A Place to Stand

The Scottish Liberal Democrats are holding their spring conference. According to the BBC their "theme" is the economy. Back when I was a member & indeed since, I expressed regret that in the years (2 conferences a year) since devolution they hadn't had a single debate on the economy. Not even when their "Enterprise" minister was in charge of it. It would be good to see that they were taking my advice but unfortunately it is, as normal, spin.…

I will parse the policy motions later but more interesting is the list of exhibitors, ie following the money trail and see exactly who they serve (missing out ones that are internal party organisations)

Strathclyde Partnership for Transport - Government quango

Action for Children - Fakecharity (a fakecharity is one which gets a large proportion or all of its money from government, whether by direct grants or them buying training or publications or reports from them. Though reported by the state media as charities they are obviously extensions of the state).

Pharmacy in Scotland - "is a joint venture between the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain and Community Pharmacy Scotland". The latter being a government quango they are a fakecharity

Electoral Commission "is an independent body set up by the UK Parliament" ie quango

Association for Public Sector Excellence "is the fastest growing local government networking organisation with a dynamic portfolio of services working with over 300 local authorities throughout the UK. Specialising in supporting front line service delivery, the Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference is an ideal opportunity for local government practitioners to acquaint themselves with APSE and our services to local authorities". According to its own site it "is a not for profit local government body" ie quango.

EIS is Scotland’s largest teaching trade union" - union of government workers. If "the purpose of government spending is to pay government employees & their allies & only secondarily to do their official job" (Pournelle) then the purpose of government unions is, quite properly, to maximise the amount that goes to the primary role. The proper role of politicians is to resist such pork barreling not to take money from them & promise to give extra taxpayers money to them. Adam Smiths admonition "Whenever 2 businessmen get together they conspire against the public." obviously applies even more to politicians & people they pay.

League Against Cruel Sports - Probably genuine charity

WWF Scotland - website doesn't ask for donations or say where the money comes from but works "with other organisations, Government and Parliament to inform the development of these Bills ...we work closely with organisations in the environmental network Scottish Environment LINK so it looks like a fakecharity

UNISON - "is Scotland's largest public service union" like EIS but moreso

Equality & Human Rights Commission Scotland - is the independent advocate for equality and human rights across Scotland - site says "Section 17 of the Equality Act 2006 allows the Equality and Human Rights Commission to give ..." so quango.

Bernardos Scotland - "is a national voluntary organisation" - Once it was but now it is a fakecharity.

Guide Dogs for the Blind Association - list income of £7i.9 million, £60 m from donations, £3.2 million from property sales, rest not listed so probably government. Probably can't quite be classed as fakecharity but give them time.

Scottish Environment Link - "is the voice of Scotland's environment
movement" i.e. lobbyists for "businesses" wholly dependent on government subsidy

Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland - "An estimated 10,500 people in
Scotland have MS, a higher prevalence than anywhere else in the world" - charity says "We receive no government funding" but also " It produces numerous publications on MS" which often means they sell publications to government, the paying market elsewhere being limited nonetheless probably a genuine charity. Almost certainly the easiest way to reduce MS would be making vitamin D free to everybody as part of a public health programme.

Electoral Reform Society - Almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the party.

Digital UK - "is the independent, non-profit organisation leading the process of digital TV switchover in the UK. Digital UK provides impartial information on what people need to do to prepare for the move to digital, and when they need to do it" - quango.

Children in Scotland - "is the national agency for voluntary, statutory and professional organisations" i.e. government quango

RNIB - "is the leading charity helping blind and partially sighted people to live as fully and independently as possible" declared income of £98.7 million & while no specific denial of government money is made it looks like this is largely from investment income from legacies.

SAMH - "We provide direct services, including accommodation, support, employment and rehabilitation, and actively campaign to influence
policy" - "Our principal income streams are from Local Authorities, Social Work Departments and the NHS". Donations are listed at £93,000 while costs of staff alone are £16.8 million so clearly a fakecharity. An unusually honest admission of being a state funded organisation lobbying & promoting for the purpose of increasing state power.

RNID - As RNIB but for deaf rather than blind - Doesn't give any specific figures for government money but say it got £1.972 million from "operating activities" & later says "grant income is included." Looks like a fakecharity.

