A particularly sickening trick from the BBC a few weeks back raised my blood pressure whilst in hospital and almost finished me off. A French Euro MP was asked for “the French view” on Scottish independence. She said that France would oppose it and the French government takes the view that an independent Scotland would be outside the European Union. I was absolutely astonished that the BBC had managed to find the only French person in the entire world who is against Scottish independence, and that she was telling an outright lie about the position of the French government.
Then I realised who she was – the former research assistant (and rather more) of New Labour minister and criminal invoice forger Denis Macshane. She worked for years in the UK parliament for New Labour, in a Monica Lewinsky kind of way. All of which the BBC hid, presenting her simply as a French Euro MP. There are seventy million French people. How remarkable that the one the BBC chose to give the French view of Scottish independence was a New Labour hack!
Today the news came out that Scotland contributes a net £3.6 billion a year to the UK government finances. Scotland’s fiscal deficit is an extremely respectable 2.6%, compared to 6% for the UK as a whole, or 6.3% for the rest of the UK excluding Scotland.
But even that is not the full story. These figures are based on a geographical allocation of oil revenue – but that geographical allocation is based on New Labour’s incredible gerrymandered 1999 England/Scotland maritime border which gives eight major Scottish oil fields to England, including two North of Dundee.
On a realistic maritime boundary, which an independent Scotland would undoubtedly win from the International Court of Justice, Scotland would actually have a budget surplus of £1.9 billion. Hurray, boys and girls, we are in the black! Remember I was Head of the FCO Maritime Section and I personally was involved in negotiating most of the UK’s maritime boundaries, including with Ireland, France, Denmark and Belgium.)
I know it is hard to believe, but that really is the England/Scotland maritime boundary which the revenue figures in the GERS report are based on. That is why England’s oil revenues are surprisingly high in the report – and Scotland’s surprising low.
But even on that boundary, the GERS report shows beyond any argument that Scotland’s public finances would be much better outside the Union.
Yet this morning the BBC choose to present the report as showing that because Scotland has a fiscal deficit, an independent Scotland would not be viable. Despite the fact that deficit percentage is less than half that of England. Despite the fact that every country in the Western world has a budget deficit.
The BBC have simply become addicted to the Big Lie when it comes to Scottish Independence. Talking of big lies – now they are even wheeling out Blair!
“I found the reliance on that little sideways photocopy poor, no wonder it wasn’t pointed out when i asked.”
I posted a link to the map yesterday at 7.55pm.
“Here is something more respectable to judge:”
It still shows the border equidistant from Scotland and England in line with international conventions.
“England can do what they damn well like”
Nobody has said that. The UK government which seems to comprise more than their fair share of Scots can do what they damn well like because it’s all UK territory.
“It still shows the border equidistant from Scotland and England in line with international conventions.”
It is not equidistant from “Scotland and England” it is only equal for a small unrepresentative stretch of coast.
Regarding that being “in line with international conventions”, can you say who or what convinces you it the case, that a small stretch of coast can selected and surrounding topography ignored?
“”England can do what they damn well like”
Nobody has said that.”
You wrote this yesterday Fred.
“At the moment the Westminster government can legally set the boundary where the hell they want,”
Not reported on the BBC of course.
This is today, on the day of Friday prayers, in Jerusalem and is exactly how Sharon got the 2nd Intifada started.
Israeli attacks on Aqsa – 8 March 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GXam41TA_DM#!
David Schermerhorn, an American activist, says:
We must consider the possibility of Israel provoking the next Intifada as Obama’s visit approaches. Bibi could use an outbreak of violence to discourage pressure for renewed peace talks. “How can you talk to these people?” Bibi would despair. And possibly even the symbolic trip to the West Bank by Obama would be cancelled.
We must also ask if the increased pressure by the Egyptians on the tunnels is partly in exchange for our 200 million USD grant that is in turn a gesture to Israel that we are still watching out for them. It may not be Iran but it is a small step in the right direction.
The actions are discouraging. The motives obscure. Circles within circles.
David Schermerhorn
Exactly how Sharon got the 2nd Intifada started.
‘It is not equidistant from “Scotland and England” it is only equal for a small unrepresentative stretch of coast.’
Rubbish, it’s equidistant, I measured it.
‘Regarding that being “in line with international conventions”, can you say who or what convinces you it the case, that a small stretch of coast can selected and surrounding topography ignored? ‘
I’m not ignoring anything and I have never said anything about any small stretch of coast, the distance is measured to the nearest point as where it is.
‘You wrote this yesterday Fred.
“At the moment the Westminster government can legally set the boundary where the hell they want,”’
So where the hell did I use the word “English” in there? The Westminster government is the UK government and those are all UK waters.
