Remarkable what a pro-SNP filter will do to your perceptions. The BBC interviewed the SNP’s deputy leader Stewart Hosie who told us that the SNP would block any spending it didn’t like and that included defence spending and especially Trident…and Labour confirmed it would make a deal with the SNP if it was the only way to get into power.
This is the BBC’s report…
SNP to launch manifesto as parties continue campaigns
SNP deputy leader Stewart Hosie said his party’s manifesto would “lay out incredibly clearly how we intend to see a genuine end to austerity”, and would “try to bring progressive politics to the rest of the UK”.
Er…and that was that…not a mention of holding the country to ransom unless it got its way on Trident, the BBC preferring to emphasise ending austerity and imposing ‘progressive politics’.
How different other news providers….
SNP prepared to paralyse Armed Forces unless Trident is scrapped
Labour admits it is willing to do a deal with SNP to get Ed Miliband into No 10 as SNP threatens to block defence spending unless it gets its way on Trident
SNP threat to hold UK to ransom: Nationalists say they’ll block any spending they don’t like if they hold balance of power
The Times:
The Independent:
It’s not as if the BBC doesn’t know what the SNP said and recognised its significance, after all it was said in a BBC interview….the best the BBC can come up with is a reference to the ‘ransom’ in its what the papers say section…
Newspaper headlines: Migrant tragedy and SNP ‘ransom note’
In other words Fallon was right…Miliband is prepared to betray the UK to get into power by dealing with the SNP who will be happy to wreck the armed services for its own ends….and the BBC ignores both the threat from the SNP and the ‘stab in the back’ from Labour for the UK.
Seems that, along with what is news and “not news’ (c) A. Newsroom Tealady, the BBC’s renowned ‘analysis’ can be spared as circumstances dictate.
Propaganda backed by censorship via editorial of omission.
They really are pulling out all the stops.
Let’s just pull that whole idea apart and analyse the prospect of the SNP being in a position to do what the article says.
1) Spending on Trident will be passed by 100% of Conservative MPs, and about half of Labour MPs. Cons will have about 270-280 Seats if the polls are accurate, needing only the Labour front benches and a few others to push through Trident, even if there is a rainbow left coalition.
2) If defence spending needs to be passed, the same will apply – the front benches of the Labour and Tories will collude to reduce SNP influence. Tories will not behave like Labour have in opposition – they are not as ‘political’ as Labour, a revolutionary party from its roots. Conservatives are an administrative party by their nature.
3) The SNP will back a Labour Queen’s speech even if it renews Trident. If they put the Tories in by refusing to back Labour, their own supporters North of the border will monster them in the 2016 Holyrood elections. They will not bring down a Labour government, even over Trident.
Sturgeon is not in as powerful a position as she thinks, because if she votes down a Labour government then the only alternative is the Tories, and the Scots won’t forgive her for that.
By removing Trident from Scotland, we remove the barriers to Scots independence, and we should do this as soon as possible.
Good analysis.
I don’t believe for a minute that Sturgeon and Salmond want Milipede to be PM, with the danger to the SNP of guilt by association. They’re desperately hoping for another five years of standing on the sidelines, shaking their heads about the ‘evil Tories’. To admit that would be the kiss-of-death, of course, and so everyone plays out the deceit until election day.
I quite agree – but they might be left in an awkward spot – i.e. where Labour + SNP = 320 or not far short.
Cameron will not try to hang it out in No10 if that’s the case – he wouldn’t have 320 with the Lib Dems, and I’m not sure his back benchers would go for that again anyway.
So the SNP will have to make an agreement with Labour , and that means they will face the reality of government. That won’t stop them blaming the English though, because they will simply point to the areas of agreement where their votes aren’t required, Trident and defence – because they can’t bring a Labour government down again – they did that in 79 and it has never been forgotten.
A subtle piece of bias from the Beeb today on their website, headline
Election 2015: Cameron in Scottish devolution vow
http://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-32377513
There are two photo’s used in this article, one of Cameron and one of Ed Two Kitchens.
The photo of Cameron shows a lost figure in an ugly London street, one of Red Ed, nice close up dynamic shot – almost (but obviously not) JFK like.
Pathetic
What has troubled me slightly about this whole election campaign is how easy it has been for the left to invoke class warfare and how ready the public are to spew forth their sheer hatred of anyone who has made good use of the opportunities they have been lucky enough to be granted by their parents hard work or fortune.
