Jim Murphy's ordinary followers hit the capital

 

Jim Murphy is a thoroughly unpleasant individual.

I'm convinced that he is the thin, more conservative version of George Galloway. Neither like being challenged and will blow and bellow any naysayers aside. Bullies.

Galloway-Wilson roadshow

On the other hand, whereas Galloway rarely has anyone accompanying him to hog the limelight - other than maybe Brian 'poison dwarf' Wilson making a cameo appearance - Murphy has a small cadre of weird looking drones in suits to beef up the numbers. These followers seem to have a dual purpose - they can act as 'grassroots' listeners in the PR photos but also Jim can rope them in to laugh at anyone who questions him.

Myself and a friend got wind that he was gonna do his 'soapbox' thing 'opposite' a certain pub on the seafront in Edinburgh West. We're both left of centre and can both remember meeting Mr Murphy on anti-racist marches in Glasgow some time ago - back when Murphy was an NUS high-heid-yin hoping for a cushy career in the Labour Party.

My friend is a member of UNISON and hails from a Glasgow scheme. Indeed, he admitted to having been a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists some 30 years ago. Both of us are public servants and are seeing our pensions eroded and pay frozen. We also don't like it that Better Together see fit to use sectarian BNP supporters who one day tweet that 'Catholics should hang from lamposts' while the next appearing on televised Better Together propaganda posing as 'ordinary voters'.

Things are slow to get going but at half an hour later than the scheduled time there are around ten BT automatons gathered. There is no 'juice crate' or megaphone. Instead, Jim and his weird looking band set up camp in a local beer garden. Two shiny drones in BT jackets take to the esplanade for all of 3 minutes to hand out leaflets. No-one seems interested so we engage the drones in conversation and are invited across 'for a chat' in the beer garden where Jim is holding court with a pint in hand. Farage?

Where is William Hague Jim Murphy?

One lady is stating that the NHS is "100% devolved". I add that maybe the running of it is up to us but the financing certainly isn't. Something that Labour-affiliated UNISON seem to agree with.

I raise the Yvonne Hama issue. Murphy asks 'Did that sway you into voting Yes or were you Yes beforehand?' I say it doesn't matter - you shouldn't use racist sectarian nutters in your publicity. 'If you were Yes beforehand then it isn't an issue' he retorts.

Better Together's grassroots - kept hidden today

During the conversation, another friend who's working on a documentary about the referendum texts to ask where Murphy is going next. Reasonable request, no? However, this is where things get really weird.

"It's all online" says one of the drones. 'No it isn't, my friend has tried. Can you tell me just now though?'

"Stick to the issues" says a posh professional PR guy in a suit who wears a 'No Thanks' badge.

Eh? We're confused. 'We aren't arguing, only saying that a friend would like to interview Mr Murphy for his documentary. He's a Swedish film-maker...'

"Shut up and listen!" says the posh suit.

'Er... where will you be next...?"

Murphy steps in, guffawing and egging on his Mormon-esque mates to shout us down. An elderly posh couple - they look like something from Condé Nast Boat Owner mag - step forward. They old guy approaches me in an aggressive manner, finger wagging, "Why don't you just shut up and stop shouting over Jim" he says like an angry father.

I persist. 'Listen. There's a chance for you air your views in a documentary...'

Jim and Posh Suit raise their voices. 'OK these guys obviously aren't interested in the real issues. let's all move over to another table'.

At this point, we open our jackets to show off our bulging belts of explosives as Murphy seems to expect. "Saor Alba!" we cry as we detonate ourselves sending Yessers and BT loons alike into space...

No. You can't join the club.

Actually, we just left.

It's sad when a discussion with an MP leads to said MP and entourage putting their fingers in their ears and yelling 'nah nah nah....!'

We were struck by a number of things...

• my friend said that they were the poshest Labour guys he'd ever met
• none of them looked 'ordinary' - they were like pseudo-religious politico hobbyists
• Jim Murphy doesn't like being challenged as has been evidenced in his '100 Days of Sodom' tour
• Murphy has the desperate air of a man who sees his seat on the gravy train evaporating
• they made no attempt to persuade us to vote 'no'

The future must be ours.

Crow v. Galloway

The RMT were not my union, but it was clear that Bob Crow fought tooth and nail for his members and the working class. He had more passion and progressive politics in his wee finger than the like of George Galloway who exists solely to further the ego and publicity of George Galloway. Also, unlike Galloway and some on the Labour and ex-Labour left, Crow embraced the progressive possibilities of independence.

“I think what Scotland went through under Thatcher it should never have to go through again with this lot and if it was independent, it could be a beacon to the rest of Britain to show that there can be a much more equitable distribution of wealth then there is at present. If you could get hold of the Brent oil fields and the gasses and minerals that surround Scotland then people could be a lot better off than they are now.” Crow said that Scotland was one of his favorite places and that he was “absolutely in love” with the Western Isles.

Perhaps as a result of being English, he didn't have the loathing or cringe that some Scots have towards their culture. Indeed, as you can hear below, Galloway doesn't even recognise Scottish culture. Gaelic and Shinty in particular cause him grief. Kudos to the young guy from Ireland who tackles Galloway on this and who persists despite the bullying and bellowing from Galloway.

Pardon my Gaelic, George but you're an amadan a' chac.

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.

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

A letter to Johann Lamont

Dear Ms Lamont,

I am writing regarding the recent council tax cuts imposed on the people of Stirling and the employees of Stirling Council. It appears that the local Labour Party actually opposed their own proposal and united with the Tories. As an employee of Stirling Council and active trade unionist, I am deeply worried about the effects of this on public services and jobs in Stirling. Many schools are now without specialist teachers in the areas of music, art and Gaelic and I fail to see how these cuts will improve this situation.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/political-news/councils-tax-cut-decision-condemned.1330139172

It would appear that the average household in the Stirling area will save only £12 a year. Unfortunately, the impact on pay and conditions, jobs and public services will not be so slight.

As I understand it, Labour has in recent years condemned the council tax freeze as a threat to jobs and services. It makes me wonder how Labour imagine that uniting with the Tories to deliver tax cuts will protect our jobs and services.

http://www.labourhame.com/archives/2467

Lastly, in view of this, do you still expect us to vote Labour this week?

I look forward to your reply.

yours,
Tocasaid

Further reading:
http://newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-economy/4416-threat-to-stirling-council-living-wage-as-labour-tory-pact-blocks-snp-budget

The Tories like Labour's 'manoeuvre' though...
http://www.toryhoose.com/2012/02/in-defence-of-consensus-stirling-council-cuts-tax/

As to the photo above...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17829438

A confused driver has ended up trapping his car on the steps of a Paris metro station, after mistaking it for the entrance to an underground car park.

"There's a sign saying 'Haussmann Parking' right in front... I made a mistake," the driver - identified only as Johan - told the AFP news agency