The Prime Minister’s Grandfather was a Laird in Aberdeenshire, the previous Prime Minister was Scottish and the one before that was born and raised in Edinburgh so stop calling the Westminster government English because it just isn’t true.
This is supposed to be a thread on future Scottish independence and BBC bias in reporting on the issue, isn’t it?
Most commenters seem to have understood that and there have been some very interesting and informative comments made, mostly in a good spirit. I think everyone will have learnt something from the exchanges.
Can I ask Mary why she seems unable TO STAY ON TOPIC and to stop using this – and every other thread – as a vehicle for her stream of anti-Israel propaganda?
Her last three posts concern, respectively, an evening hosted by the British Board of Deputies, the record number of PQs asked about Palestine and the possibility of a 3rd Intifada.
I recognise Mary has strong feelings about Israel/Palestine – and she is entitled to communicate them – but it would be nice if she could occasionally let a thread on another matter run its course without hyperventing them.
********
La vita è bella, life is good! (Help the Obsessed is my charity of the month)
Sorry, for “…BBC bias in reporting..” read “..propaganda against independence.”
“Rubbish, it’s equidistant, I measured it.”
Your scrappy printout and measurements are rubbish.
“I’m not ignoring anything and I have never said anything about any small stretch of coast, the distance is measured to the nearest point as where it is.”
Which is a small stretch of coast, you completely ignore all the rest of the coast, not to mention the relevance of the land mass.
“At the moment the Westminster government can legally set the boundary where the hell they want,”’
So where the hell did I use the word “English” in there? The Westminster government is the UK government and those are all UK waters.
Your saying the word hell a lot.
Whether it is “Westminster” extending English waters “where the hell they like” into scottish waters, or the “English” doing it, is nothing more than a turn of phrase Fred. You said as much and doth protest too much.
Maritime boundaries are fundamentally arbitrary and self-serving. There is no point in discussing whether an instance of a boundary conforms to a mathematical ideal or not. It’s not a technical issue, it’s political. If Westminster proposed a change to the boundaries, it wasn’t for technical reasons, it was for geopolitical and economic reasons.
The primer –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_boundary
Discussion about methodologies –
http://www.marineregions.org/eezmethodology.php
. . . .
One thing I forgot to ask is how many ‘yes’ votes will be required to carry the motion. Is it to be a simple majority or two thirds? Will Scots get a second chance or will they be stuck with the decision they make, for better or worse, on that date? It would be a shame if the referendum did not express the dominant and enduring sentiments of the Scottish people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_independence_referendum,_2014
. . . .
@AAMVN, 8 Mar 8:57am – I agree with you. I don’t think independence will be allowed. Every trick in the book will be used to prevent it from being realised. The BBC has clearly been co-opted for this purpose. I imagine that somewhere, hidden in the bureaucracy, is a contingency plan for dealing with independence issues.
Hi Technicolour, wonder if you had a chance to read my response to you re Jemima Khan of yesterday:
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2013/03/propaganda-against-scotland/#comment-397969
Keen to get your response.
Technicolour,
Krishnamurti expounding on humility:
The undoing of knowledge is the fundamental revolution; the undoing of knowledge is the beginning of humility. Only the mind that is humble can understand what is true and what is false, and is therefore capable of eschewing the false and pursuing that which is true. But most of us approach life with knowledge – knowledge being what we have learned, what we have been taught, and what we have gathered in the incidents and accidents of life. This knowledge becomes our background, our conditioning; it shapes our thoughts, it makes us conform to the pattern of what has been. If we would understand anything, we must approach it with humility, and it is knowledge that makes us unhumble. I wonder if you have noticed that when you know, you have ceased to examine what is. When you already know, you are not living at all. It is the mind that is undoing what it has gathered that is actually and not merely intellectually dissipating what it has known – it is only such a mind that is capable of understanding. And for most of us knowledge becomes the authority, the guide which keeps us within the sanctuary of society, within the frontiers of respectability. Knowledge is the center from which we judge, evaluate, from which we condemn, accept, or reject.
Now, is it possible for the mind to free itself from knowledge? Can that self-center, which is essentially the accumulation of knowledge, be dissolved so that the mind is really humble, innocent, and therefore capable of perceiving what is truth?
After all, what is it that we know? We know only facts, or what we have been taught about facts. When I examine and ask myself, ”What is it that I really know?” I see that I actually know only what has been taught me, a technique, a profession, plus the information which I have acquired in the everyday relationship of challenge and response. Apart from that, what do I know, what do you know? What we know is obviously what we have been taught, or what we have gathered from books and from environmental influences. This accumulation of what we have acquired or have been taught reacts to the environment, thereby further strengthening the background of what we call knowledge.