Vattenfall - "Vattenfall’s vision is to be a leading European energy
company and is today the fifth largest electricity generator and the largest heat generator in Europe. Our target is 49 TWh from wind power by 2030" - a "business" which depends on government subsidy for its existence & hope of expansion - in the pork barrel with both hands.

Advocates for Animals - "campaigns to improve the lives of animals" - Used to be the anti-Vivisection League. Its site doesn't explain where its money comes from but has only a very token request for donations. If it isn't a fakecharity I would like to know how it is funded but unfortunately they don't list that as an FAQ.

Friends of the Earth, Scotland - FoI Europe is certainly a fakecharity paid by the EU states to lobby for more bureaucracy.

Alliance of Sector Skills Councils Scotland - "is tasked with representing, promoting and supporting the work of the Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) in Scotland" i.e. PR dept of government quangos.

Aberlour Child Care Trust - "is Scotland's Children’s charity. Today we are working with over 6000 children, young people and their families across Scotland, providing a broad range of service" charity, paymaster undisclosed but "In 1978 a new constitution was drawn up to allow the newly formed Aberlour Child Care Trust greater flexibility" but since it says it has 800 employees I very much doubt if it can be funded without being a fakecharity

RSPB - "is the charity specialising in the conservation of birds and biodiversity". Well known for raising lots of money, spending it on advertising & getting in the papers & not actually able to show having done a single thing for charity. Say without giving numbers "our numerous supporters, including corporate partners, grant-making bodies such as Heritage Lottery Fund, charitable trusts and our members" so fakecharity.

So looking at the list of exhibitors sponsoring the conference. Of 26 such 7 are openly government depts. or quangos (Strathclyde Transport, Association for Public Sector Excellence, Electoral Commission, Equality & Human Rights Commission Scotland, Digital UK, Children in Scotland, Alliance of Sectors Skills Scotland); 9 are what are known in the blogsphere as "fakecharities" i.e. getting between 10% & all of their money from government (Action for Children, Pharmacy in Scotland, WWF, Bernardos, SAMH, RNID, Friends of the Earth, Aberlour Trust, RSPB); 2 are unions of government employees (EIS, UNISON) & 2 are lobbying for an "industry" (windmills) whose existence depends entirely on the fact that they get more money from government subsidy than from selling electricity, their nominal product (Scottish Environment Link, Vattenfall). There are only 6 charities which are real or of unknown provenance (League Against Cruel Sports, Guide Dogs for the Blind, Multiple Sclerosis Society, Electoral Reform Society, RNIB, Advocates for Animals).

Taken all in all the LibDems Conference get their funding overwhelmingly from the state, some via middlemen. This perhaps explains why all of the motions under discussion involve more regulation, government spending &/or taxes & none of them endorse anything the founders of liberalism would have recognised as such.

The motions being:

1 - Tobacco Vending Machines
They want to ban them

2 - An Economic Recovery Package for Scotland
Conference blames Labour & SNP
They are already committed to have more devolution; spend more on public works; find which jobs need more subsidy.
In addition they want to woffle; borrow from Europe; pay government invoices on time (OK); spend money on broadband (OK but why can't the market do it); more money for apprentices & students (apprentices probably a good idea); lots of Green subsidy.
Raise taxes on above average incomes & have matching reductions in the below average; tell the banks who they have to loan too; give the banks more money; "compel" energy companies to cut prices;
End the 2.5% VAT cut & put even more money into Green subsidies & reopening loss masking railways; have government spending properly audited (really)
Call on the EU to "help" business by having more regulation on business "impact"; make sure the aforementioned money we borrow from Europe is invested in Luddite stuff; ditto research: make EU immigration easier; more of more subsidies for windmills.

3 Minimum Income Guarantee
"students ..£7,000 per annum, to be met through varying combinations of grants,
loans and parental contributions"

4 Financial Inclusion for Low Income Borrowers
Introduce an "anti-usury’ law to give people more access to money lending (not explained how); more regulations; government to pay for giving financial advice; government to pay for the politically connected to set up financial services; government to set up a quango to think of more things to do.

5 More Powers for the Scottish Parliament
Holyrood to have control over guns, human rights; transport & eco-fascism; broadcasting; undisclosed tax raising powers; government to be able to borrow extra money; to produce more taxes; councils to be able to raise more taxes; more quangos; more tax money from the UK to go to Scotland including part of oil revenues;


Good stuff eh? more government, more taxes, more government borrowing, more eco-payola, more nannying & absolutely nothing to actually help the economy. The other thing is that during the main conference of the year they only have 4 policies debated & cannot find anything else more important than banning cigarette machines.

