Oor Nicola Sturgeon thread.

[Oceanlineayr]

14 minutes ago, FreedomFarter said:

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

They usually also have affinity to Rangers. It's not like a "great" Scottish institute like Rangers would ever dodge tax??

[SouthLanarkshireWhite]

18 minutes ago, FreedomFarter said:

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

How many of those live in Scotland?

[Aufc]

1 hour 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

 

44 minutes ago, SouthLanarkshireWhite said:

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

 

 

 

To be fair, not everyone who doesnt pay tax "takes" from the system. Some of them could be full time maws (like my wife) albeit she runs a couple of businesses but doesnt earn enough to pay tax. 

 

[Guest]

18 minutes ago, SouthLanarkshireWhite said:

How many of those live in Scotland?

My last reply there wasn't a rebuttal to your point. I agree that taxing workers isn't the ideal solution. I'm instead inclined towards this (it's specifically a funding model for UBI being posited here but the base thinking is transferable):

Quote

A common myth, promoted by the rich, is that wealth is produced individually before it is collectivized by the state, through taxation. In fact, wealth was always produced collectively and privatized by those with the power to do it: the propertied class. Farmland and seeds, pre-modern forms of capital, were collectively developed through generations of peasant endeavor that landlords appropriated by stealth. Today, every smartphone comprises components developed by some government grant, or through the commons of pooled ideas, for which no dividends have ever been paid to society.

So how should society be compensated? Taxation is the wrong answer. Corporations pay taxes in exchange for services the state provides them, not for capital injections that must yield dividends. There is thus a strong case that the commons have a right to a share of the capital stock, and associated dividends, reflecting society’s investment in corporations’ capital. And, because it is impossible to calculate the size of state and social capital crystalized in any firm, we can decide how much of its capital stock the public should own only by means of a political mechanism.

A simple policy would be to enact legislation requiring that a percentage of capital stock (shares) from every initial public offering (IPO) be channeled into a Commons Capital Depository, with the associated dividends funding a universal basic dividend (UBD). This UBD should, and can be, entirely independent of welfare payments, unemployment insurance, and so forth, thus ameliorating the concern that it would replace the welfare state, which embodies the concept of reciprocity between waged workers and the unemployed.

Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/basic-income-funded-by-capital-income-by-yanis-varoufakis-2016-10

Of course the SNP aren't offering anything close to that. Yet nor are Labour and then the current Conservative government are committed to the direct opposite. We can talk about the prospects of socialist economic policy in a Scotland seceded from the UK but that wasn't why I jumped in there. We know what that guy I replied to was implying. He wasn't meaning the ownership class in society but was instead taking aim at the least wealthy among us.

[54_and_counting]

3 minutes ago, Aufc said:

 

To be fair, not everyone who doesnt pay tax "takes" from the system. Some of them could be full time maws (like my wife) albeit she runs a couple of businesses but doesnt earn enough to pay tax. 

 

Examples like your other half arent the ones i mean though, the ones i mean are the ones who'll be absolutely ecstatic about the proposed 25k a year benefits crap we heard yesterday 

[Benjamin_Nevis]

2 minutes ago, Aufc said:

 

To be fair, not everyone who doesnt pay tax "takes" from the system. Some of them could be full time maws (like my wife) albeit she runs a couple of businesses but doesnt earn enough to pay tax. 

 

Hardly any will take from the system. Most folk in the benefits system I've worked with hardly give a shite about politics, I'd be surprised if the turnout rate for them is anywhere near 50% 

A fair chunk of those will be folk on low earnings as well. They may well get UC as an effective top up but I think we all know what the idiot Rangers fan was hinting at. 

[edinabear]

Want be long until wee nippy is arrested. A disgusting Brit Nat, Yoon conspiracy 

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, 54_and_counting said:

Examples like your other half arent the ones i mean though, the ones i mean are the ones who'll be absolutely ecstatic about the proposed 25k a year benefits crap we heard yesterday 

Aye, the plebs. The underlings. The ones you spit on.

This is a forum for football fans, rooted as we are in working class communities. Away ye go, ya filthy snob.

[vikingTON]

4 hours ago, Aufc said:

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. 

So you agree that a Maoist elimination of the landlord class is the only sensible solution then. 

[Aufc]

9 minutes ago, virginton said:

So you agree that a Maoist elimination of the landlord class is the only sensible solution then. 

Not really as my wife has a property business and is a landlord! I think the issue is that there is happy medium to be found. Clearly there is a requirement for landlords at some level. There is no requirement for shite landlords. There is a requirement for more housing to be built. Tenants should be able to get a mortgage based on previous rental payment history (i read earlier this week that there is a building society looking at a product like this). 

[vikingTON]

There's no requirement for landlordism. You and your wife will be on the list. 

[Ludo*1]

On 17/04/2023 at 16:29, 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 outed as a lying arsepiece is pretty decent as well.

 

[sophia]

Ivan McKee had a less than subtle dig this morning when asked if he supported suspensions.

His reply was no and no despite suspensions having been handed out in broadly similar circumstances in the past.

 

[Scary Bear]

On 18/04/2023 at 17:21, virginton said:

There's no requirement for landlordism. You and your wife will be on the list. 

How will I get a holiday cottage for a week in August if there are no landlords?

 

[Suspect Device]

 

Motorhomes and burner phones. Very Breaking Bad.

 

BTW, the 'story' is a load of pish and innuendo. Police are looking for stuff. Add in something that most people would associate with criminals (through Line of Duty or Breaking Bad) and you have a Sunday Mail story.

 

 

[doulikefish]

Burner phones

No such thing just watch Hunted on ch4 to dispel that myth 

[Dan Steele]

"luxury pens" though.

 

[Savage Henry]

13 minutes ago, Dan Steele said:

"luxury pens" though.

 

Those SNP branded Parker Pens are collectors items.  
 

[Wee-Bey]

23 minutes ago, Dan Steele said:

"luxury pens" though.

 

When Rangers get their traditional 80th minute Ibrox spot kick at 3-0 up rather than 0-0.

[Dan Steele]

47 minutes ago, Savage Henry said:

Those SNP branded Parker Pens are collectors items.  
 

Scenes when they find box loads of yellow Post-its in the cupboard under the stairs.