Toxic Tory Policies - a case review

Precis:

The trickle down effect of  Toxic Tory Policies is effecting all levels of UK society turning decent people cynical and the already cynical into pretty venal, self interested and nasty people who do not give a shit because it is clear the UK Government does not and is only interested in generating big cash jobs for its MPs and other Oxbridge types from the correct schools and colleges.

Case Study:

In 1988, in an attempt to raise standards in UK dentistry ever higher, the UK Dental Profession agreed to the top slicing of the NHS dental budget (in effect taking a pay cut) to fund vocational training schemes for newly qualified dentists to work in a salaried position within an NHS practice so there was no need for them to churn and burn from day one to meet principals targets for monthly gross income. The original scheme was decently funded and a success, liked and appreciated by both training practices and Vocational Trainees.

Then somebody decided the scheme should no-longer be voluntary but compulsory for all newly qualified dentists while the top sliced percentage to pay for the increased provision, from the NHS dental funding, stayed the same. This was feasible because the number of dentists required in the UK NHS would be decreasing, according to a DoH survey and projection. Further, as a number of UK Dental Schools were being closed there would be fewer UK dental vocational trainees by the year 2000 so all would be well.

In 1990 a sizable number of the UK Dental profession pointed out to the then Tory Government, they were talking a load of old bollocks and their actions would destroy NHS Dentistry. The Tory Government gave them the two finger salute and told them to get their grubby noses back on the NHS dental grindstone, where they belonged, and NHS Dentists should be grateful they were even being paid for the honour of working for a Tory Government - after all where else could these UK NHS dentists go, private practice?

In July 2015 an article in a Dental Professional magazine had a headline 'NHS Vocational Trainees facing a 'Dutch Auction' for training places'. The article went on to explain the difficulty newly graduated dentists were having finding vocational training places in England as a result of the number of dentists practicing privately and no longer having an NHS contract number. The funding package for NHS dental principal's was now so bad that a few of the remaining NHS Vocational Trainers had started asking trainees how little they were willing to work for, in effect top slicing the supposed salary trainees were to receive. The article pointed out that where multiple applications for places were received these unscrupulous trainers were asking the interviewees to put their 'bids' in sealed envelopes then selected those willing to work for the lowest pay. Worse, this selection system was becoming increasingly common across NHS England. Vocational Trainees are complaining the level of supervision and support offered by Vocational Trainers is next to non existent except for a few exceptions.

Discussion:

On first glance this is just another unethical, greedy dentist tale where a system I was involved in trialing and launching in 1988, for NHS England, is being abused by unscrupulous dentists for their own ends.

This is a simplistic view and ignores the reasons why unscrupulous NHS contracted dentists have ended up as NHS Vocational Trainers, the impact this is having on retention of young UK trained dentists in the UK in general and what this means for the future of NHS dentistry across the UK - not just England where this is reported as happening.

1. As the percentage top sliced for VT training has not changed since the 1988 trial and the overall NHS England dental budget has not kept up with the true costs of delivering dentistry the VT funding package, in 2015, is now worth around 30% of the value present in 1988, in real terms. This clearly has an impact on funding available for VT training in Scotland as a 'Barnett' consequential
2. Many of the original VT trainers took the Tory Government's two fingered hint in 1990, exited NHS dentistry and, because they were amongst the most competent, had few problems converting their practices from NHS to Private contract. As a result they could no longer accept NHS VT's as they did not 'do' enough NHS work. A result of this was a sudden need to recruit extra NHS dental practices as VT trainers and a fall off in selection criteria to meet a UK Government political imperative of providing VT places for all new UK graduates
3. In 2015, even in Scotland, a lot of NHS dental provision is provided by a private company, Integrated Dental Holdings. IDH are not interested in VT's as they are not productive enough nor cost effective. The company prefers to employ young dentists from Eastern Europe who can work in the NHS without any VT training as 'assistants' on low salaries, no UK dentists would accept. This reduces the core number of available NHS practices for UK VT trainees. Without VT Training certification, UK dentists can not get a NHS contract number. This combination of walls and mirrors has increasingly seen recent UK graduates being recruited to posts in the USA, Australia, Canada and New Zealand where the standard of training UK dental students receive is highly regarded, status within the community is higher and the working conditions are far better.
4. The problem of the retirement of the 'Baby Boomers' born between 1940 and 1960 means there are big holes now appearing in overall numbers. This is being seen across the NHS in general with the number of GP practices struggling to replace retiring senior GPs and the increasing number of unfilled GP vacancies. The same is true of UK NHS dental practices. This problem dates back to the manpower review undertaken in the mid 1980's by the Tory Government which did not account for the mass retirement of so many health professionals over a ten to twenty year time span, starting in 2000, nor the increased numbers of female graduates (over 50% of UK medical and dental grads are now female) who it was likely would take a break to have children in their thirties and be more likely to return to the workplace in a job share role until their late 40's and even then they may not return to full time work.
5. It is this environment created by political interference and incompetence regarding the NHS over the last four decades where 'cost effectiveness', 'value for money', 'targeted care' and 'tightened budgets' have become the be all and end all, the modus operandii of these dental VT trainers should be viewed. They have a product 'Vocation Training Place' which are limited in number in England and chased by more people than the places are available for. This is market place NHS in the raw, a commodity trade where the seller is looking to maximise their 'investment', a good bit of Tory, get ahead on the backs of other, dogma. The NHS dentists feel they are being screwed over by the UK Government so it seems OK to screw over NHS VTs. This is simply another product of neo-liberal 'trickle down' theory.