Of more actual interest is the exhibitors i.e. where the party gets its money & calls its tune. This explains why a nominally liberal party produces absolutely no policies consistent with traditional liberalism.

There has, naturally, been no depth coverage of the recent "conviction" of several Serbs, though not the leader, for what did (& didn't happen in Kosovo. Here, with a few end comments, is a slightly edited & highlighted article written by Andy Wilcoxson:

Last month the Hague Tribunal convicted five senior Serbian political, military, and police officials for their roles in the 1999 Kosovo war. They were convicted of crimes against Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population during (but conspicuously not before) NATO’s 1999 attack on Yugoslavia. ...

Criminal liability for each of the Accused fell into one or more of the following ...

1) Command Responsibility: A superior officer is held criminally responsible for the acts of his subordinates if he orders them to commit crimes or fails to prevent and punish criminal conduct in his ranks. This judgement does not cite a single instance of a crime being ordered. In this context, command responsibility is limited to crimes of omission – i.e. failure to prevent and punish crimes.

2) Joint Criminal Enterprise: A conspiracy. Under this mode of liability, the participants in a conspiracy are held criminally responsible for crimes committed in the pursuit of the conspiracy. In its judgement the Tribunal found that the Accused had “participated in a joint criminal enterprise to modify the ethnic balance in Kosovo in order to ensure continued control by Yugoslav and Serbian authorities over the province.” And that “the purpose of the joint criminal enterprise was to be achieved through a widespread or systematic campaign of terror or violence against the Kosovo Albanian population, including the various crimes specified in each of the counts of the Indictment.”...

Although the trial lasted for more than three years and the judgement was four volumes and nearly 2000 pages long it doesn’t hold up to even the most basic scrutiny.

I’ll start with the issue of command responsibility. The crimes charged in the indictment are all alleged to have happened during the NATO bombing, which ended upon the withdrawal of Serb and Yugoslav forces from Kosovo...

Carrying out a proper criminal investigation while the country is being attacked by the largest military alliance on Earth would be difficult if not impossible. No rational person could blame the Yugoslav authorities if they had other priorities during the NATO bombing.

What is remarkable, and the Tribunal noted this in its judgement, is the fact that orders were issued to the police and military to respect human rights and Yugoslav military courts were set-up to prosecute soldiers who committed crimes...

While “command responsibility” pertains solely to crimes of omission in this judgement, the far more serious finding is that of a “joint criminal enterprise” or conspiracy.

With this judgement, the Tribunal has found that the government of Slobodan Milosevic undertook a massive conspiracy “to modify the ethnic balance in Kosovo” by means of “a widespread or systematic campaign of terror or violence against the Kosovo Albanian population” for the purpose of “ensuring continued control by Yugoslav and Serbian authorities over the province.”

That conspiracy theory is the keystone of the entire judgement and the foundation of the whole trial. That conspiracy theory is the only thing linking the military, political, and police leadership to the crimes alleged in the indictment. Debunking that conspiracy theory blows the whole premise of the trial out of the water.

This particular conspiracy theory faces two insurmountable problems (1) all of the crimes charged in the indictment are alleged to have happened during the NATO bombing -- not before it, and (2) no military, political, or police official is on record in any of the transcripts, documents, or trail exhibits discussing or referring to any kind of a plan, policy, or conspiracy to terrorize, kill, or expel the Kosovo Albanians.

The judgement attempts to overcome the timing of the alleged crimes -- the glaring problem that each and every crime charged in the indictment happened during the NATO bombing -- by claiming that Serbia wanted the NATO bombing.

According to the judgement, Serbia sabotaged the 1999 Rambouillet talks. Serbia’s motive in doing so, the Tribunal would have you believe, was that Serbia wanted to be attacked by NATO. Serbia wanted to be attacked by the biggest military alliance on the planet for two reasons we are told: (1) NATO bombing would “gain time” for Serbia to carryout its dastardly conspiracy against the Kosovo Albanians, and (2) NATO bombing would give the evil Serbian conspirators “plausible deniability”.