The BBC has not helped here, continually pushing the ‘Fields of Eton’ meme. It has been very unfortunate for the country and the kind of social cohesion that the left say that they want, but clearly don’t.
Beeb are certainly going all out,i t’s hardly subtle anymore .Even my son has noticed and he is someone who thinks they’re all as bad as each other and won’t vote.
All the more reason to Vote UKIP. Ali Beeb detest Farage and the ‘People’s Army’.
“The BBC has not helped here, continually pushing the ‘Fields of Eton’ meme. It has been very unfortunate for the country and the kind of social cohesion that the left say that they want, but clearly don’t.”
The BBC and the left don’t care about that kind of social cohesion, only the kind that involves British people not being allowed an opinion on the annual swathes of foreign arrivals.
Two kitchens photo has been ‘vanished’ – even more pathetic.
Progressive = marxist
We’ve long known that England is surrounded by socialist states but I think this is the first time they’ve all trumpeted their communist ideology so publicly and venomously. They obviously think some end game is at hand and so they no longer need to skulk in the shadows.
Spot on, John, which is why the BBC is getting ever more arrogant with its bias – it thinks it’s on the home run with the ‘progressive’ alliance.
Labour’s ‘Stab In The Back’ For UK
Is this NEWS?
Labour stabbed the UK in the back, and put its very existence at stake, when it imported millions of Muslims. This cohort’s numbers are increasing at twice the rate of any other demographic, and will be majority in 50 years or less.
The future of the UK is bleak at best. More so, as the people have been deliberately misled by the BBC.
‘Stabbed in the back’? Owen Jones says it is anti semitic to say that.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/steerpike/2015/04/did-owen-jones-once-describe-an-anti-semitic-trope-as-eloquent-during-a-book-talk/
So, as Jones was making an issue of Miliband’s Jewish origins, and Fallon was clearly not doing: Jones is therefore the anti-Semite. Anti-Semitism is a nasty sympton of the chronic and nasty left-wing disease, and Jones shows he is no exception.
Correct. To hear this gay man defend hamas and all it stand’s for is beyond belief. If he lived in gaza he would be swinging from a crane of plunging from a high building. In Tel-aviv he could march proudly with his fellow bum boys.
I heard Stewart Hosie going on about ‘not spending money we don’t have on Trident’, yet elsewhere in the SNP manifesto they intend doing exactly that
Confused
The Scottish National Party is a national socialist party.
Now I’m not saying they’re the same (because they’re obviously not), but the Nazis were national socialists too weren’t they?
National Socialist German Workers Party.
Yes, and many of us on here refer to them as the Scottish National Socialists. They share many characteristics.
It’s not the leadership that share qualities from that era – though their nationalism is striking and without much realism.
Rather it is the rapt attention of Scottish Nationalism’s supporters that conjures up comparisons with the Nuremberg rally.
Compare and contrast Labour, Conservative and Liberal supporters against the fervour and lack of critical analysis of both SNP and to a degree UKIP supporters. Both the main parties supporters (and to a lesser degree the libs) tend to take a very critical approach to their chosen party, agreeing with only a minority of its policies but finding them the best of a bad bunch . Not so the SNP (or UKIP), whose support has a quasi religious level of belief, largely devoid of critical analysis. Every statement is cheered to the rafters.
That for me, is very worrying. It suggests that a certain detachment from reality has occurred in terms of actual achievable policy in the political arena and that its now about suspending disbelief and voting for pure hopes alone, reality and the true limitations of government are left unaccounted for.
I found the attached an interesting read yesterday in the Sunday Telegraph
The SNP has been the government of Scotland since 2007, with complete control over health, education and most other domestic policy, except welfare. It receives an annual block grant from Whitehall, guaranteed by the famous Barnett formula to be about 20 per cent higher per head than in England, and decides how it is divided up. It doesn’t have to follow the departmental spending choices made south of the border – and it hasn’t. In key areas, the government of Scotland has been significantly meaner than heartless, Tory-dominated England.
Between 2007/8, the SNP’s first year in power, and 2012/13, the latest available year, health spending in Scotland rose by 15.5 per cent, substantially slower than the rise in health spending in England (22.8 per cent) over the same period. Education spending in Scotland rose by 3.8 per cent, in real terms actually a cut and again far less generous than in England, where spending rose by 12.2 per cent to broadly keep pace with inflation.
