Cruelty built on lies, Reform’s immigration plans

Feb23 by weegingerdug

On Monday Reform UK’s home affairs spokes bigot the millionaire Zia Yusuf announced his party’s plans for the immigration system should we be unfortunate enough to see Reform UK take power after the next Westminster general election, which due to Westminster’s corrupt and undemocratic first past the post voting system could allow Farage and his minions to win a crushing majority in the Commons on as little as one third of the popular vote. Should this transpire, there would be virtually no checks and balances in the British political system to limit Farage’s exercise of unlimited power.

Reform’s plans for immigration are every bit as cruel and petty as you might have feared. A Reform UK government would create an agency modelled on Trump’s paramilitary thugs of ICE which would aim to deport hundreds of thousands of people, including many who arrived in the UK through recognised and governmentally accepted routes, who have obeyed all laws, abided by all the Byzantine settlement rules and regulations imposed by the Home Office, and paid the UK Government thousands of pounds in visa fees.

One of the nastiest aspects of these plans is that Reform intends to abolish Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) status, and replace it with a five year visa for which only those earning more than £68,000 a year would be eligible. Holders of this visa would not be entitled to treatment on the NHS or to claim any benefits. This is more draconian than even Trump’s immigration policy and it would make the UK one of the very few states anywhere in the world without a visa category providing for the permanent residency of foreign nationals who have met stringent visa conditions.

There are an estimated 430,000 people living in the UK with ILR, many of whom have lived in the UK for decades, are raising families here and have built their lives here. Reform’s vile plans throw them and their families into chaos and uncertainty.

As is typical of Reform UK propaganda, the party spreads lies and false information about foreign citizens resident in the UK. My other half is an American citizen who arrived in Scotland in 2019 on a spouse visa, so we have personal experience of the UK visa scheme and the arduous and expensive process of obtaining ILR. He was finally awarded ILR at the end of 2024. Throughout the five year qualifying period he was not eligible for and did not claim any benefits. One of Reform’s most common lies is that immigrants are only in the UK for benefits handouts. This is categorically untrue. Those in receipt of ILR can claim benefits and use the NHS freely but they can only do so after having proven that they can support themselves without recourse to public funds for at least five years. Only 2.7% of Universal Credit claimants are ILR holders, a third of whom are in employment, hardly the epidemic of foreign benefits scroungers Farage would have us believe in.

Migrants who come to the UK on family visas because they are the spouses or family members of British citizens are not entitled to benefits and may only use the NHS after paying an NHS surcharge to the Home Office on top of their visa fees. This charge is currently £1,035 per year for most applicants, meaning that those on a 5 year pathway to ILR – which the Labour government is planning to abolish and replace with a ten year wait – will have to pay a total of £5175 to the Home Office on top of their visa fees. For us the visa fees were £1,321 for the two and a half year duration of the visa, this then had to be renewed whereupon the same fee had to be paid again along with £2587 in NHS surcharges. Applicants have to pay this surcharge even if they are paying UK tax and national insurance. The surcharge must also be paid for each dependant child on the visa. For a family with two children this increases the total cost over a 5 year pathway to ILR to an eye watering £15,525.

Additionally, applicants must demonstrate that they meet the earnings threshold set by the Home Office, which is currently £29,000 annually per applicant . The income threshold is higher if the couple have dependent children. The main visa applicant must show evidence of earning an additional annual income of £3,800 (for the first child applicant) and £2,400 (for all subsequent child applicants), in addition to the £29,000 per annum minimum income requirement.

The visa applicants must also prove that they are resident in the UK, have suitable accommodation and are of good character. If the applicant is from a non-English speaking country they must submit proof of competence in written and spoken English. Technically, they could submit proof of competence in written and spoken Welsh or Scottish Gaelic instead.

While you can apply yourself, the complexity of the process is such that it’s advisable to use the services of a good immigration lawyer. If your application fails you don’t get your visa fee back.Using an immigration lawyer can add £1000 or more to each of the minimum of three applications or renewals you’ll have to make in order to get ILR (in our case the initial application, the visa renewal after two and a half years, then the application for ILR after 5 years. At each step you have to shell out thousands of pounds and submit reams of paperwork. The application for ILR costs £3029 but you don’t have to pay the NHS surcharge.

Once we had successfully negotiated all of this and my husband was granted ILR we thought that was the end of it. We had gone through a gruelling, stressful, and expensive process and finally got permanent residency for him. In total we estimate that we had spent over £15,000 and submitted over a kilogramme weight in documentation to get to that point.

Then we heard that Farage was planning to abolish ILR status and replace it with a five year visa which would be financially out of reach to the great majority of people, including us. We could not risk pinning all our hopes on the Reform UK bubble bursting, keeping our fingers crossed that they would not become the party of government in Westminster following the next general election. The peace of mind and security that we and so many other families in our position had worked so hard and spent so much to achieve was suddenly wheeched away. Hundreds of thousands of law abiding and hard working people with ILR have paid thousands of pounds to the Home Office, obeyed all the rules, cleared every hurdle, only for right wing British nationalists to go – HaHa! We’ve changed the rules, suckers.

So we were forced to take an additional step and submitted an application for British citizenship for my husband. This cost an additional £3700 including lawyer fees. His application was successful, and he will formally become a British citizen on 5 March, safely beyond the reach of Farage’s racist goalpost shifting.

We were able to scrape the money together to take this final step, but not everyone can. Those families are now facing very uncertain futures, dreading the prospect of ICE style raids on British towns and cities, sweeping up hard working law abiding people for the “crime” of being foreign. That’s the dystopian fascist Britain that’s in store for Scotland as part of this so-called union, cruelty built on lies.

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Rejoining the EU looks set to get much easier for an independent Scotland

Feb22 by weegingerdug

According to former SNP MP and MEP Alyn Smith, who is well informed about developments within the EU, joining the EU looks set to become a whole lot easier for an independent Scotland. The EU Commission is proposing to revamp and speed up the process through which states which are candidates for EU membership accede to membership of the Union. If these proposals are adopted, as Alyn Smith believes to be highly likely, then an independent Scotland could rapidly find itself back in the EU with Scottish businesses enjoying unfettered access to 465 million consumers in the European Single Market comprised of EU and EFTA states and a restoration of freedom of travel and settlement throughout Europe for Scottish citizens.

