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RAG

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Everything posted by RAG

  1. Interesting. Thanks for the info! The Green Killie Shorts Mystery is probably of more value than the £11 - at least to me!! I’d assume it’s a manufacturing thing for the Killie badge. Is May 2016 and a pallet of Nike Killie shorts is turning up at the badge stitching factory tomorrow, run this green pair through the machine to test badge positioning, sizing or whatever. Turns up on eBay some years later - like a classic Billy Connelly movie!
  2. She also invented soft scoop ice cream, so understood physical alchemy, then applied that skill to politics. A much smarter human than you or I - not that that’s any great virtue!!
  3. Picked these up recently on ebay for a bargain £11 + postage. Anyone else got a pair? No QTS logo on the back. Are these goalie-shorts, or some strange justsport test press? I have a vague memory of McDonald in green, so suspect is the former. Pretty sure are authentic, the badge’s stitching looks identical to my red away shorts of the Nike period. Wasn’t in the market for a pair of green Killie shorts, but today is a good day to be the owner of weird green Killie shorts!
  4. Labour are sitting on a projected 13 seats in Scotland, SNP 40. The current polling on independence is 53% Yes - 47% No, so when exactly was this succession of ‘blows’ to the cause of independence?! I’ll give you a hint - it didn’t happen in reality - it’s a made up media narrative - a fib. 👇🏻 https://news.stv.tv/scotland/ipsos-poll-snp-lead-shrinks-as-labour-narrows-gap
  5. Not sure by-elections are indicative of GE’s. All the political nutters are out for a by-election, less so for normal people! Although if you look at 1970s, when people start to feel the penny pinch, you get frequent changes of government. Is even more true in US election where the incumbent loses when people feel they have less. We’ll be in years of unstable government like Italy.. 5 years from now, we won’t be better off as a nation. Labour may be putting off their core traditional support, but when were Labour at their best polls wise in last 40 years? New Labour and now. They are more popular when they adopt the neoliberal mantra. Perhaps not to you or I, but to the population at large and more importantly, the businesses that actually fund Labour now they’re not operating under a subscription based organisational model. I only fairly recently realised what he was actually like - you (and others) were well ahead of me on that one! I agree with you - except for one or two things.. Starmer does have beliefs, strong beliefs. Might not be wise for him to telegraph them to too many folks just now, but like with Blair, I’m sure we’ll see the mask slip, and the character magnified in political power. Starmer is worse than dangerous, he uses his intelligence and intellect to gaslight people into believing his words on face value, whilst perpetually talking over their heads in a coded neocon lingo. All while spouting more stupid tabloid friendly catchword slogans to take attention away from the tangible red tory content of what he (or the even worse Rachel Reeves) actually said. To me that’s evil rather than dangerous. But no worse than Blair, who was in turn a war criminal like the OG shock therapist Pinochet!
  6. As opposed to Ken Loach who calls him “treacherous & dishonest”!! Ken Loach absolutely DESTROYS Keir Starmer 👇🏻
  7. But Starmer is going out his way to pitch Labour as Red Tories! If you look at what he said when praising Thatcher in the Telegraph.. “The course of shock therapy we gave our party had one purpose: to ensure that we were once again rooted in the priorities, the concerns and the dreams of ordinary British people. To put country before party,” Highlighted phrase may seem fairly innocuous, but it’s a key plank of neoliberalism/chicago school/ Friedman economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics) I was lucky enough to attend an online course on democracy at the University of Edinburgh last year, which explained how politicians telegraph their various philosophies, or indeed what their philosophies are all about. Highly recommended if you’ve a spare evening a week & think KS is a bastard.
  8. They got hit with another $100m in interest on top of the original $350m!! BBC are reporting it as $463.9m or £368 million!
  9. Was also a shedload of North Sea Oil funding Thatcher, all pumped ASAP rather than sipping over 200 years as Norway does. Not as well reported in Scotland, but her WM peers all say oil, not privatisation, was key in funding her utilitarian policies. Leaving grannies in 1 bed flats paying the same poll tax (council tax) as millionaires in mansions. Then the riots. It’s never ‘the left’ that end neoliberals like Thatcher - which goes some way to explaining the current Brexit obsession. Thatcher had 11 years to reshape the country in her mold (or perhaps mould). A vision which was probably all right if you are an aspiring Oxbridge graduate married to a millionaire. Boris or RS are nothing like that quality of operator. We have a leader of the Labour Party who has ‘admiration’ for someone who constantly uttered sh!t¢ like this? (Which we could describe in 2024 as elitist, unbelievably misogynistic and sexist, all or nothing thinking, bad for the environment, social cohesion, the list goes on & on..) I’d stick that Thatcher quote and KS’ admiration on every bus and train in Scotland if I were the SNP in the run up to the GE. Starmer is a total charlatan, apart from when he says Labour have changed since the last election - on that point, he’s totally correct.
