IAN Murray claims the GERS figures show that Scotland benefits from the Union. That’s because he’s fully on board with English Labour’s project to bleed Scotland dry in order to prop up the Union’s rotten edifice.
GERS is a Unionist propaganda tool devised in 1992 by then secretary of state for Scotland Ian Lang for the sole purpose of keeping Scotland in the dark about its vast wealth and to deter it from breaking free.
The UK conveniently dumps on to GERS the cost of its debt and spending outside Scotland, supposedly for Scotland’s “benefit”, which swells the expenditure side and makes Scotland look like a child that can’t subsist on its puny allowance. In reality, Scotland generates far more revenue than it spends, revenue that rushes into London’s insatiable maw.
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UK civil servant Gavin McCrone knew the truth about Scotland’s wealth. His 1975 report said North Sea oil would give Scotland a “chronic surplus to a quite embarrassing degree and its currency would become the hardest in Europe”. It would also mean Scotland would choose to leave the UK, to be free to use its wealth to benefit its people. So, the UK Government classified the McCrone Report “as top secret.”
It only saw the light of day in 2005 after the Freedom of Information Act was passed.
Wonder why there isn’t a GERS for England, Wales or Northern Ireland? It’s because the UK fears losing only Scotland, its cash cow. That’s why it continually gaslights us with the connivance of its Scottish satrap, the Scottish administration, and the subservient Unionist stenographers who pretend they’re journalists.
We need to tell the SNP administration to cut the crap, get angry at how we’re treated in this Union and end it.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
IT is noteworthy that the various (English-based) media are reporting and commenting negatively on the Scottish Government’s stance on the Winter Fuel Payment. Nowhere at all is there a similar critique
being directed at Westminster, the real architects of this appalling attack on some of our most vulnerable citizens.
This predictable offensive on the devolution agreement is being orchestrated somewhere (I suspect Westminster) and being propagated through their friends in the media. Those of you who supported Labour, which is of course your right, should be thoroughly disgusted by the rapid and sustained attacks on pensioners.
We are all paying a heavy price for voters electing a bunch of elitist politicians who neither understand the needs of the vast number of pensioners, nor care enough about them to help address their needs.
Yet at the same time they allow the billionaires and millionaires to use smart accountants to help them avoid paying their way. How much more money do these folk need?
And to hear those in power proclaim that they are helping those most in need is totally hypocritical in my opinion. They are helping their friends in high places, knowing that those of us at the bottom of the ladder are helpless to do anything about it, and they laugh at us we hiding away their wealth.
Not for this government the traditional Labour message of supporting the working classes. It simply does not care.
Chick McKenna
Dumfries
COULD the UK Government’s decision to invest £3.4 billion in an energy super highway be the spark which lights up independence for Scotland, taking the majority well above the current 50% in favour?
This latest front-page news in The National certainly turned on a bright light in my mind! Scotland’s oil, now Scotland’s renewable energy, first under Mrs Thatcher and now Sir Keir Starmer, an admirer of Mrs Thatcher. This we should see with open eyes and a strong resolve not to let it happen again.
No wonder the new Prime Minister would not agree to a second Scottish referendum. As the “First Minister of England”, he could not afford to lose Scotland’s renewable energy. What will he give Scotland in return – continued austerity, fuel poverty, lost jobs and income?
I appeal to the Scottish Government to act in the interests of the Scottish people and the Yes movement to find the much-needed opportunity to gain our independence.
Robert A J Moodie
Kingsbarns
CURRENT estimates are of 40,000 Palestinians having been killed by the Israeli government’s policy of mass murder and indiscriminate killing by bombing from the air.
It is impossible to accurately estimate how many more are buried beneath the rubble of destroyed houses.
The deliberate targeting of schools in Gaza makes it clear that Israel never intended to target the structure of Hamas.
Indeed, it is obvious that this is a policy of genocide aimed at eliminating the Palestinian people as a whole and is likely to motivate any survivors to resort to a future seeking revenge rather than the simple right to return to their stolen homes and farms.
Norman Lockhart
Innerleithen
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