A failed state? How about Scotland under Wee Burney?

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RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: A failed state? How about Scotland under Wee Burney?​

By Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail
25 Jan 2021



Boris Johnson is reportedly flying to Scotland this week ‘to save the Union’. Why? It’s not as if he hasn’t anything better to do, apart from the small matters of dealing with a global pandemic and the economy going to hell in a handcart.

Yet the Prime Minister is about to drop everything to race north, panicked by the threat of a new wildcat independence referendum, with polls suggesting that this time a majority of Scots would vote to break away from the UK.

This isn’t the smack of firm leadership, it’s a feeble knee-jerk response to an opportunist smack on the backside from a two-bob Toytown Tartanista chancer.

Wee Burney told the BBC’s Andrew Marr on Sunday that following the SNP’s expected landslide victory in May’s local elections she intends to call another referendum, with or without Westminster’s permission.

There’s always the Catalan Model as a precedent, even though most people can’t tell the difference between a Catalan Model and a Matalan Model posing in cut-price knickers on an artificial beach in Dubai.

That’s if they don’t think a Catalan is a boat with two hulls. So, I repeat, why is Boris bothering to take the high road? An unscientific survey conducted by this column yesterday produced the decisive finding:

Boris Johnson is reportedly flying to Scotland this week ¿to save the Union¿. Why? It¿s not as if he hasn¿t anything better to do

Boris Johnson is reportedly flying to Scotland this week 'to save the Union.' Why? It's not as if he hasn't anything better to do

What we want is another independence referendum, said absolutely nobody outside the ranks of swivel-eyed SNP supporters.

The people of Scotland, like everyone else in the UK, are first and foremost fixated on surviving Covid-19 and getting back to some semblance of normal life.

By banging on about independence yet again in the middle of a catastrophic health crisis, Sturgeon has only served to highlight her insular monomania.

Wee Burney is the John Cougar Mellencamp of British politics. She was born in a small town . . .

There’s not a single issue in life that this Lilliputian charlatan can’t refract through the prism of Scottish separatism.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore once produced a spectacularly tasteless sketch in which the cause of every misfortune was put down to ‘cancer’. In Wee Burney World, the solution to every failure of her own dysfunctional, jumped-up parish council at Holyrood is: independence.

If in doubt, blame the English.

Failing schools: blame the English. Corona: blame the English. Celtic falling 23 points behind Rangers: blame that cheating Scouse Git Stevie Gerrard. Send him hame to think again!

Sturgeon never takes responsibility for her own failures. Far easier to point the finger at the wicked Westminster bogeyman.

In a brilliant commentary for this newspaper in November, Andrew Neil eviscerated the dismal record of the Nats. He highlighted the cynical fashion in which Holyrood has become a trebles-all-round job creation scheme for otherwise unemployable William Wallace wannabes.

Neil pointed to the shocking fall in educational standards north of the border — an area in which Scotland once proudly led the world.

The SNP’s stewardship of the NHS has been equally disastrous. Life expectancy in East Glasgow is shorter than in Djibouti and Mongolia. Even during the current Covid crisis, the SNP’s performance has been no better than elsewhere in the UK.

But Sturgeon has been allowed to pretend that she is handling the pandemic with far more assurance than Boris.

Part of this is down to the cult of personality which has been constructed around the First Minister, by a largely slavish domestic media and the support of a political class who owe their lucrative fealty to the myth of SNP competence and invincibility.

Sturgeon’s presentational ‘genius’ appears to amount to little more than listening in to the morning Cobra briefing in London and then announcing whatever has been decided before Boris can get to the cameras ahead of her.

Every lunchtime at midday — until I switched off in disgust — the BBC and the increasingly Left-wing Sky News Black Lives Matter Channel (under its new American management) beamed Wee Burney and Her Amazing Dancing Bear across the kingdom. TV producers are happy to roll out the red carpet for Sturgeon because she reinforces their own anti-Boris, anti-Brexit fanaticism.


She was at it again on Marr, using Burns Night to accuse the Prime Minister of being a ‘cowering, timorous beastie...’

Boris should have ignored her, instead of dancing to her tune, as usual, terrified of being the PM who ‘lost the Union’.

Gordon Brown is no better. He’s been disinterred since Sunday, warning that unless further concessions are made to the Scot Nats, the UK is over. Brown wrote: ‘The choice is now between a reformed state and a failed state.’

He could have said that if there’s one failed state out there, it’s Scotland under Wee Burney and the Nats. And if anybody failed to see that coming, it was Gordon and New Labour who thought devolution would shore up their hegemony north of the border — and by extension give them a guaranteed majority at Westminster.


Instead, first Alex Salmond and now Wee Burney have done up Labour like an Arbroath smokie.

Sorry, but it’s time Westminster stopped parking the bus and went on the offensive.

Boris should be reminding the Scots that it’s England’s money footing the bill for the largesse they enjoy and for which the SNP takes credit.

It’s the UK Government which took the gamble on the Oxford vaccine and approved the Pfizer jab currently being administered everywhere.

