Rutting season

The Scottish word for October is Dàmhair and describes the time of year when the stags would descend from the mountains and rut in the glens and straths. The political stags in the strath of London are also busy rutting at the moment and their descent has been a moral one.

The bewildering pronouncements of Ed Miliband's chosen envoy to Nof Bwitain, Johanna Lamont have been covered in gory detail in many different forums. Seems though as if her sudden swing from apparent-lefite to full-blooded Thatcherite was but a warm-up act for Miliband himself at Labour's annual lecture for the automatons.

Miliband rubbed salt into the wounds by not only demanding cuts - not to the war budget mind - but by imploring all us Bwits to submit ourselves to the One Nation.

Milibland's right-wing froth was the cue for Cameron's compassionate millionaires to again lay the blame for society's ills at the doors of the poor. The message was, once again, if you are poor then you are to blame and all you need to do is work harder. There was no carrot and Cameron presented the poor with the age-old stick of benefits' cuts. As far back as I can remember, London governments have been shaving £millions of the benefits budget. Thatcher and Major were enthusiastic slashers and the trend continued under Blair and Brown's Nu Labour chimera.

And the end result of three decades of cutting benefits?

Who knows? But there's still loads of dough left for new fleets of aircraft carriers and Trident missiles.

Labour is bad for your health.

Which brings me back to Scotchland and the bloated irrelevance that is Jackie Baillie - Labour's representative in the Scottish Parish Council for the porridge wogs of Dumbarton and also, bizarrely, their health spokesperson. Her defence of the nuclear WMDs at nearby Faslane was every bit as conservative and blinkered as Micheal Forsyth's doomed defence of the Poll Tax in Scotland. Poor Jackie when challenged by Brian Taylor on his 'Big' Debate as to whether there could be any moral alternative to using WMDs to provide jobs was unable to offer anything positive and simply stated, 'well that's the way it is'.

This kind of response to the progressive idea of removing weapons of mass destruction from Scotland is typical of the tired and complacent Labour Party in Scotland. It was simply beyond the ken and wit of Jackie Baillie to imagine that the many hundreds of £millions we spend on Trident could be spent on something more constructive and peaceful. Trams for our cities? Equipment for our hospitals? Wind and wave turbines?

Lastly is the bizarre pronouncement that London will, in 2014, spend £50million on commemorating the start (!) of the First World War. In the absence of a royal wedding, jubliee or Team GB, London obviously needs another excuse to foist the Union flag and London's version of patriotic history upon us.

If my history serves me correctly though, twice as many Scots died in their role of cannonfodder in a what was basically a war between Europe's moribund imperialist elites. Something that is certainly worth remembering in the year of the referendum.

As for the LibDems... their unpopularity has finally been eclipsed by Jimmy Saville.

STUC report on cancelling Trident

MyDavidCameron posters

Not in our name - report on campaign in The Independent