We can make this a better country with UKIP. I run a science fiction bookshop in Glasgow (which partly explains my enthusiasm for human progress). Married to Hazel. Living in Woodlands. My father was Eastwood candidate for the Liberals. I spoke at LibDem conference in support of nuclear power, against illegal wars, for economic freedom and was the only person to speak directly against introducing the smoking ban. I was expelled, charged with economic liberalism. In 2007 I stood as the 9% Growth Party for economic freedom and cheap (nuclear) electricity. I am still proud of that manifesto - if vfollowed we would not have rising electricity bills and would be 80% better off with 7 years of 9% growth.
- UKIP is the only party opposed to Scotland having the most expensive "Climate Change Act" in the world; only party that wants us out of the EU - only part of the world economy still in recession - the rest is growing at an average of nearly 6% a year; only party opposed to effectively unlimited immigration; committed to growing our economy by the only way it can be done Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy; we offer referenda as a basic citizen right, as Switzerland and California do. --- Neil Craig

Saturday 31 May 2014

Daily Mail Letter - Racism Smear

  This letter was in the Daily Mail yesterday. It went out to most Scottish papers. I seem to be doing very well with the Mail - or arguably doing inexplicably badly with the rest of the press.

Sir,
      UKIP gaining 1 seat out of 6 from Scotland in the EU election is actually surprisingly low.
 
     A recent poll showed that 70% of Scots people agree with UKIP's policy on immigration - limit it to 50,000 a year. On other policies we have a lead that is less but not that much less.
 
    No new party have got 70% - many people vote for parties because "our family have always voted ....." and perhaps some distrust of policy promises is justified.
 
     Nonetheless something other than honest political debate on policy has clearly been at play.
 
      This can only be the disgusting smear campaign run by the state owned ("balanced" it says so in their Charter) BBC and some followers in the media, claiming UKIP is "racist". This claim is a deliberate, untruth [and cannot be proven].
 
      I challenge any of those who made this wholly false attack on UKIP to provide proof of UKIP having done anything 1/10,000th as racist as those parties or the BBC. By definition, any honest media personality who promoted the smear, will wish to prove it, and any who did and don't are totalitarian liars.
 
       Bear in mind that UKIP opposed our illegal wars including the one that led to our police (appointed from the KLA, a NATO organised terrorist group, in turn recruited from gangsters, sex slavers, organleggers and drug lords) dissecting thousands of people, chosen on racial grounds, while still alive, in Kosovo. This was done with the support of out main parties, though UKIP opposed it, and with the censorship, racial smearing and spinning of the BBC.
 
     If not they owe an apology not just to UKIP but to every British citizen for the way something close to a media monopoly has been used to subvert democratic choice. An academic statistical study has shown that the degree of governmental corruption and incompetence is directly proportional to government ownership of broadcasting (direct control of the press is less important) and that it had "no benefits". By their dishonest censorship and smearing (which has been much worse in Scotland than across the UK) the BBC have proven their monopoly power is not compatible with a free society.
Neil Craig
 
 
    The stuff in italics was edited out and the rather simpler but less emphatic "and cannot be proven" substituted. Not surprised. In fact I left it in because I doubted the letter would be published in any form. The accusation of LabConDem/BBC complicity in something that makes simple genocide look clean by comparison is undisputably true but (for that reason) virtually entirely censored by our media.

Friday 30 May 2014

Brian's Big "Debate" Today

 Was held in Townhead "Village Hall". This one was specifically about the referendum (16 weeks to go). The total audience was about 35, which is poor, though no schoolkids. On the panel were -

- Patrick Harvie, Green leader (* coincidentally on during the April edition previously described, and also previously described by me as "a permanent fixture on the BBC")
- James  Dornan, SNP

V

- Annabelle Goldie, Tory and previously party leader
- Jim Murphy, Labour (impressive - he has mastered sincerity and displays it as effectively as he did the spot of blood in the middle of his white shirt after the Clutha bar tragedy)

4 questions during which I was able to answer twice as was Robert Malyn, Glasgow branch chair.

1 "Who should we believe when the figures the Yes and No camps produce are so far apart."  Obviously everybody said me, what else can they. However Harvie somewhat weakened my question to him by getting in his admission first. Dornan had said their growth figures were credible. Harvie then said it wasn't about growth or economic success but equality, greenery etc. When I got chosen I pointed out that Harvie had said in a TV debate that "nobody should vote for independence on the grounds that it would produce growth, indeed that he didn't expect any growth" and that Nicola Sturgeon, on stage with him, hadn't disagreed. Would these 2 lie to tell us which it was, since it is difficult to accept their position until we know what it is.

Brian then took several other questions and in the shuffle mine went unanswered, which is answer enough.

2 - "Can Scotland be viable without oil" - Murphy wisely answered that of course we would be viable, just poorer. Harvie said we must stop burning oil because of "catastrophic" warming.

I put up my hand and got called & said "As a supporter of UKIP I do not believe in the catastrophic warming Mr Harvie warns us of. This is supported by the fact that there has been no warming at all, let alone catastrophic warming since 1998. However, be that as it may, because of the shale gas revolution, we must expect oil prices to fall. There is as much shale available in Britain as to match our oil. One thing we can be sure of is that if the SNP or Greens had been in power when north sea oil was found it would still be in the ground.

Robert also stated from personal experience of living in Ireland in 1990s and 2000s during the boom, that Ireland generally since Independence in 1922 has been an economic basket case and various public services e.g. health service, Public Service TV, and Transport Infrastructure roads / rail etc were pretty poor in comparison to the UK in General and Scotland in particular.

3 - "What about the pulling of cinema ads" - a light hearted bit in which people said which films they didn't like. I wanted to point out that this may show the people to be less interested in the referendum than the political classes and it would be dreadful if the vote, either way, went 51:49 on a 40% turnout. I wasn't asked.

4 - "Do we need Trident in a post cold war world" - Quite a lot of sensible points were made on all sides, mainly on the principle of keeping it. I didn't try too hard because I really don't know what the proper answer is. If I had been taken I would have said something about it being a token on both sides since there is no possibility of Britain actually using our nukes except as part of a general NATO action.

Robert got to point out the incongruity of those wanting to cancel our nukes on financial grounds while we give foreign aid to those investing in their own ones. 

Thursday 29 May 2014

Brian's Big "Debate" - Bearsden - 4th April

  On Friday I am going to be part of the Big "Debate" audience in Townhead. So here's one I did earlier:

Friday 4th April, Bearsden the panel, Patrick Harive for the Greens, David Martin, Labour MEP, Mona Siddiqui, Edinburgh Uni, formerly Glasgow Uni, Court member, Fiona McLeod, SNP MSP and Neil Baxter.
 
There were 4 questions on three of which I got to say something simply by keeping my hand up. The one I didn't was about global warming where Brian specifically said he was moving on though there were still hands up. Perhaps the email from the Head of BBC Scotland Censorship Dept saying that under no circumstances should any debate be allowed on the subject, in which the other side were allowed to participate, be allowed, had something to do with that. Siddiqui was balanced on this in that she said she knew nothing about it so Harvie was given as much time as necessary to assert that catastrophic warming was visible.
 
Childcare - all about the SNP promise to spend more on childcare after separation. It had recently been found that their promises that this would be payable for out of the extra taxes working mothers pay had no factual backing. No serious estimate had been made of how much these mothers would pay. I got to point out that childcare costs in Britain are 41% of average wages whereas in Estonia, not a country known for hating their children, it was just 6% and that the difference is entirely political regulations which, even though a member of UKIP, I couldn't blame on the EU because Estonia is a member too. Holyrood has control of most regulations so the SNP could massively reduce those costs right now if they wished.
 
Red Road Flats being blown up to celebrate the games - everybody disagreed with that. I got to say that the problem was not the blowing up but the decades spent letting them decline, when they were structurally sound - and that this was symptomatic of the way 3/4 of housing costs are actually political not technological. The blowing up was cancelled but that is just cosmetic - the real damage was done.
 
