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Scottish politics dissected from a left, pro-independence stance. Each week, award-winning broadcaster and journalist, Lesley Riddoch chews over the week’s news with co-host Fraser Thompson. If you like intelligent, quirky chat about Scottish society and culture, and Scottish, UK and international politics analysed from a Scottish perspective; this podcast is for you.
Well, it's been a while since the last podcast and Pat is still nigh weel, so thanks to the coach for stepping in. We discussed the U turn by the Westminster government on the winter fuel allowance. Does anyone have any interest in where that's going to come from, how it's going to be paid?
Because it was the big accusation levelled when the SNP rose to the challenge. And what about the impact it makes now on the SNP's policy, with Labour trying to make it look as if the Scottish payment will just be £100? It won't. We try to clear some of that up.
We look too at the aftermath of the Hamilton by election and there's no getting away from it. It was a really bad loss by the snp. There was no mention of independence and the candidate was not as local as the truly local David Russell. And that seems to matter in an era where people have lost trust in parties.
They trust their own guy on the ground. What does that say about the candidates chosen so far for the SNP in the Scottish election? We look as well at Israel and Gaza. Breaking news that the British government has taken sanctions out against two Israeli cabinet members. But that's not going to go anywhere near placating the 300 civil servants who've written a letter objecting to the British government's support of the Israeli government and have been told that if they want to keep objecting, they can resign.
That and much more in the Lesley Riddick podcast on social media and lesleyridich.com. those are the headlines now for the podcast.
Well, hi, chums, and welcome to this week's Leslie Riddick's podcast. Unfortunately, Pat is still on the Pat, Mick. And he's nay afy Wheel. Not, as Leslie tweeted out the other day, afy no wheel. He's just got a recurrence of the dreaded lurky afi no wheel is serious. Nay AFI Wheel is just nay AFI wheel.
So today you've got the coach in for a recording rather than just lobbing in thoughts from afar. I have to confess, though, right at the top, I have absolutely no knowledge of or passion for football. So all the Dundee United fans might be a bit let down this week.
I hope that's the right type of Dundee, Leslie. It is now, thank goodness. In fact, I couldn't honestly say that I've ever watched a who football match from start to finish.
Right, and I think you're digging the hole too deep now.
So, Lesley, as usual, barely anything has happened since the last time, which is to say the last time that the podcast was actually recorded, rather than the last conversation we've just had for the last 50 minutes where I had asked for permission to record. But sounds as a two stage process, you need to ask and then record.
So that's a lesson learned for the old future.
We have had the perfect podcast. I know, Pat, if you're listening, look, you know, everybody makes this mistake, you know. Yeah. But me also, because as the sort of person on the other end of this, it normally does a little American recording beginning or something like that, which I should have noticed didn't happen.
So hands up all round.
Yes. It's the only thing I didn't get to test. I had been running around trying to get a proper microphone and then the only one I could get was a complicated setup with a box of tricks that needed to be plugged in and a driver downloaded and then synced and something else.
So there we go. Anyway, where to start?
Sorry, there's just a release of nervous tension here.
Now you're up late for the Al D By election and so was I. I'm normally standing in a cattle shed at Ingleston for election counts, so it was quite exciting for me to be on the sofa with Coca Cola and a biscuit rather than being tortured waiting for the votes to be slowly counted.
And you were in the studio and.
I should point out, in case people think you're some sort of, you know.
Concrete hall election, an election agent for Joanna Cherry.
And indeed you pointed out, sorry, this will now be referred to as the last time throughout, that you actually, your first time tramping the halls in Edinburgh was with Margot McDonald back in 2011.
Yes. So I've campaigned for her in 2006 and I was at the count again in 2000, although that was back in the old halcyon days when the electoral people, whoever it is, they are, I think it's the UK government forked out for a carpet and they don't do that any longer.
So you just have to stand in the bare concrete for four or five hours, which after you've been up since 6 o' clock in the morning pounding the pavements and putting out a boards is absolutely torture.
Right, okay. So it does feel to me then that I'm sort of, you know, the least experienced in this conversation. And also, I've got to say, I just should confess, I hadn't actually visited Hamilton, Stonehouse or Larkhall in the run up to the to the by election, but I was pulled in as a kind of observer, you know, COMMENTATOR on the night by the BBC, BBC Scotland.
And there's just no two ways. This was a really bad result for the SNP and for independents. You know, everybody by now knows that the much pilloried Labour candidate, one Davy Russell and, and I haven't actually really heard anybody from the SNP making any sort of, you know, it's, it's all very well to point out, and I have now had a look at the various versions of how much Labour's vote has, has sort of decreased from the halcyon days of the 2024 by election.
And actually looking at that, it would seem that that Labour's vote is actually down 18% from 2024. It's only down 2% from 2021. But, you know, this was part, meant to be part of the roller coaster. So according to many people, including the sacred He Must Be obeyed John Curtis, that's not enough.
The, the, the kind of level of win that the Labour had at the Hamilton by election isn't enough to let them springboard over where the SNP are sitting at the moment and win the Scottish elections next year. But this is really pretty poor. And I got to say in the studio there was quite a lot of shock, albeit Angus Robertson, who was there from the snp, managed to remain sort of sphinx, like throughout.
You wouldn't really know what he was thinking. But I didn't hear anybody kind of come anywhere near being able to recognize the level of defeat that this represents. And it really does. The, the things that people were saying at the time, quite interesting. Paul Okane was there from labor and he was basically saying that everyone was underestimating the importance of localness in all of this.
And, you know, again, you might just shrug that off and think that's not, you know. Nah. But the point was, I think if you've got two governments that seem to have lost their way in the eyes of a lot of voters, they've just kind of given up thinking that there will be dramatic change coming from either labor, courtesy of all their, you know, betrayals basically on the benefits front particularly.
And the Scottish government, you know, the Hamilton city center, town center is still described as a kind of, you know, wasteland. There's, there was a proposal locally to move a neonatal unit which was explained away by the candidate, the SNP candidate. As just an expert says, that has to happen.
