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Thought this would sum up the season pretty well, hats off to young man who put this together. Beating Celtic at their very best and finally reaching the Scottish cup final was a biggie for me. https://youtu.be/f3y-PUd2hr8

Spot on, Charles. Actions speak louder than words and despite all the tiresome anti Tory, anti austerity rhetoric of the SNP, Swinney has delivered an austerity budget that goes beyond even what Osborne delivered for the UK in that not only has he not raised the income tax rate, but yet again he has refused to allow local Councils to increase Council Tax. The pathetic justification given for not using the new devolved tax raising powers they have been shouting long and hard for is that it would be an unacceptable burden for the poorest in our society. Nothing could be further from the truth. The poorest in our society don't pay any income tax and by progressively raising the tax threshold to £11,000, the current government has already taken nearly 300,000 Scots out of income tax altogether. (Wicked, wicked, Tories!) And with regard to the Council tax, Swinney has even more scope to focus any higher payments on those who can afford to pay. Raising the basic rate of income tax would benefit the poorest most and would cost them nothing. Allowing Councils to increase Council Tax rates would again cost the poorest least and give them the most benefit. Whilst appealing to the most vulnerable with their rhetoric, this wretched Scottish Government willfully refuses to use the powers it has in order to raise the money required to support these folk. They claim to be anti-austerity and yet impose austerity with a vengeance for fear of losing the votes of those on whom the tax burden would fall. The level of hypocrisy is truly breathtaking. As a member of the Highland Council's Citizens Panel, I have recently completed a consultation survey on their Budget options. They are looking to see how they can save over £20m from their budget. It is sobering to think that if the SNP had allowed Councils to increase the Council Tax by a modest 1.5% each year, the Highland Council would be raising £16m more in Council Tax next year than the Government is allowing it to. That is £4m more than wee Nicola grandly announced recently that Scotland was giving to "Global Climate Change Justice" to demonstrate her leadership in world climate change politics. Just think, if this Government had not imposed its austerity strategy on the Council, we, in Highland with just 4% of the Scottish population, could have donated £12m to Nicola to save the world and still had £4m left to provide support for some of the most vulnerable in our community.

SWINNEY BOTTLES IT http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-35106701 They've been girning and greeting away about "more powers". They've been whining and whingeing about austerity and the Tories. And then when they get the powers to set a Scottish rate of income tax which could bring in funds to do something about austerity, what do they do? Nothing. They stick with George Osborne's Westminster rate of tax. And when they could alleviate the desperate situation local government services have been thrown into by allowing increases in Council Tax, what do they do? Nothing - again. It almost beggars belief (until you remember that this is coming from a party that doesn't give a toss about people and cares only for its sole, destructive ideology of breaking up the UK) that anyone can bleat on for years about a problem and then, when presented with the means of alleviating it, does absolutely nothing. Clearly, their tunnel vision takes them no further than the May elections and the SNP don't want to risk annoying people with tax increases. For a start, this begs the question of how seriously people take austerity if paying a bit more is all that unacceptable as a means of easing it? But the real bottom line is that John Swinney and his pathetic bunch of separatist obsessives have had a choice between solving the very problem they have complained about for years, which they say has had such a bad effect on people' lives.... and getting themselves re-elected. And they have chosen the saving of their own self interested skins well ahead of protecting the interests of the people of Scotland. It really is becoming so obvious that even the most naïve separatist convert has to be able to twig that the SNP is simply pulling their privates for political gain.

Not to worry, once the Europeans get a taste of his blunders they will just assume our referees are on a par with our footballers.

Golobart When he was good he was good and when he was bad he would scare the crap out of half the team.

A week ago I asked what Latapy was up to these days, and since then he's been in the papers a few times. Yesterday's Sun filled a column inch or two with a "he could be the man for Alloa" non-story which had no basis other than the fact that he was interviewed for the position when it was available last season. The Record today says Latapy is very keen on the St Mirren vacancy, and also mentions that he applied for the Motherwell job a couple of months ago.

