The hapless Ian Murray gets one thing right
ScotGov is a colonial administration, designed to fail.
It’s rare that I agree with the hapless Ian Murray on anything, but he got one thing right in his weekly column. He unwittingly calls the Scottish government a “failed administration.” He’s right. It’s a colonial administration ultimately controlled by Westminster. It has never been a government.
Devolution was always a trap, designed by Blair’s English Labour to fail and thereby demonstrate that Scotland just isn’t up to self-government. Devolution bestows just enough authority on the Scottish administration to give it the appearance that it controls its economy, health service, education, energy and transport but not enough to actually do so. The real powers are reserved to the colonial overlord, Westminster.
And if the pesky Scottish administration passes laws that Westminster doesn’t like, Westminster overrules it. (However, it would be helpful if the Scottish administration let the People decide via a referendum on some of its wackier ideas such as Gender ID, Hate Crime and now, Jurlyless trials.)
For Scotland to be in control, it needs its own central bank and currency to set interest rates and create money to invest in public services, infrastructure and green technologies. It needs the power if not to fully renationalise, then at least to take a significant ownership stake in its energy sector so that the billions currently flowing into foreign government and corporate coffers stay in Scotland. It needs an independent foreign and defence policy to avoid being dragged into endless wars or having to defend the indefensible such as Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.
What Ian Murray gets wrong is denying Scotland’s right to do these things, including addressing the ‘climate emergency,’ such a ‘pressing emergency’ that English Labour cancelled its £28 billion green investment plan.
Forget the politicians. The People must free Scotland from this union sham.
100% agreed: the para starting with "For Scotland to be in control..." nails it firmly. In the 2014 referendum my Yes Vote was done throught gritted teeth as the ecnomic policy deployed could never have succeeded and indeed it was the critical factor on which the Yes Campaign foundered. I vividly remember watching the Salmond v Darling TV debate in which Darling wiped the floor with Salmond on the currency/economy topic, at which point I went out for a walk, enraged by knowing that the campaign was lost regardless of the voting outcome. Even with a Yes vote, we could never control our economy and we could never activate the complex process of creating a new state from scratch without begging the UK Treasury to borrow and ultimately repay crippling amounts of sterling. Salmond claimed to have been an economist at RBS, but clearly knew nothing about the operation of a central bank, or the creation of money, or how the macroeconomy actually works.