"Celtic are 23 points behind Rangers – blame the English"

He must turn the spotlight on Sturgeon and her husband, who run Scotland as their personal fiefdom.

They wouldn’t get away with it in London. Carrie may bend Boris’s ear over climate change, but she’s not chairman of the Conservative Party — unlike Burney’s old man, who is the SNP’s full-time chief executive.

By all accounts, it’s not all sweetness and light within the SNP, either. And not just because of the split between Alex Salmond and Sturgeon, who is accused of misleading the Edinburgh parliament over complaints against her former boss.

She’ll probably dodge the bullet. Demagogues generally do in one-party states. But there’s also simmering resentment between the Holyrood crowd and the SNP’s Westminster contingent, led by porky pub bore Ian Blackford, suspected of living high on the hog in London at taxpayers’ expense.

Everybody back to the cigar bar at Boisdale!

Word is that if Wee Burney fell under a bus tomorrow, there’s no natural successor and the whole shooting match could go belly up. So Boris would have been well advised to stay away for while and concentrate on the day job.

From all this, some of you may conclude that I couldn’t give a monkey’s if Scotland broke away from the UK. You couldn’t be more wrong. I’m a visceral believer in the Union.

I even tracked down the late Joel Barnett, the Labour politician who dreamed up the eponymous ‘Barnett Formula’ under which Scotland even today receives well over the odds from the Treasury — reckoned to be pushing an extra £2,000 in cash and other benefits for every man, woman and child north of the border.

Even though this generous discrepancy is a bone of contention, when anyone bothers to think about it, especially in England’s Northern Red Wall constituencies, I concluded that it was worth it.

The ties that bind matter. Only yesterday, we booked a hotel room in the Lake District for the wedding of the son of our best friends, proud Aberdonian Scots who live west of Glasgow. We met when they lived round the corner in North London.

We like the same music, we like the same bands. . . as Springsteen sings on one of my all-time favourite tracks, Bobby Jean. In fact, the last time I saw Springsteen live was at Hampden.

It didn’t occur to me that I was in a foreign country. I’m just as comfortable in Glasgow’s Horseshoe Bar as I am in London’s French House.

Unlike our ill-fated experiment at bonding with our European neighbours, we are one people — albeit with our own peculiarities. We have a shared history, shared values, and hopefully a shared destiny.

Look, as a hardline Brexiteer and a democrat, I couldn’t deny the Scots the right to self-determination.

Even though I fear that if you extended the vote on Scottish independence across the whole UK, the English would in a heartbeat wish the North British a fond farewell — glad to be well shot of whining Wee Burney and her gang of ingrates.

Still, let’s hope that never happens and the last two lines of Bobby Jean don’t come true.

And I’m just calling you one last time, not to change your mind,

But just to say I miss you, baby, Good luck, goodbye...



 

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Alex Salmond to topple the Scottish Government within two days.

Police say that being offensive is an offence.

 
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UK Parliament to rally against the Scottish Government.

Former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond to publish his evidence against Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

 

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The rotten state of Scotland​

The Salmond affair exposes the SNP's corruption of the institutions of government.

The rotten state of Scotland

TIM BLACK​

COLUMNIST

26th February 2021​

Spiked​


Given the Scottish National Party’s political monopoly north of the border, and the lack of scrutiny to which the SNP’s petty authoritarian rule is subject in the national media, perhaps it was always going to take a vengeful SNP insider to expose the rot in the state of Sturgeon-land.

Enter former SNP leader and Scottish first minister Alex Salmond. This week he claimed, as he has done for the past couple of years, that there has been ‘a deliberate, prolonged, malicious and concerted effort among a range of individuals within the Scottish government and the SNP to damage my reputation, even to the extent of having me imprisoned’. He doesn’t say ‘conspiracy’, but that’s certainly what he’s implying.

This would be explosive if it were true. It’s the equivalent of Theresa May claiming Boris Johnson had used the apparatus of the British state to try to frame her as a paedophile. Because that is what Salmond is effectively claiming. He is saying that everything that has happened to him since 2018 is part of a plot to push him, as an increasing embarrassment to Sturgeon’s government, out of public life. The government investigation into complaints of sexual misconduct made against him; the subsequent police investigation and the trial which led to his acquittal; and the attempts ever since to thwart a Holyrood inquiry into the handling of his case – all of that and more was, he claims, the product of the shadowy machinations of the SNP’s leadership, from its chief executive Peter Murrell to his wife, the first minister herself, Nicola Sturgeon, not to mention the Scottish permanent secretary, Leslie Evans.

