Confirmed speaking dates at the moment are
26 August St Andrews
28 August Insch
29 August Dundee
30 August Cupar, Fife
I will post details of times and venues shortly – these are all evening events. I am still open to invitations on dates around these, and indeed any daytime events. Don’t mind dashing all over the place. A number are in the pipeline already. Contact me using the button at top of page.
Have been rather unwell the last couple of days, so please forgive lack of regular posts. BBC Hardtalk interview with Anders Fogh Rasmussen of NATO made me feel much worse. Totally incapable of acknowledging the disasters NATO and NATO members have inflicted on the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union – and the BBC totally incapable of serious questioning on the point.
“My passport says I’m British”
I think you’re telling me that yes, you’re N American.
CabSpeccy
“…according to Habbabkuk’s sanguinity test,”
_______________
Not mine, old boy. Lex sanguinis has been around for a lot longer than I have.
Israel would not survive without weapons
You don’t say rabbi.
So the parasitic supremacist creed justifies shooting fish in the barrel, as the zionist scum were attacking Gaza; a concentration camp that has been under a regimen of medieval siege by land, sea, and air, for the last eight years. This was in a bid to satiate the zionist scum’s blood-lust, in their pursuit of even more stolen lands and more Palestinians killed maimed and cleansed, zionistan cannot survive without weapons, and a constant stream of murdered Palestinians blood.
@CanSpeccy.
Re your comment 9.05
The Holyrood government that’s in power just now who propose independence,the SNP, voted strongly against any attack or invasion of Iraq, lets make that crystal clear, they also vote no to the invasion of Afghanistan. As for Brown and Blair, they may be Scottish of birth but they carried out their atrocities at Westminster, Brown also raided the pension pot, and sold UK gold at an all time low price, he and Alistair Darling, never saw the 2008 crash coming . As for Blair his deeds of destruction are well documented.
As for the English people not having a choice as where the monies were spent, this statement of yours answers the case for Scottish independence, the people of England are stuck with a corrupt Westminster government, it however doesn’t mean Scots have to as well.
Now speaking of the national debt, the UK government have said in a round about way that Scotland won’t obtain any of the assets, ergo it stands to reasons no assets no debt.
But again you haven’t done your homework, and I’ll tell you why, if you did you’d know that the UK government has guaranteed to pay the UK debt regardless of the independence outcome. Therefore how can Scotland be held responsible for a debt it doesn’t owe.
This action shows the desperation of the UK government when twice in the past year alone the UK’s credit rating has been lowered from the AAA rating.
Finally the Scottish government wishes to take its share of the debt, along with its share of the assets, a reasonable and fair request.
Fred
“It was Salmond who went there in secret and in disguise.”
____________________
The mind boggles. I’m happy to believe you, but do you have details?
Fedup
“Israel would not survive without weapons
You don’t say rabbi.”
________________
I’m afraid he does, Fedup. As is implied by the founding charter of Hamas as well.
As per conventions, and treaties, resistance to occupation is an inalienable right of the nations under the occupation of enemy. Hamas are only defending their lands against the occupying and marauding zionist scum.
According to the thread above, an independent Scotland will use Faslane for a Navy. I assume that it too will have weapons of some kind – if only for fisheries protection an customs enforcement.
@Fred.
Re your comment at 9.11
I have to agree with your point, to a point, David Cameron’s visit to Shetland, didn’t have its usual fanfare trumpet, that surrounds the press, on any of his visits.
Re your second point I’ve no idea if Alex Salmond went to Shetland in disguise, if so please provide link, many thanks.
As does Israel – recognized by the UN as a State in UNGA resolution 273 of 11 may 1949
@Tim.
Re your comment 9.43pm
Yes indeed the Scottish government propose to have naval ships, though I’ve read they’ll be more for protection than attack, and will have a multi-task remit, I assume guarding the rigs, and coastline along with patrolling our waters.
Something quite similar to what Norway has at present, there’s no need for Scotland to have an aircraft carrier, though it would be something to have one (second hand) as a medical ship, sending it around the world, to carry out medical operations and procedures, in less fortunate countries.