Can't remember the last question now but it gave me a chance, at the very end, to say that it was improper for the BBC to censor UKIP, particularly when it is important enough for attacks to be made (2 panel members had made such). Brian denied that UKIP was censored, citing as proof, that I was able to speak from the audience. I don't know if any listeners found that convincing

Wednesday 28 May 2014

3 News Items about UKIP

   3 Interesting news items about UKIP

- Lord Tebbit's blog on the Telegraph points out:

"There were some odd features of the poll, particularly the puzzle of who was really funding the "An Independence From Europe Party" whose title put it at the top of the long ballot paper which had Ukip at the bottom. Clearly the organisers and funders could have had no hope whatsoever that it would gain enough votes to elect an MEP, so what was their motive? I can only assume it was to catch out voters intending to support Ukip and lure them into precipitately putting a cross against its name before finding Ukip right at the foot of the page. One way or another it secured 1.49 per cent of the vote and if one adds even half of that to Ukip's score it makes Mr Farage's lead even more impressive."

I commented - Thanks for pointing out that 1.49% the spoilers took from the UKIP vote - something the BBC media have been silent on. Bearing in mind that the difference between UKIP getting no Westminster seats, at least if we don't target, which we will, and winning an overall majority of Westminster seats is only 10% (25% to 35%) that is a major effect.

Running this through Electoral Calculus we get

Conservative 210 seats, Labour 278 seats, LD 20 seats, UKIP 113 seats

-----------------------------------------------
- The BBC have just been reporting a ridiculous claim by the Yes campaign that, because they will achieve a marginally higher growth rate than currently, after 17 years we will all be better off. This is to counter an opinion from No that it will cost us over £2 bn to do the organisational changes of setting up new departments in every branch of government now run centrally. Yes's counter was to say it would cost £200 million. Bearing in mind that the enormously simpler job of raising or cutting Scotland's income tax alone by up to 3p has long been agreed on both sides, to cost £40-£45 million the idea that hundreds of changes of a similar order could be for £200 is ludicrous and even No's figure seems optimistic.

   Which didn't stop the BBC repeatedly saying the truth must be half way between each figures.

    This also induced me to send them this email. While it has not been answered it is now undeniable that a "balanced" BBC would have to give, at least, matching airtime and matching support for this:

"The Yes campaign's assessment of us being £1000 better off in 17 years depends entirely on the SNP being able to promise a slightly higher growth rate. That is simply an evidence free assertion. If they achieve an economic collapse we will be poorer.
 
Or if we achieve the average growth rate of the non-EU countries (5.5%) rather than our 2.5% we will, in 17 years be 65% better off (1.o3^17) or £17,000.
 
We can be much more confident we can do that with a UKIP government outside the EU. Lets see if the "balanced" BBC state propaganda organisation decides to allow, or to censor, mention of this option."
 
I have much more faith in UKIP, outside the EU, achieving non-EU average growth rates than I do in the openly Luddite SNP achieving higher growth rates, or any growth, outside the UK & inside the EU.
-------------------------------------
- The Scotsman has a relatively friendly article about David Coburn's victory.
 
"Ukip is currently without a Scottish leader – although Mr Coburn said he was “sort of running it” as the only elected parliamentarian the party has north of the Border."
 
I assume this means that because we have not yet had this year's AGM due by the end of May, Misty Thackeray's pro-tem leadership is no longer legal. Fortunately the AGM is promised very shortly and we can clear up the leadership issue. This is vital if we are to have a full range of radical, visibly Scottish, policies before the run up to the Westminster and Holyrood elections. 

CON


36.97%


307


23.00%


4


101


210
LAB


29.66%


258


24.40%


35


15


278
LIB


23.56%


57


6.60%


0


37


20
UKIP


3.17%


0


%


113


0


113

Tuesday 27 May 2014

If 70% Of Scots Support UKIP Policy Why Do Most Vote For BBC Approved Parties?

   Letter sent today. Any odds on whether it is censored, let alone whether any of the lying beeboids feel able to answer the question raised.


Sir,
      UKIP gaining 1 seat out of 6 from Scotland in the EU election is actually surprisingly low.
 
     A recent poll showed that 70% of Scots people agree with UKIP's policy on immigration - limit it to 50,000 a year. On other policies we have a lead that is less but not that much less.
 
    No way could any new party have got 70% - there are many people who vote for parties because "our family have always voted ....." and perhaps some distrust of policy promises is justified. Nonetheless something other than honest political debate on policy has clearly been at play.
 
      This can only be the disgusting smear campaign run by the state owned ("balanced" it says so in their Charter) BBC and some followers in the media, claiming UKIP is "racist". This claim is a deliberate, totalitarian lie.
 
      I challenge any of those who made this wholly false attack on UKIP to provide proof of UKIP having done anything 1/10,000th as racist as those parties or the BBC. By definition, any honest media personality who promoted the smear, will wish to prove it, and any who did and don't are totalitarian liars.
 
       Bear in mind that UKIP opposed our illegal wars including the one that led to our police (appointed from the KLA, a NATO organised terrorist group, in turn recruited from gangsters, sex slavers, organleggers and drug lords) dissecting thousands of people, chosen on racial grounds, while still alive, in Kosovo. This was done with the support of out main parties, though UKIP opposed it, and with the censorship, racial smearing and spinning of the BBC.
 
     If not they owe an apology not just to UKIP but to every British citizen for the way something close to a media monopoly has been used to subvert democratic choice. An academic statistical study has shown that the degree of governmental corruption and incompetence is directly proportional to government ownership of broadcasting (direct control of the press is less important) and that it had "no benefits". By their dishonest censorship and smearing (which has been much worse in Scotland than across the UK) the BBC have proven their monopoly power is not compatible with a free society.
Neil Craig
 
 
   Incidentally, just as I was writing this BBC Radio Scotland have just broadcast (12.40 today) another attack on UKIP as being "racist" - no attempt at facts made by these totalitarian fascist liars.

Monday 26 May 2014

UKIP Victory Across Britain as well as Scotland

   "There is no substitute for victory" according to General Douglas MacArthur and UKIP don't need a substitute.

   We came a clear 1st in the UK election:

   "UKIP won 27.5% of the vote and had 24 MEPs elected. Labour, on 25.4%, has narrowly beat the Tories into third place while the Lib Dems lost all but one of their seats and came sixth behind the Greens."

    So we may expect to see the Tories cease demanding free marketeers support them for fear of "splitting" the vote, indeed in theory they should start telling their supporters to vote UKIP everywhere where they came 3rd and while I don't expect them too, the voters are smart enough to work that out for themselves.

     While it was not the 100% wipe out for the LibDems some had predicted it is close enough - they were beaten by the Greens.

     Eurosceptic parties also did well across the continent.

    The Scottish vote is also a victory:

"The SNP won 386,193 votes on the night - almost 29% - with Labour coming second, on 346,377 votes (25.9%).

In third place was the Conservatives, with 230,569 votes (17.2%), followed by UKIP on 139,687 (10.4%).....

The Scottish Greens hailed their "best ever result", after winning 107,805 votes (8%), while the Liberal Democrats got a total of 95,076 votes (7%)."

   That is very bad for the SNP, particularly with the referendum coming up. It looks like a lot of SNP who would be Tories elsewhere decided to vote unionist. It is good for the Tories who were well ahead of us, though UKIP thrashed them elsewhere - I suspect this is not so much an increase in approval for them as a decrease elsewhere.

    Though we got our seat and are now the 4th party in Scotland, it was by a very thin margin. I strongly suspect that the votes going to the Tories not us (& more) was entirely because of the disgusting, dishonest and wholly corrupt campaign run by the BBC to call us "racist".

     In theory, and law, now that we have just over 1/3rd of the vote of the SNP the BBC will be obliged to give 1/3rd as much airtime to UKIP members as to Salmond, Sturgeon and co. In practice you would have to believe we live in a free democracy to expect that law to be enforced. However we can expect an almost infinite amount more coverage (ie some) and even some making up for 2 decades of censorship.

    10.4% in an EU election suggests a somewhat lower Holyrood vote, though, since Holyrood is under a PR system, not the squeezing out that happens in Westminster elections. To be a major party at Holyrood we have to have positive Scottish policies to put forward. I am convinced that the Scottish people only need some serious policy alternatives to the present "left of the UK Labour party consensus" that all 5 Holyrood parties share. I hope to keep on suggesting some.

    The Greens beating the LDs is also a humiliation for them, though it was achieved more by the latter increasing their vote - another sign more of dissatisfaction with the main party alternatives, I think, than approval of the Green enthusiasm for recession, blackouts and pensioner freezing.