The judgement says: “The international negotiations of 1999 sought to bring about a resolution of the crisis. The FRY/Serbian delegation, along with the other interlocutors, all contributed to the failure of these negotiations, the decision of the NATO Council to use force was put into effect, and the NATO bombing began. The partial responsibility of the FRY delegation in causing the talks to fail, when viewed in light of the movement of additional forces to Kosovo, gives rise to the inference that this was being done to gain time.”

The judgement goes on to explain that “The NATO bombing provided an opportunity to the members of the joint criminal enterprise — an opportunity for which they had been waiting and for which they had prepared by moving additional forces to Kosovo and by the arming and disarming process described above—to deal a heavy blow to the KLA and to displace, both within and without Kosovo, enough Kosovo Albanians to change the ethnic balance in Kosovo and maintain control over the province. And now this could all be done with plausible deniability because it could be blamed not only upon the KLA, but upon NATO as well. While some orders may have been issued directing the police to prevent the departure of civilians from Kosovo after the mass exodus was underway, these orders do not create doubt as to the existence of the common purpose and its execution by VJ and MUP forces.”

The Tribunal did not even attempt to overcome lack of any reference to a conspiracy in the trial record. The judgement simply announced that it was going to ignore that inconvenient problem.

Here’s how the judgement tries to gloss over the lack of evidence: “The Chamber places little stock in the witnesses who testified that there was no common plan, design, or purpose to displace the population or in the lack of any reference to such a common purpose in official meetings of entities such as the VJ Collegium. The Chamber largely accepts the Prosecution’s arguments on this point, namely that witnesses who testified that there was no plan (a) had a motive to lie about it to protect themselves, their colleagues, their friends, and the institutions of which they were members; (b) were not told or were not in a position to know about it; or (c) were merely speculating based upon inadequate information.”

This is the dumbest conspiracy theory that has ever been imagined. How could such a massive conspiracy have been undertaken out without any record being made? Without any plans being drawn-up, and without any orders being given to the troops on the ground? Are we supposed to believe that the Serbs did this through some kind of mental telepathy? A person would have to be stupid to believe that the conspiracy being alleged here actually happened.

The Judgement lists several hundred Kosovo Albanians (mostly military aged men) that it claims were victims of Serbian war crimes. The trial record contains evidence going to show that a great many of these “victims” were members of the KLA... the crimes charged in the indictment are without exception alleged by the Prosecution to have happened during the 78-day NATO bombing campaign.

Although their conclusions about so-called “joint criminal enterprise” and the criminal liability of the Accused are obscene and an anathema to justice, the judges do concede some interesting points in this judgement -- points that refute their conclusions.

Especially interesting are the passages related to Rambouillet. According to the judgement, “The Chamber is of the view that the FRY/Serbian delegation went to Rambouillet genuinely in search of a solution.” but “the international negotiators did not take an entirely even-handed approach to the respective positions of the parties and tended to favour the Kosovo Albanians.”

That is an interesting concession for the judges to have made, since it undermines a key pillar of their conspiracy theory. If the Serbs “went to Rambouillet genuinely in search of a solution” that obviously contradicts the thesis that the Serbs went to Rambouillet to sabotage the negotiations so that NATO would bomb them and create an opportunity for them to persecute the Albanians.

Another interesting passage in the judgement relates to Bill Clinton and the reasons he gives for the NATO bombing campaign. According to the judgement, “President Clinton stated that the provision for allowing a referendum for the Albanians in Kosovo went too far and that, if he were in the shoes of Milošević, he probably would not have signed the [Rambouillet] draft agreement either. Although President Clinton initially referred to the intervention of NATO in terms of responding to a humanitarian crisis, he also said that the issues that led to the bombing no longer mattered and that the main issues, which ensured the bombing would continue indefinitely, were that the credibility of the U.S. was at stake, the credibility of NATO was at stake, and his personal credibility as President of the United States was at stake.”

If anybody deserves to be prosecuted for war crimes its Bill Clinton. Here’s a guy that comes right out in the open and says that he’s bombing a country because its leader refuses to sign an agreement that he wouldn’t sign himself, and the reason he’s doing it is for the sake of his own vanity -- to preserve his “personal credibility as President of the United States”. It’s more than a little bit ironic that this judgement contains better evidence against him than it does against the men it convicts.

