Deluded, Divisive and Morally Bankrupt, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon uses HGV Driver and Fuel shortages to attack UK Government -The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow Uni

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I suppose it was only a matter of time before Nicola Sturgeon jumped on the grievance wagon again, and unsurprisingly, her ‘any issue to complain’ is about the HGV driver and fuel shortage. There are two things which should be established about both issues which the ‘pro Brexit’ camp has skated over which are very important.

1/ The HGV driver shortage was caused by poor pay and conditions.

2/ The mainstream media created the fuel panic buying.

Driving for a living is highly different than driving to work or indeed driving for pleasure, for one thing, most people get to go home at night to their own bed. HGV driving because of its nature sees some drivers having to sleep in their cabs, and not have proper access to shower or toilet facilities. So, when you hear stories of drivers sleeping in lay-bys and pissing into milk bottles, you get to see a snippet of the real life of a trucker. Another which is important to everyone regardless of what job they do is pay. You will hear tales of magical amounts of money being paid to drivers such as fuel drivers, but the reality is far from the truth of most drivers. The average hourly pay for a Fuel Tanker Driver in United Kingdom is £12.66. When you consider the the average salary for a CSCS Labourer is £11.13 per hour in Scotland, you can see how this highly skilled HGV job is underpaid massively. My brother is a joiner, if he does a date time shift in an agency, he can make between £20 and £22 an hour, and if he does a ‘shop fitting’ job, he can pull in a 70 hr week. So, his top line before tax and deductions is £1540. An HGV driver gets hit with not just with low pay, but also with strict legal laws regarding the amount of time they can work. A HGV driver must not exceed 60 hours working time, which includes driving and other work, in any single week. In addition they must not exceed an average of 48 hours working time over a specific reference period. It is important to stress the reason for the restricted working is health and safety.

Given there are many lesser skilled jobs which pay higher hourly rates, allow you to do a 9 to 5 job, instead of shifts, why would you sign up? The main reason for such low pay was EU membership, specifically ‘freedom of movement’. Freedom of movement only benefits a few people in real terms, but what it does do, is suppress wages by flooding a country with cheap labour. The people like Nicola Sturgeon aren’t affected by freedom of movement in her job, nor does it affect the rate of her £157,861 a year plus expenses salary. When Nicola Sturgeon travels abroad she doesn’t sleep in a drivers cab, she doesn’t wash with baby wipes, and she doesn’t piss in a bottle, her experience is 5 star hotel, luxury shower and toilet. Of course I have written before how Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t care about working class people many times, she would rather sacrifice them, so that she can move on from First Minister and join the EU elite. In every stunt she has been involved in, to save Scottish jobs via the taskforce farce, she has never saved one! She uses working class people with the sole intention of pushing her independence agenda forward and shining a spotlight on herself as some kind of saviour.

Nicola Sturgeon is quite the despicable human being.

If we come back to the fuel shortage, this has been entirely whipped up by the mainstream media, they have used the lack of fuel drivers affecting a few garages to create a nationwide demand, that has resulted in panic buying. This isn’t the first time that this tactic has been used, it was done during Covid, people flocked to supermarkets to panic buying of food and household essentials. Who would have thought at the supposed end of the world, the British people would be so concerned about access to bog roll. In this current manufactured crisis by the mainstream media, their efforts have caused emergency planning to be brought forward so that if needed, the British Army could ensure fuel supplies got through. Driving a fuel tanker isn’t just a matter of having an HGV licence, there are other qualifications required, and it is also an anti social job with some fuel deliveries done at night. The average pay for a tanker driver using “indeed” as a source, puts their rate of pay at £14.50 an hour. Recently at the Labour Party Conference, activists called for a McDonald’s worker to get £15 hr. If they believe that is fair, what price do they or should they put on the men and women who supply everything they use to live? Driving an HGV isn’t the same as driving a car, and driving an articulated lorry isn’t the same driving a lorry dubbed a ‘rigid vehicle’. I know this from experience because I have passed my car licence, my rigid vehicle licence, my bus licence and also my articulated lorry licence. However, I would need a refresher course to feel comfortable with the bigger vehicles.

