Will Scotland Leave the UK?

There are all sorts of things wrong with the procurement assumptions at CMAL, the state body that owns Scotland’s entire maritime transport infrastructure. On top of all of them, in this specific instance, was the SNP’s political imperative to prevent the last commercial shipbuilder on the Clyde from going bust and then chucking it an eye-catching order for two great big Hebridean ferries that would look great on the front of the newspapers with Alex and Nicola waving from the bridge.

Ferguson Marine had never built a ferry this big, and it was now asked to build two of them simultaneously, and also to incorporate novel dual fuel technology that was entirely beyond its experience or expertise. Add to that CMAL’s slapdash, fluid and lackadaisical approach to design and specification and it was a disaster in the making. The reason for the latest six-month delay announced this week is that, incredibly, so many years down the line, they are *still* coming to build bits of these things and finding that the bits haven’t even been properly designed and specced.

CMAL is State owned and Scottish ministers are its ‘shareholders’. Ferguson Marine is likewise State owned.

The shytte-show that is CMAL is squarely the responsibility of the SNP who have been in government for 16 years. And the utter farce that is Ferguson Marine is not something the SNP can claim to have inherited. It is entirely of their own invention.

[jfman]

And it’s howling at the moon compared to HS2, or other similarly farcical UK-led procurement or investment. I don’t see as many tears shed for taxpayers money when it’s London burning through more of it, faster.

That said, it shouldn’t detract from the hilarity that has been the SNP leadership contest of which the membership numbers and accusations of “Trumpian nonsense” is the latest instalment.

One can only suspect the massive self inflicted own goal of “gender reform” hasn’t went down to well with the membership. Scotland isn’t as socially progressive as the SNP Twitter echo chamber would wish it to be. I also think having a go at Forbes for her religion, in a country with a sectarianism problem, is a really interesting approach.

The really negative outcome - in the absence of any meaningful policies from the unionists - would be even greater influence for the Green Party after the next election.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by jfman

And it’s howling at the moon compared to HS2, or other similarly farcical UK-led procurement or investment. I don’t see as many tears shed for taxpayers money when it’s London burning through more of it, faster.

I am totally on the record for denouncing HS2, I can already get to London from Leeds in under two hrs, and generally in 2hrs 20mins.

Originally Posted by jfman

And it’s howling at the moon compared to HS2, or other similarly farcical UK-led procurement or investment. I don’t see as many tears shed for taxpayers money when it’s London burning through more of it, faster.

That said, it shouldn’t detract from the hilarity that has been the SNP leadership contest of which the membership numbers and accusations of “Trumpian nonsense” is the latest instalment.

One can only suspect the massive self inflicted own goal of “gender reform” hasn’t went down to well with the membership. Scotland isn’t as socially progressive as the SNP Twitter echo chamber would wish it to be. I also think having a go at Forbes for her religion, in a country with a sectarianism problem, is a really interesting approach.

The really negative outcome - in the absence of any meaningful policies from the unionists - would be even greater influence for the Green Party after the next election.

If the SNP has any sense at all - debatable - it will distance itself from those policies that were the price of this totally unnecessary coalition and make clear to the electorate that they were Green, and not SNP, initiatives. There’s some evidence that they were able to deny they lost 30,000 members in a year (as reported in The National last month) because from December 2021 to December 2022 they had actually only (!) lost 20,000. The 30,000 figure obtained by the National was correct, but it took the SNP until February to lose that additional 10,000, and all of that appears to have been the direct fallout of the Gender Self ID bill. One begins to get some idea why Nicola chose to step down; even in the absence of a leadership election they wouldn’t have been able to keep that disaster secret forever.

Yes, Westminster has its grand foibles and incompetencies but there is an entire forum in which we can (and do) discuss them. Bringing them up here just whiffs of whataboutery.

And as for Forbes, well yes, I think one of the things Sturgeon has got spectacularly wrong is that her eye has been so fixated on building grand coalitions that she thought shackling herself to the Green Party and its gender ID proposals would kill two birds with one stone and generally be an extremely Good Idea. Yet the upshot is you have to wonder whether she has any understanding at all of what Scotland actually is.

[jfman]

It’s not whataboutery to bring a sense of perspective to the claims of gross incompetence that unionists - like yourself - will cling to. The SNP don’t exist in a vacuum. Scottish politics is a competitive marketplace devoid of ideas.

[pip08456]

Murray Foote has resigned as SNP media chief.

Yep … as I said earlier, The National (strapline, “the newspaper that supports an independent Scotland”) actually got hold of the membership numbers a month ago. When they put it to the SNP Press Office they unfortunately seem to have framed the question in such a way that the SNP leadership thought it could swerve it with a denial. I thought it might have been to do with the exact timing of the loss of members but apparently it was to do with the National suggesting that the Gender ID bill was the precise cause. The SNP leadership can’t know for certain what the cause of all those lost members is so they used that as the basis for a flat denial.

In the light of all that has come out this week that has put the person acting as press spokesman in a very difficult position because the agreed response was clearly an extremely pedantic and deliberate ploy to avoid the truth. The party leadership might have assured itself that it wasn’t lying but nobody outside that clique will see it that way.

[jfman]

Mr Sturgeon resigns as CEO of the SNP.

Indeed. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-65000606

The wheels haven’t just come off, they’ve bounced over the central reservation and caused a pile-up on the opposite carriageway.

[jfman]

At this point Ash Regan going to court and getting the process started again might actually be beneficial. They can heavily lean on almost anyone else - Robertson, Matheson or McKee to have a long hard think about it.

[Sephiroth]

Sod the lot of them. I'm so pleased their bubble is bursting.

[RichardCoulter]

Nicola Sturgeon has recorded a song to celebrate her time in office:

https://www.google.com/search?q=fe+f...id:Tn-ZSizEdMI

SNP in 'tremendous mess' ..

There is "tremendous mess" in the SNP over the party's leadership race, the new interim chief executive has said.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla...itics-65001543

Deep fried schadenfreude never tasted so good

[nashville]

After the disaster of Nicola Sturgeon and her party, Who on earth would we want to vote the SNP again, Scotland , England Ireland and Wales all need each other, We are a great country together, why let these halfwits break it up. They have wasted enough money and getting nowhere but failures,