Now there’s a warship I ‘d happily wave off at Greenock.
“The mind boggles. I’m happy to believe you, but do you have details?”
It’s supposed to be secret, I shouldn’t really be telling you this, his disguise was ingenious.
On the link I posted, look carefully at the photo, see the pony with short legs a fat belly and it’s eyes are too close together…
Don’t change name and start peddling the same nonsense. The border ambiguity, nuclear ambiguity, peace ambiguity, are all deployed by the Jewish supremacists and their parasitic supremacist networks from without zionistan, and all designed to cover up the most aggressive fascist, racist regime on the planet through seeking to justify the nonsense of “recognised by UN” what is the UN recognition?
How come UN becomes relevant so far as the 1949 is concerned, and then it becomes irrelevant for the rest of the times? There again UN ambiguity, I forgot.
Typical zionist scum blaming their victims for their suffering, and evidently the rest of the goyim cattle are not suppose to come to understand; the only aggressor in the Palestine equation are the zionsit scum, as they openly are admitting; without the flow of weapons and free money project zionistan is a dead duck.
I think you’re telling me that yes, you’re N American.
Frankly, I’m a little confused about my identity.
My passport was issued by the UK, for which reason I stated that it stated that I am British. But then at one point in my career I swore undying allegiance to Queen Elizabeth, Queen of Canada. But according to “lex sanguinis,” I am apparently Scotch by virtue of a pure Highland Scotch grandmother — for which reason I am for Highlands independence from those lowland bastards in Edinburgh. We Highlanders, of course, will take all the oil.
Unfortunately, the Scotch don’t understand genetics and thus only recognize patrilinearity, unlike the Jews who deem race to be a matter of mitochondrial DNA and thus of matrilinearity. Fortunately, I’m not a Scotch Jew, so I don’t have resolve the conflict over the correct means of racial identification.
UN recognition was absolutely conditional on Palestinian refugees right of return and restitution. Which still stands and is not invalidated by events or later pronouncements.
RoS:
UK government has guaranteed to pay the UK debt regardless of the independence outcome. Therefore how can Scotland be held responsible for a debt it doesn’t owe.
How. Just watch us, laddy. We’ve got nukes and you haven’t. So much for your mean rejection of a tiny share in the cost of Trident.
As does Israel – recognized by the UN as a State in UNGA resolution 273 of 11 may 1949
Hi Tim – if you haven’t noticed yet you have entered a parallel universe where the ultimate arbiters of what does and doesn’t constitute international law and who is guilty under that law are not courts but the self selected Emonences. If their logic is circular it is because it is meant to be.
Understood – but “knock down ginger” is still a fun game from time to time. Remember, if blogging threatened the system they would have abolished it (as some countries seem to try)
Tony M – this is true, and might explain why Israel’s supporters seem more worried about what they call “lawfare” than they are about warfare. Firing rockets at them has only made things worse for everyone.
Yeah a conversation is struck up, because goyim cattle are far too dumb to get the drift of it all, one entity talking to itself with the help of the not so secret profile management software, all these grants and aids paid to the zionist scum can afford to throw a bit of money around for the keyboard brigades.
Circular arguments; now that is pot, kettle etc. “eminences” ie those goyim cattle who will not buy into the cock and bull yarns of the “land registry records” the rest of the world knows as “The Bible” that bequeaths the lands of Palestine to the sons of Abe. That is after he was caught by his Mrs, in trousers around his ankle situation giving some RE to the maid girl. Note Abe was a very modern chap and he was trousered despite his contemporaries wearing long skirts and no knickers.
As Abe got the sharp end of the Mrs Abe’s tongue, he thought it out quickly and came up with the patrimony deal for her sons. Abe was saving his butt and he never thought that the poor Palestinian will pay for his little indiscretions, that had so upset Mrs Abe.
UN general assembly which has since declared zionism is racism these days is an irrelevancy but seeing as goyim cattle cannot understand shorthand and figures then; hey what the heck UNGA resolution 273 of 11 may 1949, which was based on the UNGA 181 but who gives a rat’s butt what that was about?
Evidently only the “master race” have access to these “UN” material, and goyim cattle are incapable of googling.