Saturday 24 May 2014

Daily Mail Letter Of The Week - Honour Colin Pillinger By Building Beagle 3 Cubesat In Glasgow

Scottish UKIP policy proposal #1
 
    I got a notification (and a pen) from the Daily Mail that mine had been chosen as their letter of the week. Published 13th May. That is pretty cool. All the moreso since the letter, below, is one I am extremely proud of and which contains a proposal that could be literally world changing (the world being Mars). The letter had gone out to 30 odd British newspaper and not appeared when I googled it so I assumed it had not been used but the Mail don't put their letters online.

   I would, once again, like to take the opportunity to say that I think the Mail is the only real newspaper in Britain. The only one that goes looking for real news rather than rewriting press releases and "reports" from government, or government funded sock puppets (or in the Guardian's case, under the counter smears from Conservative central office or assorted genocidal Nazis). This is presumably why it is relentlessly denigrated by the propagandists at the Ministry of Truth BBC.

     original article it was derived from was on my blog here.

   The editings have been done with respect for the content and must have taken time. I suspect they have improved my grammar a little, though sometimes the most grammatical is not the most impactful. The editor dropped the "Westminster" from "Westminster MPs" - I assume because it was used in the Mail across the country not just Scotland though local references to Clydespace and the Forth bridge cost were kept in, which is good.

  It was slightly shortened, remaining the longest letter of the day (May 13th).

   I am happy with that editing.

   Google still indicates no other Scottish or UK paper found it reached their literary standards. I may be biased but I think the Mail's literary judgement is better than theirs.

    I also trust their judgement on what is popular with readers more than the other papers - and on that I have the support of their rising number of readers as competitors readership falls.
--------------------------------------------------------
Sir,
       The death of Professor Colin Pillinger who dreamed up the 2003 spaceprobe Beagle 2 was, is a time for a little reflection.
 
      His brainchild was built on a shoestring and made so light that ESA couldn't find any excuse not to include it with its probe to the red planet.

      Against all of the expectations of our political class it became incredibly popular, and a source of pride.

        That shows good judgement - finding life on Mars means life must be common across the universe  and. If there is a more important philosophical question than "are we alone in the universe" I have yet to hear it.

      Beagle 2 was renamed a spaceprobe in its own right rather than just an experiment (& Pillenger was awarded  a CBE).

     But it failed, as scientific experiments often do when something unusual is being attempted.

       The ESA said it would take it the Beagle programme over and do "more efficiently" - at 10 times the cost. Our MPs told Pillinger why they thought Beagle 2 had failed. He hadn't spent enough or taken long enough.

        ESA got their budget but  Beagle 3 is still unlaunched. Now we have cubesats (square "black boxes" 10cm o that are as revolutionary to space experimentation as containerisation was for shipping). And of how an engine is being designed that can drive a cubesat, or a cluster of them across the solar system. I suggested then they would be ideal for exploring and assaying the asteroids beyond Mars.

       They work because as Moore's Law predicted, computer capacity doubles every 18 months, so equally efficient devices can be made ever smaller.

         Beagle 2 was launched 11 years ago and according to Moore's Law capacity is up 400 times - a cubesat of 100g would be as efficient as Beagle 2.

           Cubesats (with 40% of all all those now in use around the world containing hardware produced in Glasgow) are being put in orbit for under £100,000 and they are proving to be a technology that is game changing for space development.

          Beagle 3 would be much more complicated than 1 communications cube in Earth orbit. But how much more. It looks as though the cost of launching Beagle 3 would be far more expensive than cubesats at several million £s although that than 1 metre of the new Forth bridge.

           Is that worth spending if we get closer to answering arguably the ultimate question about life and the Universe?

            I would think Westminster, and all our best known philanthropists would fight for the opportunity to honour Professor Pillinger thus.
 
Neil Craig
-----------------------------------------------------------
   If there are no technical reason why I am wrong and I don't think there are, then I hope I and perhaps others can push this further. If government (UK or Scots) were to put up even £1 million I am sure sponsorship of any excess would be possible, as much of the much greater cost of Beagle 2 was raised privately.
 
    My thanks to William Scott for posting me the page from the Mail on 13th May containing my letter.
 
    The editings are shown on my blog for anoraks like me who enjoy seeing them http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/honour-colin-pillinger-with-beagle-3.html

Friday 23 May 2014

Any Scottish constitution should liberate us, not enslave us

New ThinkScotland article on the danger of us waking up with a collectivist constitution. Please put any comments there.
UKIP Policy Proposal #1
-----------------------------------------------------------

   I have written on ThinkScotland before about the purpose of constitutions. I incline to the view that a constitution is necessary primarily to say what the limits on government power are.

   As Heinlein put it "Like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom - if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. I would not be unhappy if this convention sat for ten years before reporting - but I would be frightened if you took less than a year....

But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative" Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do."

   The SNP and the Scottish political establishment seem to consider the opposite. That a constitution should exist to give the power to the state and indeed duty to do ever more, and to remove the possibility of us objecting. This is the precise opposite of the principles on which Anglo-Saxon politics have worked since at least Magna Carta. 

   This is what that SNP's blockbuster promises (Page 353) :

European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), would be embedded in the written constitution.

Beyond those there are certain provisions that the present Scottish Government will propose for consideration by the constitutional convention:

 ■■ equality of opportunity and entitlement to live free  of discrimination and prejudice
 ■■ entitlement to public services and to a standard of living that, as a minimum, secures dignity and self-respect and provides the opportunity for people to realise their full potential both as individuals and as members of wider society
 ■■ protection of the environment and the sustainable use of Scotland’s natural resources to embed Scotland’s commitment to sustainable development and tackling climate change
 ■■ a ban on nuclear weapons being based in Scotland
 ■■ controls on the use of military force and a role for an independent Scottish Parliament in approving and monitoring its use
 ■■ the existence and status of local government
 ■■ rights in relation to healthcare, welfare and pensions
 ■■ children’s rights
 ■■ rights concerning other social and economic matters,  such as the right to education and a Youth Guarantee  on employment, education or training

   Now most of those sound nice, except the ECHR of which we have actual experience and we know how it means enforced votes for prisoners and interpretations of words which are both unusual and have extended government control of ordinary people, usually in the false name of "minority rights".

   Lets look at what they mean, and sometimes what they could well mean if interpreted enthusiastically by a European court that works as it has.

* Equality sounds good but it means the state has a constitutional duty to interfere in our lives any time somebody complains. Does that mean people being sued if results don't produce the "right" number of women or minorities - it does in the USA where their Constitution has been "reinterpreted" to find such a right even though it isn't written.

A few days ago an independent EU candidate was arrested for reading out a Churchill speech about Islam (don't worry you didn't miss it - its only news on the BBC when people get arrested in Russian churches for insulting Christianity - free speech arrests in Britain don't count). However at least in the current Britain this guy will have an opportunity of a trial. Under the SNP's constitution he could make no defence.

* This is even worse. What income, lower than the national average ensures "self-respect"?  In which case this is gives the state a right and duty to ensure absolute income equality - not even Mao managed that.

* This makes the catastrophic global warming lie and the SNP's promise of "100% renewable by 2020" the rigorously enforced, unshakable law. To call this economic suicide is greatly understating.

* I'm a bit agnostic about a separate Scotland having nuclear weapons so not to worried about this "leftist" shibboleth.

* Any independent state has this in some form. This is just a token blow against NATO. A separate Scotland would be silly to go to war with anybody anyway.

* Local government will "exist". what does that mean or guarantee?

* If the Scots £ fails to keep parity with the UK one, these rights would become impossible to maintain at parity with UK values. that would mean Holyrood would have no lawful alternative to increasing taxes or printing money. Both are obviously economic suicide but any lawful alternative is excluded.

* Current practice suggests this means the "every kid has a social worker with power over them" legislation and probably an extension of it. Scotland already has twice as many kids per capita in council "care" - the results of which consistently mean that when they grow up they are at the wrong end of any measure of human failure. "Children's rights" in this instance do not mean any rights for children but merely the right of social workers to build bureaucratic empires on their bodies.

* A catch-all. everything will be forbidden except where it is mandatory and subsidised.