Late last year, the highly influential European Policy Centre published a report, A Test of Times, which set out proposals to revise and speed up the accession process for candidate states to become a part of the EU. The report was written in response to the geopolitical challenges which currently face Europe, in particular the war in Ukraine and the increasing unreliability of the United States as an ally of Europe under its unpredictable and intensely corrupt authoritarian president. The report concludes that the current accession process is too slow and unwieldy and makes a number of proposals to streamline it and speed it up.

You can read the full report here:

Click to access Enlargement_Reform-Web__1_.pdf

Billed as “reverse enlargement”, the proposed new accession process is intended to be more dynamic. The tldr version essentially allows candidate states partial membership of the EU with full access to the European Single Market and representation in the European Parliament and Commission while work is in progress to comply with the complete set of requirements for full EU membership. Although the paper was written with the idea of fast tracking EU membership for Ukraine and candidate member states in the Balkans, it could also have a dramatic and positive impact on Scottish hopes of returning to the EU. Scotland’s forced exit from the EU was the greatest single betrayal of the promises which were made to Scotland by the Better Together campaign during the 2014 independence referendum campaign.

Scots were falsely told that a Yes vote for independence would entail Scotland’s immediate ejection from the EU, yet we learned from the bitter experience of Brexit that it took almost four years from the EU referendum of 2016 for the UK to exit the EU, that would have given an independent Scotland ample time to accede to the EU in its own right given that as the former part of a member state it was already in full compliance with EU membership requirements and there was and is no majority desire within Scotland to leave the EU.

As is well known, 62% of Scots voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 EU referendum. That Scottish result was completely discounted and ignored by a Conservative government which pressed ahead with a hard Brexit in contravention of promises made by the Leave campaign which had insisted that a leave vote would not mean leaving the Single Market and Customs Union or an end to the freedom of movement and settlement throughout the EU which British citizens had hitherto enjoyed. Now British citizens may only visit an EU country for a maximum of 90 days in any 180 day period and will face biometric checks on entering the EU.

According to the most recent opinion poll, 73% of Scots favour a return to the EU but under Starmer the Labour party has fully signed up to the Conservatives’ hard Brexit. Even the Lib Dems previously the most pro-EU of the British political parties, has watered down its policy on rejoining the EU. There is no realistic prospect of the UK rejoining the EU for decades. The only route open to the overwhelming majority of Scots who desire a return to EU membership is through an independent Scotland joining the EU in its own right.

Now the EU Commission is proposing to allow partial EU membership in 2027, giving Ukraine EU status and a seat at the top table, before it has fulfilled all the usual criteria, with these rights and obligations being phased in later. This fast track membership process would also apply to other potential member states which have demonstrated a commitment to the European project. In this regard Scotland would be a shoo-in. Scotland is seeking independence from a state which has left the EU in no small measure due to public dissatisfaction within Scotland at being taken out of the EU against the will of the majority of the people of Scotland. You don’t get a stronger demonstration of commitment to the European project than that.

Additionally, unlike Ukraine or Kosovo, other candidate members to which this speedier accession process would apply, Scotland is neither embroiled in a war or dispute with a neighbouring state which rejects its right to independence or claims all or part of its territory. Unlike Albania, Scotland does not have serious issues with organised crime at all levels of government, and unlike Georgia Scotland has strong and robust democratic institutions. Scotland is already in compliance with most of the criteria required of an EU member state and would be considered an ideal candidate.

At this juncture I need to repeat something that has previously been covered numerous times on this blog. Spain would categorically not veto Scotland’s accession to the EU in order to discourage the Basques and Catalans. Spain objects to Catalan and Basque independence and refuses to recognise the independence of Kosovo because Basque or Catalan independence and the independence of Kosovo are prohibited by the constitutions of Spain and Serbia, from which the Albanian majority Kosovo declared independence in 2008. There is no such constitutional prohibition on Scottish independence in the UK and by agreeing to the independence referendum in 2014, the British Government accepted the right of Scotland to self-determination. Spain thus would have no reason to object to Scottish independence as it does not set a constitutional precedent which the Catalans or Basques could follow.

The repeated claims of a Spanish veto are based on a self-serving and wilful British nationalist misunderstanding of the nature and motive for a Spanish veto.

Should these new proposals for EU enlargement be adopted, an independent Scotland could find itself back in the EU and with full freedom of movement restored to Scottish citizens within a few months of independence. This could be a game changing argument in a future independence referendum campaign.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

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Kenny MacAskill announces that the party is over for Alba

Feb21 by weegingerdug

So much for my afternoon off. Literally seconds after publishing my last blog piece I learned that the Alba party’s leader Kenny MacAskill had issued a statement in an email to Alba party members saying that the party will not after all be standing candidates at May’s Holyrood election. The statement blames the sudden decision on the “perilous financial state”in which the party finds itself and the likely inability of Alba to re-register with the Electoral Commission by the end of next month as it is legally required to do. Unless something unexpected happens, this spells the end of Alba as a political party.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have never been a supporter of Alba, but in line with the long-standing policy I maintain on this blog I typically refrain from attacking other independence parties with which I disagree. I have long felt that the SNP leadership could do with a kick up the arse when it comes to pursuing independence, although I have never doubted the commitment of the party to independence. However Alba was never about putting pressure on the SNP to pursue independence with greater vigour. Alba was founded by Alex Salmond as his personal political vehicle.

Alba did not want to give the SNP leadership a kick up the arse on independence, it wanted to decapitate the SNP, pour petrol on the party’s corpse, set it on fire and kick it into a ditch. Founded with considerable publicity, boasting two Westminster MPs among its ranks and led by a former First Minister of considerable political talent, there was a brief time in which it seemed that Alba was about to become a major player in the Scottish independence movement. However the party failed to make any headway in the May 2021 Scottish elections or the local elections the following year. Despite gaining an MSP when Ash Regan defected to Alba, and receiving the defections of a couple of former SNP councillors, Alba never came anywhere close to winning an election in its own right.

