Has anyone seen Anas?

Spare thought for poor Anas Sarwar, who rarely misses an opportunity to brush off his best sneery face and take to the airwaves on BBC Scotland, sticking it to the SNP. He must have been so looking forward to the gloatathon that his branch office winning the Westminster general election in Scotland would give him. He could have been on the tellybox every day, gleefully telling the viewers of Reporting Scotland’s Och Aye the News that the Labour party in Scotland was back in business in its rightful place in power, having trounced the divisive forces of vile nationalism, because naturally his own British nationalism doesn’t count.

Instead Anas has been forced to make himself very scarce. He has been stripped of the schadenfreude opportunities he must have been so looking forward to because his party has reverted to type far more quickly than even the most cynical observer of Labour party politics in Scotland [raises hand shyly] could have predicted. Instead of Anas doing his smirk face, we got Labour’s gaslightmeister Blair McDougall, taking to BBC Scotland to rewrite his party’s recent election campaign regarding the two chilc cap on benefits.

It has only been a couple of weeks but already the branch office manager has been caught out in two huge lies. Firstly the Labour party in Scotland’s lie that it opposes the two child cap on benefits and that it is willing to stand up to Keir Starmer on the subject. Secondly the lie that Labour will not have to institute a new round of austerity or raise taxes in order to deal with a multi billion pound black hole in public finances left by years of Conservative mismanagement.

During the general election campaign the SNP highlighted that a study from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) was warning that there is an £18 billion shortfall in funding for public services only to be dismissed as scaremongers by Sarwar and his cronies, doing their best impression of pearl clutching.

However we now know that the funding shortfall is at least £20 billion, £2 billion more than the SNP warned it was, and it could be even more than that. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to make a statement about the state of public finances to the House of Commons on Monday afternoon. It is expected that the government will make large cuts to planned infrastructure projects in order to make up the shortfall and may have to raise taxes. On the Sunday politics shows, Labour spokesgaslighters tried to claim that they did not know that the public finances were in such a dire state and blamed the Conservatives for covering it up. The Tories covered this multi billion shortfall up so well that no one knew about it except the IFS, the SNP, and a whole slew of economists and observers who were warning that Labour and the Tories were trying to get through the election campaign without talking about it, just as they got through the election campaign without talking about the damage that Brexit has done to the British economy.

Not that you’d know this from BBC Scotland, which has been going out of its way to protect the Labour Saviours of the Union from the consequences of their lies and duplicity. BBC Scotland did not see fit to mention that not a single one of Labour’s new 37 Scottish MPs voted to abolish the two child benefit cap when the matter came up for a vote in the Commons last week. This is despite the fact that BBC Scotland had given considerable publicity to the claims of the branch office manager that he opposed the cap and that he and Labour MPs from Scotland would be prepared to stand up to Keir Starmer on this issue. The only reasonable conclusion is that BBC Scotland is protecting and defending the Labour party while ignoring and marginalising the Scottish Government and the SNP except when there’s bad news, then the focus is constant and unrelenting.

This conclusion is strengthened by the fact that BBC Scotland has given considerable publicity this week to Starmer’s pet GB Energy project, glossing over the reality that it is really a mechanism for selling off Scotland’s renewable energy resources to the private sector and exporting any profits generated out of Scotland. It’s North Sea Oil all over again. Mind you at least this time they can’t tell us it’s running out when we threaten to take it back. Yet despite all the publicity BBC Scotland gave to Westminster’s renewable energy activities in Scotland, there was no mention of the Scottish Government’s investments in carbon capture or Scotland’s electric bus fleet.

Yet the most appalling decision by BBC Scotland during the week of 22 to 26 July was the broadcast on Reporting Scotland of a lengthy puff piece about the hard right anti-European and anti-immigrant Reform UK party in North East Scotland, the piece was little more than a party political broadcast for Nigel Farage. BBC Scotland can find time in its broadcasting schedules for the shameless normalisation of the hard British nationalist right, but not for holding the Labour party to account for misleading the Scottish public about the two child cap on benefits or the lies Labour told about the true state of public finances and a return to austerity.

