Dancing to Rupert's tune...

The Scottish Executive's response to SSE's warning that uncertainty threatened  investment was to announce they wanted to delay the referendum for a year longer than necessary.

They announced this not in our parliament but through the pages of  a newspaper.

What a kick in the teeth to our people and our democracy.

Separatist claims look less powerful by the day......

Consternation  at SNP HQ over power company SSE's response to the consultation processes  being conducted by the UK government and the Scottish Executive.

In their submission the company seem to confirm the fears of the Citigroup report regarding subsidies from the rest of the UK in an independent Scotland.

They also make the reasonable point that the longer the uncertainty continues over the referendum the more uncertainty continues over investment.

It is pretty self-evident but bizarrely it's a point that the SNP have consistently tried to refute.

Name one company who say that the uncertainty the referendum brings will affect investment in Scotland, several nat bigwigs have asked.  

Step forward Scotland's second largest company and champion of the SNP's renewables revolution.

 "Right, apart from them" splutters Young Master Pringle as the cybernats set their freedom phasers to 'smear'..

Who's the gauleiter in the (yellow and) black?

Less than a month after Mr Salmond's tantrum over the beeb declining his offer to speak about  rugby and his subsequent disgraceful nazi slur on a public servant we discover that Mr Salmond's increasingly authoritarian regime isn't above such tomfoolery themselves.

Mr Salmond was originally invited to speak at a dinner celebrating Loganair's fiftieth birthday and when the first minister declined,  the invitation was extended to Jim Wallace. Mr Wallace gladly accepted only to have his invitation cancelled after threats from the SNP Scottish Executive and their insistence that the cerebrally-challenged Keith 'I was an action-man Falklands hero but never mention it' Brown take his place.

So the good folk of Loganiar had to listen to the deluded ramblings of a self-aggrandising dullard with the sinister threat from one of Mr Salmond's 'gauleiters' that 'it would not be in their interests' to have Mr Wallace present hang over their heads. Not the best recipe for an evening of celebration and conviviality.

This would just be another tale of governmental control-freakery and embarrassing petty vindictiveness from a party who has a long-established reputation for such things if it wasn't so inextricably linked to their campaign for separation.

It is now absolutely clear that the campaign for separation will be conducted in the most vicious,  ruthless and destructive fashion by the SNP. Anybody who disagrees with them can expect to feel the full force of their power and wrath of their supporters. They will use every penny they can of public money and every bit of influence they have in their pursuit of breaking up Britain.

The real danger of course is that in their fevered obsession with separatism and their ugly and spiteful campaign they end up breaking Scotland.

Reasons to be cheerful Part IV

Well, at least now they can't accuse us of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Tories...

Forget the beef, where's the positivity?

There was something not quite right about Kenny MacAskill's performance on Sunday's 'Politics Show'. It wasn't his boorish sniping at Mr Darling nor his hopeless spluttering after walking into a trap of his own making - that kind of bitter buffoonery is only to be expected from our Kenneth. It was something altogether different: it was the sight of a SNP spokesperson with nothing new or positive to say about separation.

Nothing, zilch, hee-haw.

That got me thinking about the 'positive' campaign for separation over the last few weeks and realised that there hasn't been one. There has been lots of gnashing of teeth, pulling of hair and beating of tartan breasts. There have been bleats about the beeb, tantrums about the Tories, libels of the LibDems and lies about Labour but not a positive peep about separation.

So, when can we expect the positive campaign to begin?

I am looking forward to hearing about the advantages of not having the support of UK embassies when I'm abroad, why it's worthwhile to set up a separate DVLA for Scotland and I can hardly wait to find out  how it's in my best interests to cut back my access to the BBC to the levels of the Irish and Dutch.

The only pity is that even with all those 'benefits' separation still won't deliver financial independence.  The SNP policy of allowing the UK treasury to oversee an independent Scotland's interest rates, borrowing limits and fiscal policy has rendered Mr Swinney's much-heralded financial 'levers' about as useful as one of those wee plastic steering wheels kids use to 'drive' the car.

No wonder the SNP don't want to talk about separation; they have no positive arguments for it - the idea of giving up British institutions makes no sense and they have already conceded the point that all  important financial decisions will be made in London by a Tory minister.

"Plus ca change" as Robert De Brus would no doubt have said..

Things you couldn't make up, part I

This from Her Majesty's Daily Record:

"Salmond said: “When something is put on the table, people around the table deserve to see it face up, not face down. Give us the detail, where’s the beef, what’s the proposal, give us the timetable?”

Mr Salmond, in case you've forgotten, is the guy who had to be forced into revealing the year he wanted the referendum held.

We're still waiting to hear the actual date he favours.

And this is the man who had the brass neck to demand a timetable from David Cameron.

You could not make it up.

It's beginning to look a lot like a cunning plan...