      Elsewhere, just for political correctness, they promise that a requirement to give 0.7% of gdp, rising to a world beating 1% annually, will be another of these constitutional requirements "which alterith not". Though, as I wrote here previously, the evidence is that "aid" money is almost entirely wasted. Another example, like windmillery that the SNP's "nationalist pride" consists of being proud to be able to show eurocrats and the international apparatchiksthey can have the state remove the absolute maximum of wealth from the Scots people and nothing else. This has had virtually no discussion and unless I miss my guess, will be no more popular here than the Godfrey Bloom
incident proved it wasn't down south. But as with the scots media generally, the issue doesn't even get aired.

     I am afraid the statists have stolen a considerable march on this issue. ALL the discussion I have seen of constitutions has been by "leftists" within the political elite. This is a flat repudiation of the entire liberal Enlightenment tradition which was once, correctly, the glory and much of the reason for success of Scotland.

     Even if we vote No we may expect these to be raised as part of the "new powers" that Westminster has shown some inclination to give. That would be new powers purely for those in charge not for us.

     The paper is also imprecise about how this constitution would be set up. "One of the first and most fundamental tasks of the parliament will be to establish the process for preparing Scotland's first written constitution".  Others may be included but, certainly as long as one party has  majority, I assume it will be limited to those and such as those. As a member of UKIP (the street fascist attack on us having been publicly supported by Salmond & having been 100% censored by the BBC state owned  broadcaster from speaking in the referendum "debate") I am not anticipating even being asked what sort of constitution I would like. Even if, as polling on the upcoming EU election suggests possible, we replace the Tories as Scotland's 3rd party this May.

    Presumably between the independence vote and the adoption of the constitution Holyrood would vote through some Articles of Association (as the USA did) which would turn out to reflect what the SNP want anyway. The example there is Blair's evisceration of the Lords on the promise it was only provisional till they worked out how to create an effective second chamber - for which we are still waiting.

   Noticeably absent from the Scotland's Future guide is any mention of us getting a referendum on our constitution. That looks like stitch up. This is the same political class that boasts that the, after our pseudo0independence, Scots people will not be subjected to the worry of a referendum on our membership of the EU as the poor benighted English will.

   Free market proponents of separation generally say that after it happened Scotland would be forced into the real world. The lunacies of our current leaders would not be maintained. That without the safety net of Westminster the Scottish people would vote, sharply, for the sort of traditional liberalism that is working worldwide. The problem is that constitutions are designed to keep particular values in place.

   To remove the duty of ensuring we have the world's most expensive electricity and highest taxes would require junking the brand new document - probably requiring at least a 2/3rds majority and a lot of time. Meanwhile we would be stuck with an economy with all the freedom, charm and success of North Korea.

    Perhaps I should join the "debate" and say what sort of constitution I would go for to maximise freedom and growth. Any bets that I could come up with a constitution limiting government interference and maximising freedom and economic growth that would both represent "traditional Scottish values" (going back to the Enlightenment) rather better than windmill subsidies do, and would, after any genuine uncensored "debate" would get more voting support from the Scottish people than the SNP's selection of collectivist shibboleths would.

Thursday 22 May 2014

EU Election Day - 7 Out Of 10 Scots support UKIP Policies But The BBC Keep Lying

   This morning I did my stint outside Hillhead Primary. When I turned up I was the only person there. One voter accused me of being a racist & shortly came back with a bundle of anti-UKIP posters. In due course he was replaced by a woman, whom I assume he had phoned up. She confirmed she was an SWP member so while this is rudeness and loudmouthism it clearly does not represent general opinion (see under). Later she was joined by a Green however it was amazing to see that, during one of the 2 periods of greatest voting activity, none of the serious parties had any presence. Labour used to have an organisation that could swamp any event in Glasgow. This suggests that the hollowing out of political parties has gone further than they will admit and I suspect that official membership figures (which show UKIP still marginally smaller than the LDs) depend on them still listing bas members people who left, or died a decade ago.

     Voting has been slow.

    I initially set up outside the polling station door rather than outside the school gate, we and the other parties had done during all the last elections. When I moved to the gate for higher visibility I left my trolley of posters and leaflets. In due course the SWP woman complained to the officials that this was inside the grounds. I said I was perfectly willing to move if that was the decision but pointed out that this was contrary to previous practice and wished for their assurance that the rule would be maintained and apply to everyone. I got that assurance and we will see.
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Seven out of ten Scots 'back Ukip policy on immigration'
UKIP policies to curb immigration, cut overseas aid and crack down on benefits claimants are backed by a majority of Scots, a surprise new poll suggests, despite the repeated failure of Nigel Farage's anti-EU party to make a breakthrough north of the Border.
The survey shows nearly seven out of 10 Scots back stricter immigration controls, a key pledge in Ukip's manifesto for tomorrow's European elections.
Just over half want international aid budgets to be cut, while six out of 10 people say benefits should only be available to those who have lived in the UK for at least five years.
 
This Herald article was pointed out to me. Bear in mind that the Herald hate us, having run a campaign against us and even censored readers letters to exclude us so that figure cannot be an overestimate.

Yet the "balanced the law says so" BBC and the rest of the media have been running an unrelenting campaign of smears and lies against us in a manner no honestly impartial or democratic media could.

And we may expect them to continue lying and censoring to "educate the public" to accept only what Scotland's monolithic political elite want them to get. 

As an example of deliberate lying the BBC chose to report on a series of newspaper articles all alleged to be against UKIP. Peter Hitchens, who wrote one of them pointed out that his actually supported UKIP strongly, albeit with a couple of caveats which was all the BBC reported. The BBC have acknowledged their untruth and intend to apologise publicly.
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EVENING UPDATE

Just back from manning the polling station from 6 to 10. Some things worth mentioning.

1 - Yet again there was nobody from any of the main parties. The Greens had someone up till 8 but that was it. I remember, back when I was a LibDem, the Labour party owned Glasgow and when, for any election, they could overman anywhere & the other parties put up a coverage most tomes and places. Now they all leave a major poling station unsupported all day. There may be something tactical to this since it is a less important election to them than us, but even at its worst they should be using it as a training exercise for next year. It can only mean the collapse in membership of these 4 parties is massive.

2 - The attack - that is overstating it but I was accosted, in a veryin your face manner, by a young woman & 3 male friends for having that morning responded in kind to a verbal attack by her friend & her. Her friend being Green councillor Martha Wardrop. Allegedly, from her experience in such things, she knew that the law did not allow me to respond so. I invited her to make a  complaint to the counting officer and they went off to do so. When they came back they had clearly been told that there were no special rules requiring UKIP members to defer to even such exalted persons as Green councillors because she lost the heid and tore down a poster I had. I wouldn't have responded even had there not been 4 of them and as attacks go it was hardly serious. Still.

I reported it to the counting officer just for the record but that was it. I would like to make it clear that these people were completely different from the Green guy handing out leaflets when I got there and the girl who replaced him - both of them were not merely civil but pleasant. However it does show that when we scratch the surface of politics, particularly on the far "left" there are quite a lot of people for whom the principles of democracy and even free speech are quite alien.

[A couple of days ago a UKIP group was barracked in Shettleston, by the SWP (including one who explained the locals didn't want us, in an American accent) and the police had to lift some]

3 -The "racism" lie. I did meet a fair number of people who said "no way and vehemently denounced UKIP as "racist". They had 3 things in common - they could not provide any evidence for it and  didn't care - they were, without exception, white (it is a heavily Asian area and they politely took leaflets and one family made it clear they had voted for us, and probably wouldn't have if I hadn't been present and the other parties absent - they were, insofar as it is possible to tell, middle class.

Few of them were willing to say they liked the EU and didn't want a referendum or give any other coherent reason for, under no circumstances, even listening to what we said, so the "racism" lie has clearly hurt us. The BBC liars have a lot to answer for, having clearly subverted a democratic election. If a little pressure from the Sun "wot won it" was enough to swing 2-3%, as both sides claim, the censorship, slanting smearing and direct lying by the state owned broadcaster, reaching far more people and with a far stronger emotional effect, should have cost us 20-30% of the vote.

Not saying we won't win, just saying that without a totalitarian media monopoly UKIP would sweep the board. I don't think this could be easily denied even by those who don't want us to do so, indeed that Herald poll mentioned above suggests I am understating & we would get something close to 70% even in Scotland with "balanced" broadcasters.