So, can the mind, which has been put together through knowledge, undo what it has gathered and thereby remove authority altogether? Because it is the authority of knowledge that gives us arrogance, vanity, and there is humility only when that authority is removed, not theoretically but actually, so that I can approach this whole complex process of existence with a mind that does not know. And is it possible for the mind to free itself from that which it has known?
We can see that there is a great deal of tyranny in the world, and that tyranny is spreading; there is compulsion, there is misery, both physically and inwardly, and the constant threat of war, and with such a world there must obviously be some kind of radical change in our thinking. But most of us regard action as more important than thought; we want to know what to do about all these complex problems, and we are more concerned with right action than with the process of thinking which will produce right action.
Now, the process of thinking obviously cannot be made new as long as one starts thinking from any assumption, from any conclusion. So I must ask myself, as you must ask yourself, whether it is possible for the mind to undo the knowledge it has gathered because knowledge becomes authority, which produces arrogance, and with that arrogance and vanity we consciously or unconsciously look at life, and therefore we never approach anything with humility.
“Your scrappy printout and measurements are rubbish.”
You have your head up your nationalist arse and refuse to see the truth. Not wasting my time on you any more.
“Maritime boundaries are fundamentally arbitrary and self-serving. There is no point in discussing whether an instance of a boundary conforms to a mathematical ideal or not. It’s not a technical issue, it’s political. If Westminster proposed a change to the boundaries, it wasn’t for technical reasons, it was for geopolitical and economic reasons.”
There has been no change to the boundaries, that is just Nationalist propaganda.
The first boundary only decides legal jurisdiction, which laws apply Scottish or English, it has not been changed, that is still the boundary to decide which courts someone will be tried in. It is still on the statute books you can look for yourself.
The second boundary concerns fish, which are Scottish fishing areas and which are English, the boundary was drawn fairly according to the accepted international methods.
I’m afraid the Nationalists are a fanatical lot who will scream “bias” and “unfair” at anyone who doesn’t agree with them yet see nothing wrong with lying and cheating for the cause.
Fred’s stock approach to having his inconsistencies highlighted.
“The Prime Minister’s Grandfather was a Laird in Aberdeenshire, the previous Prime Minister was Scottish and the one before that was born and raised in Edinburgh so stop calling the Westminster government English because it just isn’t true.”
Oh yeah Cameron is as Scottish as the short kilt.
Blair only went to a school in Edinburgh, where is academic performance was mediocre, before being kicked out after some indiscretion that is hardly a deep secret, at that time his family lived in Durham, where his had been a prospective Conservative MP, who failed to get selected for the seat, the father – who was an adoptee of a pair of London-domiciled travelling actors – for a time during world war 2 worked for a Glasgow Communist newspaper based in Govan, not serving in the forces suggests he was more likely in ‘intelligence’. Blair would have it his granny wore workmans boot’s and smoked a pipe.
At the same that just round the corner, also in Govan, Brown’s father was a presbyterian minister and an early rabid-Zionist before it was the fashion of the ruthlessly ambitious. Brown Snr. despised the poor of his parish and denonced them from the pulpit so bitterly and offered them no succour from charitable donations as was expected of him, so appalled the whole congregation that they petitioned and agitated for his removal if not dismissal and were mollified by having him shifted to the wilds of Fife.
for a stress-free life, ignore the BBC…….simple, yet effective
Habbabkuk (Lan dhen cac) 8 Mar, 2013 – 11:53 pm
Number of OFF TOPIC comments by Habbabkuk (Lan dhen cac) addressed to Mary on this thread = 8
“Blair only went to a school in Edinburgh”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Blair
“Blair was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 6 May 1953, the second son of Leo and Hazel Blair (née Corscadden). Leo Blair, the illegitimate son of two English actors, had been adopted as a baby by Glasgow shipyard worker James Blair and his wife,”
Crab, simply denying the facts makes you look like a complete buffoon.
The line is the line of equidistance. I used a software package for map analysis and calculated the line of equidistance. It matches the map in the legislative document.
Fred, I’ve tried reasoning with my fellow nats about this subject so many times, but they just don’t listen, so I commiserate. I’ll still be voting Yes in 2014 despite them; all countries have their share of boneheaded idiots.
Cryptonym 9 Mar, 2013 – 10:47 am
Essential sartorial advice for David Cameron:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ_fFLaljY0
Fred, RE Tony Blair.
If somebody went to a private school in London (and imagine that people who went to private school were mostly wealthy Scottish and the typical private school accent was upper-class Scottish) and then they moved to Scotland for the rest of their life, and they had a perfect Scottish accent with no hint of an English accent, it’d be considered racist to deny their Scottishness.