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Glasgow is suffering because SNP council leader won’t stand up to Nicola Sturgeon – The Scotsman

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Home to around one-fifth of the nation’s population and sustaining hundreds of thousands of jobs, the city will shape Scotland’s economic performance in the years ahead.

This week, the 23rd annual State of the City Economy Conference will be held in Glasgow and hear about the opportunities for growth. The city has a chance to transform into a green powerhouse and take advantage of new industries such as digital tech.

We have the people and we have the talent. But this transformation will also require ambition for Glasgow. And that is sadly lacking in the current SNP administration in the City Chambers. With Susan Aitken in charge, we do not have a champion for our city.

Instead we have someone who refuses to take responsibility and blames the residents of Glasgow for its current challenges – wrapped up in rhetoric that would make Margaret Thatcher blush.

It’s just a “spruce up” that the city needs, she told STV in a car-crash interview. It’s “wee neds” to blame for the state of the city, she told the BBC in another attempt at deflection.

Rubbish piling up on the streets? People need to take more responsibility for cleanliness in their communities, according to Councillor Aitken. Every single time, whatever the problem, there is always someone else to blame for the SNP.

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Covid, ambulance waiting times, energy bills and empty supermarket shelves have created a perfect storm that reveals how badly Scotland is governed – The Scotsman

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It is difficult at the moment not to feel that we are in the very eye of a momentous political and economic version of exactly that.

For 18 months, we had endured the seemingly unending and life-threatening waves of the pandemic, to the point where we seemed almost to have become inured to it.

We are braced – but not prepared – for the national and personal economic impact of the end of furlough, the Universal Credit uplift and business support.

And now we find that our energy bills could rocket, inflation is rising, the impact of Brexit is contributing to empty supermarket shelves, and the Scottish government is putting our travel and hospitality industries at a disadvantage to the rest of the UK.

That list was already challenging enough without the stark realisation over the past few weeks that our NHS, which has got us through this crisis, is now at breaking point.

I know that is a claim which politicians are often accused of making simply to weaponise a public service which is held in such specific and special regard by so many of us.

But sadly, all the evidence tells us that the claim is true. Both for the institution itself and the many courageous and tireless staff at its heart.

It must be tempting for those responsible for the well-being of the NHS to blame its current predicament on all the other elements of the storm. That somehow the crisis which has necessitated calling in the Armed Forces to support our ambulance service is purely the result of the circumstances we find ourselves in. That they can look to the example of our energy industry which is defending itself with evidence of an unusual lack of wind and solar resources and a fire on an interconnector.

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Leaked SNP document dubbed ‘pathetic’ and ’embarrassing’ by critics – Daily Record

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The SNP has been accused of serving up a “pathetic” briefing parroting “scripted lines” to party MSPs on the ferries crisis.

In the document, leaked to the Record, the Nationalists went back sixteen years to point the finger at the Labour administration under Jack McConnell.

Labour MSP Neil Bibby said: “It is frankly embarrassing for the SNP MSPs expected to wheel out this nonsense in defence of the indefensible.”

The Ferguson Marine shipyard in Port Glasgow was saved by the SNP Government in 2019 after collapsing into administration, but the rescue deal laid bare a number of issues which would cause multi-year delays to two key vessels under construction.

The decision of Caledonian Maritime Assets Limited (CMAL) – the body tasked with procuring Scotland’s ferries – to invite four foreign yards to tender for two ferries to serve Islay and Jura also created huge anger last week.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Government has been dogged by criticism over Ferguson Marine and Finance Secretary Kate Forbes has said she is “monitoring” the yard’s leadership.

The SNP has now been criticised for circulating what critics believe is a tame briefing to MSPs which does not criticise the Government.

Produced on September 17, researchers said the SNP Government had been clear with Ferguson’s management on the need to get the yard “into shape”.

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The SNP and Alba conferences are over, so what have we learned? – The Scotsman

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Between the virtual SNP conference and that of the new Alba Party in Greenock town hall, the refrain went “anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you” – with a call and response of “no you can’t, yes I can” coming from Scottish nationalists, once comrades -in-arms, but now locked in a woad-stained battle.