  10. Brexit party / Reform / UKIP is the UK equivalent of the NRA or Tea Party in the USA. In practice, 13% under FPTP will do about as much damage at a GE as the Lib Dems on a very good day. Once you leave Europe and PR systems, FPTP sucks the oxygen out of smaller political parties. Are much more effective as an NRA or Tea Party type organisation than a political party under FPTP at WM. JRM was fairly comfy with the Labour vote, as they hadn’t beaten the combined score of Tory & Reform. Farage was spotted at Truss’ PoopCon event, so make of that what you will!! Thatcher had the lowest opinion poll scores in history for a sitting PM just before the Falklands war, so there is a way the Tories could still win it.
  11. The last Scottish GE poll showed the SNP on 39%, Labour 32%, and Tories 13%. In many respects it’s fairly amusing you’d think the SNP were in meltdown whilst 7% ahead of Labour in the polls..
  12. They’d be no realistic prospect of Reform or a Brexit party actively functioning in government, they’re a disruptor not administrator. The Brexit party got what they wanted at the last GE by standing aside for the Tories. All they wanted was free markets (freed from the restrictions of EU legislation on financial regulations) which meant a Brexit outside the customs union. Tories happily gave them that, and as a right wing pressure group / single(-ish) issue lobby, they made their mark on the Tory party post Brexit. If business knows for sure we’re gonna leave the customs union, one can short the pound and make a few quid guaranteed without any money directly changing hands. A second round of this clearly happened during the Truss government. Is the difference between politics and democracy. Too many people in Scotland take WM at face value and expect WM politics to be about democratic will - it isn’t - it never was. WM is overseen by the House of Lords and that’s all about politics not democracy. The will of the 1% over that of 50%+1.
  13. Challenge for Labour in government will be papering over the cracks between the divergence in Scottish opinion over these big issues like Brexit and that of wider UK. That clearly exists, cos people are still split evenly on independence in Scotland, and that’s because of WM’s poor performance, not the outstanding SG! As Labour lurch to right to combat a more right wing Tory party and Reform, whilst having strict budget constraints in office, no doubt spending 5 years dismissing opinion of 1/2 of Scottish electorate on indy, they could be left behind like in 2015, should more people decide Scottish and UK politics simply diverged around the 2014/2016 period. Is a ‘new thing’ this potential of a Labour government at both Hollyrood and WM, yet there remains evenly split support for Scottish independence. Isn’t quite the gushy Labour renaissance some of the BBC documentaries I’ve heard and watched on the matter recently have characterised it as! There’s an interesting Radio 4 one where Kezia Dugdale admits even she voted SNP over Brexit. Fine if only divergence in opinion was Brexit, but as you saw with Sarwar over Gaza and Starmer - is a perpetual problem and divide to paper over for unionism in Scotland. Splits exist in SNP, but is nothing like that over the end goal. Selling the sort of UK the Tories and Labour want post Brexit to the Scottish electorate will be a ‘good laugh’.
  14. Aberdeen concede 3 at home? Perfect for the cup match. Aberdeen were ”all over the place” according to Willie Miller..
  15. But you need to think of reform / Brexit party as a kinda right wing lure of the 1% to get the 99% to follow, in itself the whole point of politics. We spend too much time thinking about democracy - 50%+1 - most of UK politics ain’t like that. The game changed over Brexit in 2016 and you’re still seeing that in successive GE’s. The cohort of disenfranchised ‘floating voters’ the parties are after is significantly more right wing than previous generations of Brits, significantly better financially insulated against Tory austerity, and are less educated than the population at large - hence the use of vacuous silly slogans over policy from both Labour and Tories. The purchase of Sky and Sky News by Comcast along with Brexit has hastened this lurch to the right and American republicanism. But much like Tories and Reform, GB News get all the right wing headlines. It’s a totally different playing field to Scottish politics.
  16. Last poll I saw broken down by age showed 1 in 8 under 40s backing Tories and only in over 70s did the Tories have a majority. Is sizeable support for Reform in the older age brackets in England, which wasn't there at last GE with Brexit party standing aside, so KS moving to the right might well be a sensible move to get elected, as endears him to the only demographic group Torires have a majority in.
  17. Starmer has an unassailable lead politically, he could be replaced with a Jack Russell and still get a commanding majority at the GE. Which makes his purging of the left and 'admiration' for Thatcher in interviews even more telling. He's a complete charlatan, who could easily lead the Tory party without anyone batting an eyelid. He only gets away with it, cos the rest of the Labour Party are so incredibly desperate for power.
  18. RAG

