A Place to Stand

     Yougov came out with this poll on voting intentions in a general election held now. The columns at the right show voting intention by region and at the far right in Scotland.

They read:

Con 19% , Lab 41%,  LibDem 4%, UKIP 4%, SNP 33%, Green 2%, BNP 1%

  UKIP have traditionally done much worse in Scotland than nationally and to be fair this is still under half the vote shown across the UK. On the other hand it is a considerable step up and when you bear in mind that we have a relatively proportional voting system here, augers well. It is particularly valuable because we have a wider number of parties, even if they don't offer much electoral choice.

   This shows UKIP matching the LibDem vote and doubling that of the, everpresent on the BBC, Greens. It also gives us nearly a quarter of the votes the Conservatives get. An 8% swing to us would make us the standard bearer of free marketists in Scotland (ignoring whether the Scots Tories are such) and because of our voting system we do not run the risk of "splitting the vote" that exists in the south.

   Considering that (A) we have let ourselves be painted as not Scottish based and (B) the media, led by the outrageously biased & statist BBC have virtually censored any appearance, this is a gain.

   I am including this with my unpublished Scotsman letter because it may be that my inclusion of a mention of this poll result was part of the reason it was not printed. Scottish Renewables had replied to GM Lindsay's & my letters with a string of obvious lies. Most seriously, to my mind was the claim that windmills produce "more than 1/3" of our energy. This is an obvious lie and the fact that they thought they could get away with it without the Scottish media nailing these government funded propagandists and that they didn't says much about the Scottish media. It is the factual equivalent of letting the government away with saying Santa Claus took all the money.

Unfortunately the Scotsman decided to not to allow my reply though it did allow Dr Lindsay's. On Tuesday you published a letter from me in which I suggested that the public letter writers from Scottish Renewables regularly claimed things which were not so. Lo and behold on Wednesday we had a reply from Naill Stuart, from Scottish Renewables who asserted that SR are "apolitical" (which as a government funded organisation they certainly should be) & an industry "that meets more than a third of the country's power needs"
Clearly the question of whether the taxpayer should pay out £1 billion a year to subsidise windmills (enough to reduce income tax by 3p) is indeed a political one, even if UKIP (admittedly only at 4% in the latest Scottish opinion poll but larger than the LibDems across the UK) is the only party opposed to doing so. Thus SR is a political organisation.
As regards the other claim - according to Scottish government statistics http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Business/TrendElectricity all "renewables" other than hydro produce around 6 Gigawatt hours of electricity out of 50 across Scotland. That is 12%. In what universe is 12% "more than a third"? It is possible that some parts of what SR claim may be infinitely more accurate than these ones but it seems improper to me that public funds should be thus devoted to promoting "environmentalist" counterfactuals.
On the other Colin McInnes letter on the same day was a breath of fresh air. He is correct to make the comparison between Lenin's belief that socialism could be achieved by "the electrification of the whole country" and the present faux-left's adoption of the Green Luddites, whose obvious wish is to close any practical electric generator. The 25,000 pensioners who die, unnecessarily, each winter because of artificially high electricity costs may not, even over decades, match the killings of Stalin but at least he thought he was working in the cause of human progress not merely to make windfarms profitable.
Whether the adoption of Luddism by the "left" is a result, or a cause of socialism's failure may be subject to debate but is a sad end to a movement which once aspired to be progressive.

UPDATE
This UK poll result just in
Survation/Mail On Sunday Poll CON 25.8% LAB 36.6% UKIP 11.5% LIB DEM 7.4%

That not only gives us clear water well ahead of the LibDems but gives us almost half the vote of the Conservatives.

Last week Charles Kennedy spoke on Andrew Neil's show of what the LibDem leader would be saying at the next election TV debate between "the 3 party leaders".  While Neil made no demurral it is obviously increasingly impossible for even the BBC to maintain their blatant censorhip.