Oor Nicola Sturgeon thread.

[StellarHibee]

46 minutes ago, ScotiaNostra said:

How long would you expect them to last before being suspended

About as long as a tory lasts before being suspended. Either a very long time or just not at all.

[Trogdor]

Humza deserves a chance to clean the mess. Noises so far are decidedly mixed. I really want to see more of the scope of this governance review. Get it right and he buys himself more time. Get it wrong and it'll be open season at Conference.

He needs to tell Hosie, Blackford, Marwick etc. to keep their mouths shut. It's unhelpful. 

There won't be a re-run of the leadership election. It is now becoming clear why some people opted to be a shitebag and duck the contest. It was because they knew the scale of the mess. Humza looks like the one establishment stooge that didn't know! 

[Leith Green]

1 hour ago, George Cowley said:

Decent piece by Kevin McKenna in the Herald describing it, I think fairly accurately, as a giant Ponzi scheme. 

https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/23458842.kevin-mckenna-snp-took-scotland-ride/

  Reveal hidden contents

Kevin McKenna: How the SNP took Scotland for a ride

11 hrs ago

“YOU reap what you sow,” said Nicola Sturgeon during leaked footage of a National Executive Council meeting of her party in 2021. It was meant to be a warning, but given what we now know about the grubby behaviour of the SNP’s professional wing, it might also be seen as a rallying call. “Fill your boots” is one other interpretation.

The SNP’s platinum-card lounge confers many benefits. The £110k camper van sitting in a Dunfermline driveway and a luxury holiday villa near the Algarve testify to the sort of lifestyle that accompanies a journey up through its ranks. Second homes in the Highlands, trips abroad to “encourage trade links”, a few days in New York to celebrate Tartan Week.

Ah yes, those trade links. I’m sure such trips are motivated by a genuine desire to spark interest in Scotland from global business leaders and foreign governments. Everybody says so. It’s just that, well … places like Possilpark, Wester Hailes and Shettleston can never quite access the benefits of the SNP flying club’s selfless devotion to international travel.

The wholesale meltdown that’s engulfed the SNP over the last three weeks indicates that, at the very top of the party, a sort of political Ponzi scheme has been operating.

This is how it works: you, the members, must give us your money and trust us to invest it in the struggle for independence. However, you must never ask us any questions about how your money has been deployed.

In the NEC footage obtained by the Sunday Mail, Ms Sturgeon says: “I’m not going to get into the details … but just be very careful about suggestions there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors. There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances, and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting there is.”

So there we have it. In most well-run and honest enterprises, suggestions that there may be a problem with the finances usually meets with a pledge to investigate the matter and report back soonest. In the SNP you’re told to keep your mouth shut lest it interrupt the cash flow from the rank and file membership.

Henceforth, the phrase “taken for a ride” will link to this found footage of a serving First Minister of Scotland hectoring the body which is supposed to ordain proper financial governance of her party.

Several of us – both inside the SNP and out – have been casting doubt on its commitment to independence. For the handful of commentators asking such questions, responses rarely get much worse than being accused by the party’s gargoyle division of being Yoons and Red Tories. Occasionally, some of the leadership’s favoured lickspittles in the media will respond with suitably soothing and unctuous hagiographies of the former First Minister. Less truth to power, more soothe to power.

For those inside the party it can result in being bullied, intimidated and threatened. And all of it orchestrated by the leadership. In the leaked footage, Ms Sturgeon furiously seeks to close down discussion of the finances. Someone called “Alison” is targeted. The message is clear: “I know it was you, Fredo.” It’s the sort of behaviour which forced people like Joanna Cherry to resign from the NEC.

And so, we’ll ask again: has the party in the Sturgeon era ever been serious about independence? Even if the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances concludes there’s nothing to see here, one thing is clear: whatever that missing £670k was spent on, it had little or nothing to do with independence.

In Ms Sturgeon’s nine years as SNP leader the independence movement has undergone a quiet metamorphosis. The ordinary members believed it to be driven by them through their cash donations and hundreds of hours of street-by-street, unpaid campaigning.

Yet, all the time, those in receipt of their largesse have been viewing independence as an enterprise zone based on a fiendishly simple business model: condemn the Tories; stand up for Scotland; win elections; give your friends and family key appointments to ensure loyalty and keep the gravy train chugging along.