It soon became apparent that Alba lacked internal democracy, most shockingly illustrated by Alex Salmond’s unilateral decision to rip up the results of Alba’s internal NEC elections in 2023. Founding members of the party were expelled, and Alba soon became mired in rancour and internal fighting. While Alex Salmond was alive the lid was largely kept screwed down on all of this, but following his untimely death it all soon blew up. Ash Regan was clearly deeply unhappy to lose the leadership election to Kenny MacAskill and left Alba to sit in Holyrood as an independent. Alba’s internal dissensions exploded into the open with the very public warfare between Kenny MacAskill and former general secretary Chris McEleny. The various factions within the party were soon vying for power and the resignations of former high profile supporters came thick and fast. Alleged irregularities in the party’s accounts were reported to the police and by the New Year it became increasingly apparent that Alba was on its last legs.

But none of that matters now. With his email to party members today (Saturday 21 February) which was first published by James Kelly of Scot Goes Pop, Kenny MacAskill has effectively announced the end of Alba as a political party. In his email announcing the decision not to contest May’s election he writes. “I have to advise that it looks likely that we will not be able to register and therefore even to contest the election. That brings also into question the viability of a Party which neither has financial resource nor the ability to contest elections.”

As far as May’s election goes, this means that as the anti-independence parties are splintering, the pro-independence parties are consolidating. The SNP and the Scottish Greens are now the only pro-independence parties contesting May’s election which have been heard of by the wider Scottish public. The other minor parties have a small number of loud and vocal online supporters but only a negligible presence elsewhere. All of them combined have only a fraction of the support that Alba had. The question now is whether Alba’s supporters will rally behind the SNP, or the Scottish Greens or will scatter to support for minor parties which will not save their deposits thus increasing the chances of a unionist candidate winning. But for Alba, the party is over.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

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New polling and Reform may have peaked

Feb21 by weegingerdug

I’ve been blogging a lot this week, which is what happens when there’s nothing on the telly except the Winter Olympics. All power to those who enjoy that sort of thing, but watching people sliding down a mountain in the snow with two planks strapped to their feet leaves me cold, pun intended. So my lack of televisual entertainment is your gain, or possibly loss, I’m not going to judge.

Anyway I had intended to take a bit of time off, but gobshite that I am, there have been a few developments I’ve not addressed so far which may have an impact on Scotland’s hopes of escape from this on-going car crash that calls itself a union. It’s a union in the same sense that I have a full head of long flowing locks, something that exists only in fantasy.

Anyway, what is real, and yah boo sucks to be you YouGov, yet another opinion poll has just been published with headline figures the exact opposite of the seriously dodgy YouGov poll published earlier this month which purported to show that levels of support for independence have hardly budged since the 2014 referendum. Friday’s poll from Find Out Now, commissioned by The National newspaper, puts support for independence on 53% while 47% would vote against, with don’t knows removed. This comes hot on the heels of a poll by Norstat which put support for independence on 51%.

I’ve previously blogged about how the methodology employed in YouGov’s polls on Scottish independence systematically undercounts the true level of support for independence and artificially boosts the level of opposition to it. The Norstat and Find Out Now polls which both showed a majority for independence and came in the same month as a You poll which claimed that the level of support for independence has hardly budged since the referendum in 2014, confirm that YouGov’s polling on the issue is methodologically suspect. YouGov is now the only polling company which still habitually returns polls showing majority opposition to independence. YouGov’s polls on Scottish independence are now more about providing political ammunition to parties opposed to independence than about assessing the true level of support for independence amongst the people of Scotland.

The Find Out Now poll makes for some seriously dire reading for the Labour party in Scotland. Not only does it show that Labour could lose almost half of its seats in Holyrood and fall to fourth position behind the SNP, Reform UK, and the Scottish Greens, it also shows that Anas Sarwar’s do or die attempt to oust Keir Starmer has died not done. While 70% of Scots think that it was right to call for Starmer’s resignation, 75% say Sarwar’s call will have no effect on how they plan to vote in May. Just 8% say that it makes them more likely to vote Labour, while 17% say it makes them less likely to vote for a party which has been unmasked as an irrelevant branch office by Sarwar’s vainglorious demand. This is hardly the political gamechanger which Sarwar hoped it would be. Indeed, all he has done is to reveal just how desperate things are for the Labour party in Scotland.

While this poll confirms the findings of other recent polls in pointing to a pro-independence majority in Holyrood composed of the SNP and the Scottish Greens – Alba is not polling remotely close to the level necessary to get any of its candidates elected and its continuing existence as a political party is now being called into question – this poll also shows that Scottish voting intentions are not immune to the constant barrage of attention and platforming given by the British media to the bide-a wee-home for Tories that is Reform UK, a party which asserts that it can fix broken Britain by providing another shot at electoral success for the Conservatives who broke it in the first place.

We face the hideous prospect of Reform UK becoming the second largest party in Holyrood, while they will be comfortably outnumbered by the SNP and the Greens, never mind by the other anti-independence parties, they will still have significant representation on Holyrood committees and as the largest opposition party will get prime place at First Minister’s Questions, which will give them an important platform from which to spread their racist anti-immigrant bullshit to scaremonger about the LGBT community, and, perhaps most importantly, to hinder the development of Scotland’s vital renewable energy industry with their climate change denying nonsense and the lie that the pursuit of net zero is the real reason for high energy bills in Scotland. All of this offensive deceitful far right Anglo-British nationalist slop will be eagerly lapped up by a Scottish media which is currently in desperate need of a new Saviour of the Union.

However, while it may not come in time to affect Reform’s performance in the Scottish election in May, there are a few welcome straws in the wind which suggest that Reform UK’s appeal may have peaked. Polling for the Gorton and Denton Westminster by-election due to be held on Thursday suggest that the Greens are narrowly ahead and may snatch the seat from Reform, which has thrown everything into the contest and whose victory is eagerly anticipated by the right wing press. Increasingly the English and Welsh Greens are being seen as the most credible party to defeat Reform in England. That’s very good news for supporters of Scottish and Welsh independence as the English and Welsh Greens support independence.

There are also some signs that the wheels may be starting to come off Nigel Farage’s one man bandwagon. The councils in England which are controlled by Reform have been mired in chaos and controversy. Despite being elected on a promise to reduce Council Tax they have all increased it while at the same time axing vital council services. Reform is discovering that like Keir Starmer, the self-serving lies you can get away with in opposition will find you out once you are in power.

