Charles Bannerman

Keep them coming Alex. What we really need at the moment is ongoing insights into the ineffectiveness of the forces of nationalism - such as their legendary and inarticulate reliance, in the absence of any ability to state a case, on insults and sloganizing. I thought you would at least have made some attempt to justify this latest instance of political masturbation on the part of the SNP which you highlighted above, rather than simply chunter. Interesting to note, though, that the SNP appear to be realising that their party is not long for this earth and is responding with predictable self interest! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35120884

Electorates do from time to time tend to make big mistakes which they later deeply regret. Look no further than Holyrood and "The Fiftyhowevermanyofthemarestillleft".

Is this George Galloway in disguise or a member of the latest generation of Moon Landing Deniers? Or just somebody on the wind up?

Yup, that's a pretty hefty hit for the luxury of the leader of a devolved regional assembly trying to con the international community into believing that Scotland is actually a significant world player rather than simply the United Kingdom's equivalent of Bavaria, Tuscany, Wallonia and sundry regions of various other countries. However I suspect that the said international community is not going to be as easy to con as almost half the Scottish electorate have been - although evidence which will help the penny to drop there is now accumulating at a gratifyingly increasing rate. But quite frankly, I find it just a bit embarrassing that Sturgeon should turn up in Paris at a meeting where dozens of delegates from the world's sovereign nations would have been asking in various languages "Who the HELL is that? David Cameron's PA or Wee Jimmy Krankie?" Mind you I suppose it's just the kind of grandiose showboating you would expect from a successor of Alex Salmond.

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.

This reminds me of the true story of the teacher who was marking test papers where, in response to the question "In which state is Sulphur Dioxide at a temperature of minus 25C?", one pupil answered "Texas".

My only concern here might be that this "usual routine" was apparently not picked up by the stewards long before now. As Caley D says, unattended bags have been a big no-no for a very long time - by that I mean at least the early 1970s when the Irish "troubles" were becoming a problem. I just hope there aren't too many JodieC95s around because that is just the kind of lax attitude that terrorists are looking for.

Santa is not responsible for your nocturnal habits Hawkeye!

Positivity??? Hang on a minute, this is a thread about the SNP's performance in the exercising of devolved powers...... and you're looking for positivity??!!!!

OK so 40 tonnes is "average"? Alex, for goodness sake.... stop digging!! (And maybe you should take yourself off that mailing list from the SNP's Baseless Assertions Department?) So let's refocus on what this thread was set up to do - keep a running audit of the SNP's catastrophic stewardship of the powers which they now have the hard neck to ask for more of, despite making a complete donkey's bum of the ones they already have. For a start, once they realised in 2011 that they could call a referendum, every picojoule of energy they possessed was thrown into that. The other bonus for them in the 2011-14 period was that everybody was obsessing so much about the referendum that scrutiny and evaluation of executive functions was reduced to a minimum. But since the referendum passed into history, there has been far more of this scrutiny and the dreadful extent to which the whole devolved administration has been allowed to unravel has become increasingly and brutally apparent. There is, of course, the additional factor that SNP types are not natural administrative thinkers since their tunnel-vision mindset is focused entirely on a single regressive and destructive agenda. They are totally programmed to try to acquire powers and hence have to concept of actually exercising them for the public good. Add in the consideration that Party Central demands that no SNP politician makes any administrative decision without it passing the "What implications does this have for the cause of Separation?" test and you get to a place where the exercise of devolved powers degenerates into a horrible mixture of incompetence and inefficiency hamstrung by Party dogma. I know it's the pantomime season but, despite the Comic Cuts nature of it all, we really shouldn't be laughing at what's happening because these serial follies are progressively destroying our law and order, health service, kids' education etc..... and now our transport system. I would imagine that by now, SNP Central is pure dead bricking it. With the windfall of a dysfunctional Labour Party rendered even more chaotic by Jeremy Corbyn, they have managed to delude and bribe enough people with "$103 a barrel" type assertions and promises that they will still get there by the May elections. However the SNP bubble is beginning to leak gas faster than a cow on a diet of baked beans. As a result, as each crisis like the Ministerial Truss End Member rolls up, that bubble looks progressively less likely to remain inflated through until they can get to an excuse to hold anther referendum.