If you're living in Hamilton, it'll just feel like nothing ever changes. And there needed to be a feeling that there was something, a goal to work towards 18 leaflets apparently from Katie Louden, the SNP candidate, and not a mention of independence. And in any case, as Jonathan Shaffee wrote in a good article today, just mentioning independence is no good anymore.
It needs to be translated into here's the way that this would improve that, that, that, you know, we need to have something beefier. And none of it was there. But the point about the local thing Paul was saying when they were going around with Davy Russell and everybody will know he's the guy that didn't pitch up for debates, he didn't really string together sentences particularly well when he did and was kind of a bit surprised looking at the obvious points that were put to him but by the fearful beast of STV, Colin MacKay, the political editor.
But the point was when, when they were taking Davey around, apparently people would say, oh, that's Davey the guy that we see down at the bowls, or oh, that's Davey the guy that volunteers at the hospice. That's Davey that does various other charities. That's Davey that does the blooming karaoke.
And you got to say that's Davey that's a member of the Orange Lodge. So the point is that if you, if you've lost faith in everything else government wise, it probably looks like a sensible thing to just get one of your own in there because he's going to at least just represent you and your, your interests in Hamilton.
And it looks like that is what happened allied with two months of campaigning by Labor. They just camped out there and I know Jackie Bailey said, the last time I was in that BBC studio was the Rother Glen by election in October 2023. And at the end of that, when they won, she said, thank God for that, I can get home now after two months.
So she had actually been camped out there for two months and I suspect similar had happened here. Now, I don't know, the SNP could have put the same level of effort in, but they just decided they were going to basically trail Davey Russell around every door and stress the point that he had these local credentials and, and basically they managed, that, managed to succeed over all the appalling stuff that Labour has done at Westminster level.
And the council, which, generally speaking, councils are generally speaking so remote, they're much hated around the country. You'd have to say South Lanarkshire is, is definitely picking up a lot of negative vibes. And that's a Labour run council. So Labour's success there really requires somebody to think very deeply.
And as far as I can see, the kind of candidates the SNP is favoring are not necessarily. I'm not saying that Davy Russell's some kind of local hero advocating community buyouts. Hey, let's buy Hamilton. Let's roll our own. And kind of a sort of left wing perspective on very much he's not.
But the kind of, you know, if you're putting technocratic in any way, parachuted in candidates who are not able to advocate for the local area and are not credible to local people, that is just a losser. And I think the SNP's vetting policy, I know from one woman who looked like a complete dancer for the constituency she was in, but she didn't have experience at Scottish Parliamentary level, so she was doofed out.
She wasn't even passing vetting. So I don't know. You'll have much more experience to that, Fraser.
I mean, I think. That's really a big problem. And okay, he wasn't super articulate, but he was the kind of local person that was really embedded in lots of local networks. As you say, he looked like a real person. He was a real person, much more three dimensional. Labor had a way better ground campaign.
And one of the problems in politics is that once you start going down, you have fewer and fewer people to come out to support you and it's a kind of downward spiral. If you look at a lot of the candidates that have been selected for the main political parties, I know Labour said that they were struggling to get candidates for Holyrood.
Equally. There's been little to no competition in some seats and a bit of competition in others for the SNP. And you've got people coming through in their early 20s that don't have any experience at all. I mean, there might be a local councillor, but they've actually had no other paid employment other than perhaps being a sort of comms person or some kind of constituency caseworker for an MP or an msp.
And they think having worked for both, you know, I've worked for an MSP and an MP makes them actually doubly qualified rather than zero qualified. It also struck me, Leslie, as there was a very kind of middle class campaign that the SMP seemed to be running. It was a bit sneering.
John Nicholson was doubling down on that. Even after the vote, nobody seemed to could kind of countenance the idea that David Russell had won. It was basically insinuating that he was too thick to be an msp. But you know, the guy was a service manager at Glasgow City Council responsible or something like 2,000 workers under him.
But you've got John Nicholson saying that, you know, he would struggle with committee work but maybe brighter members would cover for him in initially, the local campaigning, I think, is a real struggling point for the snp. That Labour Party are now way ahead in terms of their technical ability.
And just on that technical point, you're just slightly popping, my dear, just to warn you. So just a couple of inches back from the mic and all will be well.
See, this is the, the take two. We never had a single problem the first time around. Always the way. So, yeah, technicals. Well, you know, the SMP's main campaign technology was launched 2005. Six in the lead up to the 2007 Holyrood campaign. I think the iPhone was originally launched in 2007.
If you imagine trying to use an 18 year old iPhone now, it'd be barely functioning. Labor are way ahead. There was plans put in place in the aftermath of the 2017 Westminster disaster for the SNP to radically overhaul that system, but all these things were cancelled by Peter Murrow with no explanation.
And you've got a system now that just doesn't function in the way that the Labour Party are able not just to sort of identify their own voters, but actually use technology to say, well, you know, here's the people that are voting for us. Find me people that look a bit like them in terms of demographic and age and profile elsewhere in the constituency so we can go and go and speak to them.
So, you know, the S and P are really, really far behind in its technology and actually had to bring a number of motions to conference to try and force a binding resolution to make the HQ team pursue these changes. Now some of that is starting to get underway, but it's way too late and we're seeing the problems that have been thrown up both in terms of the type of candidate that are being selected and in the way that they actually f.
Physically carry out their business.
And you know, the, the other thing that's really come to the fore is criticism of John Swinney for, for basically trying to whack reform. You know, there's, it's basically a two, two horse race, SNP reform, big essentially biggin up reform. And I've got to say I worried about this from the minute that that anti far right conference was, was called together because there it's.
I mean essentially the Scots do love an underdog and when you get all the great and the good basically in to say these guys are bams, it starts to kind of tilt the thing the wrong way. It just needed to be some tangible gains, some action and active looking government not falling back constantly on mentioning the Scottish child payment.
We've got it, it's good, everyone thinks it's great. You? Yes, everything should be a lot better if the British government would pick that up. Yes, we've got that. There's more progressive taxation here. Again, policy suggests that if Westminster copied that, poverty would be much remedied. We've got that and we've got all the advantages of the glory years of the snp.