Indeed. If it is accepted, as it has been by the British Parliament, that the war was criminal all those who supported it are thus members of a joint criminal conspiracy. [Under the court's theory they are also guilty of participating in the Yugoslav's joint criminal conspiracy to get themselves bombed]

A higher proportion of Serbs than of Albanians fled Kosovo during the bombing. Though they didn't get on western TV this proves that it is simply impossible for the bulk of refugees to be caused by Serbs cleansing Albanians but by KLA & NATO bombers cleansing everybody. There is a lot of other evidence supporting this. If the cleansing was a joint criminal conspiracy, as the NATO funded "court" claims every single NATO politician who supported it is part of the conspiracy.

Beyond that we have the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 from Kosovo when under NATO rule. By the precedent established that is not equally but much more criminal, because it happened in peacetime, when NATO was not focused on people bombing them. Ditto the massacres, such as Dragodan & many others; the kidnapping & selling to western brothels of 10s of thousands of children; the dissection while still alive of thousands of Serbs to provide organs for our hospitals.

All these were carried out by our police (previously the KLA but sworn in en masse) & therefore the direct & deliberate responsibility of such obscene Nazi filth as Clinton, Albright, Blair, Ashdown, Kohl through Brown, Biden, Ming Campbell, Lord Bonomy (as accessory after the fact) all the way down to every single judge & prosecutor who has not publicly denounced this racial genocide as being criminal.

Once again a minor kicking of Debra Storr the LibDem councillor who is complaining that being suspended by the LD group on Aberdeen Council has forced her to resign from the party. She was suspended for her eco-fascist & entirely illiberal opposing of letting Donald Trump invest £1 billion in Aberdeenshire which has understandably annoyed her consituents & made the party almost unelectable in the region.

The irony is that she was one of the party executive who decided to expel me (nothing as wishy washy as suspension) for wishing to discuss traditional economic liberalism like cutting taxes & Scotland having control over Corporation Tax which were officially decided to be "illiberal", "too right wing" to even discuss & "incompatible with party membership". Indeed she deliberately lied to say that the reason my attempt to get these discussed by Conference was not because the party leadership wanted to keep any consideration of liberalism off the agenda but because my motion had been "badly drafted". In fact the drafting had been done by her.

Obviously no party member who is in any way honest & who did not protest my expulsion can honourably complain about her quitting. A recent Scottish Roundup linked to those who had & I put up comments.

My Comments were censored by these Pseudo Liberals:

1 - Iain Dale (not the well known one)
2 - Caron somebody or other
3 - Derbra Storr (both her new & old blog)(though she did take a comment on another thread reassuring her that her washing machine was neither more nor less "green" than its conpetitors

but were uncensored by
4 - Callum5 - Bernard
6 - ruaraidh
7 - Stephen
8 - Neil not an uncommon Scots name

So congratulations - 63% of "Liberal Democrat" bloggers do not automatically censor commemts to prevent undisputed facts being seen. And 37% do.

Censored comments:

1) Somewhat hypocritical since both Debra & you unambiguously believe in expelling people for believing in traditional economic liberalism...

Or alternately Iain will you be censoring any adverse comment - again? Iain did so on a previous occasion
==========
I note that on another thread Iain has complained about somebody not answering points raised.

Not being a total hypocrit, there must be some technical reason why he has not been able to answer the point raised above.
------------
2) Since Debra voted for my expulsion on the grounds that I support traditional economic liberalism there is clearly some hypocrisy in her complaint that she hasn't even been expelled.
------------
3) Since you not only supported my expulsion for being a traditional liberal it seems a little hypocritical to complain when you have not been expelled despite putting eco-fascist idealogy before your constituents & the party's interests.

As you deliberately lied by endorsing a document saying that a motion I put forward for conference had been rejected because it was "badly drafted" when it had in fact been drafted by you I suppose I should not be surprised when you complain that the party have "acted inappropriately". If it was approriate of the fascists running the party to treat a liberal of 37 years standing like that you have nothing to complain of.

Perhaps somebody in the media could explain why this isn't newsworthy while denying that the media is a fascist network of paid liars. I suspect not.

I missed this letter yesterday & only saw it because another writer congratulated Richard Courtney today:

"last Wednesday, the debating society of St Andrews University debated the motion "This house believes global warming is a global crisis". It was defeated.

As I said in my address at St Andrews: "There's no evidence for man-made global warming; none, not any of any kind."