Wednesday 21 May 2014

What the Election Leaflets Say

    I got 4 election leaflets through the door. Obviously the UKIP one was perfect in every way. As for the others:

Labour  "We have no limit on our ambition for Scotland and we want no Scot to have a limit on their's"  and "Labour will build a moral economy where the national wealth is used for the benefit of all" and promises growth with "a rising standard of living". Who can be against any of that except that if equality of outcome is enforced to ensure nobody has a below average income, then nobody can have the ambition to have a higher than average one and if we have that much state control of economic outcomes we can't have the free market incentives needed for growth. So this is just cynically promising everything to everybody, knowing it is impossible. We have to make choices. I think we should choose growth because that maximises the benefit for everybody. Labour are perfectly entitled to say they prefer total equality to being better off but it is dishonest to treat us like children and promise to maximise both.

      Of course they support the EU but the only reason they can come up with for doing so is that we benefit from the British, partial, rebate!

       And they promise more foreign "aid" and to be "global leaders in tackling climate change" which is dishonestly portrayed as making money rather than destroying it.

Tories
 List a number of things they have done for us. Including to have cut Labour's deficit by 1/3rd, omitting that they promised to end it in this parliament. But most interestingly is "We've taken all the action we can under the current EU agreements to fix our immigration system". They promised at the last election to cut immigration to "10s not hundreds of thousands" which is actually a tougher promise than UKIP's to reduce it to 50,000. Of course they broke it and immigration is still well above 200,000 but the EU regulations were in place when they made the promise. This is thus a public admission that their promise was a deliberate lie - that it was  always impossible to carry out their promise while in the EU.

Greens
. It is all about nationalisation, forcing us to eat "local food", and "creating thousands of jobs in green industries" (this is a cynical lie as they know perfectly well that each subsidised "green" destroys 3.7 real jobs).

     In an accompanying "newspaper" they attack the SNP for pouring insufficient billions into windmill subsidy and define the catstrophic global warming we are supposed to be experiencing as "the defining issue of our age". On that we agree. Catastrophic warming is not happening, indeed there has been no warming, of any sort, for 19 years - it is a totalitarian lie designed to give the political elite more power and more of our money (as they all provably know or it would not be necessary to suppress discussion). It does indeed define all the parties promoting this lie.

     Sorry I didn't get anything from the SNP and LibDems.

Tuesday 20 May 2014

EU Election Hustings

   I went to the hustings run by the Glasgow Skeptics last night. Not nearly as exciting as last time but that's ok. Speakers were

Jamie Gardner for the Tories - fairly young and clearly thinks about and can discuss policies.

Cat Styler for Labour - intro speech concentrated on promising her party's police is "jobs, jobs, jobs" but reticent about saying how, except for more windmill subsidies (which she knows perfectly well destroy 3.7 jobs for every one created). Normal Labour bull.

David Coburn, UKIP - when, in the intro, he spoke about how disgraceful it is Scotland's education system is being allowed to fail, you could see he meant it.

Tasmina Ahmed-Sheik, SNP - she is good looking and projects well. She put the SNP case, which was really about independence capably.

Maggie Chapman, Green - none of the wit, or even understanding of what they are saying, that Patrick Harvie has.

George Lyon, LibDem - also made his speech on jobs; also named renewables subsidies alone, as the way to produce them; also knows this is a lie.
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With that many we did not get through many questions. One about CAGW which all the other parties agreed was the most dangerous problem facing humanity. David was conciliatory on the issue whereas I would have pointed out that there has been no warming since about 1995 and the whole thing is a fraud.

There was also discussion on nuclear power in which Labour, Tory and LibDem all said they now support nuclear. Since this was part of why I was expelled from the LDs that seems improbable and in fact what they all mean by "support" is that they won't absolutely ban it so long as the cost is increased 50 fold by government parasitism; it isn't going to be working till they are long out of office; and they still get to support windmills with vast amounts of cash, including profits of nuclear. David spoke in favour of current nuclear until we have fusion, which I suspect is a long time off.

And the EU & Scotland's membership where lines were drawn as expected. The Tory scored a hit saying that an separate Scotland would lose the UK share of the rebate and have to put VAT on books and newspapers and that he doubted even the SNP would deny that - and Tasmina kept silent.

And there was the inevitable one about UKIP's "racist" wanting limits on immigration, which gave an excuse for everybody to gang up, though the Tory said no other party would support unlimited immigration, to be immediately contradicted by the Green, who said her party does (I know they hate the British people but what does she think hundreds of millions of immigrants would do to the environment). In fact Mr Gardner was wrong and thinking about it overnight this is what I think should be the definitive UKIP answer:

      UKIP's immigration policy is to limit it to 50,000 a year, which is the same as every British government until the Messiah of Socialism, Tony Blair took power. Anybody who says UKIP is racist must either be on record as saying every single British government up to Saint Tony's reign is racist or owe us a public apology. The Tories official promise at the last election was to cut immigration to "10s of thousands" which averages lower than our promise. The difference is that they knew at the time that this was a lie. As long as we are in the EU we cannot control immigration and all the parties know it, and promises to do so are false. If the difference between UKIP and all the other parties is that we mean our promises, I don't see that as something to apologise for.

       I would also like the other parties to say what, if our 50,000 limit is "racist" what precise limit on immigration they, should the EU ever allow, they would want? At least the greens have the honesty to say they want unlimited immigration, though they do not explain how our NHS would hold up when 6,000 million people across the world would have the right to come and use it. Immigration is a serious issue and deserves honest answers.
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        Then to the bar. I would like to acknowledge 2 things about the "Skeptics". Firstly that comparing this to the Brian's Big "Debate" hustings on Friday, in which everybody interrupted everybody and sounded like cats in a sack, this was conducted firmly and politely. Secondly I have suggested before that I believed the "Skeptics" were a government funded fakecharity - I don't now think this is so. I wish they were willing to allow the entry of scepticism about catastrophic global warming and think it is wrong to use the title and claim openmindedness while they won't even look at the evidence, but appear to have reached that, entirely wrong, decision without payment.

       Finally I would like to mention something George Lyons said - that this was the largest EU election hustings he had attended. My estimate about 70. 

Sunday 18 May 2014

UKIP 35% Labour 24% Tory 20% Green 7% LD 6% Overall

Comres has now released yet another poll for The Independent on Sunday on the European elections voting intention. --- These figures are weighted against voting intention – those highly likely to actually go out and vote.
Polls 18 May 2014

     Still not doing so well in Scotland where we are neck and neck with the Tories

Saturday 17 May 2014

Dalgety Bay Report "Leaked"

  Newspaper letter sent out a few days ago. That the entirely false Dalgety Bay radiation scare is promoted by SEPA and the BBC, is scandalous. The rest of the media are not willing to allow serious reporting of the facts either:

Sir,
       Once again we see the Dalgety Bay scare story being hawked around by the most scaremongering, and least reliable, parts of the media (that would be the BBC & Guardian). 
 
       The facts are that not only is there zero evidence of any harm whatsoever.
   
      Worse SEPA (nor indeed anybody else) have even attempted to deny that the very maximum radium that could have been put on that site 65 years ago was 0.25 grams, one quarter of what is there naturally and 36 billion times less than the 9 tonnes of uranium and thorium in a normal square mile of soil)
 
      Which is why SEPA have known but kept silent that the radiation at Dalgety Bay, all perfectly natural, is over 1/3rd lower than found, equally naturally, in any Aberdeen street.
 
      Rather worse that, though SEPA have publicly claimed to have found "the daughter elements of radium" as part of their collection of rocks there is only 1 such element, Radon gas, which, being an unreactive gas, could not possibly be a rock.
 
      This scare may have provided years of gainful employment to government "environmental officers" but it has cost the taxpayer many millions of £s and by planning blight, cost homeowners in Dalgety Bay at least as much. All for a scare which any honest scientist knows to be false.
 
      If it were not the Ruhr, over which a thousand times as many, with miniscule amounts of radium containing paints, were destroyed, would have been uninhabited ever since.
 
Neil Craig
 

Friday 16 May 2014

20 Leftist Policies From UKIP (Certainly too radical for Labour)

1 - Not being ruled by an unelected elite in Brussels - or is Tony Benn a rightist? When Neil Kinnock took over the Labour party they were committed to leaving the EU without even a referendum. Since then his wife, himself and now his son have each been making about £200 K a year out of the EU and coincidentally Labour support staying in without even a referendum.