Over the past few days there has been a slew of defections from Reform UK to a new party which is even more vile and far right than Reform is. Nine Reform UK councillors have defected to Restore Britain in the week since it was set up by Rupert Lowe, elected in 2024 as a Reform MP for Great Yarmouth. Lowe left Reform after an acrimonious falling out with Farage, Reform wasn’t big enough for both their egos. Lowe’s new party, Restore Britain, espouses nakedly racist policies and Christian nationalist policies essentially identical to those of the far right National Front in the 1970s and 80s. Restore Britain is ethno-nationalist and has attracted support from white supremacists. Lowe’s party asserts that possessing a British passport does not necessarily make you British and seeks the mass deportation of millions of people, particularly targeting minority ethnic communities. The new party has received the backing of Elon Musk, who will use his social media platform and immense wealth to promote it.

Lowe has previously called for the abolition of the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. His new party calls for a “single, uniform legal system” across the entire UK. This policy appears to be targeted at Sharia Courts, which contrary to far right disinformation are not supplanting the English and Scots legal systems. Such Sharia courts as exist in the UK are legally non-binding arbitration and mediation services which are used by observant Muslims in civil and matrimonial cases. However Restore’s policy is incompatible with the existence of both the Scottish legal system and a Scottish Parliament with law making powers.

Restore Britain is a far right English nationalist party. It is essentially fishing in the same pool of voters as Reform UK, painting itself as the real anti-establishment party of the hard right, a task Farage has made easier by stuffing Reform full of the dregs of the Tory party.

Restore Britain is a deeply unpleasant party, espousing views that not so long ago were confined to the lunatic fringes. Yet due to the normalisation of the far right by the British media these disgusting views are becoming mainstream. No support for Restore Britain anywhere is to be welcomed, but this new party may succeed in peeling off support from Reform UK and reducing the number of its candidates who get elected.

One way or another, all this confirms that the UK’s political system is irredeemably broken. It cannot be fixed, both Reform UK and Restore Britain are peddling lies. They stand for nothing but the increasing enrichment of the wealthy at everyone else’s expense, the devastation of civil and human rights and the rape of the environment. Independence is Scotland’s only way out.

Update: Literally seconds after publishing this piece I learned that Kenny MacAskill, the leader of Alba, has announced that his party will not be contesting May’s Holyrood election. In his message to members he states that the continuing existence of Alba is now in question. This means there is now a lesser chance of the pro-independence vote being split in May’s election.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

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Labour Together: the authoritarian right wing rot at the heart of Starmer’s project

Feb20 by weegingerdug

Having had personal encounters with people on the right of the Labour party the left wing comedian and Corbyn supporter Alexei Sayle said: “The right of the Labour Party are some of the most fucking horrible, vile, gruesome people. I’ve never met such awful people as those on the right of the Labour Party.”

After eighteen months of a Starmer government everyone else is learning just how horrible, gruesome and vile the right of the Labour party really is.

Sitting at the very centre of the modern Labour party and devouring it alive from the inside like a gall wasp larva ingesting the living flesh of its paralysed host is the right wing entryist group Labour Together, an organisation funded by dark money which has the aim of moving the Labour party sharply to the right, into that part of the political spectrum vacated by the Conservatives when Brexit turned them even more cruel and insane. With the void of Keir Starmer as their front man, the stock photo in a new picture frame made flesh, Labour Together has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams and our worst nightmares.

The previous head of Labour Together was one Morgan McSweeney, a protege and close political associate of the disgraced Peter Mandelson. As is now well known, Mc Sweeney went on to become Starmer’s chief of staff after engineering the sacking of Sue Gray, only to be thrown under the bus as Starmer attempted to save his own political skin in the fall out from the Mandelson affair.

In 2023 Josh Simmons was the head of Labour Together when he appeared on LBC to discuss the Tories’ Rwanda plan and the use of barges to house refugees. His sole objection to the plan was that he didn’t think it was value for money. Its cruelty and inhumanity did not appear to trouble him. Simmons then suggested that migrant smuggling gang members should be put on the barges and shipped to the north of Scotland, because that is all that Scotland represents to these people, a convenient dumping ground for criminal gang members, radioactive waste, and nuclear weapons. Simmons was elected as a Labour MP during the 2024 general election and is now the Parliamentary Secretary for the Cabinet Office.

When asked about the comments made by Simmons, Anas Sarwar professed never to have heard of him and airily dismissed Labour Together as an embarrassing and irrelevant fringe group. However this did not prevent the Labour party in Scotland and its Westminster candidates from accepting more than £100,000 in funding from Labour Together just a few months later in the run up to the 2024 Westminster general election. This included donations of up to £10,000 to 15 future MPs. Given Sarwar’s abortive attempt to mount a coup against Starmer, which only revealed Sarwar’s utter lack of influence and relevance within the UK Labour party, it’s abundantly clear that the real embarrassing and irrelevant fringe group within the Labour party is Anas Sarwar’s branch office.

There has long been controversy about the sources of Labour Together’s undeclared funding. Under Morgan McSweeney, Labour Together failed to declare £730,000 in political donations from a handful of wealthy donors. The Electoral Commission fined Labour Together £14,250 in 2021 for breaking electoral law. This undeclared funding played an instrumental part in Starmer’s rise to power, the capture of the Labour party by the political right, and the neutralisation of Starmer’s opponents within Labour on trumped up charges of antisemitism.

In late 2023, a few months after Anas Sarwar claimed never to have heard of Josh Simmons, Labour Together hired a PR company to investigate journalists writing critical stories about its finances. It has been alleged that the group has received hundreds of thousands of pounds in undeclared political donations. Simmons, in a denial as convincing as those of the erstwhile Prince Andrew’s claims that he couldn’t have met Virginia Giuffre because he can’t sweat, and anyway was at Pizza Hut in Swindon that night, professes to be “surprised” and “furious” at the PR agency’s work to investigate journalists on his behalf.

However it is even worse than was first thought. Not only did Simmons set private investigators onto journalists who had the temerity to investigate the murky sources of Labour Together funding, on Friday The Guardian newspaper revealed that in 2024, in an alarmingly McCarthyite development, Simmons had personally emailed GCHQ, urging British Intelligence to investigate journalists looking into Labour Together’s funding, falsely alleging that the journalists were linked to a “pro-Kremlin network”.

