FREEDOM!!!! [4]

Today Scottish Labour at their Conference voted overwhelmingly to oppose Trident renewal.
Scottish Labouir and Westminster Labour now have two different policies.

Whats wonderfully absurd about this is that Scottish Labours leader Dugdale is for Trident renewal but her party is against it. And Westminster Labour has Corbyn as leader who is in favour of getting rid of Trident, but his party is for it.

You couldn't make this up.

Not that it matters anyway- defence is reserved to Westminster, all they can do is instruct their 1 MP to vote with the SNP at the debate- and the Tory majority with Labour votes plus the NI parties will win it easily anyway.

Maybe this could all be solved by Corbyn becoming Scottish Labour leader.

they need to get their act together.

Not likely Figg- they are total car crash this Trident thing gets worse and worse.

Today Corbyn and his allies say the Scottish party backing no renewal of Trident is 'significant' and will feed into the wider policy review on Trident that they are conducting.
However the rest of his shadow cabinet are letting it be known that it doesn't matter what the Scottish Labour party vote as its not a devolved issue and its only the Westminster position that counts- thus utterly undermining Scottish Labour- who have been trying to do all they can to undo some of the damage left by a previous Scottish Leader who said Westminster treated the Scottish party like a branch office.

But if all this infighting wasn't bad enough it turns out the Policy Review on Trident will take 2 years. Yes two fucking years.
Which means IF Corbyn is still leader in 2 years and he wins his case- it wont matter- the vote is coming up next year.
Labour are going to be in the ridiculous position of going into the vote to vote for renewal whilst not having an official policy on it because its under review and a party leader who is against, and a Scottish party who are against.
And by the time they decide what their policy is the Commons will have long since voted for renewal and spent the money.

The SNP are going to have a field day with this!

update- the labour spokesperson on todays Daily Politics said that there had to be 'one unified position' with regards the Scottish vote- when pressed if this meant if Westminster Labour voted for renewal would the Scottish party have to accept that as the position he said- "Yes. The party has to have one unified position."
Thus seemingly destroying Scottish Labour leader Dugdsales entire pitch that she has made Scottish Labour autonomous from Westminster.
If the Westminster actually do that- and order the Scottish party to adopt a policy their conference and members oppose- its the final nail in Scottish labours coffin I reckon. At the very least its the end of a UK Labour party and the beginning of an entirely separate Scottish Labour.

Good news for women in Scotland- 'Scotland has the second highest female employment rate in the European Union, according to official figures. The latest figures, from April to June 2015, reveal the female employment rate was second only to Sweden.
Scotland also recorded the second lowest female unemployment rate - after Germany.'- BBC

Sadly not so good for the rest of the UK which ranks 8th for female employment.

Its a pity the women are all employed as Haggis stuffers.

Yeah but the haggis are happy

Depends which end you start with ?

Hard to tell with a haggis. Both ends make noises (especially when they are startled)

First Syrian refugees arrived in Scotland today.
We got 20 arriving in my bit. Best of luck to them in their new home

I am sure they will have lots of fun debating which would kill them quicker, guns and bombs or Scottish cuisine.

My money is on the fried Marsbars.

They arrived the same day Barnaby or some blood stupid named storm did. So there first night in Scotland was on an island (they were settled on Bute just off the coast here- Ive posted pictures before of my trips there) in 80mph winds and torrential rain. Must have been a bit of a culture shock.

definitely

Damn right!

Knew it wouldn't take long before the SNP showed their true colours. now every kid is going to be ID'd and spied on. is this what they mean?





http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11221902/Legal-fight-starts-over-SNP-state-guardian-for-every-child.html

http://www.google.it/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0ahUKEwjdkOqAhYLKAhWLWBoKHeUUAT0QFggqMAI&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fuknews%2Fscotland%2F11778974%2FOfficials-cast-more-doubt-on-SNP-state-guardian-scheme.html&usg=AFQjCNHHfgVSu-vBT2fP4r6dBJrWr2HNHg&sig2=nb7fcuqgSxVY9geTvnqK3g

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/15/nicola-sturgeon-big-sister-criticism-named-person-scheme

Usual rigth wing hysterics. The policy was created in response to tragedies like Baby P- where the death was entirely preventable and foreseeable were not for the lack of proper joined up communication between all the various government agencies the baby and family dealt with- social work, police, dhss, nhs, schools ect.
The idea of the named person scheme is that there is a named professional person responsible for every new child. Whose job is it is to see that such lack of joined up communication cant happen, and that signs of abuse can therefore be spotted early.

I am not in favour of everything about it, but I do think its worth a trial run to find out.

Note also the survey the press are using to beat the SNP over the head with here is one commissioned by the SNP? Why? So they can see any problems ahead of time as envisioned by the professionals and try to improve those areas before it becomes enacted.

I will wait to see the finished legislation myself, not judge it when its still in the being shaped phase.

they will start tagging next.

last time I looked The guardian wasn't party to 'right wing hysterics'

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/scottish-children-government-appointed-guardians
The SNP's disturbing, seven-year obsession with looking through the nation's keyholes to ensure we are all behaving, sitting straight, eating properly and getting to bed early continues. It is surely only a matter of time before the Scottish government's children's minister, Aileen Campbell, is invited to North Korea to make a presentation on how her party has managed to secure such coast-to-coast state surveillance of families without any bad publicity.