After I stated this, the citing of one solitary piece of evidence for anthropogenic global warming could have been used to demolish and ridicule my case, which was the foundation of our opposition to the motion.

We won on "truth", and climate realists always would win on "truth" in an open debate.

This demonstrates what can happen when people – including those in Scotland – are exposed to both sides of the global warming debate."

As an example of the accurate & unbiased media we have the only mention I could find of it worldwide on Google News was this pre-match puff piece from the main alarmist speaker.

"The expert who dubbed global warming a "weapon of mass destruction" will present the scientific evidence for global warming and outline the actions required to halt climate change at a public event in St Andrews this week"

Clearly the fact that he lost & the sceptics prevailed was not so newsworthy.

UPDATE
There is a full review of the debate here. Ross Finnie was the leading alarmist speaker & despite his clear ignorance of the subject (& his previous claim that everybody who doubts catastrophic warming is "from Mars") I think he is a capable speaker. I faced him at a Lib Dem conference debating nuclear power & he had the wit not to try to debate on the facts of nuclear power but entirely on the conference not embarrassing the leadership by voting the other way. That appeal purely to party loyalty worked.

There is a good, if quite long article here on the influence that Foundations run by the extremely rich have on promoting the "environmentalists" claims. It was written in 2004 in British Columbia & it may well be that on this side of the Altantic a much higher proportion of funding of eco-fascist lobying of government is paid for by government. Also in Britain the broadcast media is directly government owned. Nonetheless it gives an overview of exactly who is paying the piper of this particular tune. I won't put up the while thisg, which you can link to, but here are some snippets & the conclusion:

...there are currently over 1,000 commercial corporations affiliated with either the "World Business Council for Sustainable Development" or the "Business Environment Leadership Council"; including about 100 of the world's largest multinationals....Western Europe, since 1970, have established a myriad of state Environmental Ministries which, via their stringent imposition of regulatory green tape onto industry, have engendered a caste of professional environmentalists. These Eco-Ministries also quietly lavish funds upon environmental activist groups in sums comparable to the collective contributions of the major Green foundations...The major eco-foundations (Mellon, Ford, and Rockefeller) were promoting population control and land conservation decades before there was an EPA...While about a thousand independent incorporated foundations (also known as "trusts", "endowments" or "funds") give money to the North American environmental movement 90% of the cash comes from about forty huge, and uniquely environmentally focused, foundations... Rockefeller Foundation (www.rockfound.org) currently values its assets at $3.1 billion. They've been averaging about $175 million per year in grants to various causes over the last several years. They no longer list "population control" and "environment" as distinct programs. They now deploy vague program headings such as "Working Communities", "Global Inclusion", "Food Security" etc., but searching deeper one discovers many of the grants allocated under these program headings are going to the usual neo-Malthusian, eco-activist NGOs...the dynasty probably donates over $50 million per year to environmentalist/population control activity... MeArthur Foundation ...about $12 million to green groups, while $8 million was spent on population suppression... Turner Foundation ...$575 million between 1997 and 2002. The bulk of this money went to environmentalist groups, including many extremist ones, and to Ted's other favorite cause - population control...
Ford ..."Asset Building and Community Development" portfolio received $202 million dollars during the last year of record and probably somewhere near 80% of that fell into the coffers of the great green crusaders... (other foundations concluding) several thousand persons are bankrolling 98% of this social movement and even the bulk of these several thousand patrons are merely followers of the forty or so people who supervise the disbursement of over a billion dollars per year and who, by virtue of this, also indirectly ride herd over an equivalent amount of lesser donations...

Conclusion
No, down here we get to argue with kids with daisy-counting diplomas from community colleges in their hands and grant applications to the Ford Foundation in their hip pockets; and good luck trying to change the minds of people like this. If not for environmentalist suppression of economic activity North America would be experiencing a tremendous and sustained boom that would reduce unemployment to a smidgeon of its current rate. The responsibility for all of the under-employment, all of the want of opportunity, the lack of housing, the scarcity of public funds, the poverty, the hardship, hard times and heartache people are experiencing shall be layeth upon the well-guarded doorsteps of Big Green. We smolder, we seethe and we type on.

SCOTLAND'S largest council announced yesterday all its workers would be paid a minimum of £7 an hour.
Council leader Steven Purcell revealed details of the Glasgow Living Wage at the Scottish Labour Conference.