From Keith Brown’s plea to members to “reach out” to No voters to Nicola Sturgeon’s referendum-heavy speech, the SNP conference played many of its greatest indy hits over again. Meanwhile members of the Alba Party congregated for their first conference in Greenock, flocking to the sound of Alex Salmond’s cry for freedom.

The parties may want the same outcome, but their approaches are wildly different. Ms Sturgeon has shifted her stance slightly and is appealing for “co-operation” rather than confrontation with the UK Government in her bid to ensure a second referendum can be held by her promised date of 2023.

She is pinning her hopes on the idea that Boris Johnson will be forced to move his position by the sheer force of democracy and the mandate she says the Scottish people gave her at the May election, when the SNP won a historic fourth term in government.

But there is an undercurrent of a harder-edged challenge from the First Minister.

Work on the “prospectus” or white paper on independence has restarted within the Scottish Government, and she has been clear to state that any vote will be “legal”, which raises the prospect of the whole situation ending up in court – and who knows whether it will be adjudged that such a vote without Westminster approval will indeed be legal.

The Alba Party, however, believe the SNP has been too slow for too long in its demands for independence and called the six years since the referendum “Groundhog Day”.

In his speech, Mr Salmond was scathing, telling delegates: “If you constantly march people up to the top of the hill and then down again, then you end up all singing Rule Britannia.”

Sturgeon pushes for independence (again) – The Spectator

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t’s Groundhog Day in Holyrood. Amid criticisms about her administration’s underwhelming ‘Programme for Government,’ Nicola Sturgeon has returned to her favourite hobby house: Scottish independence. Much like ABBA’s reunion, the First Minister combined some new tunes with her greatest hits, declaring that May’s election was an ‘undeniable’ mandate for such a plebiscite by the end of 2023 ‘once the Covid-19 crisis is passed’.

Steerpike is not surprised at Sturgeon’s choice of priorities, preferring to have her civil servants devote their energies to indyref2 rather than letting Scots take their masks off when sat on a train. The SNP and its acolytes have had no compunction in undermining the Union at every opportunity throughout the pandemic; a strategy that has been great for poll numbers but has led to almost half of Europe’s top 20 Covid-19 hotspots being located in Scotland.

Much more noteworthy is the lack of interest in Sturgeon’s announcement. Westminster was admittedly distracted with Boris Johnson’s tax shenanigans but even north of the border there was a far more muted reaction to the First Minister’s pronouncements then her previous statements. The Scottish editions of both the Times and Daily Telegraph for instance relegated the news on their front to a nib; BBC Scotland similarly buried the announcement on its homepage.

Leaked internal report reveals SNP ‘overwhelmed’ by member complaints – GuidoFox

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A bombshell internal report written by SNP Deputy Leader Keith Brown has revealed the dire state of the party’s internal affairs: not only does the report suggest creating a new financial scrutiny committee to “restore confidence” in the SNP’s financial governance, it also shows that party has been “overwhelmed” by the volume of member complaints over harassment and impropriety since 2014. Presumably keeping their new ‘complaints adviser’ busy, then…

The report goes into great detail to explain how “recent controversies concerning the party’s finances” (in other words, how a £600,000 referendum war chest seemingly vanished into thin air) have “inevitably raise[d] questions about the SNP’s financial governance”, and recommends creating a more formal financial governance structure that “encourages good financial practices, [and] has the potential to pick up any irregularities”. Which is useful, because the party’s auditors have already washed their hands of that responsibility.

It also says that the party’s “current complaints-handling procedures have themselves resulted in a real dissatisfaction [and] lack of trust” amongst the membership, and that the Governance Review Group often failed to act on incidences of abuse despite repeated warnings from within the party. Considering 1 in 5 SNP MPs has either recently quit, or been sacked, investigated or suspended, perhaps the Governance Review Group has just had its hands full…

Leaked Internal Report Reveals SNP “Overwhelmed” by Member Complaints

Scotnitive dissonance: Scotland’s other pandemic – Think Scotland

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IN To A Louse, Robert Burns laments “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us, To see oursels as ithers see us!”, which, roughly translated, means that it is a shame that we can’t see ourselves as other people do, faults and all.