But there you are. Where's the glory years now? We need movement on, energy, movement on, you know, a kind of audacious salmon style moves on things that are even close to competence on stuff that is absolutely pivotal to people's lives and yet we're not getting that. I mean, we don't own.
Not only don't even get a mention of the word independence, but it doesn't get unpacked. And forgive me now because we've spoken so many times about this, I don't know if I've already said it, but Jonathan Shafi's article is basically saying that it's not enough to just mention the word as a headline, you have to unpack it.
And it could even be too late to do that for the next election because fundamentally I don't think many people now believe that the SNP has put much time into any proper planning or campaigning or being perky or rebuttals or any kind of focus on the issues that there are.
The big fear I think would be that the S and P trot out some kind of half baked summer of independence campaign, which is what normally happens when the SNP leadership get into a sort of sticky situation like this, which is basically neither a summer nor a campaign nor much of an independence.
But it kind of looks a bit performative for the rebound the. The yes.scott website and relaunch it as they did in October, November time, which I think was a fourth or fifth relaunch of that type of platform, which seems to have no actual purpose to it, no follow through.
You can always sign up to be some kind of supporter or an activist on these websites, but that information never falls out of the back end to anybody locally saying Jimmy signed up to campaign for independence and get him out there.
It's almost as you say, a bit too late to sort of change gear into a very heavily independence driven campaign. And as Jonathan points out, this anti reform campaign seemed to be the main strategy for the Scottish Parliamentary election next year. Starting off with that summit and kind of building up this narrative that reform had to be kept out and everybody had to sort of club together in order to do that.
This kind of pearl clutching mantra which has been bust, you know, that may well have been a kind of reasonable national strategy, but it's been proven wrong in this local by election and it's probably now a busted flush for the rest.
And as I understand it, there's a National Council meeting now. You'll again tell me, because these tend not to be tremendously feisty events, do they? But there's one for next week, it's the 20th, I think of June. I spoke to somebody who is going to that and had said there had been a lot of motions put in to basically saying we have to fight this, you know, as line one, page one, independence.
And that just can't be. There's the word again, this needs to be a full throated independence campaign. Which of course in a recent interview John Swinney asked the question, is it line one? Page one didn't say yes. So the, the, apparently the upshot is that the first part of the National Council meeting will be people discussing independence and then they'll move on to, you know, the business as usual.
I understand. And this reminds me of actually last year's conference which started off with a session that people just basically, you know, complained really about the lack of an independent strategy and then it just went back into the usual conference in which independ was not mentioned. So if this is what we're heading for again, and at the risk of being, well, I was going to say labeled an agile provocateur, but you know, basically I can clear a room of SNP officials quicker than blooming Donald Trump.
Anyway, you guys that are going to this council meeting need to strategize about what you're going to do because if you really believe this, that a spark, hope, vision is needed to win an election of any kind, this is possibly the last chance saloon for trying to get some action.
A lot of people I know will already say this is hopeless. And you can see that there's been, if you would have to say, probably the usual suspects calling for John Sweeney to go, Alec Neal, Jim Sellers and I think Tommy shepherd is very critical of the approach of kind of trying to whack reform.
But this is going to just continue to kind of keep niggling away this leadership issue unless something big and genuine and not a summer of whatever as you suggested, comes out of this. So, you know, come on folks.
Definitely. And I mean it's quite interesting. We're into what, the fourth or fifth day now of, of not just criticism of the strategy, but criticism of John Swinney's leadership. We got front page of the National Today with James Dornan backing him, which is almost as good as calling for him to resign.
You know, it, it equally highlights the problems. It's a bit more of the kind of wished and uh, get behind.
There's obviously very serious concerns about the, the strategy and where it's headed and the pace of change. I mean talking of pace of change, in the, the great tradition of this podcast, I've watched something that nobody else would absolutely want to do in order to, to report back. I was watching the, the King's Speech, the Discourse du Tron in Canada, which was utterly boring.
It took absolutely ages because the Senate building and the Commons are actually quite far apart from each other. So the two of them, you know, when they send off Black Rod to go and get everybody, there's an absolute age of milling around, waiting for them to come back. But anyway, the bottom line is that Canada is back in business in a really quite interventionist way to build houses.
You know, the Carney government is. Going to double the rate of house building. It's creating an entirely new house building industry called the Canadian which we use Canadian technology, Canadian skilled workers and Canadian timber. This build Canada homes plan and they're investigating in creating a new prefabricated modular housing industry to drive up the supply and bring down the cost of houses.
I mean this is very similar to the commonweal home plan of five years ago and the timber industry growth set out in Scotland 2070 healthy, wealthy and Wise, the book by Hilary Sillitoe and Dorothy and Ian Godden. So you know, a lot of this work had been done by the independence movement and independence thinkers and some really detailed plans but you know, no decisive action of that kind of level.
Yeah, and we will come on to this thing of housing. We talk about this spending review but just to sort of have a look at reform in all of this.
I think actually that the main tactic reform used which was that horrible video about Anas Sarwar prioritizing the Pakistani community which did apparently have 800,000 views by the time of the election. I think that didn't actually go anywhere particularly in this by election because it just missed. It's an indication of how he just doesn't get Scotland that really wasn't.
Race wasn't a factor. I think particularly in that seat there was probably a level of scunnerment with both governments and essentially the local candidate came through the middle. But it's interesting because Farage was actually fairly on the money when it's something closer to his own home turf in the by election down south that they won and in the local elections to just before that Farage has, has actually been.
Got cuter with age and he, he became a. He didn't criticize the Birmingham bin strikers. He called for Scunthorpe and British Steel to be nationalized and he suggested that England's water companies should be allowed to go bust. In particular Thames Water. And some of the trade union folk at the time were quoted as saying that, you know, Thames call.
Farage's call to let Thames Water collapse was a breath of fresh air and political leader who was tackling the problem. And this is what will happen is that basically Farage is a shape shifter. He's not a very good shape shifter for Scotland because he's not here enough to get a kind of, you know, a feel for things.