Simmons and his team sent the email to GCHQ just weeks after receiving the report from the PR company, you know, that report which Simmons says he knows nothing about. This is even more troubling than hiring private investigators to investigate journalists in a bid to prevent them holding Labour Together to account, this is an apparent attempt to use the instruments of state power to suppress the journalistic investigation of the ruling party. This is the kind of thing found in authoritarian states.

When evidence of the emails was put to Simmons by The Guardian, he insisted that the story was untrue.

Starmer has said that he knew nothing about Labour Together’s investigation of journalists, a denial which we can file under : “Aye, right, uh-huh.” and has ordered the Cabinet Office, in which Josh Simmons has a senior post, to investigate the matter. The Labour party is going to investigate the Labour party, about the murky circumstances and dark money which led to Starmer taking power. That’s hardly reassuring. The Labour party is gruesome indeed, no wonder trust in it is plummeting.

The right wing entryism of the Labour party mounted by Labour Together has been far more successful than the alleged left wing entryism of Miltant Tendency in the 1980s. Labour Together has successfully captured the Labour party and turned it into an intolerant and nasty right wing party which is every bit as prone to demonising and attacking the traditional targets of Tory bile, migrants, the poor, benefits claimants, and the disabled as the Conservative party it has morphed into. Vote Labour get Tory has never been more true.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

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If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Yes United and Independence Forum Scotland : Putting the band back together

Feb19 by weegingerdug

Please note that tickets for the daytime conference are now sold out, but tickets are still available for the evening event.

Frustration at the lack of progress to secure better lives for current and future generations of Scots has raised the number of independence campaign groups working outside party politics. Campaigns focus on all sectors of society; energy, currency, banking, the economy, land reform, foreign policy, defence, pensions, housing, healthcare and education. Groups of committed, professional volunteers have more front-line experience in these areas than elected representatives and are keen to collaborate. Yet they are excluded from conversations in favour of costly consultants with less first-hand knowledge and narrower agendas.

Two of these campaign groups – Yes United and Independence Forum Scotland – have taken the lead in ‘putting the band back together.’ The aims are to build a manifesto and policies for a more equal and richer country where no one is let down by a system that prioritizes profit extraction over people, and to have some fun along the way. This chapter of ‘The People vs Party Politics’ is one of a series of events planned throughout the year to quietly and determinedly do the hard yards to build a better nation. As the names suggest, Yes United and Independence Forum Scotland want to collaborate with people and groups with common aims. This first joint venture has attracted a long list of well kent names and tickets are selling out fast.

Event: Politics and a party without the political parties

Venue: Òran Mor, Byres Rd, Glasgow

Date: Saturday 14th March,

Time: Politics 10am – 4pm; Party 6pm til late

Broadcaster, blogger and film producer Lesley Riddoch, former MP Phil Boswell, and long serving MP and independence campaigner Jim Sillars will lead the daytime line up at the Spring Conference on Saturday 14^th March at Òran Mor on Glasgow’s Byres Rd. Lesley’s unrivalled knowledge of the potential of small independent countries will set the tone for the day. Phil, whose wit and wisdom is a cornerstone of Through a Scottish Prism podcast, will kick off the afternoon’s proceedings with his own take on the morning’s discussion topics. Jim’s passion for independence is matched only by his experience and eloquence in explaining how it can be achieved.

Discussions on Scotland’s Economy, Energy Sector, and future relationship with Europe will be a chance to explore options and consider the pros and cons of different ways forward now and post-independence.

The broad questions are:

On the Economy, what priorities and choices will most benefit the key economic sectors in post-independence Scotland?
On Energy, what current actions will be most significant in progressing an independent Scotland’s affordable and sustainable energy strategy?
On Europe, what relationship does an independent Scotland want to build with the EU and what opportunities and challenges does this present?

To include as many voices as possible in the conversation, people will move between roundtable discussions managed by experienced facilitators. A summary of discussions will feature in a plenary session in the afternoon and feed into the Manifesto for Statehood being drafted by Yes United with a host of expert groups and specialists across Scotland.

The conference is followed by an evening showcase of musical talent, from 6pm til late, with performances by Eddi Reader and John Douglas, Bobby Bluebell, The Countess of Fife, King of Birds, Mellow Party, Sulidae, Roo Geddes, and Tommy McKay. Poetry is by Seahorse Poets, Allan Law, Graham Fulton, Linda Jackson, Donna Matthews, and Jen Dunn. The evening is a reminder of how important culture is to national identity, and a celebration of an arts/music sector that manages to flourish despite challenges like the cultural vandalism currently happening at BBC Radio Scotland.

The cultural stream, embodied by National Collective and a host of individual performers, was a highlight of the 2014 Referendum campaign. Bella Caledonia’s Songs for Scotland in the same iconic venue at Òran Mor, and The Yestival tour that attracted huge audiences around the country are enduring memories. The momentum may have stalled after the referendum result, but an overwhelmingly positive response to the current event shows the spirit of independence is alive and well within the arts community.

People from all sectors of society are putting in a ton of work to promote the case for independence. Polls show support remains constant at over 50%, but with no common strategy or date to work towards, the sense of urgency to see it delivered is missing. It’s time for a Yes movement revival, so we’re putting the band back together and having a party, without the party politics.

Tickets, (excl booking fees), at £10 for the daytime conference with lunch included, £20 for the evening, or £25 for both, are available at the Independence Forum Scotland website the Yes United website or directly from Ticketsource.

For further information contact:

[email protected]

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Corruption Westminster style

Feb19 by weegingerdug

The biggest news story today is one we can only talk around, not directly about. The King’s brother, the allegedly sweat free Andrew, will be sweating buckets today, after being arrested and taken into custody by Thames Valley Police on charges of misconduct in public office. This is a serious offence, and if found guilty he could potentially be facing years in prison. However, colour me cynical, but we all know that won’t happen, the British establishment looks after its own and there is no one more establishment than the King’s brother. Like everyone else who is arrested, he is to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and Mountbatten-Windsor has always strongly denied any wrong-doing.

Documents released as part of the Epstein files appear to show that the former prince had passed confidential UK Government documents to his sex-trafficking paedophile friend, whether Mountbatten-Windsor received any cash or favours in return for doing so, had he indeed done so, will be the central topic of the current police investigation. He has become the first person to be arrested in connection with the information released in the Epstein files. Donald Trump, who is mentioned in the files released so far over one million times, and who has been alleged to have been involved in some particularly disgusting and revolting crimes, continues to be protected by the Republican Party.