SNP Leader Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond campaign in the Gordon constituency in Inverurie, Scotland
In order to maintain its flagship policy of free university tuition while making real-terms cuts, the SNP has slashed the number of students in further education – sixth-form colleges, vocational training and the like – by more than a third. Maintenance grants for poorer university students have also been cut.
Since FE students are mainly working-class, and FE is the traditional bridge for the disadvantaged, the cuts will worsen Scotland’s already bad record of getting poorer students to university. Scotland’s “free” universities are significantly more socially exclusive than those of wicked, Right-wing England, where the policy is to charge the middle classes but target help on poorer students.
“Free tuition in Scotland is the perfect middle-class, feelgood policy,” says Lucy Hunter Blackburn, author of a recent report for the Centre for Research in Education Inclusion. “It’s superficially universal, but in fact it benefits the better-off most, and is funded by pushing the poorest students further and further into debt.”
Scotland’s actual spending priorities have been rather Thatcherite. Health and education rises have been held down to protect spending on enterprise and the new, SNP-controlled national police force, which has been flexing its biceps with massive increases in armed patrolling and stop-and-search. In its first year, Police Scotland stopped and searched 500,000 people, a number equivalent to a tenth of the country’s entire population.
• The senior politicians who could lose their seats in the 2015 general election
• Revealed: Labour wants to ‘get rid’ of Trident
As the former Labour MP Brian Wilson puts it, “ask supporters of the Scottish Government to name a single measure of the past eight years which redistributed wealth from the better to less well off and you can expect one of two responses. The first is silence followed by a rapid change of subject. The second is a list of measures which actually, whether they understand it or not, moved scarce resources in precisely the opposite direction such as tuition fees and the council tax freeze.”
Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy unveils Scottish Labour’s election manifesto
Yet, for now at least, none of this appears to matter in the slightest. Educated and serious people believe that the referendum was stolen. Nationalist canvassers are blitzing council estates like payday loan companies, promising goodies up front but forgetting to mention the years of repayments. Doe-eyed members of the Scottish chattering classes embrace the SNP as progressive. True and relevant facts to the contrary are automatically dismissed as the lies of the Westminster elite.
As political scientists will tell you, voting anywhere is seldom a wholly rational choice, but is governed by people’s emotions and feelings. In Scotland this spring, national emotion appears to be sweeping all before it, and the SNP has been able to create an impregnable parallel reality. Enormous chunks of what was once a sceptical, questioning country are about to take part in mainland Britain’s first faith-based election.
Cue Albaman to refute?
I could not get the link to work so copied and pasted, the pictures did not come out but the cations did so there are couple of extraneous sentences “SNP leader …” and “Scottish Labour leader …”
If you think the BBC south of the Border is biased you should try the BBC north of the Border, especially BBC Radio Scotland, which had changed allegiance from Labour and the Left to the near Marxist Social Nationalist Party of Scotland, aka SNP Scotland. Radio Scotland were virtually the Mouthpiece for the “Yes” Campaigners in the Referendum Debate with even the non-news and current affairs programmes prodding the public in the direction of a “Yes” vote.
I don’t think they went as far as a rerun of the fantasy film, “Braveheart”, which was actually the name for Robert the Bruce and had nothing to do with Wallace, but they did do a rerun of the other Scot’s national hero, Rob Roy, a cattle thief pictured as some kind of “Rob the Rich to Feed the Poor” hero when in fact he was just satisfying his own greed. All good rousing Scot’s are Heroes fighting for the downtrodden masses propaganda.
I notice the SNP keep using the word progressive in the same sentence as positive so as to link the two words in peoples minds. This couldn’t be further from the truth though as we all know after the Blair years. To me the word ‘progressive’ is a swear word and definitely negative.
Orwell told us of this, for progressive read Socialist or Communist.
Lefty taqqiya merchants.
Yes, the left-wing fruitcakes think that all progress is good. Left Wing progress to me is like the cattle that are progressing to the abattoir, and it will end just as messily for us all if this left-wing progress continues. Progress like that I can well do without.
Talk about a democratic deficit.
This is the first time in my lifetime where Marxist traitors openly threaten to scupper the will of the British people.
Outrageous-and there will be blood on the streets in an updated version of a civil war if the Nats get the nation by the nuts.
Let`s remind ourselves again-Sturgeon is a Scottish MSP-so has NO democratic mandate over anybody but her pals in Scotland.