Given that, thankfully, in the last 334 years both farming technology and poetry have come a long way, this presents the opportunity for Scotland to update this charming little maxim because it’s needed now more than ever before.

In fact, rather than seeing ourselves as other people do, we should settle for the slightly less lofty goal of seeing ourselves as we actually are because there is a huge gap in our arrogant perception of ourselves versus the uncomfortable, destructive, and harmful reality of modern Scotland.

Scotland is in the grip of a condition I’ve come to call, Scotnitive Dissonance… and it’s hurting us.

You will have heard the claim before, surely? It first came to my attention during the debates, speaking engagements, and other such events I took part in during the 2014 independence referendum. Representing, it will come as no surprise, the NO side, I often heard about how much more “progressive” Scotland is compared with the rest of the United Kingdom and that, my interlocutors would insist, was grounds for Scotland to go it alone.

Those claims have, from what I can tell, gotten louder since 2014. Their 2021 updated versions usually comes accompanied by pointing to the electoral success of the SNP, an essay on whose ‘talk’ versus ‘act’ difference could also be another 1000 words or so, and their new ‘not a coalition’ partners in the Scottish Greens. Proponents of the ‘Scotland’s just more progressive’ line also regularly point out that Scotland overwhelmingly voted to stay in the European Union which, I hasten to point out, is a crass over-simplification given the strength of the left-wing, Tony Benn school, of Euroscepticism. It’s a simple failure of reasoning that takes no notice of things in practice.

Scotnitive dissonance: Scotland’s other pandemic

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Scottish government asked for urgent clarification over Greens’ ‘racist Zionism’ policy – Jewish Chronicle

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Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is being urged to clarify her government’s position on antisemitism after it emerged Holyrood’s power-sharing partners believe Zionism is a “racist ideology”.

In 2015 the Scottish Greens approved a motion that declared Hamas was not a terrorist organisation while branding Israel an “apartheid state”.

Antisemitism campaigners voiced concerns the party was now in power in Scotland while Scottish Conservatives called for the First Minister to condemn the “shameful stance”.

The Scottish government adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism in full in 2018 but the policy of its new junior partner appears to be a clear breach of that definition.

Policy Motion 2, voted through by Scottish Greens in 2015, has never been rescinded. It was debated and voted on at conference on a Saturday, excluding participation by observant Jews.

It condemns Israel’s claim to be the “Jewish state” and brands Zionism a “racist ideology based on Jewish supremacy in Palestine”. It accuses Israel of being an “unacceptable” “apartheid” state.

It goes on to demand Israel repeal its law of return for Jews, while backing the right of return for all Palestinian Arabs and their descendants.

It declares that Hamas should no longer be designated as a terrorist organisation and offers its support for the anti-Israel BDS boycott movement.

Jackson Carlaw, whose Eastwood constituency is home to a sizeable Jewish population, branded the Greens’ position “a disgrace”.

The Conservative MSP said: “They have backed positions that appear to be contrary to the IHRA definition.  Nicola Sturgeon has to distance her Government from this shameful stance. This kind of outrageous rhetoric from the Greens has no place in 21st Century Scotland. It doesn’t belong anywhere near the Scottish Government and should be stamped out.

“Scotland’s Jewish community needs to hear an unequivocal condemnation of the Greens’ position and assurances that the Government does not support these extreme views.”

The historic cooperation agreement between the Scottish National Party and the Scottish Greens ensures two ministerial roles for the junior party and bolsters the First Minister’s case for independence.

Leaving Union would be Brexit times ten, says Sturgeon adviser – The Times

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A leading economist appointed to Nicola Sturgeon’s panel of advisers has warned that the damage from tearing up the 300-year-old Union between Scotland and England risks being equivalent of “Brexit times ten”.

Mark Blyth, professor of international economics at the Watson Institute of Brown University in Rhode Island, was announced as a member of Sturgeon’s council of economic advisers in July amid claims that it would “bring forward bold ideas that will transform the economy”.