As this story unfolds, the spotlight will inevitably shift to the behaviour of the King and his late mother, who enabled and protected Andrew for decades. For all their efforts to distance themselves now, efforts which will be ably assisted by the full weight of the British media, the entire Royal family will be held accountable by the public and the reputational damage to an already discredited institution will be significant.

This story goes to the heart of corruption, British style. The UK likes to pretend that it not corrupt like Russia, Hungary, or countries like Nigeria, where senior government officials routinely use their positions to rake off millions and even minor bureaucrats and police officers can be bribed with cash to expedite an application for planning permission for a property extension or to turn a blind eye to a traffic ticket.

Yet the UK is a deeply corrupt polity. The entire British political system is rooted in corruption, corruption which is entirely legal and within the rules. British political corruption manifests itself in the form of donations by wealthy individuals and companies to parties, politicians, and think tanks which do not have to reveal the sources of their funding. We are expected to believe that these donations are made out of sheer altruism and the goodness of the donors’ hearts, showering favoured politicians and parties and mostly right wing think tanks with hundreds of thousands of pounds with no expectation of anything in return. As my late mother always noted, You don’t get to be rich by being a nice person, and millionaires do not shower their cash on politicians and think tanks out of an excess of niceness.

These donations and the network of think tanks which they foster, have been responsible for shifting the entirety of British politics sharply to the right over the past few decades so that “common sense” in British politics is now routinely defined as policies which act in the interests of the rich and well-connected. So the reckless bankers who were responsible for the financial crash in 2008 got away Scot free while the poor were blamed for the greed of the rich and instead of sanctions and safeguards being put in place to penalise the individuals and companies responsible and who had profited from the financial havoc they had caused, we got a decade and a half of austerity and the devastation of public services, the consequences of which we still live with today.

We see British corruption in the revolving door of lucrative appointments doled out to the cronies and associates of government figures. A case in point is Gordon Brown’s decision to give Peter Mandelson a peerage and bring him back into government despite Mandelson already having been sacked twice from ministerial positions and being dogged with controversy and allegations of corrupt behaviour throughout his time as the UK’s EU Commissioner. Starmer then compounded and condoned Mandelson’s behaviour by appointing him to the important post of British Ambassador to the USA despite knowing that Mandelson had continued to associate with Jeffrey Epstein after the latter had served a prison sentence for sex offences involving a minor.

The entire House of Lords is the embodiment of British political corruption. In the UK a politician with the favour of the British establishment can never fail. Even if roundly rejected by the public at the ballot box, he or she will be granted a peerage and will be able to continue to be supported by public funds for the rest of their life while influencing and helping to shape government policy free from the irritation of ever having to be democratically accountable. We end up with grotesqueries like Michael Forsyth, AKA Baron Forsyth of Drumlean, who was Thatcher’s favourite tame Tory Jock and later Secretary of State for Scotland under John Major, who continued to deny what was by then clearly the settled will of the people of Scotland for the establishment of a Scottish Parliament.

Forsyth presided over the annihilation of the Conservatives in Scotland in the Westminster general election of 1997, you don’t get a more decisive democratic verdict than that. If Forsyth had been a medical doctor he’d have been struck off and forbidden from coming within a hundred yards of a stethoscope ever again. But as a politician he rose from the dead as a vampire and was given a peerage in 1999 when Tony Blair was Prime Minister. Forsyth was nominated by out-going Prime Minister John Major but the nomination was approved by Blair because Labour as much as the Tories has a vested interest in keeping the corrupt Lords gravy train on the rails.

As a Lord, Forsyth was a prominent pro-Brexit voice who argued that leaving the EU would make Scottish independence less likely. Without a shred of irony he spoke out against the iniquity of unelected bureaucrats making decisions which affect all our lives without the electorate ever having the chance to hold them to account at the ballot box, quite, Mikey, quite.

From the corruption of the first past the post system, which gives Keir Starmer almost unlimited power on a mere one third of the popular vote, to the back scratching and favours upon which the practice of political donations rests, the bide-a-wee hame for time serving politicians that is the House of Lords, the entire Westminster political edifice rests upon foundations of corruption. Westminster cannot be reformed as its corruption is not a bug, it’s a feature. It can only be replaced. We can replace it with an independent Scotland with a written constitution which bans political donations greater than £2000, which has laws to ensure transparency in the funding of think tanks, which has a press regulator who guarantees that the media is broadly representative of the public it purports to serve, and which ends the farcical pageant of inherited titles and privilege.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

The choice facing Scotland is independence or fascism.

Feb18 by weegingerdug

A major new poll was published on Wednesday which confirms other recent polls in showing that Scots are on track to elect a pro-independence majority to Holyrood in May’s election. Even better, this new poll, carried out by More in Common, shows that the SNP are within striking distance of winning an absolute majority in Holyrood in their own right. Seat projections from this poll put the SNP on 64 seats, one short of the majority which First Minister John Swinney is seeking, and which he claims wil guarantee a second independence referendum. Given the highly fragmented nature of the opposition, the possibility of an SNP majority government is tantalisingly close. However most polls, including this one, which projects 9 Holyrood seats for the Scottish Greens, tell us that Scotland is on track to elect another Scottish Parliament with a pro-independence majority.

The poll makes dismal reading for Labour and the Tories, who are both projected to lose heavily. Labour would fall from the 22 seats it won in the 2021 election to just 16. Labour’s internal polling no doubt points to a similarly dire result, which is probably why Anas Sarwar decided to regale a disbelieving Scotland with his best impression of a man who hardly knew Keir Starmer and wouldn’t vote for him if he had.

Meanwhile the Tories are facing catastrophe, dropping from the 31 seats they won in 2021 to a mere 12, a complete humiliation for Russell Findlay, if there was ever a politician who deserved to be electorally humiliated, it’s Findlay. Who knows, on these figures we might even finally see the back of Murdo Fraser, the Ralph Wiggum of the Conservative party in Scotland.

