KEIR Starmer recently said: “If you don’t know what I stand for, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Oh, we’ve been paying attention. Sir Keir and his Labour in Name Only (Lino) party stand for doing whatever it takes to gain power in this failing Union, which means pandering to the demands of the establishment oligarchs who fund his party and run the country. That’s why he ditched Labour’s social democratic principles for the amoral neoliberal ideology that’s wrecking the welfare state and people’s lives.
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At neoliberalism’s core is the deficit myth that says government spending is limited to tax revenues and additional money must be borrowed from financial markets. Thatcher claimed: “There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayers’ money.”
When a lie’s repeated often enough by the corporate media and politicians, it becomes the truth. People think there’s no money when the government could easily generate more. When it was heavily indebted after World War Two it managed to establish the modern welfare state and achieve full employment with no inflation. Keynes was right: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”
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The UK Treasury simply needs to instruct its wholly owned bank, the Bank of England, to create the money, which it does with a computer keystroke. The government makes the money, issues it and makes more if needed. There’s no debt – just savings. A government can’t owe money to itself.
When money is needed for wars, during pandemics, or to bail out banks, it’s readily available. Why not, then, for the benefit of the people the government supposedly serves?
Like the Tories, English Labour will keep the deficit myth going because it’s in their interest to do so. To bust the myth, the Scottish people must bust the union.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
SINCE the vast majority of scientists and world independent agencies like the UN now accept that climate change is a reality and has been greatly accelerated by human activity, why is acceptance not acknowledged by all?
Although every continent is now affected, Australia is becoming the most climatically difficult continent for human and wildlife habitation. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) has warned that the annual water flow into Australia’s vast Murray-Darling river basin (an area the size of Spain and France, providing 85% of water used for irrigation) will fall by more than 25% in the next decade. The future is not good for Australian farmers.
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By 2050 there will be about nine billion people on planet Earth. Feeding all will require a doubling of global food production. However with global water an increasing scarcity, when 1.8 billion people will be living in countries suffering from severe water deprivation, this is just not possible.
The latest IPCC report states clearly that by 2030 harvests could be halved in some countries.
The fact is that the pleasant and clean image of Australia has been tarnished by it becoming the world’s worst emitter of greenhouse gas per head of population, due to it continuing to burn great quantities of coal. Again the UN report of the IPCC states that Australia emits almost as much greenhouse gas as Italy and France, which have more than three times the population.
Furthermore, as carbon in the atmosphere increases, so does the acidity in the oceans, which is now known to have risen by 30%. Apparently this is the most significant change in the chemistry of our seas for 20 million years, making survival difficult for plankton, on which almost all marine life depends! With humans altering the ocean’s ecosystem, dreadful consequences will result for all life on earth!
Grant Frazer
Newtonmore
I MUST agree with Kenneth Ward’s comment “there is no systemic bias” when he makes reference to the SFA (Why Rangers v The SFA was an issue of timing, not transparency, Jan 12).
No-one ever expects match officials in any sport to be perfect, that’s a fact! Kenneth Ward gives his slant on the football match to which he makes much reference in the article. The point he doesn’t make is about incompetence in match officials.
It is already clear VAR got it wrong, as did the referee. The “offside rule” in the penalty incident immediately before the end of the first half could have changed the entire game, Premier League positions and certainly the many thousands, possibly millions, of pounds of potential revenue to Rangers.
Is Kenneth Ward so short-sighted that he cannot see that a club stands to lose or gain a considerable amount of money on the “whim” of a part-time official?
Rangers are right to be aggrieved, simply because the SFA don’t “generate” income, they “dispose” of it, as is their function.
Perhaps reporters should focus on the incompetence within the SFA referee system and promote the employment of professional, full-time officials or, as I suggested some years ago, bring in referees from England.
Jim Todd
Cumbernauld
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