No Alex, you said specifically "10,000 forty tonne trucks a day". But I'll happily take your figure of 66,000 total vehicles per day and then 6% of that comes to 3960 HGVs of all kinds. Please remember that a 40 TONNE truck is a vertiable whopper which didn't even used to be allowed on British roads and the numbers of these will therefore only be a small fraction of the 3960 HGVs a day which cross the bridge. Since you use the bridge once a week, I would have thought that it would have been pretty obvious that there's not one of these 40 tonne monsters going over it every 8.6 seconds. It makes $103 a barrel seem conservative! Regarding the abolition of tolls, a Fife councillor who also sat on the Bridge authority is among those quoted today as criticising the decision. I will post a link if I can find it. Meanwhile the political fallout over the Transport Minister's stiffening truss end member intensifies..... http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/fmqs-nicola-sturgeon-under-fire-over-forth-road-bridge-1-3972122

As a defence of the mess we are currently in, which this clearly was, the new Forth crossing, although being built under devolved powers, is a complete red herring. I'm not sure the people of Fife would have welcomed the removal of the tolls if they thought that they could have contributed to better maintenance of the bridge, hence avoiding the current difficulties. And if Scotland isn't capable of devising an efficient system of toll collection (which is going to become ever more common), it need look no further south of the border than the Tyne Tunnel to get some ideas.

We could start with the links below, most of which originate from the Minister himself, with whom the buck stops. On the other hand this - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-35054144 - does make you wonder whether we're talking about the version he gave to the BBC or the one he gave to Holyrood. Anyway, here is just a small sample of the requested citations..... http://www.scottishconstructionnow.com/9747/forth-road-bridge-work-was-cancelled-5-years-ago/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-35050251 http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/scotland/forth-road-bridge-steel-replacement-considered-and-abandoned-in-2010-transport-minister-reveals-1.914666 http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/forth-road-bridge-fault-could-6980296 http://www.sundaypost.com/why-wasn-t-this-fixed-five-years-ago-experts-blast-forth-road-bridge-chaos-1.914297 Winding people up? MOI?!!! (Well maybe just softer targets like Nats and Old Firm fans just a little bit!!!!)

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?"

OK. Must have been some combination of Westminster and the English then. Hope the Transport Minister's stiffening truss end gets better soon.

By the way, reports this morning suggest that the Tramsport Minister's problem at the Forth Road Bridge originate from inadequate maintenance of his "stiffening truss end".

The "SNP MPs in Westminster" thread is tending to get a bit side tracked by Holyrood issues - and more so as the crisis involving the SNP's handling of devolved matters continues to deepen. It therefore seems to make sense to split these two distinct areas. This should mean that we can use the "Westminster" thread for things like these unanimous, tokenistic block votes for lost causes relating to nuclear disarmament and bombing ISIS, embarrassing the Scottish people by way of collective behaviour as a feral mob and ongoing efforts to drive a wedge between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Oh yes.... and for ever lengthening choruses of "56 little nationalists....." Then we can use this new thread to highlight the chaotic implementation of the curriculum for Excellence, the deepening crisis within NHS Scotland, the complete shambles which has led to plummeting public confidence in Police Scotland and the complete disarray imposed on local authorities by the pig headed Council Tax freeze. And all of that before we even think about the fact that after more than 8 years of the SNP being ultimately responsible for the Forth Bridge (which means they can't even try to blame Labour or Westminster) this strategic element of Scotland's transport system suddenly had to close for a duration where guesses begin at four weeks. The amazing thing so far is that the SNP Transport Minister has got off so lightly and there have, to date, been so few fingers pointed regarding a failure which has thrown much of central Scotland into chaos with knock-on effects far beyond and loss to the economy which may well exceed the combined value of the oil and Grand Theft Auto.

Nice one!

Do you reckon the Reverend Ian Paisley wrote all his correspondence in capitals?

Or maybe "The First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment Of Sturgeon"

Did you not know that she's really there to get a Parisian artist to paint her portrait and she can then absent herself to have it unveiled the next time something important arises? Very good point and well made though Yngwie! These SNP people should forget about trying to be the statespersons which, simply as heads of devolved administrations, they are not. They would be far better instead concentrating on clearing up the mess they have created or allowed to happen in various devolved functions like police, heatlh, education and now transport. Maybe we should simply abbreviate the title of this thread to (under) "Performance of SNP".

OOPS!!!!! http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/624673/SMP-SNP-MP-Phil-Boswell-tax-probe

Naw. It wuz thae Unlglash!

Indeed... NatBashing.... part of a longstanding Great British tradition which manifests itself in various forms. For instance during WW2, British prisoners of war used to indulge in "Goonbaiting"... "Goons" being their name for German prison guards. This was especially prevalent in Colditz and no stone was left unturned by way of generally ridiculing the guards or doing anything possible to undermine German morale. The French got involved too and on one occasion a German officer asked for volunteers among prisoners to work for the Reich. A French prisoner immediately stepped forward, loudly declaring that he would rather work for 100 Germans than one Frenchman. The officer asked him what his occupation was. He replied "Undertaker!" They also used to put used razor blades in the pigswill by way of depriving the Hun of as much livestock as they could. These are pretty natural kinds of responses when oppressed by the Forces of Darkness..... hence NatBashing.