However fact that the most aggressive fascist, racist, regime born of politics of Jewish supremacy, is raining death apartheid and ethnic cleansing and genocide on Palestininas is also explained away with the UN General Assembly that these days is of no relevance at all. As the latest mass murder of the Palestinians in Gaza proves.
@Tony. Yes, spot on. Harold Wilson’s father was a bank manager. I never understood why he went out quietly, because I’m sure there was much more going on in the background than just a desire to retire at 60. I even remember exactly what I was doing when someone burst in and announced that he had resigned. In view of comments made on other threads about Callaghan, he must have been fuming over that “winter of discontent.
Republicofscotland
640 million barrels of recoverable oil is approximately 8 days world supply. 40 billion barrels of oil have already been produced from the UK North Sea sector. Peak production from the new field extension (this is phase 3 development of the Clair Field which has been in production since 2005) is estimated in the video to be 100,000 barrels oil energy equivalent (which means includes gas also produced – converted to energy equivalent in barrels of oil) per day. That’s tiny compared to almost 5 million barrels oil equivalent per day that once was produced in in the UK sector at peak.
While the new field extension is nice it isn’t any kind of game changer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_oilfield
Peacewisher
“@Tony. Yes, spot on. Harold Wilson’s father was a bank manager.”
__________________
I’m afraid you’re both spot-off.
Harold Wilson’s father was an industrial chemist.
Do you good people never check before you scribble?
The Telegraph portrays ‘Bad’ Shimon Elliot as ‘cunning’ and Aangirfan is portraying my Holy Prophet May Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him as Jewish!
If you can’t get the news to fit the facts, make it up.
Canspeccy’s granny was Scottish and my grandmother was Jewish. What is it with these people who can only see the world in terms of lineage and not in terms of ideas?
The Islamic State is just an extension of the Salafist nihilism that reduces the vastness of heart of the religion of Islam to a petty rulebook and a test of physical fitness.
The Times of New York recently reproduced the instruction of our prophet SAW about the rights of Christians not to be judged for their behaviour and not to be prevented from their Christian form of worship by Muslims.
Look at the vastness of heart of a true religion compared to the Female Genitalia Mutilation of the Islamic State.
The Salafists twist the religious instruction to Muslims not to judge ( as per gospels ‘Judge not , lest ye be judged’ into a green light to ally themselves, as all the jihadists have done , with Quwata Amrikia/ USUKIS raw power.
If one was to define humanity by ethnicity as CanSpeccy does or take the opposite meaning of your prophet’s SAW instruction as Salafism does, you can generate froth/scum like the impurities you get when smelting metal, or boiling jam.
That scum we are informed by Allah in the Qur’an is part of the cleansing process. Fedup gets it, Speccy doesn’t. I welcome the vastness of human diversity and I welcome the vastness of human spirituality, both of them infinitely more interesting, amusing and joyful than the bigotry of racism and sectarianism.
Fedup
Your comments are just rants, aren’t they.
Vulgar, hateful, badly-structured and badly-written bollocks.
Get treatment or you’ll find yourself back inside.
self-inflicted prophet you really would like to think so, the story of Abe has got you rattled has it? There again in your delusional state you are now divining about all manner of events and outcomes.
Vulgar, you say, evidently your next complaint to G_d is already formulated.
Vulgar is your incessant support of the zionist scum, vulgar is your unashamed imposition of your unwelcome interjections on this blog, vulgar is your relentless stalking of this blog.
@Habby: I remember a TV documentary about him and there was certainly someone in his family who was a bank manager, and encouraged him in Economics.
Fascinating alt-biography, with many contributions from contemporaries at:
http://spartacus-educational.com/PRwilsonHa.htm
(I didn’t know he was a suspected Russian spy… it seems rather unlikely!)
are Scot’s as exercised about non-Scottish Worldwide issues? I suggest a link between the independence vote and worldwide independence. Just askin’
Did anyone see this in ‘The Guardian’, 14 August?
One of the world’s top economists has warned that an independent Scotland’s economy would crash within seven years if it tried to use sterling.
