Showing posts with label Scottish Labour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Scottish Labour. Show all posts

Saturday, 13 September 2008

New Leader for Scottish Labour

Andy Kerr, another po-faced humourless clone, long on talk but short on talent. I'm very much afraid Smirky will eat this guy alive. Remember when Scottish Labour had some socialists in it ? Better days and better people.

Monday, 14 May 2007

SNP and Lib/Dem coalition

Rayleen (the peoples' princess) Kelly has offered here her latest views on the calamity for Labour in the local elections. She still, like many other Labour supporters and councillors, cannot get her head round the fact that the people of Renfrewshire gave the Nats as many seats as they did Labour, and now wants to re-write the rules so that it is the number of votes rather than the number of seats that count.

Sooner or later they will have to wake up to the fact that it was Labour which formed the rules under which this election (assuming it is worthy of the name) was fought. If anyone screwed it up it was Duggie, the golden one and future anointed.

Labour in Renfrewshire have poured such vitriol on all of the other parties for so long that they had no friends to talk to in coalition talks, and they are still pouring. PR is meant to deny any party total power, and to that extent it has worked. Everyone except Renfrewshire Labour seem to be able to make it work (even Happy Jack the numpty managed to make it work in the last Parliament), so don't tell me it isn't sour grapes.

We didn't do so well ourselves, but we aren't bitching 'it's an injustice' like some Calimero. We take it on the chin and try again, we don't blame the voters for our failure.

We're also kind of glad you didn't get back in.

Thursday, 5 April 2007

PFI / PPP Schools and Hospitals : BBC Poll and Brown's Lies

Looking at the results of the BBC poll here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/6526715.stm#table
it seems that the Scots don't have a very high regard for PFI / PPP as a means of providing public services.

They seem to recognise a pig in a poke when they see one, but to explain the reasoning I offer this.

1. The stated aim of the Government in PFI / PPP is to bring private finance into public projects
2. Contractors are so stupid that they will make a net input to the project
3.The treasury will have a net benefit

No, that doesn't make sense so let's try again

1. The stated aim of Government in PFI /PPP is to bring private finance into public projects
2. Contractors are so cunning that they will manipulate the contracts to make a profit thereby taking money out of public projects
3. The treasury will have a large net loss which taxpayers up to 25 years down the line will have to pick up

Yes, that seems a lot more likely, but the present lot will be long gone by that time, so they don't care about anything but the next election down the line.

But voters (as the poll shows) are not so stupid as politicians think they are. They know that contractors , far from having their money levered into these projects are tripping over themselves to get involved because of the large amounts of money that they can take out. To believe otherwise is just plain silly.

If you want to get this money from big companies into public services, why is company tax about as low as it has ever been in modern times? I await an explanation from Gordon 'the big clunking fist' Brown or even someone more local if Scottish Labour still have any say in the matter.