And then hire dozens of spin doctors and researchers, costing £1m per annum (and rising) for the purpose of briefing against any of the awkward squad foolish enough to question the leadership’s real motives. Meanwhile, assemble an army of malevolent young misogynists in cheap suits and North Face duffel bags to issue threats against women who believe in the self-evident truth that fully intact men identifying as women “are at it”.

A feature of several conversations I’ve had with party activists, journalists and Yes supporters in recent weeks is that a spell in opposition will be good for the SNP and that it will result in a clear-out of all the bad actors. After all, independence is a long game and many who have passed on could never have dreamed that their cause could have come this far. Being a glass-half-full sort of chiel, I wish I could share their optimism.

The membership had a chance of slopping out the stables during the recent leadership election. But rather than elect either of the two women who had pledged to do just that they gave the job to a leadership glove puppet whose first action was to promote a division of like-minded political misfits and mediocrities into government.

This party has laid waste to the prospects for independence and exposed Scotland to international ridicule, a latter-day Freedonia presided over by politicians channelling Groucho, Zeppo, Chico and Harpo. It’s not a spell in opposition that’s required here, it’s a winding-up of the entire party.

If the SNP are voted out of government in 2026, then what? Scottish Labour is similarly full of inarticulate party hacks and led by a millionaire who sent his children to a fee-paying, educational facility. His family fortune derives from a business that didn’t pay its lowest-paid workers a real Living Wage and refused to recognise trade unions.

This Scottish branch takes its orders from another millionaire who has decreed that members caught in possession of Socialist tendencies risk expulsion and who has been in lock-step with the Tories over immigration policy. He’s banned his elected members from supporting trade union strike action, somehow believes that empowering Big Business will improve the economic outlook for the masses and thinks that one Union Jack on his office wall is one too few.

Almost 200 years of something self-identifying as a democracy has given us a political class characterised by graft, mediocrity and exploitation.

 

McKenna?

He defamed John Nicolson in the Sunday Herald at the weekend, basically regurgitating  (hilariously) an article that was published by the Express that "MI5" were behind the plot to oust Sturgeon.

McKenna is an absolute tit, and is - today - being ripped a new arsehole by his employers for this.

Watch for the fulsome apology and donation to Nicolsons charity of choice soon.

 

 

 

[Bad Wolf]

Kevin "it's a masonic conspiracy!" McKenna is an absolute c*nt and I have always found it very hard to believe that he backs independence. He certainly didn't when spewing out the west central belt ScotLab line about poor wee Catholics being oppressed by the nasty proddy SNP post independence. I'm prepared to believe he knows more about MI5's activities than the rest of us though.

[Billy Jean King]

1 hour ago, George Cowley said:

Decent piece by Kevin McKenna in the Herald describing it, I think fairly accurately, as a giant Ponzi scheme. 

https://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/viewpoint/23458842.kevin-mckenna-snp-took-scotland-ride/

  Reveal hidden contents

Kevin McKenna: How the SNP took Scotland for a ride

11 hrs ago

“YOU reap what you sow,” said Nicola Sturgeon during leaked footage of a National Executive Council meeting of her party in 2021. It was meant to be a warning, but given what we now know about the grubby behaviour of the SNP’s professional wing, it might also be seen as a rallying call. “Fill your boots” is one other interpretation.

The SNP’s platinum-card lounge confers many benefits. The £110k camper van sitting in a Dunfermline driveway and a luxury holiday villa near the Algarve testify to the sort of lifestyle that accompanies a journey up through its ranks. Second homes in the Highlands, trips abroad to “encourage trade links”, a few days in New York to celebrate Tartan Week.

Ah yes, those trade links. I’m sure such trips are motivated by a genuine desire to spark interest in Scotland from global business leaders and foreign governments. Everybody says so. It’s just that, well … places like Possilpark, Wester Hailes and Shettleston can never quite access the benefits of the SNP flying club’s selfless devotion to international travel.

The wholesale meltdown that’s engulfed the SNP over the last three weeks indicates that, at the very top of the party, a sort of political Ponzi scheme has been operating.

This is how it works: you, the members, must give us your money and trust us to invest it in the struggle for independence. However, you must never ask us any questions about how your money has been deployed.