2 - Opposing unlimited immigration of unskilled workers which pushes down wage rates for the poorest - also a world class welfare system is obviously incompatible with allowing unlimited immigration from countries with average incomes of £350 a year. - in early 20thC America mass immigration was largely opposed by the trade unions, who feared the competition and supported by business owners who wanted cheap workers. Now Swedish trade unionists, following the race riots there largely unreported by our media, have launched a nationalist campaign, urging the government to impose restrictions on immigration in certain economic areas. The Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) complained that more than two thirds of work permits issued to people from non-Nordic countries were related to economic areas where there was already high domestic labour competition

3 - Popular right of referendums.

4 - Popular right to an EU referendum - rather like the Labour one in 1974.

5 - Being progressive as in actually supporting progress and not wanting to return to the middle ages - OK UKIP is not quite as enthusiastic for technological progress as Trotsky who said "technology, which takes nothing ‘on faith’, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them" & "that in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale" but clearly Trotsky would be far closer to UKIP than to today's "environmentally aware Trotskyites with their faith based global warming scare.

6 - Against rich people passing a law to increase the price of only the sort of drink poor people buy.

7 - Opposed to fuel poverty - the other parties are all creating ever more expensive electricity through demanding we subsidise technologically backward windmills. Particularly in Scotland where Holyrood voted unanimously for the world's most expensive Climate Change Act. This is why every single honest MSP has publicly admitted supporting more fuel poverty - but only every single honest one.

8 - UKIP is opposed to poverty generally ending it in the only way it can be done. Ending recession and growing fast which can only be done with cheap energy.

9 - UKIP has been against all the illegal wars, hospital bombings, ethnic cleansing, genocide, sexual enslavement of children and dissection of living people the LabConDems did in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya.

10 - Opposing corruption, from the EU where, for over 10 years no accountants have been willing to certify their accounts to the Forth bridge where £2 bn is going walkabout

11 - Opposed to a state enforced licence fee to pay for the BBC a corrupt and dishonest state propaganda organisation masquerading as news.

12 - "the practical purpose of politics is to keep the populace scared and eager to be led by frightening them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary" - as Mencken said so UKIP aren't practical politicians but then neither can any idealists be, on left or right.

13 - Opposed to unearned subsidies for landowners with windmills.

14 - Human liberty and equality of opportunity - this is the equality the French revolutionaries supported. Equality of outcome is a quite different thing, ultimately requiring massive state bureaucracy and thus incompatible with liberty.

15 - An end to EU food tariffs which add 20% to our food bills and prevent 3rd world countries developing - the average cow in Europe gets £400 a year subsidy which is more than the average Senegalese lives on. What sort of "leftist" wants higher food prices - no before the Greens became "leftist".

16 - Proportional representation.

17 - Equality under the law irrespective of race. So called "positive discrimination" ie discrimination against white people, is still discrimination and therefore anathema to anybody of the real left.
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18 - Politics being open to all rather than just those who did PPE (the bluffer's degree) at Oxbridge and went either straight into politics (or sometimes via government regulated media) without having to meet any of the common people, let alone working with them.

19 - UKIP are opposed to giving the anti-progress Greens a veto over any sort of human progress.  They are the most literally conservative and indeed reactionary political movement in Europe since the Roman Empire was replaced by feudalism and many Greens clearly yearn for much of feudalism, as long as they are in charge. The "new left" embracing the Greens has been an act of intellectual bankruptcy.

20 - Affordable housing by cutting political parasitism and allowing modular building. Currently housebuilders spend more on lawyers than they do on bricks. What sort of "leftist" supports that. 

Thursday 15 May 2014

Labour 31%, UKIP 15% - Labour Losing, UKIP Winning


       Other polls have similar though not quite as bad for Labour, result.
YouGov/Sun – CON 35%, LAB 36%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 14%
Populus – CON 35%, LAB 36%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 13%
Ashcroft – CON 34%, LAB 32%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 15%
ICM/Guardian – CON 33%, LAB 31%, LDEM 13%, UKIP 15%



       One might think, looking at UKIP's 15% that should be worrying but I am very pleased with this.

       Labour's vote is falling. As the economy "recovers" (still only half world average growth despite it being fuelled by an artificial house cost boom) and equally, as we get nearer the fateful moment of an election, where being against the government really could put the other rascals in, we can only expect the Labour vote to fall.

      At 31% Labour cannot reasonably be expected to produce a majority.  Their policy seems to have been to hope for 35% and thus over 50% of seats but at 31% almost any parlay of votes leaves them in a minority.

       Because of our corrupt electoral system the Tories won't either. Indeed on the shares in the chart Labour will be the larger party - Tories 284, Labour 307, LDs 31, UKIP nil according to Electoral Calculus

      On the face of it that looks bad for UKIP. But -

    It spikes the Tories greatest, argument against us. Indeed the only one they have been using. The "if you vote UKIP you will put in Labour" one. Labour aren't going to be in. The people, including their core voters, have recognised how crap they are.

    For my lifetime  few people have voted Labour because they want Labour but because they fear getting the Tories. Equally, probably more than equally, few vote Tory because they like their policies but because the fear Labour's.

    Now the Tories don't have to fear Labour - and I am quite certain that even most Tory party activists would rather have UKIP's policies than their own party's (mass immigration, EU membership & gay marriage).

   And Labour voters are also free - to vote against a party who have nothing but contempt for their voters, and secretly promoted mass immigration to replace them.

    We are very close to a tipping point. Suppose UKIP picked up 6% from each of these parties.

    We get Tories 200, Labour 223, LibDems 12 UKIP 186 MPs

    Now this takes no account for targeting of winnable seats which UKIP is doing for the first time so almost certainly understates the UKIP and LibDim votes but you get the picture.

     Another regular factor in elections has been a swing to the LDs during the campaign because they got little TV coverage at other times, but they could not be denied coverage during actual election campaigns. This, obviously, applies in spades to UKIP.

    History also shows that Tory voters have less tribal loyalty to their party than Labour which is why elections against a Tory government have generally been more successful for the LDs than ones against Labour. Disaffected Labour just stayed home.

    And the EU elections

    So a 6% reduction for each of these parties - to UKIP seems not merely possible but quite likely.

    Lets have a bit of fun and try 7% on 36% of the vote: Conservative 127, Labour 172, LD 7, UKIP 316 MPs - 10 short of a technical majority but easily able to negotiate one with Ulster if nobody else.

   

Tuesday 13 May 2014

Scotsman Letter (2 days running) - UKIP in Referendum "Debate"

    I am gratified, not to say astonished, that the Scotsman have published a letter from me today. 2 days running is unprecedented.

Sir,
      Lesley Riddoch says Perspective (12th May) that "debates are being cancelled or abandoned because Better Together won't supply speakers". If so this is disgraceful. Also unnecessary.
 
     Better Together have always refused to work together with UKIP. However UKIP has not returned the disfavour and our current leader Arthur "Misty" Thackeray was the organiser of UKIP's campaign before his elevation. I am certain that he would make every attempt to produce a speaker where a debate is wanted.
 
     I personally regard open public debate of every political issue as a necessary and perhaps sufficient condition for democracy and assume the effective BBC ban on UKIP in the referendum debate means they do to.
 
     In 2012 I had the honour, along with our then leader Mike Scott-Hayward of debating in Glasgow City Chambers for No. Despite having only a few minutes preparation (the other parties had, at the last moment, found prior engagements)  we won easily. Partly by the expedient of mentioning a prior Green assertion that "nobody should vote Yes in the expectation of any economic growth in the next 10 years" which their partners had not disputed.
 
     The opposition were left complaining how unfair it was that they had to face us when had been expecting only the usual suspects.
 
     The exclusion of UKIP from the referendum "debate" has meant that a number of the clearest arguments against have gone unmade - those relating to the EU.
 
       Losing the opt-outs Britain has would mean losing our share of the rebate (nearly £1 bn); losing the opt outs from the social chapter would cost us 170,000 jobs; signing the Shengen agreement on immigration means border posts at Gretna; new members have to promise to someday join the euro. The SNP, uniquely among nominally separatist parties worldwide, deny us even a referendum on whether we want this union.
 