This from Holyrood Magazine:

"There isn’t an SNP mandate for a second question, yet Nicola Sturgeon invokes “democracy and fairness” umpteen times to justify its inclusion. But where exactly is the democratic test? As for fairness, it excludes a large number of people who would be profoundly affected by it, but who are not considered as having the right to vote – the English"

The words of an arch-unionist implacably set against separation?

Hardly. 

These are the words of the respected senior SNP figure, Jim Sillars. Mr Sillars goes further in this devasting piece in Holyrood Magazine. Read it here:

 http://www.holyrood.com/articles/2012/02/13/second-rate-option/.

Is Mr Sillars correct?

 Is the referendum Mr Salmond's way of ditching the SNP's most unpopular policy - separation?

It just gets worse for the hapless Eck.

You'd need a heart of stone not to laugh in his stupid face.

Fresh from the humiliation of having his desperate appeals to appear on the BBC rejected it now transpires that the First Minister tried to get himself into the Scotland dressing room after the rugby match on Saturday.

Not surprisingly Scotland told him to get tae.

Mr Salmond should get used to that...

Oh Calcutta! Eck disappears down a black hole of his own devising....

Listening to Derek 'Braveheart' Bateman on his hilariously biased 'Newsweek' show has long been one of my guilty pleasures on a Saturday morning. 'Braveheart' pretty much dispensed with any attempt at even-handedness years ago and 'Natweek' is now engaged in full-blown agit-prop for separation.

One of my favourite moments came when he found an Irish 'economist' (actually a discredited Irish financial journalist) who was wheeled out to kick lumps out of Labour for suggesting Ireland was an economic basket case. The Irish journo administered the said kicking and everything was going swimmingly until 'Braveheart' made a snide comment about Tony Blair and asked how Blair was viewed in Dublin.

Imagine 'Braveheart's' horror when the journo went off-message and declared Blair a hero to many in Dublin for the part he played in the peace process.'Braveheart's' disappointment was  palpable, descending  into an hysterical cross between Iain MacWhirter and Alan Partidge, he desperately tried to shut his wayward guest up.

It was with 'Braveheart' Batement's antics in mind that I watched in bemusement at the increasingly erratic behaviour of our First Minister over his failure to get himself on the telly at the weekend. I was disappointed but not surprised at The Sunday Herald buying the SNP line about BBC censorship, the rest of the Sundays wisely gave the nat spin a very wide berth. It was so obviously an attempt by the SNP to continue their 'mood music' about big bad London stifling the plucky wee Scots that I thought it might just float away into the tartan ether of nat grievances.

So well done to the BBC for standing up for themselves and pointing out some inconvenient truths for the First Minister. The biggest and most embarrassing fact to come out of this fiasco is the revelation that the First Minister's staff had attempted not once but three times to get their man on a BBC show. The first couple of shows knocked him back, the third said they'd check and get back to him. They checked and were advised it wouldn't be appropriate for him to appear and declined the First Minister's offer. It was at this point that the First Minister lost it, shrieking that the BBC was a 'tin-pot dictatorship' staffed by nazis: it takes one to know one, I suppose.

The really worrying thing about this whole sorry tale is the continuing downward spiral of the SNP's campaign for separation. From the heady days of May last year when they boasted of running an unremittingly positive campaign to now when we have the First Minister of Scotland behaving like a swivel-eyed loon screaming incoherent abuse at public servants and  his closest allies smearing his opponents and  forging letters.

If they go on the way they are going for another two and a bit years I shudder to think how low the separation campaign will sink...

SNP currency plans? You've got to be quidding!

The SNP were up to their old tricks at FMQs yesterday . When asked to give details on an assertion about an independent Scotland's currency they delayed and obfuscated until they could hold off no longer. This is a tactic they've successfully used before; most recently with their ludicrous lie that they had delivered 86 of 96 unidentified 'headline' manifesto commitments in the election campaign of 2011. Like yesterday, they refused to identify  those 'headline' commitments  until the very last moment and by that time the lie had done its work.

The fact that they have to adopt these tactics shows just how desperate the SNP are becoming on the subject of  currency in an independent Scotland. By finally admitting that their policy is to retain sterling and  the Bank of England as a lender of last resort any attempt by the SNP to claim financial independence in these circumstances are at best naive and at worst cynically unprincipled. Put simply, if the SNP have their way an independent Scotland's  fiscal and monetary policies will be under the supervision of the UK treasury and Bank of England. See Martin Wolf's excellent article in the FT on the subject here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f2abe5a2-428b-11e1-97b1-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1lIww0swR.

The procession of SNP high heidyins denying this simple truth is beginning to ring alarm bells with the Scottish public. Opinion polls on separation have been pretty much static since the election, however the one thing showing a dramatic change is the First Minister's approval ratings. They are on the slide and will  continue to slide as long as he and his deputies present themselves as whackjob fantasists who cannot face inconvenient truths.

And finally: I see another SNP MSP has claimed that opposing SNP policies is 'anti-Scottish' - this time it's not a bonkers back bencher but a government minister. Don't these clowns realise that accusing your opponents of being unpatriotic is about the most anti-Scottish thing you could possibly do?