It is sheer nonsense for Rachel Reeves and Anas Sarwar to pretend that the Chancellor is going to ‘reveal’ some great surprising £20 billion shortfall in public finances on Monday. They all knew, and they have known about it since at least March this year. They just chose not to mention it, and in the case of Anas Sarwar chose to smear those who were warning about it. No wonder he’s keeping his head down, something which is made much easier for him by BBC Scotland, which he knows won’t go doorstepping him. Only SNP politicians get that sort of treatment. No, Labour did not just ‘find’ this black hole, the SNP and the IFS found it a month before the election happened, and Labour dismissed their warnings as scaremongering. No matter how much BBC Scotland aids and abets, the Labour party doesn’t get to rewrite history, gaslight the public and pretend this is a shock to it.

On Sunday the official Labour party Twitter account tweeted: “After 14 years of the Tories, our public finances are in their worst state since the second world war and our public services are in crisis. This Labour Government will take the tough decisions needed to deliver real change.”

‘Tough decisions’, that’s code for making the poor pay. The real tough but simple decision would be to collect the unpaid taxes of billionaires and millionaires then make sure they pay in future. They could seize the billions paid for undelivered services during Covid, that would be a big help. But they’re going to hurt the poor again.

Rachel Reeves is expected to announce immediate cuts worth billions of pounds on Monday. On 11 June during the election campaign in a Scottish leaders’ debate broadcast by BBC Scotland, Anas Sarwar told John Swinney “Read my lips, no austerity under Labour.” That clip ought be in all BBC Scotland news bulletins today which report on the cuts introduced by Reeves. It won’t be shown at all. Sarwar has disappeared completely since the election as has BBC Scotland’s interest in him. There is a wealth of recent footage of Sarwar rejecting the IFS report of an £18 billion shortfall in public finances. Sarwar brazenly lied, but BBC Scotland will not hold him to account.

Rachel Reeves’s claim “there’s no money left” in public finances is exactly the same claim as Tory Chancellor George Osborne made in 2010 , and both use it to push damaging austerity. It was nonsense then and it’s still nonsense today.

________________________________________________

My Gaelic maps of Scotland are still available, a perfect gift for any Gaelic learner or just for anyone who likes maps. The maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK. You can order by sending a PayPal payment of £22 to [email protected] (Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to).

I am now writing the daily newsletter for The National, published every day from Monday to Friday in the late afternoon.  So if you’d like a daily dose of dug you can subscribe to The National, Scotland’s only pro-independence newspaper, here: Subscriptions from The National

I am also now selling my Cornish language map of Cornwall which was produced in collaboration with Akademi Kernewek, the umbrella body for Cornish language organisations. The approximately 1200 place names on the map were researched and agreed by the Akademi’s place name panel. The map is A1 in size. The Cornish maps cost £15 each plus £7 P&P within the UK.  P&P to the USA is £16 and P&P to Europe is £12. You can order by sending a PayPal payment for the appropriate amount to [email protected]  or by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug Please remember to include the postal address where you want the map sent to and clearly mark your payment Gaelic map or Cornish map). Alternatively contact me at [email protected] for other means to pay.

Within Cornwall the map is available at Kowsva, 6 Artists Muse, Heartlands, Poll/Pool – The Kowethas shop. They are also available from The Cornish Store in Aberfala/Falmouth. Other outlets in Cornwall will follow soon.

This is your reminder that the purpose of this blog is to promote Scottish independence. If the comment you want to make will not assist with that goal then don’t post it. If you want to mouth off about how much you dislike the SNP leadership there are other forums where you can do that. You’re not welcome to do it here.

You can help to support this blog with a PayPal donation. Please log into Paypal.com and send a payment to the email address [email protected]. Or alternatively click the donate button below. If you don’t have a PayPal account, just select “donate with card” after clicking the button. You can also donate by PayPal by using my PayPal.me link PayPal.Me/weegingerdug
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/weegingerdug

Source