But before we get too overjoyed, the well-deserved catastrophes facing Labour and the Tories are coming about due to the rise of an even nastier and even more overtly English nationalist party, Farage’s little helpers, the ghouls of Reform UK, most of whom abandoned the Tories because it wasn’t right wing and nasty enough. According to this poll, Reform is set to overtake both Labour and the Conservatives and to become the largest anti-independence party in the Scottish Parliament with 17 MSPs.

Reform claims to stand for ordinary British people but it is led and funded by multi-millionaires, wants to reduce the minimum wage, and reinstate the two child cap on benefits, the biggest single contributor to child poverty in recent times. If you’re struggling on the minimum wage, Reform wants to make you struggle even more. Those tax cuts for its millionaire backers need to be funded somehow.

The party is hostile to the NHS as a publicly funded universal healthcare system which is free at the point of use. Farage has previously spoken in favour of a US style insurance based system, but he’s kept very quiet about that of late as he knows it’s electoral kryptonite. Had such a system been in place when I suffered a stroke in 2020, even with good insurance I’d have been facing a bill of a couple of hundred thousand pounds. That’s the typical out of pocket expense for Americans who suffer a stroke as serious as the one I had and who like me are left with significant life-long disabilities as a result. As it was our only out of pocket expense was on snacks as my other half was stress-eating.

Reform have also refused to guarantee that they would maintain the triple lock on state pensions. State pensions in the UK are already amongst the lowest in Western Europe, under Reform the UK’s elderly could fall even further behind.

Farage has taken aim at what he described as the “lunacy” of maternity leave while Matthew Goodwin his candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election has called for women and girls to be given a so-called “biological reality check” and for the introduction of a “negative child benefit tax for those who don’t have offspring”. In Goodwin’s universe the role of women is to get pregnant early and often and what they really need is for a man to explain female reproductive biology to them. What they don’t need, apparently, is maternity leave or subsidised childcare.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is literal fascism. Reform talk a lot about grooming gangs and the threat which they claim migrants, asylum seekers and trans people pose to women and girls, but they have nothing at all to say about the epidemic of violence and abuse which women endure at the hands of cisgender heterosexual men from white British backgrounds. Neither does Reform have much of a problem with the scourge of online misogyny from the likes of Andrew Tate and his followers or the sexist and abusive images of women created by Elon Musk’s Grok AI. Reform talks a lot about freedom of speech, what they really mean is the right to insult, intimidate and abuse women and minorities. Reform is not so keen on extending freedom of speech to those who dare to challenge racism or who seek to set the record straight on the many crimes against humanity committed in the name of the British Empire.

This poll tells us how critical it is that independence supporters turn out and vote for a pro-independence party which is actually capable of winning seats at May’s Holyrood election. That means voting SNP in the constituency vote and SNP or Green in the list, no other pro-independence party is polling anywhere close to the level needed to win seats on the list. Personally I am voting SNP in the constituency, here we have a great SNP candidate in the shape of Katie Hagmann, and I will also be voting SNP in the regional list vote, the SNP often picks up a list seat in the South of Scotland region. The choice facing Scotland has never been starker. It’s independence or fascism.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

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If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Westminster’s great Scottish energy rip off

Feb17 by weegingerdug

In news that hasn’t appeared anywhere on BBC Scotland to my shock and surprise, that’s shock and surprise as in “I was shocked and surprised to learn that the Pope believes in god.” A majority of MSPs have backed a campaign calling for an end to rip off energy bills in Scotland. Despite Scotland being a net exporter of electricity and producing more than five times as much natural gas than the country consumes itself, due to the structure of the UK energy market, Scottish households pay the highest standing charges on their energy bills of any part of the UK. These charges contribute to Scottish consumers paying some of the highest energy bills in Europe even though Scotland has an embarrassing wealth of energy resources, both renewable and fossil fuels, which together are many times more than Scotland requires for domestic consumption.

Scotland as part of the UK is shackled to UK energy policy, which is reserved to Westminster, and to the British National Grid which was privatised in one of the last acts of the Thatcher government in 1990. The grid is structured in such a way that electricity producers who are far from the major centres of population, which in the UK are concentrated in the south and Midlands of England, receive less for the electricity they generate than producers in the south of England. Recently plans for a proposed off shore wind farm near Orkney were paused as the National Grid’s punitive charges make the wind farm unviable. The 125-turbine West of Orkney wind farm had planned to generate enough electricity to power two million homes by 2029.

Labour promised to cut household energy bills by £300 a year when it was elected to form the Westminster government in July 2024 but energy bills have continued to rise. The Labour government is more interested in attacking migrants and the disabled and promoting the paedo-adjacent than in doing what it was ostensibly elected to do. Instead of cutting energy bills, under Labour they have risen by £187.

In July last year, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband ruled out introducing zonal energy pricing. This is a way of structuring the energy market so that consumers who live closer to the sources of energy production would pay lower bills than those further away. This could have a massive impact in Scotland, not only on domestic energy bills, which could fall dramatically from being some of the highest in Europe to being amongst the lowest, but also on the Scottish economy, incentivising manufacturing companies and others to open plants in Scotland in order to take advantage of Scotland’s cheap and abundant supplies of green, renewable energy.

But the plan has been rejected by the UK Government, which fears that zonal energy pricing would result in higher energy bills for households in the south and Midlands of England. As part of the UK, consumers in Scotland are being forced to pay high energy bills in order to subsidise the bills of those in London and the South East of England. That’s part of the price of Union for you.

In the vote in Holyrood on Monday, 65 MSPs, SNP, Greens, and Ash Regan, who sits as an independent, backed a campaign organised by Believe in Scotland calling for an end to an energy policy which sees Scottish consumers pay the highest standing charges in the UK, to deliver a fair, transparent energy pricing system that does not harm Scotland’s economy. To provide a pricing benefit that recognises Scotland’s massive contribution to clean energy generation. To publish a plan, with committed dates to lower energy bills for Scottish domestic and business consumers, and to cancel all new energy price rises planned by the regulator in 2026.

Not a single MSP from Labour, the self-proclaimed party of lower energy bills, the Tories, or the Lib Dems, supported the motion. All these parties are content to see Scottish households ripped off by a UK energy policy which forces Scots to pay more in order to subsidise consumers in the south of England and are content to allow Scottish energy producers to be financially penalised by the privately owned National Grid.