But doubtless he'll improve and anything any system that has massive problems within it and doesn't basically connect well like the entire privatized water system south of the border, that will just be an easy picking for him. Here it is something that his candidate pushed a lot was the net, net zero.
And there is a problem with that because again, at the behest of the Westminster government that controls energy, the decision has been made to pay for all the transition. And that means all the hardware, all the pylons, all the new connectors, all the rest of it, that is all being paid on bills, not on taxes.
And it may sound like, you know, six of one, half a dozen the other, but clearly not because obviously bills are pretty regressive in that poor folk pay more. You saw that stuff recently about folk managing to get compensation for having their houses broken into, to have repayment meters put in because they defaulted on a Bill at some point.
So they're actually paying a higher amount for their energy. They're also probably using more of it. And on the other hand, if you put that on taxation, it is even in, you know, unequal Britain, it is progressive, as in folk who pay more pay more tax. So, you know, we have decided, we haven't.
The Westminster governments have successively decided to stick with a system that loads all of those costs onto bills. And which is why the reform folk are able to jump in and say your bills are whatever it is, a quarter, a third or whatever it is of a green sands transition.
And again, that if it was basically taxes, they would be gunning for that as well. They don't want to spend money on anything but oil, which is running out. And the smart countries have already shifted most of their production and their energy supplies onto stuff that has a future, thereby guaranteeing that their kit, in the case of Vestas from Denmark, their know how, in the case of all the Nordics, their state owned companies, in the case of Norway, Equinor are now hoovering up the possibilities in our country.
So there's lots and lots wrong with energy, none of which I ever hear the SNP talking about. But reform will continue to pick that underbelly. And you know, when it comes to the next Scottish election, they'll be up in Angus, up in Aberdeenshire and up in the Northeast, basically saying, who wants these pylons?
Do you benefit from this one iota vote reform? And if somebody doesn't tackle that properly, you know, and they're not going to, I think, because the SNP has mostly passed much of that through its planning without extracting anything that they could have a bit of a, you know, look, this shiny thing that we got in exchange, that's going to happen.
Yeah. And you know, people are not seeing the benefit of cheaper renewable energy in their energy mix in their bills, as we know. And you know, when a reform's great benefits is that people seem to be able to project anything they want onto them. You know, it's not entirely clear what they stand for.
Their policies are not very well defined and are not necessarily articulated. So they're kind of all things to all people with this background hum of racism.
And actually just, just while we're at it though, I see that.
Oh, the problem is when the sort of background racism hum kind of actually comes to the fore and becomes a bit more specific, it doesn't seem to actually do well for them. And then your man Zia Yousef upped and quit and then was back 48.
Hours later, but that was over, you know, essentially entirely. You know, I keep forgetting her name. Sarah Poin.
Poin or Po.
Yeah, we, we're struggling. But anyway, the last who won the recent by election down south for reform, you know, she asked question in the comments about urging a ban on burkas. And Zia Yousef, who had had pretty much masterminded the, you know, advance of reform from the kind of background, the back room function.
He, anyway, he resigned the next day. I think he was, he was careful enough in his resignation to make it, you know, he said what he said it was dumb.
Dumb that almost, you know, Sarah, you're doing the, you're doing the quiet bits out loud again. We're not, we're not that racist.
They didn't actually, I don't think he actually named her, but maybe I'm wrong, but, but nonetheless, it was quite obvious where that was coming from. And just by the by, it seems that the guy who was leading on the called Doge unit within reform, this is the Department of Government efficiency copycat thing from, from the states of which more soon in the delicious Elon Musk Donald Trump fallout chat.
Anyway, Reform have got their own Doge unit. This guy Nathaniel Fried was in charge of it and he quit the same day as Zia Yousef, presumably over those remarks by the woman whose name we cannot pronounce.
Well, and Zia has now got four jobs apparently, so he's coming back in to lead the Doge team. So I mean, it's up and doing and in and out.
But you know, the thing is we'll get next to know if, if anybody else was doing this amount of kind of U turns. I think we're beginning to teach her into the next territory. It would have got a bit of Interest, but not with reform. They just. In fact, people will have noticed from the.
The BBC, from the Nationals website that the BBC. There's been a leak of emails and exchanges suggesting that the BBC thinks that it needs to try and produce reform voter friendly content now, which is not just. I mean, many of us will think it's been there for quite a long time, but not just in the news arena, but actually in dramas which just beggars belief, you know, that we've reached this.
Nigel Farage and Coronation street of EastEnders rather will be moving into the main street.
Just the small point is, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, because I may have got the numbers wrong. It reform have either five or six with Sarah Potion mps.
Yeah, right.
The SNP have nine. You know, they're not. They're not. I appreciate everyone thinks it's like the coming storm. You know, if you look out the window and you see the storm clouds rolling in, you go and take your washing in before you see the rain actually fall. But nonetheless, just technically and actually, we live in a blooming multiracial democracy where every point of view has got a say.
But if it's proportional, there are five blinking MPs right now. So it's outrageous that this is even being planned by the BBC. But, you know, of course, that's.
Again, Rupert Lau hadn't been suspended pending investigation. You know, they're hardly a paradigm of.
Virtue, but this, again is a point to make to people. The constellation of forces suggests that reform will always. There will, certainly, because it's a proportional election, there will be reform MSPs, but, you know, the voting proportion south of the border is clearly higher for reform and we'll end up having a BBC that adjusts all the programming for the license fee we all pay, if we choose to.
For a phenomenon that is probably not as impactful in Scotland as it will be south of the border.
Absolutely not. And you were mentioning U turns, the kind of slowest U turn in history, the caring sharing. Labour government have reinstated winter fuel payments for pensioners.
Indeed, yes. As you say, this is so profoundly not news and yet every sort of inch of it is just so creaking. I mean, just watching Rachel Reeves plant herself amongst some unsuspecting pensioners somewhere at a kind of a wee jolly, a lunchtime jolly. And coming out with that, you know, trademark woodenness that accompanies everything.
You get the bus here. Oh, that's lovely.