The move, to be implemented on 1 April, will cost Glasgow City Council up to £1.2 million, and will be funded by cracking down on absenteeism. The new wage rate is £1.27 above the current national minimum wage of £5.73.

Glasgow's initiative will mean the salaries of its lowest paid workers will now increase from £12,200 a year to £13,340 a year. There are currently 681 employees in the authority earning less than £7 an hour who will benefit.

The move did not meet with universal approval to the conference. Senior figures from other authorities were angry that Mr Purcell had put pressure on their councils to do the same.

Other Labour figures believed Mr Purcell's decision to leak the information a day early had detracted publicity from the speech made by Iain Gray on Saturday. But a spokesman for Mr Purcell said the council leader was unrepentant.

An example of Pournelle's law that the purpose of government is to pay government workers and their allies & that their official job takes, at best, 2nd place.

The last couple of paragraphs give it away - this is aimed at the semi literate Purcell getting in with the public employees who make up the overwhelming bulk activists in a Labour party who once claimed to represent the entire working class. The claim that this can be paid for simply by asking the council workers to turn up for their jobs is clearly nonsense. It would work only if they were going to cut the number of employees on the assumption that them actually being there would make up for it. There is no intention to cut employees therefore either council tax will go up or services to Glaswegians will be reduced. My bet is on the latter since they have already signed up to an agreement with Holyrood not to raise charges.

This is particularly disgusting when ordinary people are losing their jobs & seeing their pension funds eroded in great numbers while those with the party clout not only keep their jobs & padded state funded pensions but are getting raises.

The claim that this can be funded by a crackdown in absenteeism proves is how grossly padded with lazy but unsackable parasites our public "services" are. At a time when government spending is passing 50% of UK GNP & 60% of Scotland's such behaviour will ensure that the current recession goes on forever.

UPDATE
I sent this out as a letter to most of Scotland's press. The last paragraph of it alone was in the Scotsman today except they, not unreasonably, changed my reference to "unsackable parasites" into "unsackable individuals". I'm glad I didn't hold up the article, as i usually do, to give the media first publication.

This is my local constituency according to electoral calculus:

Glasgow North
County/Area: Glasgow area (West Scotland)
MP Ann McKechin (LAB) Electorate 55,419 Turnout 50.38% Top
2005 - Votes 2005 Share Prediction
LAB -----11,001 --39.40% -31.61%
LIB -------7,663 --27.45% -15.97%
NAT -------3,614 --12.94% -31.22%
CON -------2,441 ---8.74% -10.05%
MIN -------2,135 ---7.65% --7.65%
OTH -------1,067 ---3.82% --3.51%
LAB Majority 3,338 11.96% Pred Maj 0.39%

So Labour to hold it but only by 0.39% (100 votes). The minor party will be the SSP who have imploded since them & the other the Greens who dropped at the last Scottish election & seem to have dropped more with the recession & the lack of warmth this winter. Since both of those are largely protest votes & the SNP seem to have maaged the difficult trick of being both government & party of protest it would be likely the bulk of them will go to the SNP.

As can be seen the LibDems used to be easily 2nd party but they have so totally discredited themselves with their Ludditism & economic illiteracy that they aren't even contenders. Though they did recently produce a newsletter with a chart showing the previous result & them & Labour as contenders & SNP & Conservative at the bottom & nobody else standing - this was done by starting the chart not at zero but at about 2,200, which is an example of how to lie with statistics.

This is the first time I have ever been in a marginal constituency. Under the FPTP system very few of us have votes which actually affect anything.

It is going to be tough to decide who to hope loses. Labour are absolutely useless. On the other hand the SNP, who came in promising to cut Corporation Tax & produce a "Celtic Lion" economy growing faster than Ireland's have done very little. They are even more Luddite than Labour on the question of stopping the lights going out. They did introduce an X-Prize but it is for a Luddite sea turbine rather than some morprogressive technology I would like to see.

UPDATE
On further consideration I think that since the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties are all guilty of involvement in a joint criminal conspiracy to commit genocide in the Nazi cause in Kosovo it is impossible, except in times of extreme national crises where one of them actually has a credible answer, for anybody to consider voting for them when anothoer party is an alternative. UKIP. the BNP, the SSP & Respect opposed this genocide & must be preferred choices for anybody who isn't a fascit or nazi. The Greens are responsible for a different & far worse genocide.