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EU In or Out


Alex MacLeod

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I see that the DUP are threatening to scupper any sort of deal with the European Union.

They are citing, their 'blood red line' of full regulatory alignment between Northern Ireland and every other part of the United Kingdom  Say the biggotted hypocrites who refuse to align with the regulations that permit gay and lesbian people in every other nation in their beloved union the same basic rights as the rest of us and women the absolutely fundamental right to control their own bodies.

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  • 2 months later...

Things turning ugly on Westminster Green.

I can't help contrast the mild mannered if remarkably persistent conduct of the chap with the 'Stop Brexit' signs who, when the TV companies tried to thwart him by spending £20,000 building an elevated gantry for interviews countered with the simple expedient of spending a thousandth of that purchasing longer poles with the conduct of the mysoginist, racist, Islamophobic right wing extremists who have been threatening Anna Soubry and others.

If these characters prevail then a United Kingdom isolated from the international community as they wish for is going to be a dark, depressing and dangerous place.

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9 hours ago, Kingsmills said:

Things turning ugly on Westminster Green.

I can't help contrast the mild mannered if remarkably persistent conduct of the chap with the 'Stop Brexit' signs who, when the TV companies tried to thwart him by spending £20,000 building an elevated gantry for interviews countered with the simple expedient of spending a thousandth of that purchasing longer poles with the conduct of the mysoginist, racist, Islamophobic right wing extremists who have been threatening Anna Soubry and others.

If these characters prevail then a United Kingdom isolated from the international community as they wish for is going to be a dark, depressing and dangerous place.

I thought it was very bad that the police didn't step in, despite standing close by whilst Soubry was being abused, and, it appears from some of the footage, accompanying the group to the door into Westminster.  I saw a high-ranking officer from the Met on the news yesterday saying that they were now taking advice on whether any criminal actions had taken place.

Memo to the Met Police - you don't have to wait until criminal activity takes place. (Ask any subject of stop-and-search.) What you should have done was step in and tell the louts to back off. If you want to make it formal, tell them they are in danger of committing public-order offences. I appreciate that it's a balancing act - that there's a fine line between tolerance and over-zealous policing. But next time, one of the idiots may be carrying a weapon, and be stupid enough to use it, while you stand by.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I perhaps owe the Prime Minister an apology. When she said she was going to reach out and seek consensus I didn't believe her. However, it appears that she is doing just that by making further common ground with the nutters and the bigots.

Seldom has a deceased equine animal been so thoroughly and persistently beaten.

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  • 2 weeks later...
1 hour ago, Kingsmills said:

It appears that the Prime Minister has 'united' her party by promising that she will go to Brussels and bring them back a living dodo. Farce and incompetence heaped upon farce and incompetence.

Compounded, it must be said, by the complete inertia and otherwordliness of Her Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition,  who have maintained that the way forward is for them to get into power, after which they will be able to negotiate a new and different deal.  I doubt if today's talks will make much difference.

A plague on both their houses!

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It just shows the utter contempt these MP's have for Scotland when Iain Blakford was raising the issue of likely increasing food prices would cause problems for ordinary working folk one MP mutters 'go to the chippy'

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On 3/17/2017 at 3:10 PM, Laurence said:

 

The bottom line will always be Scotland cannot afford to go it alone. 

 

 

Scotland contributes around £120Bn to the Westminster Coffers each year. Scottish Govt get back around £33Bn per year to run the whole Country. Im sure if our Govt got the whole lot...we could all be living a far better quality of life.
If Switzerland Ireland and Norway  (for example) can go it alone.....why cant Scotland?

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We discovered today that the guy who runs the cheese stall in our local market is thinking of jacking it all in after Brexit.  He has been a stallholder for 25 years.

He is Dutch, and was telling us that twice a year he would have to go to the Dutch embassy in London and fill in a dozen forms about his business.  Not to mention all the extra checks that he would have to go through whenever he makes a trip to France and the Netherlands to collect cheese, as he does every week or two.

So going home to NL and selling his cheese there is currently very attractive to him.

The stallholder next to him is Belgian, and is thinking of going home too. After 30 years in England. His wife is English, but would take out a Belgian passport if she can.

In addition to the headline-grabbing losses, it will be a myriad "little things" like this that will make the UK a poorer place after Brexit.

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27 minutes ago, snorbens_caleyman said:

We discovered today that the guy who runs the cheese stall in our local market is thinking of jacking it all in after Brexit.  He has been a stallholder for 25 years.

He is Dutch, and was telling us that twice a year he would have to go to the Dutch embassy in London and fill in a dozen forms about his business.  Not to mention all the extra checks that he would have to go through whenever he makes a trip to France and the Netherlands to collect cheese, as he does every week or two.

So going home to NL and selling his cheese there is currently very attractive to him.

The stallholder next to him is Belgian, and is thinking of going home too. After 30 years in England. His wife is English, but would take out a Belgian passport if she can.

In addition to the headline-grabbing losses, it will be a myriad "little things" like this that will make the UK a poorer place after Brexit.

These myriad little things are beginning to mount up already.

One somewhat less little and very significant thing is Nissan's decision to reverse their decision to invest in their Sunderland plant and that will be just the start of it. Ironically, with Sunderland as an example, it will, without doubt, be the overwhelmingly Brexit supporting manufacturing regions who will suffer most. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas.

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46 minutes ago, snorbens_caleyman said:

We discovered today that the guy who runs the cheese stall in our local market is thinking of jacking it all in after Brexit.  He has been a stallholder for 25 years.

He is Dutch, and was telling us that twice a year he would have to go to the Dutch embassy in London and fill in a dozen forms about his business.  Not to mention all the extra checks that he would have to go through whenever he makes a trip to France and the Netherlands to collect cheese, as he does every week or two.