I wish I could actually do her accent as well. This. It's. I. I've Forgive me if I've run this theory Passion. You before. But it's strange how often leaders and deputies end up having the same speech patterns. There was a stage where Nicola had very Alex kind of speech patterns.
So Alex used to do this kind of slightly arrogant thing and then, you know, this little kind of, you know. You know, we all know what this is, Robert Str thing. But anyway, she. She and K Starmer have definitely got, you know, kind of completely colorless language that just gets rattled out off to a tee.
Anyway, let us not tackle.
The government has fixed the foundations of the economy.
Well, that's interesting, isn't it? Because actually there's. I'll put the wee link in, but there's a very good analysis by Sam Coates on Sky, who's pointing out that this is patently nonsense, or as he says, if you're being polite, contested the OBR halved growth predictions this year for Britain.
The OECD downgraded UK forecasts last week and the claim that interest rates are coming down ignores the fact that their descent is slower because of government decisions taken in the last six months. So, you know, it. There isn't a sort of, hey, look, suddenly we've made loads of money and it's all so completely different.
And I don't think there's a person in the country who believes that everything has improved so much. They know that this is just, you know, classic politicians speak for we completely mess this one up. We. Well, we're never done with hearing about it. We won't see the front pages of British, you know, English newspapers this morning, but the sun headline is.
Highlights the lack of an apology from Rachel Reeves over that, because in the end, I think they've saved only 450 million quid, which is nothing in the great scheme of things, by removing the entitlement from all pensioners. So, hey, nice one there. But their headline is Winter Blunderland. Get it?
The male brands Rachel Reeves deluded. But to be fair, they probably never liked her anyway. And the Metro headline is humiliating. Get it with the U turn. So there's. So nobody's really kind of, you know, I don't know how many Brownie points they're getting from this, but there is quite a lot of other things that are beginning to unravel because of it.
I mean, one is that this kind of, you know, for an iron Chancellor, as Rachel Reeves had presented herself, there's the first little bit of unraveling from her, you know, sacred rules. Next one is what happens now to things like the cuts in personal independence payments, the PIP payments, that mostly come from disabled people.
And the 2 child benefit cap, if people don't like that, why would they not campaign all the harder now? Because there's been one climb down already. And why logically would you hammer ahead with these ones? Because they will now become the new focus for all the soft left in the Labour Party and beyond, you know, in, in the wider community and Scotland.
Absolutely. And you know, okay, the two child cap is already in there. So whilst everybody is feeling that pain and we're seeing the comparative stats in England vs Scotland for the amount of child poverty, this change to the entitlement for PIP is going to affect a lot of people and it's going to be a change, it's going to be a massive change.
And you know, even all these new shiny Labour MPs are going to be facing that every single week in their constituency surgeries. There's a lot of people come to their Member of Parliament for help and support, filling in their PIP form. And if they're now losing points and they're losing entitlement, they're going to be feeling that front and center in their offices and be back on complaining in their backbench meetings directly to Rachel.
So I mean, I don't see the advantage of this winter fuel decision to begin with. It was just kind of, look at me, I'm big and tough, I can take these hard decisions. It was a bit of a weird one. It's been reinstated now, but it's taking them forever to actually get their U turned through.
So again, that wasn't even a particularly clever or smart way to go about things. It's just kind of slowly rolled itself out and being finally confirmed today. And of course if you earn over £35,000, it's going to be complicatedly clawed back through the tax system and then no sooner has it been done, we've got the Labour Party and the same Paul o' Kane this morning saying that the SNP must now re examine their proposals because they were only offering everybody a hundred pounds rather than the 200 that's been offered by the UK government.
You're like, well, they had motivated for 20 years.
Just as you were sort of watching something in Canada for everybody else's sake, I was listening to Ian Murray, the Scottish Secretary this morning. Morning. Good morning Scotland. While you were off sourcing a microphone and actually a very good feisty interview by Laura Maxwell there. Where to to kind of cut to the chase.
He basically got, you know, pummeled around with it all and then claimed that the SNP would only be giving a hundred pounds to all pensioners, at which Laura Maxwell jumped in and said, that's not correct. And everyone will get at least £100, but people over the age of 80 on pension credit will get 305 pounds.
People on pension credit under the age of 80 will get 203 quid. Now, you know, presumably, since they've only discovered since yesterday that there will be more money coming to them in Barnet consequentials because of the change of their own policy at Westminster, there could be, you know, they could change their minds yet as to how they deal with this, but that is what's on offer because there was he haw coming from Westminster.
So how these guys, you know, the brass neck is amazing. The next line Iain Murray came out with was after he was corrected by Laura Maxwell, which he didn't go back into any argument about the figures. He said, but why are the SNP giving money to millionaire pensioners? So that's going to be the next one, because they've got their claw back through taxation thing.
That's the way they've decided to approach it. I would just have thought people will be a lot less worried about that than just their initial stance and kind of, you know, hasty backtracking, all the rest of it, and the fact that they have not explained how they're going to fund it.
I mean, I can remember when the SNP decided they were going to come out and reinstate some kind of winter fuel payment from, again, mitigating from their own money, a Westminster policy, and then said also they would do the same with a two shell cap. And all labor had to say was, where will the money come from?
How are you going to fund it? Well, hello, how is this going to be funded? Because there has no, no detail has been come up with yet. And the speculation is doubtless it's going to come from increased taxation. And that will hover over labor all summer now until they get to the budget at the other end.
Absolutely. And there also seems to be a bit of a divide between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister keeps getting sort of slightly talked into, oh, yes, we'll look at it. Oh, yes, we're considering all these things. And the Chancellor's much more, Absolutely not. We've got the spending review coming up, which I think is going to be quite tight for a number of UK departments.
Indeed. And this was. We were talking about the housing earlier at an English level. This falls to Angela Rayner and she's got 1.5 million houses, affordable houses to build, which I think everyone has said is kind of not possible and certainly not possible unless really major amounts of money were pushed her way.
As it is, major amounts of money have been pushed in a different direction, which is towards finishing size will see and you have the figures on that days.