But is it true? It seems unlikely. Sure, there were no doubt some in the SNP who were happy to see the fall of Salmond, an increasingly troubling figure who, in 2017, seemed to be contemplating a return to the political frontline. There were others, caught in the moral gusts of the MeToo storm of the time, who would have righteously pushed for Salmond’s comeuppance. And, since then, there have no doubt been many in government desperate for the whole tawdry affair simply to disappear – at any cost. So opportunism and politics aplenty. But conspiracy? Not so much.
Yet, what the Salmond Affair has revealed about the institutions of Scotland is arguably just as disturbing. The initial judicial review into the government’s handling of the allegations against Salmond culminated, in 2019, in a judge’s damning verdict of Holyrood’s internal workings. The judge ruled that the investigation was ‘unlawful’, ‘procedurally unfair’ and ‘tainted with apparent bias’ – the investigating officer had even had prior contact with Salmond’s accusers.

Salmond’s actual criminal trial merely reinforced the impression that the investigation and subsequent prosecution of the former first minister was at best misjudged and, at worst, motivated by concerns other than justice. So it was that in March 2020 he was acquitted of 14 charges of sexual assault, including one attempted rape, involving 10 women. Some of the complainants, it was revealed, were SNP officials, others worked for the Scottish government.

Holyrood’s subsequent inquiry, launched in 2020, into the handling of the Salmond Affair has likewise revealed an institutional resistance to transparency and public accountability. The committee leading the investigation, with SNP MSP Linda Fabiani at its head, has repeatedly complained that the Scottish government has obstructed it, including an explicit refusal to hand over the legal advice it received during the judicial review – this despite parliament instructing it to do so.

Suspicions that the government is trying to hide something deeply troubling have been reinforced by the events of the past few days. That was when it was revealed that the Crown Office (Scotland’s equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service) had ordered that Salmond’s public submission to the Holyrood investigation be heavily redacted. It was no doubt entirely coincidental that the parts blacked out just happened to be those that Salmond suggests were most personally damaging to Sturgeon. As Conservative MSP Ruth Davidson put it this week: ‘Does the first minister understand that, to the public, this looks like a cover-up?’

The government might have been able to brush off the accusation on the grounds that the Crown Office is institutionally independent of government – the rule of law and all that. Except that James Wolffe QC, the head of the Crown Office, is also, as the Lord Advocate, a member of the Scottish government. Perhaps, as he claims, the decision to redact a document damaging to the SNP was taken not by him, but by independent prosecutors. Yet, as their boss, it’s hard not to question just how independent the Crown Office really is.

And there are many other aspects of the whole sordid business that raise disturbing questions about the SNP, and its willingness to bend and potentially corrupt the mechanisms of government and the institutions of law to its own self-preserving ends. Not least, there’s the question currently being investigated by James Hamilton QC, and continually dodged by Sturgeon, over when exactly she was aware of the initial investigation into Salmond. She told Holyrood it was early April 2018. Salmond’s aides say she really knew about it in late March 2018. If the latter are right, Sturgeon has breached the ministerial code and may have to resign. But, given her and the SNP’s behaviour so far, she will no doubt seek to obfuscate and blindside her way out of it.

Few will have any sympathy for poor, philandering Alex Salmond. Even his own lawyer called him an ‘arsehole’. And fewer still will believe his claims of a conspiracy. But, in many ways, Salmond and his fantasies are irrelevant. What is important is the light the Salmond Affair is casting on the internal, SNP-led corrosion of the institutions of the Scottish state. As Scottish Labour leader Jackie Baillie put it, ‘We are seeing that there is something rotten at the heart of the SNP, and it is poisoning our democratic institutions’.

 

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Alex Salmond Annihilates Crooked Krankie & SNP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Opening Monologue​

She's doomed if any of this is true...

 

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Scottish independence collapses.

The British police continue to arrest people for walking.

 

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A vote of no confidence is tabled against Nicola Sturgeon's Scottish National Party.

What Labour Party Deputy Leader Angela Rayner is doing to taxpayers' money.

 

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The corrupt little hobgoblin's days are numbered.

Old fishlips facing a triple threat to her political career.

 
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GAME OVER 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Krankie McSturgeon On Ropes 🐟 SNP 😳 Reputation & Career In Tatters 🤬

End of the line for Nicola Sturgeon. She’s in deep water 🎣

 

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🤪 Hysterical 😂 Nicola Sturgeon 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 Top 50 Forgetful Moments 😳 CAN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING​

 

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Whip SNP Boss Resigns Over ‘Grabbing’ Private Parts In Large Members Club 🎄 Soirée 🍷

He touched the male member of a male member at a members' club

 

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The SNP vow to have another independence referendum if they win the Scottish Election in May but, surprisingly, they may not win.

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BREAKING: Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon 'misled parliament' over role in Salmond investigation​

 
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Hypocrite Nicola McSturgeon REJECTS England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 But Accepts Our £12,000,000,000 Cash 🤮

 
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Right now Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP get 30% more in funding per person than the English do. And that funding comes from the English taxpayer via the outdated and divisive Barnett Formula. And that needs levelling. #BarnettFormula #Scotland #England

 

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According to a report from the Institute for Government, the whole process of gaining independence (Scexit) and qualifying for EU membership could take Scotland the best part of a decade. And it also backs up what the pro-UK Unionists have been saying since Brexit was achieved. #IndyRef2 #ScottishIndependence #SNP