Last Wednesday night, the government effectively paved the way for official surveillance of family life by allowing for state guardians to be appointed for every child in Scotland. The move is part of the SNP's otherwise sound and thoughtful children and young people bill, which also guarantees free school meals for children in primary year one to three and a significant increase in nursery provision. This interventionist, hand-wringing party of state busybodies simply cannot help itself, though, and they ruined the tenor of the legislation with their state guardians.

According to them, this is a benign move that will assign a named person to every child from birth until the age of 18. If said named person has any concerns about a child's welfare, they may be able to refer the case to social workers. Before that, though, the named person will be able to access information about a child and his family from the police and health authorities. The government says that families are not required to accept advice or offers of help from the named person. "Any actions or advice from the named person must be fair, proportionate and respect rights with the aim of safeguarding the wellbeing of the child," the government says.

So why does the Scottish government seek to impose another layer of watchmen upon the nation's families? The first reason is because it seems programmed to seek control of every aspect of the lives of its citizens. Aided and abetted by an increasingly out-of-control police force it has already sought to criminalise young people from poor neighbourhoods for singing political songs that the Scottish state deems unacceptable. It has tried to ban Buckfast; prevent the use of glasses in pubs and banish happy hours. It wants to examine our fridges and ban smoking in cars. The Scottish government, aided and abetted by a nonexistent opposition, will not stop until surveillance cameras are installed in every home.
What these people do not need is another well-meaning, middle-class, professional nanny peering into their lives. I'll be surprised if this piece of legislative suburban junk isn't deemed contrary to article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

If it is somehow allowed to become law, then we all know what the consequences will be: many more working-class people will be held to be guilty of something unstated and inferred. In several cases, innocent families will be pulled apart simply on the whim of a government that doesn't know when to stop and that wants us to sign up to its "one-size-fits-all" model of family life. Soon, they will be designing the family and telling us how big it ought to be (according to postcode, of course).

Yeah because none of the language used in that implies a bias or anything!

Nor can I trust a piece which attributes something like banning buckfast to the SNP when in fact it was a Lab/lib drive.
Or someone who sites banning glasses in pubs- the bulk of causality at a weekend is stitching up faces that have had a pint glass or glass bottles shoved rudely into them, scarring people or blinding them for life, the ban on  smoking in cars is when you have minors aboard as its a poorly vented closed space.
Lumping these measures in as somehow evidence of the SNP controlling everyone is a nonsense. They are measures broadly agreed with. And are from disparate pieces of legislation addressing specific problems in our society- which is what a government is elected to do.

The Named Person is more controversial, but the rest of the bill, which even the piece above admits has stuff they seem to like such as free school meals in it, is widely approved of.
And the Named Person bit is still in the consultation and proposals stage. It still has to be debated in the Parliament and the public consultations need to finish.

whats wrong with Scottish parents are they that bad you need the Stasi watching their every move. its creepy. what happens when two teenagers have kids, are there four sets of Stasi guardians watching them? its ridiculous. A lot of the Named People are probably abusers anyway.

Notingis worng with Scottish parents- Baby P happened in England- but as the SNP had a far reaching children s Bill in thepipeline they thoughtit prodent to addres the issues raised in the findngs form that tragic event into the legislation.
The sort of person who will be a nominated perosnis someone who will see a child on a regular basis- and if they start to spot signs that something seemsot be amiss they can then request further information if any is held by other government departments- such as health records- if there seems to be signs of abuse taking place the whole thing is then taken over by the usual authorities.
Those entrusted with tis position ar alreay dinpostioonsof trust and where they hjave to be screend routinely and checke dup on - even as a care woirker I have to have apovg done on me to see if I have any criminal record or other record which might make me unsuyitable to be around vulnerable elderyl people.
Its never going to be a 100% guarantee but its as good as you can get without actually monitoring people all the tim- which is what this bill avoids. Nobody is monitored at all- its just each child will have a person part of whose job it is is to look out for signs of trouble and ot have information passed to them by other departments from their existing records which might point to a problem.

And how many times when these sort of tragedies happen do here of all that went wrong, how departments didn't pas son vital information- and then at the end its no ones fault- as it was collective failure.

Well one benefit of this scheme is there is a specific named person whose job it is to make sure this doesn't happen and whose fault it will be.

As I said before I am not entirely convinced of the idea, but I see nothing sinister in its intentions at all, or so far its proposed implementation- but I will wait until I see how it changes as it goes through the Parliament and then onto its trial run before I pass judgement on its merits.

for 'not entirely convinced' read Its a f****** stupid idea.
If this new law had originated from Westminster you would no doubt have gone on about imperialist attacks on liberal freedoms. You would have said it was a Tory plot to infantilise Scottish parents. but because its the SNP this gross intrusion into family life is suddenly ok. What are social workers paid for? are they so inept they need unqualified vigilantes doing their jobs for them? The small percentage of feckless parents will have the perfect excuse to pass the buck on overworked teachers who have zero intention of listening to disgruntled teenagers stories of having their pocket money taken away for bad behaviour. what happens when parents discipline their kids for biting, stealing and kicking, with a slap on the legs, do they get put on abuser registers? how will the police cope with thousands of trivial instances from kids who want to get their parents to buy them new trainers so go to the police with lies about abuse. what about the so called named people who will take this opportunity to infiltrate vulnerable families? the list of potential cock-ups is enormous and the parent child relationship will become full of suspicion and tale telling. The Tories wouldn't have done anything so blatantly undemocratic in a million years.