It's a 14.2 billion, I think 2 point something of which had already been announced, taking it up to 17 billion in total for. For costs for this new nuclear power station at Sizewell, which is just, I.
Mean, you know, we could talk about. We've talked about all of this before, but that will actually come out of bills paid by us in Scotland that he. They are of course now on the front foot thanks to that election result. And again they had Tom Greatrix on, who used to be in a Labour mp, I think is now the spokesperson for the nuclear movement for the nuclear energy industry.
And he's basically saying, you know, the Scottish government's behind the curve. The decision not to have nuclear approved by planning in Scotland is bad news. And in fact, the kicker, the punchline on the interview with Iain Murray was that when, as he puts it, Scotland votes Labour and Anas Sarwar is first Minister, we will reverse the SNP's veto on nuclear power, but labor.
And we'll give you a shiny new nuclear power station.
Yeah. Instead of. And this is again, the points that have to be, you know, really pushed home. We very probably need some kind of baseload energy. And we've had, you know, the extra podcast we did with two energy experts, went into a lot of this in great depth. But there's, you know, there's all sorts of technologies that will never get their chance.
Every time nuclear kicks in, research and support for wave energy, tidal energy just dries up completely. And it looks like that cycle which began so many years ago, is about to happen again because all the big money is going into nuclear. And that will now be presented by the Westminster Labour government and by Labour here as the sort of smart, technocratic, clean way to reach net zero through clean energy.
Now, I mean, we could have a long conversation about how clean anyone feels. Dunray was with the shaft that was denied its existence, was even denied for the best part of 20 years, the radioactive shaft. Of course they'll say, yeah, but that was then and everything's better now. And, yeah, fine, we have got enough energy in Scotland.
I mean, we're already, we've already over 100% renewable energy. We do need something that's baseload, but we should be deciding ourselves which technology we want to use. The nuclear industry is taking decades on planning and the investment in it. The reason, I think partly that the British government has come to.
To the rescue is because private industry, there's. There's squillion sitting in the City of London. Why are they not investing in size? Well, c. Because it's bad news, that's why. And it may, you know, never come out safely out the other end. So we don't need that. We need something.
We need our own mix and we need advances in our own mix and we need a government in the SNP that keeps making that point. In explaining it.
And you've been looking at renewables on Applecross and some of the challenges there.
Indeed. Well, people may have already got a drift of this one, but I know one of the women who spent, who did almost an impossible thing. Applecross, little peninsula up in the northwest overlooking Skye on the other side of the Bialachnam. Bo or Ba, depending on which Gaelic you're using.
250 people live there and they managed to raise three quarters of a million pounds in 2015 to get some Westminster funding to create a community hydro. Happy days. The community hydro would get income and they could spend that on everything that the state basically and the council don't give to a remote peninsula like them, however, was a problem, which is that the GR grid that goes across to Applecross and you need to feed into the grid to get money paid back out to it.
That grid is a teeny weeny useless grid which is basically full if you sneeze. I do exaggerate for effect, but the, the small community hydro, which was 90 kilowatts, could only export 50 kilowatts into the grid and be paid for that. And, and there that meant it couldn't put a second one in.
It's lost huge amounts of money over the 10 years it's waited for SSE, which is a private company. Thanks to Thatcher, the privatization of the energy industry was done in such a way that a private company, not the state, makes the decisions about which grid connections go ahead in a way that no other country in Europe does.
So SSE has kind of looked at the we folk over in Applecross and gone, nah. Actually, just to be fair, they've looked at Orkney, energy rich Shetland, awash with wind energy, the Western Isles, same story, and also thought nah until extremely recently. But Applecross still stuck and stuck for all these years since 2015, not able to export.
What does that mean as well? It means there's no three phase energy on the peninsula. It's been a bit of an education session for me. That's the kind of energy you need to be able to run a business where what that means is that the upper crossing has not, for example, got electric showers, it has got showers in each room, but they just can't be primed by electricity because there's not enough.
About 7 in 10 people live in fuel poverty. There's another commercial hydro again expecting to have a decent grid connection, which is why millions were put in by two brothers who live in Argyle. It's been exporting 1 40th of its capacity for about five years. So I was going up to show the Denmark film in Applecross, which definitely was like rubbing people's noses in it, when they saw the island of Samso, which is energy self sufficient in Denmark, pulling in all the energy it produces there for the people on the island, and thought we might as well make a film while we're here about the, you know, the pickle that Applecross finds itself in.
That film's been online for a week. I think it's had about 15,000 views, definitely. SSE who did finally apply for a grid upgrade in 2022. It's been sitting in the Scottish Government's planning entry since then, which is three years. Got, you know, to get a decision. It's part of a general improvement of the grid from Fort Augustus to Sky.
So that has stalled for such a long time. Yesterday as I was looking to see, you know, what happened with it, I got an email from SSE saying basically yesterday the Scottish government approved the grid.
Upgrade and that was nothing at all to do with the press inquiry or the film. Post hoc ergo Proctor hot after this, therefore, because I'm sure that just fell out just naturally in the process.
Yes, I'm sure there's nothing to do with it at all. All it seems to have, you know, gathered dust and stalls for quite a long time. Still, it's worth. We'll put the link up. It's worth people, particularly on that other route, having a look at quite where where the grid upgrade there will go.
They're. They're undergrounding it for 15km past the Cullens and 9km approaching Fort Augustus. So a lot of decisions have been taken by the Scottish government because there was quite a lot of contestation along the route.
So.
So it's good for people everywhere else to have a look at it and I would humbly suggest it would be very good for the people of Applecross to keep the foot on the throttle, have show the film which they are intending to do in this month and invite SSE to come up and explain when that new grid will come so that, you know, there's the possibility of, for example, the Applecross brewery, which is currently not situated on Apple Cross because there's no three phase energy businesses could actually think about sighting there.
So for example, there's no public charging point for electric vehicles. That's a livener when you've come over the Bialoch. That is not a future proofed community because, you know all the, the targets are there for conversion to electric cars. They can't do it. As things stand, all these things, this, the film translates again, it's a bit like independence, just translates this abstraction into, here's how people's lives are being impacted on all this.