    Israel

    You could apply that difference in UK foreign policy / Scottish opinion to Brexit, financial crash, war in Iraq, going back a couple of decades. Even if you go back to 2014 and the referendum, the catchy "Bairns not Bombs" stickers are equally as applicable to UK / Scottish gov. positions on Gaza in 2024.
  19. Would be cool to see the original 1990s illustrations! Is a community pitch, presumably for kids mostly to come to Rugby Park, live the dream, get hooked and return as paying spectators. Which would be something lost when we return to grass. Is probably useful to the 1st team to have some sort of 4G training / warm up area at the ground, even once we have a training ground.
  20. RAG

    Israel

    They're not sitting on their hands. They've been involved in widening the conflict beyond Gaza, whilst simultaneously refusing to acknowledge the clearly stated public position of both the Houthi & Israelis on Palestine. As we know from American and UK political funding, some serious money has changed hands. Seems bizarre they are utterly paranoid about any covert Russian involvement in UK governance, yet overt funding by other morally dubious foreign countries, that clearly impacts on our own foreign policy, is completely ignored.
  21. £2.2bn wouldn't buy you 5 miles of a trainline between 2 cities in England in 2024, let alone make a difference to energy infrastructure! Consumers in this country are shafted by domestic gas being sold to them at international rates. Consumers of wind power are shafted by its price being artificially high to subsidise gas based electric generation, predominately around large English population centres. High national grid access charges for Scottish projects where the renewables actually are, and they've not even stared developing hydro, which accounts for 93% of Norways electricity. All of that stuff is part of the Tory energy market which Labour have done nothing to reform, apart from the mere window dressing you mention. The entire mechanism of the Tory energy market remains, complete with a Labour guarantee not to increase their corporation tax.
  22. RAG

    MUP up 30%

    Yeah but.. "The UK is the biggest medical cannabis distributor in the world. Teresa May’s husband’s company, Capital Group, which owns a significant share in GW Pharmaceuticals and is one of the biggest cultivators of cannabis in the world, made $7.2 billion last year."
  23. RAG

    MUP up 30%

    Restrict alcohol sales to off licenses rather than supermarkets, decriminalise other less dangerous recreational drugs and sell them over the counter instead of booze if the consumer wants that. Using price fixing whilst supermarkets have literally aisles full of booze seems even more silly. Is true MUP reduced alcohol consumption, but that also coincides with an increase in illicit drug deaths in Scotland. More information is required on that.. As alcohol is an 'exceptional circumstance' with a monopoly on drug consumption, seems totally logical they'd be issue with alcohol consumption in society.
  24. I think they'd like us to focus on a small scandal, what other countries do, and not on stuff like the Green 'pledge'. You are aware China put in as much solar power as the rest of the world combined in 2023? We're being left behind technologically in favour of 'market forces' in the energy market. Although imo a lot of the magical thinking surrounding Green Energy isa actually abut storage - clean cheap mass produced battery technology that simply does not currently exist. Any time a lawyer 'pledges' something, you know it's BS from the outset. they now how to use language. My problem is Labour abandoning the Green Pledge prevents people exiting the Tory energy market. Labour need to keep big business onside, so they're not gonna provide people with the finance for infrastructure to micro generate their own power, when they could instead be consumers and subservient to utility companies. Labour could use the £28bn infrastructure investment as a social leveller against 30 years of privatised utilities, but they're not a socialist or even social democratic party in 2024. In times where the public purse is historically skint, cost of living etc , they've already said they won't increase corporation tax in next parliament, with no similar pledge on individuals!
  25. Even if there was, we could have another 2.54 million SNP iPad scandals for the cost of Labours £28bn Green Pledge.
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