In the NEC footage obtained by the Sunday Mail, Ms Sturgeon says: “I’m not going to get into the details … but just be very careful about suggestions there are problems with the party’s finances, because we depend on donors. There are no reasons for people to be concerned about the party’s finances, and all of us need to be careful about not suggesting there is.”

So there we have it. In most well-run and honest enterprises, suggestions that there may be a problem with the finances usually meets with a pledge to investigate the matter and report back soonest. In the SNP you’re told to keep your mouth shut lest it interrupt the cash flow from the rank and file membership.

Henceforth, the phrase “taken for a ride” will link to this found footage of a serving First Minister of Scotland hectoring the body which is supposed to ordain proper financial governance of her party.

Several of us – both inside the SNP and out – have been casting doubt on its commitment to independence. For the handful of commentators asking such questions, responses rarely get much worse than being accused by the party’s gargoyle division of being Yoons and Red Tories. Occasionally, some of the leadership’s favoured lickspittles in the media will respond with suitably soothing and unctuous hagiographies of the former First Minister. Less truth to power, more soothe to power.

For those inside the party it can result in being bullied, intimidated and threatened. And all of it orchestrated by the leadership. In the leaked footage, Ms Sturgeon furiously seeks to close down discussion of the finances. Someone called “Alison” is targeted. The message is clear: “I know it was you, Fredo.” It’s the sort of behaviour which forced people like Joanna Cherry to resign from the NEC.

And so, we’ll ask again: has the party in the Sturgeon era ever been serious about independence? Even if the ongoing police investigation into the party’s finances concludes there’s nothing to see here, one thing is clear: whatever that missing £670k was spent on, it had little or nothing to do with independence.

In Ms Sturgeon’s nine years as SNP leader the independence movement has undergone a quiet metamorphosis. The ordinary members believed it to be driven by them through their cash donations and hundreds of hours of street-by-street, unpaid campaigning.

Yet, all the time, those in receipt of their largesse have been viewing independence as an enterprise zone based on a fiendishly simple business model: condemn the Tories; stand up for Scotland; win elections; give your friends and family key appointments to ensure loyalty and keep the gravy train chugging along.

And then hire dozens of spin doctors and researchers, costing £1m per annum (and rising) for the purpose of briefing against any of the awkward squad foolish enough to question the leadership’s real motives. Meanwhile, assemble an army of malevolent young misogynists in cheap suits and North Face duffel bags to issue threats against women who believe in the self-evident truth that fully intact men identifying as women “are at it”.

A feature of several conversations I’ve had with party activists, journalists and Yes supporters in recent weeks is that a spell in opposition will be good for the SNP and that it will result in a clear-out of all the bad actors. After all, independence is a long game and many who have passed on could never have dreamed that their cause could have come this far. Being a glass-half-full sort of chiel, I wish I could share their optimism.

The membership had a chance of slopping out the stables during the recent leadership election. But rather than elect either of the two women who had pledged to do just that they gave the job to a leadership glove puppet whose first action was to promote a division of like-minded political misfits and mediocrities into government.

This party has laid waste to the prospects for independence and exposed Scotland to international ridicule, a latter-day Freedonia presided over by politicians channelling Groucho, Zeppo, Chico and Harpo. It’s not a spell in opposition that’s required here, it’s a winding-up of the entire party.

If the SNP are voted out of government in 2026, then what? Scottish Labour is similarly full of inarticulate party hacks and led by a millionaire who sent his children to a fee-paying, educational facility. His family fortune derives from a business that didn’t pay its lowest-paid workers a real Living Wage and refused to recognise trade unions.

This Scottish branch takes its orders from another millionaire who has decreed that members caught in possession of Socialist tendencies risk expulsion and who has been in lock-step with the Tories over immigration policy. He’s banned his elected members from supporting trade union strike action, somehow believes that empowering Big Business will improve the economic outlook for the masses and thinks that one Union Jack on his office wall is one too few.

Almost 200 years of something self-identifying as a democracy has given us a political class characterised by graft, mediocrity and exploitation.

 

Seriously, it's just regurgitation of everything we already know with a bit of insinuation on top. McKenna knows no more about what this us all about than anyone else outside the upper echelons of Police Scotland. All media outlets are using identical tactics now as they are as much in the dark as the rest of us are. The biggest surprise is McKenna didn't link it all to a Masonic conspiracy !