So come on, Applecross, just get the guys up there and put them through their paces and everybody else have a look at the film.
Well, we'll make sure that link is in the show notes, but it's on Leslie's YouTube page, which you can find very easily. A quick search. And from electricity to sparks flying, the dawn and Elon have had a big falling out, which has been more spectacular than anybody could have imagined.
I think we were all waiting for it and hoping for it. Elon maybe needs to lay off the old Special K and the magic mushrooms. He's been doing some angry tweets and Donald's not been happy.
Yeah, it's hard to know, actually. I must say. I must have taken my eye off this somewhat. I think this all began to start happening when I was in Orkney and having a happy week off. But I mean, it's culminated in Musk obviously leaving the government and suggesting that he wants to start his own party, the America Party, because he put a tweet out on his own network and 80% of people thought it was a blooming good idea.
That seems to be not likely to happen. You've got. Because we've done this twice.
I know you've got such interesting.
About SpaceX.
Well, SpaceX is, is huge. I mean, the. Donald obviously was not very happy about being called a pedophile or being dobbed in for being on the Epstein flight logs. Musk donated something like $290 million
to the, the Trump
campaign. That's about million pounds. And Donald was then saying, oh, well, maybe the, the best way for the US government to save money would be to Cancel Some of SpaceX's contracts. Since 2008, they reckon the US government contracts have been worth something in the region of $20.9 billion
to SpaceX.
£16.3
That's about billion, but it's almost kind of too big to fail. The big changer, the game changer that SpaceX have, of course, is that they've got this booster rocket stage that they can catch. You probably have seen the videos of it, where it kind of slowly, it comes back down to land and then gets grabbed by the arm of the sort of tower, and that means that they can refurbish and reuse that booster section and bring their cost of launch down so it's really improved the efficiency and reduced the costs and also means that they can launch much more frequently, which is hugely attractive to the U.S.
government and the, the Pentagon and NASA. SpaceX across the whole of the world did something like 83% of all spacecraft launch, which about 134 launches in comparison to the EU's Ariane group where they had only three. So you know, it's a big, big player and it's the cheapest. So it's a problem.
You've got the old taco Trump. Trump always backs down or caves in. He seems to have quietened down on the canceling of the contract. And I think you were saying some of the more dodgier tweets have also been wheeled off Twitter.
Yeah, the one about the connections with Epstein apparently was deleted and there was another one later where he'd backed somebody who was calling for Trump to resign. But I see now looking at it, that it's the one big beautiful Bill Act and God almighty that this sort of sprawling Bill that Trump has backed that was described by Musk as a disgusting abomination.
This is still potentially on the go as a kind of live issue because it got it narrowly passed the House of Representatives, but apparently it still needs to go through the Senate and if they make any changes it has to go back to the House again. And Musk is continuing to really push against it.
And here's another one. I mean, I don't know if he was on the mushrooms at this point, but he apparently wrote on Twitter, I'm sorry, I'm just not calling it X anymore. Trump has 3.5 years left as president. I will be around for 40 years.
So you know, I mean, I'm sure people will think these guys fall out with each other and then regroup. And, and they certainly do seem to be able to, you know, Trump particularly seems to be able to suggest that Putin, whoever it is, is either his closest friend and then a bit of a weird guy.
You know, they, they, he shifts across the spectrum at a rate of knots. But it looks like there's still, you know, there's going to be a battle yet over that Bill which Musk will think of various tactics to try and influence.
Definitely. And you know, you've got all sorts of trips in California. You've gone from having the, the National Guard to actually calling up the Marines to deal with these protest against the really heavy handed immigration enforcement that's going on there, which the governor of California doesn't want, nobody else seems to want.
The National Guard there, never mind actual proper, full time serving troops. I mean, it's a very dangerous situation. You get a whole bundle of very twitchy guys with guns. Something is going to go wrong eventually. There's an Australian TV presenter shot with a plastic bullet the other day. There was a coverage of, and I think a British cameraman who ended up having to go to hospital to have part of a plastic bullet removed from his leg.
It's a really serious situation.
Who actually was watching? Watching that. Who said that? He predicts that basically there will be live round shot soon.
Unquestionably. I mean you just, you can't have that amount of firepower in such a small amount of space without something going wrong at some point. And sadly as we've seen, you know, once these guys start shooting it's impossible to, to rein it in without doing huge amounts of damage.
Well, just while we're on that, I'm just noticing 40 minutes ago the UK has decided to sanction Israeli ministers over their comments on Gaza.
Well that's quite a size up from.
Ben to do stuff and Bezalel Smotrich both face a travel ban entering the UK and will have UK assets frozen as part of measures announced by David Lammy. I mean this. Okay, that's, that's something I have to say that at the same time the News is reporting 300 Foreign Office staff who raised concerns about UK complicity in Israel's disregard for international law.
And we're now watching just, you know, it's all bets are off firing at ref. At at people desperately trying to get food supplies, then lying about what happened. It's just, and actually there was a piece on Channel 4 suggesting that the Palestinians who have been deployed by the Israelis in their so called humanitarian effort were actually agreed to be the people who had been looting aid.
So they are basically bams who are being used by the Israelis to distribute aid now the guys who'd actually got the biggest reputation for stealing it anyway, 300 foreigner of a staff raised concerns about UK complicity of all this and, and they are apparently outraged after the, the civil service told them your ultimate recourse is to resign from the civil service.
So that's where things are at the moment with this and you know, until this going to presumably once again and I'm thinking on my feet here because we've just literally seen this, but this, you know, the easiest thing to do rather than to take any stance on Gaza is to sanction two people that are, you know, that are kind of.
You know, it's a coalition. They were the kind of worst of the worst. Yes, that's the kind of pick you off. We'll still send a trade ambassador and we'll still send you all the stuff you need and we'll still provide you with spy planes out of, you know, our military bases and we're not going to kick up too much for fuss that a UK registered vessel was part of the freedom flotation.