Stop being a racist.
Well I’m working from memory Fred, the clarification is not unwelcome, the details fray over time. Wherever Blair was born, he was brought up in the North-East, a cucko-Geordie as much a cuckoo-Scot. His father must have been the original neo-con transitioning from Communist to Conservative Party member and would be Tory MP, between the forties and fiftes.
Westminster is and always has been England’s parliament, however you twist and turn.
“You have your head up your nationalist arse and refuse to see the truth.”
I am one of the commenters most sympathetic to Unionist concerns here. I would like a good strong political union between everyone on these Northerly Islands, but the legacy arrangement we have has us warmongering and de-socialising together.
It speaks very poorly for your support of the current arrangement, that you would answer fair complaint about a maritime boundary with simplistic measurements on a scrappy printout and completely unsubstantiated declarations on international conventions, along with jibes like “Westminster can set it where the hell they like” and “nationalist arse” Who wants to be united with that? The breakup of the legacy union is about taking power away from that old attitude. You should get back after you have taken a good look at your persuasions Fred.
I could have agreed something earlier if not for the hullabaloo — Craig’s map is horizontally squeezed a bit, making the 1999 boundary look steeper than it is, that is something that can be criticised but is trivial presentation, compared to your protests that it is just fine for Westminster to draw it where they like and that some conventions insist a deviously selected simplistic calculation can be foisted on the weaker party.
“Fred, RE Tony Blair.
If somebody went to a private school in London (and imagine that people who went to private school were mostly wealthy Scottish and the typical private school accent was upper-class Scottish) and then they moved to Scotland for the rest of their life, and they had a perfect Scottish accent with no hint of an English accent, it’d be considered racist to deny their Scottishness.
Stop being a racist.”
All I said was that Blair was “born and raised in Edinburgh”
When this was denied I posted proof without comment.
How does this make me racist?
Or is it the usual Nationalist tactics of if you can’t argue with the facts attack the person?
“Westminster is and always has been England’s parliament, however you twist and turn.”
Deeper in denial than an Egyptian skin diver.
“it is just fine for Westminster to draw it where they like and that some conventions insist a deviously selected simplistic calculation can be foisted on the weaker party”
For sure. It’s incredibly awful that Westminster drew this line that fairly allocates sea to the nearest country. Perfidious Westminster, how darest thou be fair like this!!! FUME RAGE etc
Fred, come on – Westminster is 90% English. It rules a country that the world thinks of as England. It rules a country, the vast majority of whose inhabitants think of as ‘England’. Over the years, it has housed the same government that England-proper would have elected almost every time.
There’s no shame* in admitting that being a region of the ‘UK’ means handing over rule to country that forms the vast bulk of the ‘UK’, populationwise.
What is delusional is to kid yourself otherwise. At least admit it. Argue your case for a regional existence from a position of honesty. Own It.
*OK, I don’t actually think that 😉
‘Noooo’ come the fading cries of the people of England; ‘don’t leave us!’
(OT) Dear Villager, yes, I read the links, thank you: was waiting until the thread had run its course a little. Krishnamurti is always interesting, and it’s hard to disagree with him about compassion & humility. I don’t know whether Khan’s compassion for Assange was initially ‘faked’ or not, or whether she has been used, or threatened, but the New Statesman should publish Farrell’s excellent letter – if it hasn’t been sent to them for publication, with a demand for the right to reply, it should be.
“Westminster drew this line that fairly allocates sea to the nearest country”
“Argue your case for a regional existence from a position of honesty.”
The line does not allocate Sea to the nearest country, it does by a certain simple 1-dimension measurement of the 2 dimensional problem allocate Sea to the nearest coast. A fraction of all coast is relevant to the measure because of the receeding Firth above and receeding english coast below. This fraction which is all that guides your prefered measure just happens to be pointing about 45 degrees towards the north, which is where the country of Scotland is positioned in relation to England.
@ Fred
You see, that’s what you get when you go against whatever is the established line of the day on this blog.
Hi TC, couldn’t agree with you more. I would love to read a detailed rebuttal. We’ll see but i think it unlikely.
Re: “I don’t know whether Khan’s compassion for Assange was initially ‘faked’ or not, or whether she has been used, or threatened,…”
Threatened seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Who would threaten her? (Zionists, Americans, the Taliban…am kidding of course). I emphasise again, she is a Goldsmith after all.
If you fear she has been used, which could easily be the case, hasn’t she allowed herself to be, and wasn’t she forewarned? Can she be absolved of all self-responsibility?
Btw, Technicolour, hope you don’t mind my call you TC…one of my most favourite and lovable characters. “Top Cat and TC to my friends.”