Happy Winterval from Scottish Labour

If the real life Tony Blair Xmas card wasn't bad enough - they seem to be impersonating some of the cast of Hellraiser - Scottish (or was it London?) Labour have decided the way to tackle the SNP in Scotland and to win back the working class pro-independence vote is to move to the right. Labour's answer to Johann Lamont's leadership-suicide note accusing the London Labour machine of dictating to Scotland is to... parachute in a right-wing Blairite who doesn't yet have a seat in Holyrood.

The fact that he was the only candidate for the job who form cohesive sentences doesn't say much for the wealth of talent in Scottish Labour. The 'left wing' choice Neil Findlay is relatively more traditional Labour but in a shambling interview on BBC Scotland radio, he didn't seem to know his arse from his elbow.

Murphy though has had his fingers in many dirty pies over the years and more than likely has a cupboard full of skeletons waiting to appear. He's rumoured to be a millionaire which leads one to ask, how can someone spend nine years at university - at our expense - before leaving without graduating to 'forge' a career in the Labour Party machine and come out 20 years later as a millionaire? I wonder if his expenses claims have helped a little?

Did Murphy know?

More importantly though, as a Blair loyalist and supporter of the illegal Iraq war, just what did holy-willie Jim Murphy know about the CIA torture of prisoners? Where did he stand on the rendition flights that used Prestwick as a stepping stone?

We look forward to those bones being revealed.

These are interesting though...

Jim Murphy, Torture Apologist

Jim Murphy – the wrong answer to the wrong question

Alternatives to independence?

Apart from the crazy notion of standing on your own two feet and doing things in your own way there are many reasons to vote 'NO!' to Scotland running her own affairs. Especially if you're a sad auld 30-something virgin male who still lives with his maw and has yet to fly the coop to establish your own... er independence in the world.

I say this because there are those who claim we're better off staying together as a 'family' of nations. Now this may be a strange concept to such street-wise guys like Ed Miliband or Alastair Darling but I left home decades ago and yet still manage to maintain cordial relations with my family - the auld dear, brothers, aunts, cousins etc. It's just that I don't want to share a house with them.

Please... stay at home.

Now that's out of the way. Suppose you do vote 'NO!' What next? Scotland continues to run almost all things by herself but leaves the rest - including the financing of it all - to the likes of...

Ed Miliband??! The same Ed Miliband that those durty Tories have outed as a conservative?! 

Er... no, no and no.

Aye, him. Not very inspiring, is it? No wonder he was roundly booed by the large TUC anti-cuts demo in London.

How about ye olde Black Dwarf then... Alastair Darling who's doing a swimmingly good job of keeping the anti-indies of Labour, LibDem, Tory and... Orange Order, BNP et al... together in the good ship Bitter Together. In his previous life as chancellor of the exchequer he presided over the collapse of many of Golden Britain's banks.

Oh, wait a minute... that Alastair Darling. The infamous 'worse than Thatcher' one mentioned here:

 Alistair Darling admitted tonight that Labour's planned cuts in public spending will be "deeper and tougher" than Margaret Thatcher's in the 1980s, as the country's leading experts on tax and spending warned that Britain faces "two parliaments of pain" to repair the black hole in the state's finances.

This really is shit. The 'socialist' alternative promising 'pain' worse than the Mother of a Thousand Dead. What else can London offer then?

Whatever floats your boat...

On the Tory side of things, we have the Billy Bunter of the brothels himself, George Osborne. Privileged, clueless and in absolutely no position to lecture others on the need to suffer public service cuts. Here he is with prostitute Natalie Rowe sitting at a table on which there are apparently lines of coke.

...but mind this when the talk turns to morality and family values.

Do you get the feeling that there are those who wish to preserve the Union only as a means of keeping their snouts in the trough? Surely not!

London-based politics is knee deep in shit. Every few months seems to see a new sorry episode. Free rein given to greedy and corrupt bankers. Cameron's friends in the Murdoch media empire illegally eavesdropping on almost everyone - hey, they got a murdered schoolgirl's phone but not Savile's! Cops are paid by said corrupt journos. Cops kill innocent bystanders at demonstration. MPs expenses fraud on a mammoth scale - and they're still at it. The Hillsborough cover-up which includes top cops and yon auld witch Thatcher.