    Apart from the harm the Better Together campaign and the gatekeepers of the media have done to the No campaign, the Scottish people have, so far, been denied a genuine 2 sided debate on the issue. That can still change.
 
Neil Craig
Prospective UKIP Glasgow candidate
 
 
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    That is as good as I could ever have wanted. Not edited - check; party affiliation - check; dig at the other parties - check; pushing my own hobbyhorse of the importance of open debate - check; significant pressure to get us elbowing our way into the debate - check; bit of humour - check; getting to modestly imply I am a capable public speaker - check; getting to call the BBC totalitarian censors - check; putting forward a range of anti-separation and anti-EU arguments that have barely been mentioned - check; getting to use the word "censorship" in print to describe the censorship endemic to our politics - check.

Monday 12 May 2014

UKIP Meeting - Scotsman Letter

   My letter on the UKIP meeting has, rather to my surprise, been published by the Scotsman today. The bits in bold were edited out:

Sir,
       Having attended the Scottish UKIP meeting with Nigel Farage may I point out a substantial factual error in your report of the event. Rather than a "couple of dozen" of us there were around 100. Granted this was probably less than the total of protestors but one must remember that they were drawn from, by their own admission, diverse viewpoints.
 
         From hooded and masked thugs at the, back of the crowd, to those waving IRA flags, SWP promoters of totally unlimited immigration, windfarmists, and various strands of gays including one young woman holding up a poster about her genitalia and another denouncing fascism, but spelling I with an H. The only common factors seemed to be their opposition to democracy and free speech and their commitment to the SNP's "Independence in Europe" (indeed at the meeting organising this spontaneous demo a few No campaigner supporters were made ostentatiously unwelcome).
 
        It is arguable that UKIP represent the views of the average Scot and perhaps even the average Scotsman reader rather better than these assorted totalitarians do. Which is why, despite almost total censorship of debate of our actual policies by the state broadcasting corporation and most of our media we are getting 12-18% here in polling for the EU election and the assorted thugs of the Yes campaign are reduced to protesting against Scots rights to vote for who they want.
 
      It is unfortunate that your newspaper decided to falsify its report in a manner designed to support what are, at least by Mussolini's definition of the word, fascists.
 ====================================
 
      This is a case where the editing clearly reduced the impact, but I nonetheless feel this makes the point. My only regret is that I did not, at the time, know of the LibDem leader's call on Alex Salmond to "call off the dogs".
 
     One commenter disputes my remark about policies, claiming "This censorship which Mr. Craig alludes to must be why I have never seen an actual policy document from UKIP" which is open to the obvious rejoinder that we have published many policies and it must indeed be because of censorship that has not seen them discussed on the MSM.
 
     Unfortunately I my email has been censored from the Scotsman for mentioning the dissection of thousands of living people by our KLA "police" in Kosovo - something which has since been confirmed by the Council of Europe but remains non grata in our MSM. If any of those who falsely call UKIP "racist" were not deeply and murderously racist themselves they could not possibly have failed to spend several thousand times longer denouncing the LabConDem parties who promoted and have legal responsibility for these obscene racist atrocities. There are no circumstances under which we should not vigorously counterattack anybody making such claims about UKIP when they have not opposed real racist atrocities - that particularly includes the state censors of the BBC.
 
    I trust our lead candidate David Coburn will approve of this contribution since, though he has expressed discomfort with other members participating in the campaign, he drew our attention to this article himself and did not ask us not to reply. 

Saturday 10 May 2014

I Went And Saw Farage Yesterday

    Last night I was at a UKIP rally in Edinburgh.

     Misty (Arthur Thackery current chairman) confirmed that polling shows us on 12-18% which is enough for 1 MSP and within striking distance of 2. Well ahead of the Tories and far ahead of LDs and Greens. That went down well.

       Nigel encouragingly said that in parts of southeast England he expects UKIP to take more than  50%  of the vote. That the political class are terrified of us because they know they have no serious counter arguments to us.

        In Scotland the official Better Together campaign (which actively excluded UKIP)  are so Europhile that they simply will not mention that a separate Scotland would only get EU membership term far more expensive than we have as part of the UK. He also suggested that a good UKIP showing in Scotland will put pressure on the SNP to say they would allow us to have a vote on EU membership, which they are currently set against.

         He made an amusing but serious comparison between alcohol and nationalism - they make you feel better in moderate amounts but can be ugly when overdone.

         He predicted eurosceptics would do well not just in Britain but across all of northern Europe and Scotlands ruling political consensus is out of touch with the people.

         On the matter of the media accusation that UKIP is a one man band (the BBC in particular, for years, refused to have anybody else on QT and then use this line) he said that this clearly untrue but for us to win at a general election we have to be seen to have a wide ranging and competent Shadow Cabinet and that this is "one of his most important jobs".

         We are "on the verge of the most extraordinary breakthrough in British politics for 100 years.

===============================

        Unfortunately most of the media coverage has gone on a remarkably unquestioning and factually non-truthful reporting of the demonstration outside.

        Interestingly Misty told us of how he had gone to Radical Independence's public meeting organising the demo outside, without announcing himself, and heard how the organisers "led" the meeting to reject suggestions of wishy washy pseudo liberal demo handing out "foods from around the world"; or any involvement from No supporters to concentrate on chanting and being intimidating. He described this, I think correctly, as Indy-Fascism and pointed out that our First Minister and Justice Minister, among others, have always refused to even mouth any objection to their thugery.

   Certainly had anybody rioted against the SNP or any of their PC activists or Rangers fans against Celtic ones (though probably not vice versa, they would have been immediately arrested. That isn't a guess - this Christian preacher arrested purely for exercising what used to be the right of free speech, did not approach the nicest of the RI thugs in violence. It didn't even get coverage in the obedient Scots media.

     Attributed to Churchill but Huey Long got there first "The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists"

     And that the reason for their demo was not because any of them believe the multiple and conflicting things they accuse UKIP of, but because we are winning.

     As we were leaving and being followed by 2 very young girls one bearing the anti-fascist poster referred to below where Fascist was spelt with an H. He turned to the other and asked why they opposed UKIP - "Because you're anti-gay". In fact he is not merely gay but clearly so to anybody who reads body language. Our candidate is too. She went silent when informed.

     This was symptomatic of the entire pseudo-left today - not only were they demonstrating under a large variety of causes, many of them such as gay rights and the IRA, which have no connection either to each other or to UKIP, but they are overwhelmingly ignorant of the principles they are supposed to believe in and to what the word fascism actually means (and fairly ignorant of the real world too). "Left" has become a portmanteau label for those who have not thought through their beliefs and want somebody to give them some out of a box.

     I have sent this letter to the Scotsman who will doubtless censor it in their normal way:
Sir,
       Having attended the Scottish UKIP meeting with Nigel Farage may I point out a susstantial factual error in your report of the event. Rather than a "couple of dozen" of us there were around 100. Granted this was probably less than the total of protestors but one must remember that they were drawn from, by their own admission, diverse viewpoints.
 
         From hooded and masked thugs at the, back of the crowd, to those waving IRA flags, SWP promoters of totally unlimited immigration, windfarmists, and various strands of gays including one young woman holding up a poster about her genitalia and another denouncing fascism, but spelling I with an H. The only common factors seemed to be their opposition to democracy and free speech and their commitment to the SNP's "Independence in Europe" (indeed at the meeting organising this spontaneous demo a few No campaigner supporters were made ostentatiously unwelcome.
 
        It is arguable that UKIP represent the views of the average Scot and perhaps even the average Scotsman reader rather better than these assorted totalitarians do. Which is why, despite almost total censorship of debate of our actual policies by the state broadcasting corporation and most of our media we are getting 12-18% here in polling for the EU election and the assorted thugs of the Yes campaign are reduced to protesting against Scots rights to vote for who they want.
 
      It is unfortunate that your newspaper decided to falsify its report in a manner designed to support what are, at least by Mussolini's definition of the word, fascists.
 
 PS  If you decide not to publish this one either I must formally ask for your evidence that the meeting I attended was attended by only "a couple of dozen"
---------------------------------------------
 
An interesting sidenote - LibDem leader Willie Rennie, of whom I have said previously, is reported as having said Salmond should "call off the dogs" over Nigel's visit. That is a remarkable piece of phraseology (and an unusual acknowledgement of liberal free speech principles which would have been more convincing a year ago). Rennie works in Holyrood as part of our ruling "consensus" and certainly knows a lot more about the back corridors of power than I do and if he says Salmond's relationship to RI is a master to his dog I am inclined to believe him.
 

