AT least Starmer’s English Labour has been honest. It repeatedly said what it planned to do in office, so we shouldn’t be shocked at what’s transpired since July.
Rachel Reeves boasted her economic plan had the fingerprints of big business all over it.
That’s why she’s genuflecting to the City of London, the world’s dirty money laundromat that contributes nothing of value to the UK, instead of ordering the government’s own bank to create the money needed to protect and enhance people’s wellbeing.
Her “fiscal rules” are invented to justify cutting spending and investment, harming everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
READ MORE: Keir Starmer duped his way to power. What principles can Labour show?
The UK has had seven different set of fiscal rules since 2010, the onset of austerity. Do you think there’s a correlation?
Now Starmer vows to bin regulations to “rip out the bureaucracy that blocks investment,” but will instead strip protections from consumers, workers and the environment. Does Sir Keir recall
the Grenfell towering inferno, the Post Office/Horizon scandal, the 2008 financial crisis, or shit-filled English waterways?
To bring investment up to the level of its major competitors, the UK would have to spend £100 billion a year for several years. But rather than revive the moribund economy with badly needed public investment in health, education, housing, transport and energy that would attract private investment into these areas, Starmer’s foolishly chasing foreign behemoths like Amazon, Google, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, P&O, Blackstone, BlackRock and Macquarie (the investment bank that loaded Thames Water with unsustainable debts).
All are experts at asset-stripping and rent extraction, as if the ailing UK economy needed more of what has been destroying it since the 1980s. English Labour seem intent on destroying what little remains of the UK’s shrinking asset base by flogging it to these vulture capitalists who are laughing all the way to the bank.
The UK’s going down. Unless we get out, Scotland’s going down with it.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
FACT: It is not the price of gas or Putin that is making the UK have the most expensive for electricity in the world, causing fuel poverty and destroying our manufacturing industries and losing thousands of jobs.
Reality: It is the cost of insane over-deployment of volatile weather-dependent electricity that needs mindblowing amounts of environment-vandalising infrastructure to transport the power as it dwindles hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.
READ MORE: IDF-linked firm to receive millions from Rosebank field in North Sea
Tip: Stocking up on a candles and investing in a generator is a really sensible thing to do.
Observation: There could be a huge resurgence in the production of whale oil candles thanks to the offshore wind industry, 1) Because of expected power cuts caused by their intermittent and unreliable production, and 2) As a by-product of their marine destruction.
Green really is the new black-out.
Lyndsey Ward
Communities B4 Power Companies
THE article in The National on Stephen Kerr and the Scots language was only just drawn to my attention. I am English, a translator from Belarusian and Russian.
Together with the poet Petra Reid I recently published a translation of a novel written in both languages by the contemporary Belarusian writer Alhierd Bakharevich. I translated the whole book into English, Petra then translated my English version of the Belarusian parts of the book into Scots. The book was published by the Scotland Street Press in 2020.
READ MORE: Stephen Kerr should haud his wheesht about use of the Scots tongue
One of the central figures of the book is known simply as The Doctor, who with the permission of the authorities runs a camp where Belarusian-speaking children have their throats operated on to get them to speak “proper” Russian.
What Stephen Kerr says about Scots is a milder version of what Russians say about Belarusian and Ukrainian. In the country that calls itself Belarus, it is now a criminal offence to display any manifestation of true Belarusian culture. All Belarusians active in the specifically Belarusian cultural sphere have been forced out of the country or are imprisoned. This is the kind of extreme situation to which Kerr’s ill-thought-out remarks can lead.
Jim Dingley
via email
I TOTALLY agree with the party line that Israel’s actions in Gaza are genocide, but it’s only a word and if the indy movement is to prosper, the SNP need to be a bit less Stalinist and a bit more tolerant (SNP ‘believe Gaza genocide happening no matter the evidence,’ expelled MSP claims, Oct 14).We can argue about words after independence – Mason is no Unionist, but treating him like this will only put off possible sympathisers who are pretty angry about the two main parties, and we must seek to gain advantage!
Jim Bainbridge
via thenational.scot
MR Mason, it’s not just the SNP who believe genocide is happening in Gaza - most people who can think for themselves DO look at the evidence and come to that conclusion.
Alastair Gordon
via thenational.scot
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