It's a revolving door of corruption and sleaze. Blair copied Thatcher. Guess who Cameron copied...?

So, if you aint gonna vote 'Yes' because as some claim, 'there are no really independent nations anymore', then will voting 'No' save us from this lot?...

Next... Halloween Horrors for 2012.

The Colonel is dead - let the vultures descend

In the Corporation where I used to work, one guy used the word 'Colonel' as rhyming slang for a half-day. 'Halfie' rhymes with Gaddafi, see? Its funny the things that come to mind when you see endless mobile phone videos of an ageing leader of his nation being hounded by bloodthirsty liberators before being summarily executed against the conventions of warfare.

Sure, Gaddafi was an evil bastard who for much of his 42 year reign tortured and killed his own people. However, this didn't seem to matter when he shook hands with Blair, Sarkozy, Obama or Berlusconi or dined with Condoleeza. More importantly for short-term economic gain, his evil deeds were ignored when signing business deals. Even supplying him with weapons or sending the SAS to train his 'elite' forces was not beyond the pale.

It doesn't seem to bode well the 'emerging' democratic Libya that they kick it off by murdering one of their own. Though to be fair, the idea that the West sees suspects as innocent until proven guilty or that the West values liberty and democracy, does seem to be very flexible in its definition. And here, I'm thinking about Turkey's continuing Apartheid-like state and treatment of the Kurds. Or maybe China and its own massacre of freedom-seeking protesters. Or Russia and its slaughter of Chechnyans. I guess the morals of the US, UK and France do not stretch to reprimanding those nations that are bigger or richer than us.

The usual London-based right-wing tabloids gloated over the bloody death of Gaddafi. But surely they're fooled if they don't think there's a sizable percentage of 'Brits' who'd eagerly deal out the same fate to Thatcher, Blair, Cameron or Clegg. Barack Obama may still be a hero some deluded 'progressives' but for how much longer? Noam Chomsky has already observed that under Bush, troublesome international boat-rockers were merely tortured. Under Obama, they're just executed like Al Awlaki and Bin Laden. See interview here from Russia Today.

The US's arm continues to be a long one. Sometimes, it just holds a puppet as we saw with French aircraft targeting Gaddafi's convoy as it fled Sirte. How can the attack on a fleeing 'enemy' coincide with the UN resolution to protect Libyan civilians? And what of the Libyan civilians who supported Gaddafi?

If anyone seriously thought that Barack Obama would bring a change to international politics and the cessation of US aggression to protect 'US interests' then think again. Remember, Margaret Thatcher too broke a conservative taboo. Having a woman prime minster was a step forward. With Thatcher though we then took several steps back. Will having a black US president be another game of snakes-and-ladders?

Lastly, our enterprise in Libya has cost us some £300million. Will the ConDems of London spend a similar amount to protect public services and jobs during a recession? Aye right. Though, I guess that Cameron is banking on the carve-up of war-ravaged Libya giving a valuable boost to British companies eager to profit from 're-building'. Or, maybe that Libyan oil will flow just a little easier our way. Then, a 'victorious' and canny Cameron can boast of his exploits in defeating Gaddafi and 'creating' wealth for Brits in his attempt to become a UK Prime Minister that really is democratically elected.

Some interesting reading btw...

The Libya Secret: How West Cooked Up “People’s Uprising”

BEHIND LIBYA’S “SPONTANEOUS REVOLUTION”
What the media has so relentlessly characterized as the “spontaneous uprising” of February 2011 was hardly spontaneous. It began even before the Arab Spring itself commenced in Tunisia during December of last year—and it was orchestrated by the West.

In October 2010, Qaddafi’s protocol chief, Nouri Al-Mesmari, arrived in France, purportedly for medical treatment. But he had his family with him, and the declared reason for his trip was a cover story. He almost immediately plunged into talks with the French and their intelligence service. He argued that Qaddafi was weak. He pointed out breaches in Qaddafi’s national security shield that made it possible to take him down. (More on this can be found on the subscription-newsletter site “Africa Intelligence.”)

