Glenconner Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Is Annabel Goldie too old for Ruth Davidson? 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fide Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 An independent Scotland would have to face the same issues. It was just a wee joke..... 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjw Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 It was just a wee joke.....apologies. No smiley, no get it. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fide Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 apologies. No smiley, no get it. My sense of humour is just too subtle for some. Either that, or I'm just vastly unfunny. One of the two. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedRob72 Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Other service related industries like tourism are the answer, not manufacturing stuff that can be made cheaper elsewhere. Further Investment in specialist engineering and manufacturing that we can still charge a premium for worldwide, whist retaining and harnessing the skills, knowledge and expertise of our workforce. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hampden Diehard Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Is Annabel Goldie too old for Ruth Davidson? The way she fumbled with some of the questions when she was pushed suggests that she's too old to be appearing as some sort of spokesperson for the Scottish Tories. Then again, the Scottish Tories like to put over that they are their own people...conveniently forgetting that they have hee-haw influence in Scotland so it doesn't matter to the voters of the party in England what they say anyway. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hampden Diehard Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Other service related industries like tourism are the answer, not manufacturing stuff that can be made cheaper elsewhere. Tourism ain't cutting it for Greece, Spain, Portugal or Italy, the big holiday destinations in Europe. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Baxter Parp Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Tourism ain't cutting it for Greece, Spain, Portugal or Italy, the big holiday destinations in Europe. Be fair, they haven't got much in the way of other industries. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bob the tank Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 I'm liking the cut of Red Rob's jib today. Don't usually agree with anything he says but credit for his last few posts 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
renton Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Further Investment in specialist engineering and manufacturing that we can still charge a premium for worldwide, whist retaining and harnessing the skills, knowledge and expertise of our workforce. Correct, it also means a proper industrial strategy and focussed investment. In Scotland you are talking about the semiconductor, computing and software design sectors - silicon glen - which today employs roughly 80-90,000 folk directly, as a sector nearly as big as those directly employed by oil and gas (although obviously the oil and gas supply chain keeps many more indirectly employed). It's mostly clustered around University towns, where you get tonnes of these hi tech SMEs offshooting from applied research at Unis. So you need a lot more inward investment into Unis to encourage them to push research along certain lines to benefit our existing infrastructure and also to find disruptive technologies: the most dramatic growth obviously comes from finding radical solutions that allow you to break competitor holds on markets. Likewise you have the 30,000 currently involved in life sciences, again clustered around Universities, which is experiencing some serious growth, and the future renewables industry that could potentially employ upwards of 60,000 people. In the wider UK sense, the UK has the second biggest Aerospace sector in the world (and genuine world leaders in some of those companies, like Rolls Royce) after the US, and is also a huge player in pharmaceuticals, as well as having a nascent space industry (the Reaction Engines Ltd SABRE engine is a great example of potentially disruptive technology. Again, like Scotland there is a very strong silicon based industry, based around Uni towns (Cambridge based ARM licenses it's designs into pretty much every portable device on the planet). The trick as I said above is focused investment into Universities to create the necessary educated workforce and to help build smaller companies into competitive forces. We can't hold onto the bulk manufacturing jobs, but we can keep hold of the design jobs and specialist manufacturing. The issue is that we have a UK government who would stand aside while our industries are dismembered, the farce with Pfizer's proposed take over of AstraZeneca, which would have seen the latter (the UK's second biggest pharmaceutical after GlaxoSmithKline) torn to pieces and gutted with a loss of highly skilled R&D jobs, the AZ board's stand in rejecting the Pfizer advances in the face of angry shareholders would've been easier if the UK government had stated a preference for keeping those jobs in the UK, or demanding guarentees of Pfizer. The shareholder value approach is also wrong, in the UK we suffer from companies approaching shareholder value as the only short and long term value they have, so if that means takeovers, mergers or spin off of divisions, so be it. R & D typically requires a lot of money and tends not to immediately pay dividends, but satisfies shareholder value in the long term. An instructive example can be seen in how Boeing lost it's uncontested supremacy in the wide body airliner market when Airbus took it's time spending money on designing and building better planes, while Boeing stood still and played silly buggers trying to increase shareholder value. There is no reason why the Scotland and the UK more generally cannot maximise it's potential in hi tech manufacturing and design, but it will require a will from the government's of the day, backed by money and a long term outlook. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Lambies Doos Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Lower the corporation tax ffs Ireland booming again 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sparky88 Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Tourism ain't cutting it for Greece, Spain, Portugal or Italy, the big holiday destinations in Europe.the problem with those countries isnt that their tourism industries are disasters or, indeed that they have poor manufacturing sectors. It's that their governments, particularly Greece, were spending money like it was going out of fashion. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjw Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 the problem with those countries isnt that their tourism industries are disasters or, indeed that they have poor manufacturing sectors. It's that their governments, particularly Greece, were spending money like it was going out of fashion.They should take a leaf out of our governments book and put some away for a rainy day. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ScotlandGer Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Ooft! Deary me! There were times when Dugdale was sat there like a juvenile audience member blankly observing other people, and overwhelmed that they had actually constructive / creative thoughts on the different questions. The silence after the big platitude stuff speech she had prepared was something else. Personally, I thought she was out of her depth when she was elected an MSP (which, tbf, can be partly attributed to a quirk of the electoral system, Labour's internal organisation for the list system, and the SNP land-slide), but when she became deputy it seemed like being an accidental over-promotion. But, to now be leader ... yikes for Labour. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
happysouth Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Ooft! Deary me! There were times when Dugdale was sat there like a juvenile audience member blankly observing other people, and overwhelmed that they had actually constructive / creative thoughts on the different questions. The silence after the big platitude stuff speech she had prepared was something else. Personally, I thought she was out of her depth when she was elected an MSP (which, tbf, can be partly attributed to a quirk of the electoral system, Labour's internal organisation for the list system, and the SNP land-slide), but when she became deputy it seemed like being an accidental over-promotion. But, to now be leader ... yikes for Labour. when you think about how representative question time like to make the audience for these shows it was quite astonishing that her (well rehearsed ) speech didn't get a single clap or even a polite hear hear. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
well fan for life Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 (edited) Catching up just now. Kezia felt she had to vote for someone who could be Prime Minister, so she voted for Yvette Cooper. And then THAT silence. They are dead in the water. I think they're far beyond that now. They drowned long ago and there's no hope of finding a body.Edit to add: I'm just catching up on this. I actually want to switch it off. Watching Dugdale flounder is fucking embarrassing, and I'm not even a Labour supporter. Edited October 30, 2015 by well fan for life 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sophia Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 Its completely remarkable that not one happy clappy party placed seal felt the urge to support her. She'd be as well taking the Keegan option without further ado. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ScotlandGer Posted October 30, 2015 Share Posted October 30, 2015 when you think about how representative question time like to make the audience for these shows it was quite astonishing that her (well rehearsed ) speech didn't get a single clap or even a polite hear hear. F*** aye, I didn't even think about that. I normally have a bad habit of feeling sorry for politicians when they're in trouble, but Dugdale just reminds me too much of the type of student-politician that you get among Politics / Law department undergraduates in Universities - over-eager, centre-right, try-hards. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colkitto Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 Caught up with this last night. I thought Keith Brown was very good and seems to be very underrated - he should be used more on these types of programmes. Dugdale, jeeze! Completely embarrassing at times and what is it with the constant smiling? Her party are in dire straights, time to show your serious side instead of this happy, everything is just rosy in the garden, persona she puts on. The big speech and then total silence wasn't just down to poor delivery , people have generally turned off from Labour and don't trust them anymore. Also, the sarcastic laugh about the Tories being the 2nd biggest party at the elections next year could just come back and haunt her.. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
well fan for life Posted October 31, 2015 Share Posted October 31, 2015 I would have more respect for Dugdale if she actually approached this like "we know we're in the shit. We know you don't trust us." Instead she does these things like a total space cadet. Acting like there isn't much of a problem. If anything people like her less now than ever. She comes across as being so far out of the loop that there is no way back for her. FFS she's making Murphy look like a political heavyweight. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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