Professor Ronald MacDonald, a currency expert who advises the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, said the Scottish government’s plans to use sterling after a yes vote were fundamentally flawed, even if Alex Salmond’s proposals for a currency union were accepted by the UK. The Scottish economy would shrink by up to £100bn by 2023, MacDonald said.
His intervention has reignited a simmering row over the first minister’s plans to share the pound after Mark Carney, the Bank of England governor, disclosed on Wednesday that the Bank was drawing up contingency plans to defend sterling and prop up Scotland’s finance sector in case of “currency flight” by depositors after a yes vote on 18 September.
Salmond insisted on Thursday that Carney’s intervention underlined the case for a currency union. He accused the UK government and Labour of creating financial instability by repeatedly rejecting proposals for a currency union as a campaign tactic in the referendum.
During ill-tempered exchanges in the Scottish parliament, Salmond cited evidence from Sir Donald MacKay, a former economic adviser to the UK government, that a currency union was “perfectly possible” and was in the UK’s long-term interests.
Salmond said the pro-UK parties had already tried and failed to sow doubts about the health of industrial investment in Scotland and its employment rates. “Trying to generate instability in the financial markets will fail as well,” he said.
MacDonald, the Adam Smith professor of political economy at the University of Glasgow and a globally recognised expert in oil-based economies, said any move to use sterling would expose Scotland to huge economic shocks because of its heavy reliance on North Sea oil revenues, but inability to set its own interest rates or control money supply.
In a damning critique of Salmond’s proposals, MacDonald said that independence would immediately mean that Scotland became a petro-economy. That would leave it heavily exposed to higher prices in shops, wage rises, a significant trade deficit and increasingly expensive exports.
Using IMF methodology, MacDonald said Scotland would face an annual deficit of 7% and would cut Scotland’s economic output by at least £30bn in a best case scenario, or up to £100bn in a more likely worst case scenario by about 2023. “Clearly this is very, very bad news,” he added.
It would greatly increase pressure for public spending cuts and tax rises, with a future Scottish government forced to impose a punishing austerity regime to balance the books, or face the prospects of an IMF bail-out, similar to the ECB’s rescue of the Irish and Greek economies.
MacDonald has been a currency adviser to banks, governments and oil rich states including Norway, but released his analysis through the anti-independence campaign run by Alistair Darling, Better Together.
He insisted he had done so because Better Together had commissioned him, and would have been “very happy” to give the same advice to the Scottish government, and denied taking a partisan stance on the referendum.
“If an independent Scotland had a separate [new] currency then I’m sure in the longer term it could survive and prosper,” MacDonald said. A separate currency “is the only tenable plan B, to be perfectly candid”.
But the first minister and his government’s advisers were wrong to predict that a currency union would keep Scotland’s economy in lock-step with the far larger UK economy; they would quickly diverge, MacDonald said, even in a currency union.
They were already different, he said. Excluding oil revenues, Scotland had an average trade deficit of 11% over the last 15 years, which became a trade surplus of 2.7% if a geographic share of North Sea oil was included.
That meant that oil played “a massive role” in determining the optimal currency and exchange rate options for Scotland. “We become a net exporter of oil and that fundamentally changes the nature of the Scottish economy and particularly the relationship we have with the rest of the UK,” he said.
A currency union, already vetoed by George Osborne, the chancellor, would be unsustainable because of the differences between the two competing economies, he said. “I don’t think it will last long. This will kick in on day one of independence. These relative price effects happen very quickly,” he said.
If Scotland chose to use sterling without a formal agreement to have the Bank of England and the Treasury underwrite Scotland’s economy, that could provoke a massive crisis and require “severe austerity” to create the significant surplus needed by a Scottish chancellor to balance the books.
Scotland’s manufacturing exports would soon become uncompetitive, because prices within Scotland would rise faster than in the UK. That would worsen if it chose to use sterling without a formal deal, with large parts of Scotland’s financial sector forced to move to London and investors withdrawing money from Scottish companies.
@ Bird Shit:
I welcome the vastness of human diversity
Which means I want to mix everyone up so there’s no more diversity.
Is this idiocy or what?