 And this from Asia Times Online: Why Gaddafi got a red card

The Sunni monarchical dictator in Bahrain stays; no "humanitarian" bombs over Manama, no price on his head. The House of Saud club of dictators stays; no "humanitarian" bombs over Riyadh, Dubai or Doha - no price on their Western-loving gilded heads. Even the Syrian dictator is getting a break - so far.

So the question, asked by many an Asia Times Online reader, is inevitable: what was the crucial red line crossed by Gaddafi that got him a red card?

'Revolution' made in France  

There are enough red lines crossed by The Big G - and enough red cards - to turn this whole computer screen blood red.

Let's start with the basics. The Frogs did it. It's always worth repeating; this is a French war. The Americans don't even call it a war; it's a "kinetic action" or something. The "rebel" Transitional National Council" (TNC) is a French invention.

John Reid v. James Connolly - you be the referee

So, the combined might of John Reid, Neil Lennon and the Catholic Church have combined to bully Hugh Dallas and Dougie MacDonald from their respective positions in the Scottish football pecking order. One of them told a white lie regarding a correct refereeing decision while the other passed on a photo which mocked the cover-ups of child abuse within the Catholic Church.

John Reid by the way is the ex-communist, now known by the modest title of the 'Baron of Cardowan'. Labour's one time bully-boy and party 'hard man' was incensed by all of this and held a grim-faced press conference at which he all but challenged his victims to come-ahead if they thought they were hard enough. John Reid may be the Baron of Cardowan but he's hardly the laird of the moral high-ground - he has form as a bit of a sex-pest amongst Labour's women and didn't cover himself in glory with Labour's warmongering adventures in Iraq. At best, he was fully involved in an illegal war. At worst, he is complicit in war crimes. Whatever privileges the British State can bestow upon the Baron of Cardowan, a sense of perspective ain't one of them.

Reid was a one-time admirer of Edinburgh's James Connolly - Irish republican hero, socialist and international trade-unionist. This past indiscretion proved no barrier to Reid when working in partnership with NATO, the right-wing Bush regime and  in his friendship with Serb war-criminal Radovan Karadžić.

"I love a good box, Don"

As Reid is so fond of a square-go, let's see how he compares to yon Jimmy Connolly. 

Connolly - escaped poverty by joining the British Army at age 14
Reid - left behind a working class background to become Secretary of State for Defence
Connolly - became an active trade unionist
Reid - became consultant for Group 4 Security and chairman of Celtic FC
Connolly - campaigned for women's rights, "the female is the slave of the slave"
Reid - pestered a female Labour MP for sex, "I want to have sex with you, I want to f*** you, you want it as well."
Connolly - went to Belfast to support Protestant and Catholic workers in the dockers and textile strikes
Reid - went to Belfast as the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland/ British Governor General in the Six Counties
Connolly - went to the US to help organise the internationalist trade-union, the IWW (Wobblies)
Reid - went to the US to meet Donald Rumsfeld and address the Pentagon in support for Bush and Blair's illegal war in Iraq
Connolly - was executed by the British Army while tied to a chair following his part in the Easter Uprising of 1916
Reid-  'commanded' the British Army in his role of Secretary of State for Defence and oversaw British troops in Iraq where torture by US and UK troops was used on captives and between 100,000 and 600,000 Iraqis were killed.
Connolly - shared platforms with Irish socialist Larkin and Scots' Red Clydesider, John Maclean.
Reid - shared a platform with US neo-con Rumsfeld as well as a jaunt to a luxury hotel as a guest of Serb war criminal Karadžić.
Connolly - inspired John Lennon to write the song 'Woman is the Nigger of the World'.
Reid - inspired Neil Lennon to bully Scottish referees.

The Baron of Cardowan, a red, white and blue Clydesider - probably more damaging to Celtic FC than Inverness Caley Thistle.

I'm no hard enough to fly these flags at Parkheid.