say, Britain has pride in the beutiful lethal force it projects over the world.
Personally however, I see the big reset and the big rebuild coming.. Make Scotland Great Again. A toilet for all. We live in grim times.
The complete ‘woke’ s***e is down to inadequacy taking the place of strength. The SNP, Greens, Lib Dems and Labour cannot – CANNOT – fix the problems of Scotland without independence, and, since none of them actually wants to fight any election on an independence ticket as opposed to a devolution ticket, they will go on and on and on backing impossibly immature and unrealistic policies because they never actually have to do anything.
They know perfectly well that the Scottish public do not back the insanity of ‘trans’, net zero, freeports, etc. For the past ten years, only policy-lite seems to have been the norm. As for ‘trans’, if people would only understand and accept that it is a men’s sexual rights and men’s rights movement, they would see why we cannot allow it a free rein.
Sturgeon could not see what would happen if she did not reach for independence after Brexit – or even before Brexit – and it has all come to pass. The UK-wide Framework will destroy every aspect of Scottish trade and business in favour of English ones. As the largest single part of the UK, this is quite logical, but it leaves the other three parts playing catch-up, which is unachievable given the obstacles that have been placed in our paths with devolution.
There really is no way out of this bind unless we go for independence. That was always the case, but it has become far more pressing now, since Brexit and the UK-wide Framework. However, we need to clear the decks with ‘woke’ before independence because we will not be able to do it after independence. Look at Ireland. Reasonable immigration has also to be applied before independence, not after, because, again, we will be unable to stop it after independence. Again, look at Ireland. Ireland is fast becoming the basket case of the Northern geopolitical sphere.
The only way to change this madness is to root out every weak and ideologically-hidebound MSP and MP, plus the civil servants, the advisers, the SNP support that will not see through the con. Sarwar did say what he was accused of saying. As simple as that. It has been happening in England for quite some time now. It is not racism because it is not about the Pakistani community itself, the race, but about Islam and its all-encompassing influence over every aspect, public and private, of human life, especially the lives of female people.