Her Parliamentary wing that IS our concern is led by her ex-boss, and one of the most reviled politicians in the land…yet how come HE`S not been doing these debates?
Sturgeon is not standing for Parliament-so has no right to speak in our Parliamentary processes-especially when the DUP, SDLP etc have been denied a forum in the recent debates.
This really is chilling abuse of the democratic process…and the 5% of the electorate that live up in Scotland had better know that we won`t let them involve themselves in issues that pertain to the 95% who do NOT have their luxury of getting free tuition, health and social care and bus passes at 60.
These teenage Marxists had better watch themselves-there`s 5 million of them, but there is over 55 million of the rest of us-and we won`t let the tartan tail wag the British bulldog.
Only the EU and Putin could see this as a neutral issue-and both have reasons to back the SNP don`t they?
Hope to God that Labour are shunned-and the Tories, crap as they are; get a thumping majority so my worst fears don`t come true…but this treachery by the SNP/Labour and the BBC will not stand…we can`t fight both IS and this lavender hill mob that are the enemy within.
And we all saw last week on the debates that they truly ARE The Enemy Within.
Look everyone, I’ve said it on this site for years now: the Scottish Nazi Party are driven by a seething anti-English hatred and aggressive fanaticism which is used against any who oppose their bigoted views. I’ve seen it in pubs when England are playing, I’ve heard it in discussions in the workplace… the Scottish nationalist is a typically a hard-done-by, narrow-minded bigot, who wants back at society… they are nasty bits of work. I’ve never come across such a moaning, bitter bunch of self-absorbed tossers. Theirs is a politics of envy and victimhood.
NO! They will not hold the UK to ransom. They will hold England to ransom. No-one mentions England.
The British Establishment/Unionists are still deliberately avoiding England and the people of England in this.
They have the enemy at the door – an enemy which is anti-English, which wishes to do as much damage as possible to England, and withdraw from the Union, and yet Unionists are still not prepared to recognise this and act against them.
They will pay the price eventually. They have the same mind-set of those prior to WW2 who criticised and insulted Winston Churchill who could see the danger of Germany and Hitler, but they would not. They would rather sacrifice the people of England and our security than recognise the realities and their own failings.
And of course the BBC is at the heart of all this duplicity and treachery.
Wow, I literally felt sick to my stomach reading some of the comments here, such anti-Scottish hatred. Some right venomous tongues in here.
Scotland and the SNP are not anti-English they are anti-Austerity and sick and tired of the way they have been treated for the last 300 and odd years. Why all the fear and bad mouthing?
Westminster begged Scotland on their knees in front of the entire nation to stay during the referendum after all the smear, lies and scaremongering, we love you, please don’t go, here, have a pledge/vow etc etc and now that it looks like they might have a bit of a say in Westminster they are now the bitter and hated, called dangerous, and demonised. Im sorry, but you cant have it both ways. Scotland is part of the UK whether you like it or not and has just as much right to have MP’s in Westminster as any other party.
The West Lothian question refers to whether MPs from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, sitting in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, should be able to vote on matters that affect only England, while MPs from England are unable to vote on matters that have been devolved to the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly.
The term was coined by Enoch Powell MP in 1977 after Tam Dalyell, Labour MP for the Scottish constituency of West Lothian, raised the matter repeatedly in a House of Commons debate on Scottish and Welsh devolution, as he would continue to do through the 1970s and 1980s.
West Lothian question
Hi Alex
You’re looking so well and dapper at the moment. You want rid of Trident? – Yep we can do that (I’m sure the people losing their jobs won’t mind as long as we’ve got rid of the Tories). You want an end to Austerity? – Yep we can borrow and borrow and let inflation rip (I’m sure all those businessmen won’t mind going out of business after all they are pro-EU). You want 45 million more immigrants let into this country? – Sure, and yes we won’t let them get into Scotland – Northern England can cope as they already welcome millions of enrichers. By the way, did I say how great you are?
Love Ed.
AlexSalmond U R Spinning. You’re kidding right? I’ve read the posts above. No hatred of Scots expressed at all. Many expressions of the true nature of the Scottish National Socialist Party though, and its ongoing aim of breaking an historically successful union.
I am a proud Englishman, and I know who is welcoming of me (including most Scots) and who is not (the often racist Anglophobic Scottish Nationalists [not all]).
We understand the will of the Scots. They voted for the union. The will of the English however, is but a mystery. After all, we are just the wallet. Who cares what the English think?