[alta-pete]

The point I was trying (and clearly failing) to make was that comparing it to a Ponzi scheme seemed (to me) a rather eloquent description. 

Just keep giving us money, give us some more, you’ll get your jam tomorrow. But producing nothing tangible in the interim. 

The faithful lapped it up, kept buying in until whoever was the chap (I think lampooned earlier) decided enough was enough and after the reallocation/pissing of the £600k accused them of being criminal. And from which point the house of cards started it’s collapse. 

[Trogdor]

3 minutes ago, George Cowley said:

The point I was trying (and clearly failing) to make was that comparing it to a Ponzi scheme seemed (to me) a rather eloquent description. 

Just keep giving us money, give us some more, you’ll get your jam tomorrow. But producing nothing tangible in the interim. 

The faithful lapped it up, kept buying in until whoever was the chap (I think lampooned earlier) decided enough was enough and after the reallocation/pissing of the £600k accused them of being criminal. And from which point the house of cards started it’s collapse. 

Never forget this guy... a hero.

[The_Kincardine]

Humza doesn't want Nippy suspended 'for what her husband did' thus 1. missing the point and 2. chucking Petey under the motorhome.  This is the sort of nonsense we were all expecting.

 

[Pocketman]

[ScotiaNostra]

13 hours ago, StellarHibee said:

About as long as a tory lasts before being suspended. Either a very long time or just not at all.

Yeah, that should work. Act like a tory would handle it

[StellarHibee]

2 hours ago, ScotiaNostra said:

Yeah, that should work. Act like a tory would handle it

Why should other parties be disadvantaged by playing by rules that the Tories don't?

Only a Tory would think that should be the way if it.

[Michael W]

Only a Tory would think the rules are for the plebs and they are above them. 

[alta-pete]

So the SNP are now Tories? 

[Aufc]

It seems that the SNP are determined to just keep increasing the tax on high earners. Scotland doesnt have a lot of higher earners so it is hardly going to encourage additional ones to the country if they keep increasing the tax rates. 

Also, i see he wants to double council tax on holiday homes which i presume is to try and stop people from owning holiday homes in rural homes to allow "local" people to live here. Forgive my ignorance, but will this not just result in the owners of these homes just increasing the rental prices to cover it? It doesnt really address the issue which is lack of houses or the price of them. Its surely a bit of a catch 22 situation in that these areas rely on tourists coming in so by making it more expensive then people may just holiday elsewhere. 

[ScotiaNostra]

58 minutes ago, StellarHibee said:

Why should other parties be disadvantaged by playing by rules that the Tories don't?

Only a Tory would think that should be the way if it.

 

[SouthLanarkshireWhite]

56 minutes ago, Aufc said:

It seems that the SNP are determined to just keep increasing the tax on high earners. Scotland doesnt have a lot of higher earners so it is hardly going to encourage additional ones to the country if they keep increasing the tax rates. 

Also, i see he wants to double council tax on holiday homes which i presume is to try and stop people from owning holiday homes in rural homes to allow "local" people to live here. Forgive my ignorance, but will this not just result in the owners of these homes just increasing the rental prices to cover it? It doesnt really address the issue which is lack of houses or the price of them. Its surely a bit of a catch 22 situation in that these areas rely on tourists coming in so by making it more expensive then people may just holiday elsewhere. 

But if you don't know how to solve something, just put the tax up. Always a good vote winner.

[54_and_counting]

1 hour ago, SouthLanarkshireWhite said:

But if you don't know how to solve something, just put the tax up. Always a good vote winner.

In this case its probably true as a lot of their core voters most likely don't pay tax and instead take from the system

[SouthLanarkshireWhite]

20 minutes ago, 54_and_counting said:

In this case its probably true as a lot of their core voters most likely don't pay tax and instead take from the system

Glad you asked that question...the idea that squeezing higher rate taxpayers to solve Scotland's problems is frankly beyond laughable.

 

 

 

Edited April 18, 2023 by SouthLanarkshireWhite

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, 54_and_counting said:

In this case its probably true as a lot of their core voters most likely don't pay tax and instead take from the system

The parasitic ownership class, who "don't pay tax and instead take from the system" generally vote Tory not SNP.

[Venti]

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-65309791

Phil Mitchell arrested