Mailwatch(ed) Forum

That pie chart. Oh God.

About that council tax freeze then. Labour have got off very lightly with Humza. Say what you like about Kate Forbes, she'd have done some sums before she pulled an expensive policy out of her arse for the conference.

Pick one!

1) Vote for us if you want to keep the Tories out.

2) A vote for us is a vote for independence.

Keeping my one-man effort on this thread going, this result is a nominal gain only (2nd seat in a two member constituency), but impressive nonetheless and consistent with other by-elections. The Tories could hold most of their Westminster seats at this rate.

I can see why the SNP are stressing anti-Tory votes- Labour voters in Scotland favour the SNP as second choice. But going to be hard to claim an independence mandate from that. Yousaf would be well advised to let that talk drop I think. I said before that perhaps he'd seen polling on Alba being a bigger threat than they looked from the outside, but given that Alba didn't even bother in this by-election, I doubt that's true.

As I say, he's not very good. He ought to delete this.

The argument here is shit too. A rightwing English Tory might equally say "English energy customers paying for wind turbines in Scotland".

There was a bit of drama last week when Prof Mark Blyth was featured at an online conference on "Scotonomics", and spoke what you might call "hard truths". Luckily Mr Truth To Power is along to put the boot into Mark Blyth.

I don't think many experts say Scotland would be a "failed state", just that it wouldn't for a long time be able to fund the spending it has at the moment without a lot of fiscal pain that the SNP aren't exactly being honest about. But yeah, MMT (without a central bank at the start) will fix it.

I see how that could happen if a Scottish Pound was pegged to the Euro underpinned by the ECB. I clearly have got no understanding of MMT either but would feel safer with Frankfurt protecting my savings than Richard Murphy’s blogs.

There is in fact every reason to think that the Scottish pound will trade at a higher value than the English pound after Independence, for the reasons I note.

So let's leave MMT aside for a moment, because Mark has clearly got no understanding of it.

If the Scottish Pound is definitely going to appreciate, the SNP are keeping very quiet about it.

The comments are a predictable shitshow of people calling others "neoliberal". The SNP know Murphy is a massive liability and keep him at arm's length. Murphy says he's "not neoliberal enough for them".

And a nice sighting of the well-known irregular verb

Mark Blyth "rants"
I/we (presumably) "make clever points in straightforward language".

Murphy judges most people who pull him up as fools who know nothing.

He's a Chartered Accountant, not even an economist. He's equivalent of someone like Rupert Lowe saying they don't need to know about trade economics because they're a businessman. Not sure he's even got a tax qualification (lots of people work in tax without the additional tax qualification, but I'd be interested to know if he has).

On MMT, good discussion here between Prof Jo Mitchell and Tim Rideout that's worth following through.

In a nutshell, MMT is a way of seeing the economy. Whether you think it's useful or not, it is up to you, but you can reach every desirable policy choice via more conventional economic models. Except those are a bit more up front about the trade offs. MMT tends to get corrupted into "government can just create money and do all this stuff now", with the "well, yeah, taxes would have to rise in time" being added only when pressed. At which point you'll probably be wondering what the point of MMT is.

Last time I looked into MMT it sounded like round the houses deficit spending or QE. Liz Truss probably believes in it to abolish all taxes. It’s not as if central banks don’t already indulge in this kind of financial jiggery pokery.

Yeah, they certainly do already when there's low demand (Covid, post financial crash). What Twitter MMT does is imply all the time that there's easy free money out there, even recently when inflation was very high. And anyone who says different is a neoliberal. Even people who support Keynsian deficit spending.

I still think the SNP will come first in Scotland because independence is still popular, but they're far from the well-oiled machine they were. Who's running the comms? This is Susan Hall standard bollocks,

1) Canary Wharf isn't primarily a residential area. It's a nonsense to describe investment in the area in terms of residents, You might as well take the amount spent on building a new school, then dividing it by the number of people in the caretaker's family,

2) It's a loan.

Actually maybe the SNP are in big trouble. There's an independent here which complicates the picture in this seat, but look at that swing to the Lib Dems. They're losing ground to rivals everywhere. Whatever else they are, the SNP have lots of activists and it shouldn't be hard to get votes out in council by-elections.

Heck.

Breaking News : Murrell is apparently being charged in connection with embezzlement of SNP funds.

I knew that campervan was a bad idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/20 ... a-sturgeon

Good Lord.

Abernathy wrote: ↑Thu Apr 18, 2024 8:02 pm Breaking News : Murrell is apparently being charged in connection with embezzlement of SNP funds.

I knew that campervan was a bad idea.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/20 ... a-sturgeon

While this is obviously awful for the SNP, it’s bad for the Tories too. They’re unlikely to pick up seats lost because of this, so it’s all just adding to the now all but inevitable Labour landslide.

From this week's Eye :

From the latest Private Eye:
Lines written on the recent developments in Police Scotland’s Operation Branchform
‘Twas in the year twenty-twenty-four
That Peter Murrell was arrested once more.
Last week he was charged, for offenses quite serious
Concerning financial affairs that are extremely mysterious.
This time in Peter’s garden there was no police tent,
And the charge was simply embezzlement.
It concerns money misappropriated from the SNP,
Tho’ details are obviously sub-judice.
Six hundred thousand poonds have gone astray,
But who is responsible I cannae say.
Nor can I mention the luxury campervan so swanky
Owned(?) by Murrell and his wife, the wee lookalike Kranky.
(I do hope that this traditional and innocent rhyme
Doesn’t qualify now as a Scottish hate crime!
Or I’ll be there in a cell, all dark and danky,
With the husband of the former First Minister of Scotland).
**
© William McGonagall, Winner of Worst Topical Poet of the Year, UK Press Awards 1867

There are many things I wonder about.

Selecting Burns over McGonagall as national poet isn't one of them.