You know, the, the coalitionberg was huckled off of. We're not going to, you know, get into that. But here's a wee bit of red meat for the gallery. I mean it still feels really just performative. It's the kind of front of house stuff as opposed to what's really happening in the.
The back rooms.
Yeah. And it's not, it's not going to, you know, even the Israelis trying to portray Gratitunberg and all the people on as a selfie yacht, you know, the one that, that was essentially, you know, they kid. The Israelis essentially kidnapped the people that were on board it because it's international waters, but it was a Ukraine registered yacht as far as I understand.
And again, all sorts of calls for intervention by, by the UK government. Absolutely nada. So this is just another kind of, you know, little attempt to deflect. But this issue is just not going to go away. Yeah.
And okay, you know, I don't accept the selfie yacht thing. They were there as part of a campaign. They didn't genuinely think they were going to get any of their aid across but they were there to highlight it in the most visible and internationally resonant way they could because it.
Things that are happening there are just appalling.
Aye. Ah, yes. So what are we left with now to discuss?
Well, I mean there's been. So we're just coming up to the. The one hour mark. We've got some good news and that the Isle of Bute boat company of Ard malicious managed to successfully launch a ferry for. For calmac. And Ruth McGuire has announced that she's cancer free and that she's going to be able to return to Hollywood after.
The summer recess, which is indeed good news. She'll be able to come back to what we were also going to discuss, which was how to respond to Keir Starmer saying there will never ever, ever, ever, ever be an independence referendum on his watch.
Yes. Talk to the hand. I mean again, very flat response to that from the, the SNP or from the government at a national level. You know, you were involved in creating that activist letter but you know, there's not much smedom or outrage and there's. There's very little detailed work going on.
Yeah. And I mean I'm sure a lot of people when Keir Starmer came up with that, I mean, kind of obvious it was going to be asked question on Good Morning Scotland about a second indie ref and that kind of out of hand rejection was just utterly instinctive on his part.
It's just a noise. It doesn't matter if it's not consistent. His explanation was that Labour last year got such a majority that they had a mandate essentially to do whatever they wanted. And then, of course, the point is, well, you know, if there's an independence majority at the next Scottish elections, does that not create a mandate to do that?
I mean, it's a bit like, to paraphrase James Robertson, the mandate where you are, you know, I mean, like, if it's a big proper one where we are, then that lets us do, you know, have carte blanche. If it's only where you are, it's nothing. And I'm sure people go, yeah, well, okay, we sort of know that.
But I really think we've got to just Act like we have our own expectations of democracy. We may be weary, but you can't let it all slip and not even bother to respond because, I mean, people notice the absence of a reaction. It's a bit like, I always think, it's like, you know, when you go to the doctors and they have that wee hammer thing and they hit you beneath the knee and would say it's astonishing your knee just swings up without you doing anything about it.
That's a proper reaction. Well, you know, this has got to have a proper reaction. And other yesers, the Scottish public, they notice when nobody bothered bothers their collective arse on this stuff. And actually, people south of the border just think they've all gone home and we haven't all gone home.
So, I mean, it's worth challenging all the thinking in this stuff, because I know might is right and, you know, Starmer will obviously not waver on a lot of his thinking, but, you know, the ideas that he's putting forward have got to be. Have got to be challenged. Because he.
He said. The other thing he said was that nobody says independence is a top priority to him. Now, Paul Kavanagh wrote a very good article. Observing that security around Starmer means no normal person probably gets to raise anything with him.
So, of all the Scottish punchers I've chatted to in the last 12 months, nobody's ever brought that up. Well, there's a surprise.
Yeah, he's been here kind of twice and he had minders every time. So, you know, whatever. But still, that's like the abstract point scoring. That does not work. You know, it's. It might work. We've got to get down to what that's actually about. Because some people might nod and say, actually, I'm sure that polling finds that independence isn't the top issue either, but I'll tell you what is it is probably sky high energy prices controlled by Westminster.
Fuel poverty is determined by Westminster benefits and most of the welfare state. Westminster. Grangemouth abandoned by Westminster and not nationalized. Trident renewed by Westminster. Privatised public services as a template for the whole UK that we didn't vote for, imposed by Westminster. The grid connections we've just discussed there. Sse courtesy of Westminster.
And actually there was a very interesting survey done that day which discovers that Britain is the OECD's most regionally unbalanced advanced economy. Courtesy of Westminster. So, like, that's the argument and that's the stuff that we need to keep emphasizing here.
Unquestionably. And it needs a proper thoroughgoing activity, not just little tweaks up here and there to sort of keep the gallery happy. We need to see long term sustained action on these matters and some real chutzpah. I mean, you've got Plaid Cymru in Wales polling ahead of the other parties.
I'm not saying they're necessarily going to end up forming the government and they had a real problem when they went into coalition with Labour the last time. But plider at 30%, labour at 18, reform 25. You could envisage a situation where Plaid Cymru had a salmon style minority government in Wales doing sort of big, sexy nationalist things and the SNP are looking even more stale and boring by comparison.
And actually this was something that Gordon McTurk talked about at a recent Saltire lunch. You could add on to that that Sinn Fein could be doing big sexy stuff in Northern Ireland. So you've actually got nationalist governments in all three Celtic countries. That would put the heat a little bit more on, you know, on Labour in Westminster for sure.
But the comparison would certainly be unfortunate. If we don't see something friskier happening in Scotland.
More friskiness definitely required.
Yes. So have we. Have we managed to get.
Yes, got through everything. We managed to sidestep poor Douglas getting thrown out of the debating chamber at Holyrood and getting right and anticipated. But I think nobody cares about that mid year.
No, they don't. Correctly divined. Well, thank you very much for, you know, being up all night, you know, worrying about how this would all get recorded, doing it twice, finding a, a kind of microphone that worked and then if anyone is listening to this at all, editing and uploading it, you know, so.
So, Pat, I hope you're feeling better in anybody's versions of Wheel or Nay Weel and we'll have you back next week. You know, batting away. But in the meantime, thank you very much, Fraser, for stepping in. It's been excellent. And leave it to you to say.
See you next time, folks.
Sam.