Viceroy Murray elevates projection to an art form
Projection is when you accuse someone of a behaviour or action of which you, not they, are guilty.
Viceroy Murray has elevated projection to an art form. In his latest scree, he accused the Scottish administration of “using poorer families as a political pawn” because it is trying to blunt the impact of English Labour’s heartless axing of the pensioner Winter Fuel Allowance and retention of the two-child benefit cap.
A pawn is a chess piece of the smallest and least value, and a political pawn is a person or group with no real power that is used by powerful others to achieve something.
This is precisely what Sir Kid Starver and Rachel the Freeze Reeves are doing in cynically sacrificing the lives of society’s weakest members, pensioners and children, to satisfy their neoliberal billionaire donors who put them in power.
The Viceroy’s boast of extra money for Scotland is hollow since he knows that when Westminster slashes spending, Holyrood’s limited budget takes a hit. He also knows that Holyrood can’t spend more than its ‘allowance’ since, unlike Westminster, it doesn’t have a central bank it can order to create the money Scotland needs.
Neither has the Viceroy gone to bat to save Grangemouth and its workforce. The refinery made a £100mn profit in 2022 profit but needs a £60mn investment to upgrade its hydrocracker. The UK government is letting it close, leaving Scotland as the only major oil producer without a refinery, and is perversely giving £600mn to the owner Ineos for a new Belgian refinery.
The Viceroy lands an especially low blow at Holyrood, blaming it for the tragedy of Scotland’s drug deaths, which are deaths of despair in our poorest communities. A recent study by Glasgow University researchers links drug deaths directly to UK government austerity.
A study author, Dr. David Walsh, Senior Lecturer in Health Inequalities, said:
“Life expectancy is about more than just health - it’s about the kind of society we live in. And in the early 2010s, after decades of continual improvement, life expectancy in the UK stopped increasing, and for a great many it actually declined. This is something that simply should not be happening in a wealthy society. Yet despite hundreds of thousands of extra deaths that the evidence shows are linked to austerity policies, governments and officials remained silent.”
Professor of Wellbeing Economy, Gerry McCartney, said:
“Despite the recent change of UK Government, austerity remains in place. The key policies which have created such injustice in our society have been - or look likely to be - reversed.”
It’s not just the least powerful who are political pawns of a distant, uncaring, overly centralised and incompetent UK government. It’s the whole nation of Scotland. We urgently need to find a way out.
His position is fitting in a Britain whose overlords like to think we're still in the 18th century.
Creepy man