Meanwhile, the Labour government continues to ramp up the pressure on Scotland to build nuclear power plants which Scotland neither wants nor needs. The electricity generated by these nuclear plants would be to the benefit of England not Scotland. Scotland would continue to get higher energy bills, and in addition the risks of radioactive leaks and contamination and doubtless be used as a dumping ground for the radioactive waste which these nuclear power plants produce. With Westminster’s energy policy, Scotland gets the worst of all possible worlds, and the anti-Scottish independence parties and their branch offices in Scotland are quite happy with that. They serve the interests of their London masters.

This week, in news that you likewise probably didn’t see on BBC Scotland, it was revealed that an underground bunker built in the 1960s on the site of the Dounreay nuclear reactor in Caithness had been leaking radioactive water into the environment for at least a year before the alarm was raised. Officials on the site have now ordered a search for other similar hidden structures that may be leaking too. The leaking bunker was taken out of use decades ago and left as a legacy structure to be dealt with during decommissioning. A report into the leak notes that it “was never designed to retain water”, yet by 2017, it was known to contain thousands of litres of radioactive liquor and had already been identified as a possible source of contamination at one of the site’s outfalls.

The liquor contained caesium‑137 and other radioactive substances. It is thought that a total of d 1078 litres of radioactive liquor escaped between July 2023 and August 2024. The risk of radioactive contamination from nuclear reactors is not theoretical. it is very real and has been shown to have happened on numerous occasions. Numerous radioactive particles have been discovered on the foreshore next to the Dounreay reactor, which was decommissioned in the 1990s. The full decontamination of the site is expected to take more than 300 years. That’s what Scotland gets from Westminster’s energy policy, high bills, clean energy producers who are penalised, and radioactive contamination. With independence, thing could be so much better, cheaper energy, a huge boost to the Scottish economy, and a cleaner, greener country.

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I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

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If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

Fundraiser update and a look to the election in May

Feb14 by weegingerdug

I thought I’d publish an update on the progress so far of the 2026 Wee Ginger Dug annual fundraiser. This is always an anxious time of the year as I ask other people to put their money where my mouth is. The blog is free to read for all and eschews advertising, paid content or sponsorship deals so asking readers to contribute what they feel able is the only way I’m able to generate vital income.

I appreciate that times are tough for everyone, which only makes me appreciate the support of the blog’s readership even more. This year’s annual fundraiser was launched early so as not to overlap with the official campaign period for this year’s Holyrood elections. Like many of you I was deeply worried about how the elections would go for the pro-independence parties, the SNP has had a torrid time of it over the past few years, but although it’sd crucial to take nothing for granted and it’s going to be all hands to the deck in the weeks running up to the election, it now looks as though the worst of the storm has passed. Scotland, like the rest of the globe, has not escaped the rise of far-right populism.

In the UK that takes the form of Reform UK, hard right English nationalists who are home to the worst of the Tory party, Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick, and Nadine Dorries to name a few, who are instinctively hostile to the idea of Scotland as a country with a political identity of its own, seeing Scotland as nothing more than a region of a UK which is essentially Little England. Reform UK is not just aggressively opposed to Scottish independence, it would also hasten and deepen the undermining of the devolution settlement which we’ve seen with the so-called muscular unionism from the Conservatives and more latterly from Starmer’s Labour party. Reform UK look set to give us not muscular unionism, but roid-rage unionism. They represent an existential threat to Scotland. Scotland cannot be defended from the far right by a Labour party whose idea of challenging Nigel Farage is to agree with him. Electing a Scottish Parliament with a strong pro-independence majority is more vital than ever.

We have had two pieces of good news in the past week. Anas Sarwar’s abortive attack on Keir Starmer has fundamentally weakened the Labour party in Scotland, Sarwar is now telling us he has no confidence in a Prime Minister whose praises he was singing just a few weeks ago, he expects us to forget that. Labour’s Scottish branch office is now divided against itself and has a branch manager who has not only proven his own irrelevance, but perhaps even worse, has condemned the Labour prime minister for working against Scotland’s interests.

Secondly, although for obvious legal reasons we cannot go into the details of the case, former SNP CEO Peter Murrell’s trial has been postponed until after May’s elections, meaning that the case will not dominate the Scottish news cycle during the election campaign.

Also postponed until after the May elections is the case for £3 million in damages being brought by the estate of the late Alex Salmond against the Scottish Government. Irrespective of the rights or wrongs of this case, it should be noted that it is being funded by a millionaire Labour donor and Better Together supporter whose primary interest is to cause political harm to the Scottish Government, the SNP, and the wider independence movement. This case will also not figure much in the Scottish media until the election is over.

We all know what the Scottish media is like, pro-independence voices are few and far between and we are fed a barrage of attack stories which constantly do Scotland down, minimise this country’s potential and dwell obsessively on what the Scottish media identifies as the failures of the Scottish Government while never giving it credit for its successes. You wouldn’t know from BBC Scotland that child poverty is lower in Scotland than elsewhere in the UK or that Scotland is more than self-sufficient in energy while having the highest energy bills in the UK thanks to Westminster’s control of energy policy.

This is why blogs like this one are all the more important, although I harbour no illusions about how limited a reach it has. It can only keep going thanks to your support. The Scottish independence movement has no billionaires with deep pockets to fund it, because billionaires know that the entire point of Scottish independence is social justice, reducing inequality and ensuring that the wealthiest pay their fair share.

I’m taking nothing for granted and thanks to your support I will be blogging more than previously as the election campaign ramps up, but with these developments I am somewhat more hopeful about the outcome of May’s election than I was a few months ago. A record pro-independence majority in Holyrood is within our grasp. I’ll keep playing my small part in making that happen.

So without further ado, I’m delighted to tell you that just two weeks after the fundraiser was launched it has now raised a total of £4457, almost 90% of the £5000 target, just one more push and with your help it will get there. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed, I will reach out to thank you individually in due course.

I will keep the fundraiser running for a few weeks more. There are a number of ways to donate. You can contribute to my fundraiser on GoFundMe, the link is here.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/wee-ginger-dug-annual-fundraiser-2026

You can donate via Ko-Fi here:

Or click the following link https://ko-fi.com/weegingerdug

If you would prefer to donate some other way, for example by bank transfer or cheque, please contact me at [email protected] for details. Once again, thank you to everyone for your support.

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