So going home to NL and selling his cheese there is currently very attractive to him.

The stallholder next to him is Belgian, and is thinking of going home too. After 30 years in England. His wife is English, but would take out a Belgian passport if she can.

In addition to the headline-grabbing losses, it will be a myriad "little things" like this that will make the UK a poorer place after Brexit.

Edam well should leave little England.

For the Gouda his business.

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On 2/1/2019 at 10:34 PM, Yngwie said:

Good god! Those figures are garbage. Even the SNP acknowledge Scotland is very heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK.

Yngwie, when did the SNP ever acknowledge that, out of interest?  But I agree the £120bn a year figure is garbage.

If you actually bother to look at the GERS figures, which are based on those produced by the ONS/HMRC guesstimates and re-guesstimated by The Scottish Governmment economists to more accurately reflect the Scottish Income and expenditure (figures which, incidentally have been accepted as national statistics)...and bear in mind the FACT that the Scottish Government is, by law, not ALLOWED to overspend their income....perhaps you could explain which bit of the UK  is producing the enormous deficit...because, sure as hades, it isn't Scotland.  

It is being in the Union that gives us a big deficit...because the bulk of the deficit is money spent for Scotland, whether we want/need it or not...money which heads down to Westminster departments to enter the English economy, mostly in London, and boosts the English tax take. When was the last time Scotland got a chunk of money out of the UK borrowing, which costs us £3+ billion a year, to spend as WE want (that would be never, I suspect). Why should we pay for (or trust) a bloated and inefficient Westminster Government parked in London, doing stuff like producing 2000+ pages of tax laws, with built in loopholes that accountants get rich from finding and exploiting, to do things for us that we could easily do for ourselves and probably do better, if we were independent?.

Out of our limited income, we fund the administration and spending of the devolved government departments,the staffing and maintenance of the Holyrood building, the salaries/expenses of MSPs etc, AND the Scottish Office and around 90 Scottish National bodies, NDPBs, NMDs NGOs etc...like the Crofting Commission, National Records, National Galleries etc. We mitigate, as far as we can, the austerity brainfarts Westminster Governments impose upon us..we pay for Education, housing and the NHS.and we still manage free prescriptions, free uni tuition, free bus passes etc.

If we allow that, whatever else we have to do in an independent Scotland in the short/medium term, is pay social protection, at at least the same level as it currently is being paid in the UK...then what was spent IN Scotland FOR Scotland, is the total of what the SG spent from the block grant, the devolved taxes raised and Local Government input via business rates etc. plus the social protection payment from Westminster. The SG spent £42,848 million and adding the Social Protection of £18,199 million, sent direct from Westminster to individuals..gives a grand total, (including accounting adjustments) of £61,047 million, against an income of £59,957 million....so a deficit of £1,090 million we know DID come from Scotland. Therefore the bulk of our deficit was made by Westminster charging us £12,251 million (nearly as much as we spent on the NHS in Scotland last year) to do things for us that we could just as easily, and probably more efficiently and effectively, do for ourselves as an independent country.   

Anyone who thinks that, after Independence Scotland is going to have a Westminster style bloated Government with over 400,000 civil servants, 650 elected legislators and 800 unelected ones, 25 Ministerial Government departments and 20 Non-ministerial ones, with up to 109 paid ministers between them, and about 520 agencies, public bodies, high profile groups and public corporations and with military services, including Trident, geared up for offence rather than defence and a national debt approaching anything like £2 trillion is looking at independence through very heavily tinted red,white and blue specs. The £12+ billion we sent to Westminster would have paid last year's administration costs for all the Westminster Government Departments with a couple or three billion £ to spare. (and we are paying for our own Scottish equivalents of most of them already.)
 
GERS Data is produced for Scotland as part of the UK, It does not model scenarios for an independent Scotland in which the Scottish Government would be able to make ALL its own choices..including not to run the economy for the benefit of London (though I would hope we wouldn't do it for the benefit only of Edinburgh and the central belt either)  We probably will have some level of austerity in Scotland until we get up and running, but it will be, I hope, an austerity not wholly paid for by the poorest and most disadvantaged of us, while the better off get tax cuts....but we are equally probably facing worse austerity in a post-Brexit UK...and what looks like Tory Governments forever, given the voting tendencies in England.

We are almost undoubtedly going to be facing drastic change soon...so there is going to be uncertainty whichever way we jump...so why not independence, if for no other reason than that the uncertainty won't last as long as the infighting within the Tory and Labour parties before they get down to doing anything useful, if measured by their incompetence in the past two years. It makes more sense to discard the crumbling security blanket of the Union and join all the other small countries who seem to manage well enough...like New Zealand,Denmark, Finland, Norway and Ireland for example......if they can succeed, why would anybody think we Scots couldn't? 

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14 minutes ago, Yngwie said:

I look forward to seeing all that printed on the side of a big red bus! ?

Don't need all that... "Scotland government competent - UK Government  gibbering lunatic spendthrifts" would do fine, don't you think?

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  • 4 weeks later...

It's getting like the Hokey Kokey in out and shake it all about, what a pantomime :lol: 

And Scott Mann, Conservative MP for North Cornwall wants all knives to be fitted with GPS.  No wonder the country is in a mess with MP's like that running it!

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8 hours ago, IBM said:

It's getting like the Hokey Kokey in out and shake it all about, what a pantomime :lol: 

And Scott Mann, Conservative MP for North Cornwall wants all knives to be fitted with GPS.  No wonder the country is in a mess with MP's like that running it!

Actually not a bad idea, would help us oldies with failing memories to remember which was the cutlery drawer.

Maybe he should have his marbles fitted with GPS as he's clearly mislaid them.

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