Friday 9 May 2014

Going To See Nigel Farage In Edinburgh Tonight

   Both Herald and Scotsman report on their front pages that Nigel Farage is going to be in Edinburgh today; that "Radical Independence" demonstrators are likely to appear, as they did in their Fascist attack on him last year; and that "right wing groups" are going to defend him.

   I and a number from Glasgow branch will be there. I don't believe the papers about "right wing groups" unless right wing means anybody who believes in free speech and democratic elections.

    I have put up this comment on the Herald's article. The Herald have a long record of censoring anybody from UKIP. I doubt if they will let this stand. If they do I will report it here. If not, not. (Actually they censored it before I had completed this article)

-----------------------------------------------

"If the Radical independence thugs are shouting racist and murderous slogans they are racist. Admittedly many of RI's thugs were SWP members bussed in from Liverpool so they were false racists, tying to play to what they believed to be Scots racism, but using racism, whether falsely or not, is racist.

Note that the only people who fell for this SWP scam was Alex Salmond & the SNP, who, in publicly supporting the racists and denigrating the victims, demonstrated that he is personally unfit for any role in any democratic state and that his "independent in Europe" regime would be an uncomfortable place for anybody with an independent mind.

The Radical Independence Fascists, appropriately, remain an honoured part of the Yes campaign."

PS Just been listening to BBC Brian's Big "Debate" in which a gratuitous attack was launched on UKIP. Brian, being an honest sort, intervened to say that it was improper to attack a party which is being censored from the "debate". Just joking - of course he didn't.



Thursday 8 May 2014

  I am posting this just because it is an example of the sort of news, without simple answers and not fitting the media agenda, but nonetheless, important enough for us to know, that our media don't mention:

An immense explosion has been heard throughout the northern Iranian city of Qazvin, semi-official Fars news agency reported, and many casualties are expected from the blast. 
Around 1.1 million people live in the city, which is located about 100 miles north of Tehran. 
The blast may be related to nuclear development in Iran, according to the Los Angeles Times. Iranian officials in the past have strongly denied claims by Mujahedin Khalq Organization, or MKO, a cult-like Iranian exile group, that it has a secret nuclear enrichment facility in Abyek, near the major city, according to the daily. 
The source of the blast remains undetermined. Several mystery explosions have been reported in the past several years in the region, none of which were ever verified.
In 2010, Bloomberg reported that Iran was developing a secret nuclear site in Qazvin.

Tuesday 6 May 2014

How To Get Growth - An Academic Statistical Studies Shows Market Freedom Works

   This statistical survey irrefutably proves that if we want a growing economy, free markets are the way to go. When I say "irrefutable" I mean nobody in any of the parties in Scotland or the UK is willing to make even the smallest move to dispute it. Of course, what they can and do refuse to discuss it at all and such is the corruption of the BBC that all our approved parties (including the Tories) know they can go on there at any time and lecture us on the need for more state control without any risk of the state broadcaster allowing UKIP or anybody else to actually mention the facts.
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I have blogged previously and elsewhere on this immensely valuable pdf document - a statistical analysis of what factors correlate with growth. It is worth doing it again & I am now going to reprint stuff from

Chapter 9 FACTORS AFFECTING GROWTH pdf page 53:

"resource-rich countries are usually slightly more prosperous than resource-poor ones. The problem is that they are not as prosperous as they should be"

"there is a great deal of evidence to the effect that governments tend to use resources less efficiently than entrepreneurs. The most significant point is that
what matters more than how much governments take in tax is what they do with it. The evidence suggests that governments are more likely to promote growth if they use their revenue primarily to:

build infrastructure, especially
transport infrastructure;

provide services, rather than
regulate economic activity;

do things that don’t duplicate
what the private sector can do,
specifically that they do not
compete with it; and

increase efficiency by outsourcing
and privatising." p54

"strong correlation between ‘business tax friendliness’ and growth. Tax friendliness measures the impact of tax complexity and incidence on business" p54

"governments are best advised to do less rather than more because the downside risk of what they do is greater than the upside potential" p55

"countries with the world’s smallest governments tend to be super-achievers" p55

"Notwithstanding a value-free approach, much of this report refers to indices of freedom defined in various ways (civil liberties, rule of law, economic freedom, political freedom et al). This was not contrived; it is simply that the factors that correlate most with prosperity happen to be indicators of some form of freedom. We expected other factors to present high positive correlations, such as natural resources, climate, history, culture, religion and governance. Neil van Heerden, former head of the SA Foundation, suggested that these ‘negative’ findings might be more instructive than positive correlations. Identifying the
extent to which people ‘know things that just ain’t so’ is essentially the falsification of hypotheses." p56

"key finding is that the least regulated economies (top quartile) grow 2.2% faster than those that are most regulated (bottom quartile)." p56

"It finds that efficient economies rely more on commonlaw than regulation, and that social democracies (like Denmark, Norway and Swede) benefit from streamlined business regulation, they offset the burden of welfare by liberating productive market forces" p57

"The world’s twenty least regulated economies are all (except Taiwan) rich first world countries, including all G8 countries" p57

"such as health and safety regulation, most of which has never been shown to have benefits exceeding costs, and all of which imposes enormous direct and indirect costs
on people at the expense of prosperity" p57

"A retreaded tyre regulation in the USA, for instance, was found to have cost a few million dollars for every sub-standard tyre identified by the measure" p57

"regulatory compliance (‘red tape’) cost South African businesses R79 billion in 2004, equivalent to 6.5 per cent of GDP" p57

"An OECD study found that over-regulation is the major cause of the slower rate of growth of the European Union compared to that of the USA. But what are the benefits of regulation? The study found ‘no quality benefits’. We all know that government is
costly, but a 75-country study found that regulations usually cost a country twenty times more than they cost the government" p58

"government may have a more intransigent problem with excess red tape than it realises. This is its fourth major attempt at systematic regulatory review. The first...The report was circulated through the Cabinet to all departments with a view to them addressing the problem in accordance with its recommendations.
... it was never heard of again. The second was to be undertaken by the Small Business Council, but it was dissolved. The third (full & never heard from again). It may be helpful to establish why isolated departments did succeed at substantial market liberalisation" p58

Chapter 10 CHARACTERISTICS OF WINNERS & LOSERS p59

"sound policies can withstand almost any shock, and produce prosperity under almost any conditions." p59

"There is virtually no empirical evidence in favour of aid, subsidies, debt relief, technical assistance or protection" p59

"the Marshall Plan failed to generate prosperity. Furthermore, the UK received much more aid than Germany without achieving high growth. If anything, aid enabled it to perpetuate inappropriate policies." p59

"the relative size of education budgets does not correlate significantly with growth" p60

"highest growth countries cover the full range of possibilities, from poor (Trinidad & Tobago) to rich (Iceland), small (Luxembourg) to big (China), formerly capitalist(Ireland) to formerly socialist (Vietnam), resource-rich (Mozambique) to resource-poor (Finland), countries that were colonised until recent decades (Tunisia) and
ones that were not (Finland). There is also a wide range of cultural, religious, ethnic, historical and geographic diversity among high growth countries" p61

"experience of other countries is that it is likely to achieve and sustain high growth only if it resists the temptation faced by all governments to abandon a winning formula when sustained high growth is achieved. As this report shows, markets tend to respond enthusiastically to pro-market reforms" p62

"Trinidad & Tobago, shifted from one extreme to the other having elevated itself from the lowest to the highest growth rate group" p62

11 SHORT LIST OF WINNERS' POLICIES p65

"The proverbial “bottom line” is that the world’s experience suggests that ........ is likely to prosper if, and only if, it:

1. reduces crime;
2. relaxes and preferably scraps exchange control;
3. reduces time people have to spend with bureaucracy;
4. relaxes or scraps insistence on centralised bargaining
5. shifts from spending on economic regulation and
parastatals to spending on transfers and subsidies...
6. the rule of law;
7. foreign trade liberalisation;
8. business liberalisation;
9. banking and financial market liberalisation.

And from p 44

"The world’s experience appears to support the view that economic freedom may be a necessary and sufficient condition for prosperity."