Believe it or not, we don't actually have any footage from our match in Romania. AndyCam was (literally) taken hostage by an over-zealous steward over there and denied access to the TV gantry. They did promise to have a copy of the game for us made up before we left...but that didn't happen and the promise to send it on to us never transpired. Complaint to UEFA fell on deaf ears. Even if we had the footage, there's huge restrictions on what you can use and you have to pay a pretty penny for the right to reproduce it....so it would likely have ended up being cost prohibitive to include it anyway. These costs reduce over time, so if we ever manage to get our hands on the footage then it may be one for the future, such as St Johnstone have done. There's a 4 figure fee to the SFA for rights to use the Scottish Cup footage. There's a ton more content we would like to have included on both DVD's, but the more you add the poorer the quality, so it's a balancing act and the decision was made to go more with the content from the games than interviews and chat....some will agree with that and some won't, que sera. One alternative would have been to add a 3rd DVD, which would have delayed production until after Christmas and put another fiver on the purchase cost....or we could have just not bothered producing a DVD at all. The DVD's had to be produced on a tight budget (all edited together by competent volunteer/s, working in their own time) in order to ensure it remained financially viable...so I can understand that people will feel it's not up to blockbuster standards. Such is the nature of things when supporting a club the size of ICTFC where sales aren't going to afford the luxury of investing in bells and whistles. The DVD was very much done as a means of ensuring fans had a record of the season and the club certainly aren't going to be getting rich off the back of it.....if they were, then we'd be doing DVD's at the end of every season!!

And how many of these were packed with of copies of GTA, because the above claim that "10,000 forty tonne trucks a day" cross the bridge is - if such a thing were possible - even more fantastic than the previous one about GTA being worth more than the oil! This link - http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/report/j8512a-07.htm will confirm in Section 6.2.2./Fig 1 that 12,000,000 vehicles a year cross the bridge. This link - http://www.starconference.org.uk/star/2006/Neil_Cree.pdf will confirm in Section 3.4 that 6% of vehicles crossing the bridge are HGVs. This link - http://www.hgvlicence.org/ defines an HGV as being over 3.5 tonnes in weight. 6% of 12,000,000 vehicles gives us 720,000 HGVs a YEAR. Divide by 365 and you get 1973 HGVs a DAY. That's 1973 vehicles weighing 3.5 tonnes or more per day.... so how many of these 1973 will be weigh FORTY tonnes or more? (Unless they're all secretly packed with barrels of oil selling at $103 each) Really, the most superficial critical examination of the quoted claim should instantly make it painfully obvious that there is nothing remotely approaching a 40 tonne truck crossing the Forth Road Bridge every 8.6 seconds!!! When will the Nationalists learn that there is a section of the population which, unlike many of their supporters, simply doesn't naively buy wild unsubstantiated assertions?

You miss the point. The new crossing is irrelevant to this discussion. What is causing indefinite mayhem throughout central Scotland and beyond is the non-functionality of the current crossing which, under the stewardship of the SNP, has been the subject of a number of warnings and recommendations which have been ignored. The result is that we now have this catastrophic event which only became identifiable once the condition of the bridge had been allowed to get so bad that a visible fault emerged. The problem probably has financial origins, but not from the source the Nats would predictably claim. It was, for instance, the SNP's decision to dispense with £12 million a year in toll revenues. This joins the list of other crowdpleasing measures such as free tuition and presriptions for all where the SNP clearly decided that hey could get the best resulting return at the ballot box rather than invest in maintenance of the Forth Bridge. So the reality is that the Transport Minister's problem with his stiffening truss end is the product of the neglect of his own party on their watch. Father Jack was sacked for far less. "Is that a stiffening truss end you've got in your pocket Derek - or are you just pleased to see your First Minister?"

What are you all wittering about, the only terrorism being perpetrated is by the security services. There is no war on terror, but there is a war of terror being perpetrated against the middle eastern nations and their poor civilians. Anyone see the "alleged" shooting of the policeman in the Charlie Hebdo attack which was unsurprisingly quickly taken down. In frame 1 there is a cue mark in the middle of the road where the car stops, in the final frame there is a cue mark opposite the front passengers wheel which was not in the first frame, ergo, the scene was shot in at least two takes ie it's a fake. I could go on about so many ridiculous issues surrounding this piece of theater. While I'm about it I would like to point out that President Assad is the democratically elected leader of Syria with 83% of the vote, you wont hear that on the BBC. Enjoy the games at TC stadium without this fearmongering.