Summary:

The venal and unethical actions of these supposed vocational mentors of young dentists are non-contestable unforgivable and unprofessional but are a direct result of the failed NHS policies of a succession of Tory and Labour Governments over the last forty years, turning working for the NHS from a vocation to just another job and the inevitable do the hours, work the minimum you can get away with, take the money, go home and shut the door attitude from the NHS workforce in general.

The real toxicity of UK Government policy on the NHS since the 1980's is this attitude is increasingly seen in the professions who are the spine of the NHS simply because they are human and there is only so far you can push any human before they simply turn on their heel and walk away. This is increasingly true of the younger members of the health care professions who have knowledge, abilities and skills others value more highly than the UK Government.

The real amazement is so many remain committed to work in a NHS system which consistently disregards them as human beings, abuses their professional commitment to the NHS on a daily basis and routinely blames them for all the NHS failings either out of ignorance (patients and families) or to protect their own scrawny political arses whether at Westminster, Holyrood, in the plethora of NHS quangos or in the NHS Towers of Mismanagement.

The question for all Scots is just how much longer can the Scottish Government cover the increasing short falls in NHS Scotland funding (as a result of 'Barnett' consequentials) from an overall Scottish Government budget which is also being cut savagely year on year. A reality which is being played up with the current Conservative and Labour Unionist Party line of 'How are the SNP going to protect Scotland from Westminster's austerity policy.'

The reality is the SNP can only rob Peter to pay Paul so far within their restricted budget. The only answer that fully deals with the contrary claims and assertions of the toxic Conservative and Labour Unionist Party is independence.

FAQ's:

The British taxpayer pays to train these people it should force them to work for the NHS, surely this is the answer?

Currently the average dental and medical student on graduating has around £40,000 of debt in student and other loans hanging around their neck which rather asks just what have the taxpayers actually paid for. The vocational training schemes were originally planned and designed to help with NHS retention by easing new graduates into the pressures of work within the NHS.

In Scotland a golden handshake was offered to dental students by the Libdem/Labour coalition to persuade them to stay in Scotland. The impact of this golden handshake was the dental students who were going to stay in Scotland got a nice tax free sum for doing what they were going to do anyway. There was no evidence that students who were planning to head off elsewhere changed their plans.

Love: Labour's Lost

He sat with his head in his hands grateful, in these days, it was merely a metaphorical expression, in the past his traitorous failure to the people of the UK would have lead to the headsman's block on Tower Hill. It had all seemed so simple. You target your policies at the 'swing voters' of Middle England as there was nowhere else for your main vote to go. It was Labour or nothing. By mimicking the Conservatives you opened a new line of financial backing which increasingly meant you could ignore the Unions, anyway where else could they spend their members' money except to prop up Labour. So you squeezed out the influence of the Unions while spending their cash as if there is no tomorrow and as long as you were getting your rich pals to fund you, what could the Unions do about it except seek to outspend the 'City of London' corporate backers in an attempt to protect 'their party'.

There were other nice earners for the Labour party, flogging honours just like the Tories did or making sure decisions and laws went financial backers' way no matter the damage done to ordinary people. The marketisation of NHS England was a classic example of 'New Labour' making new financial backers happy and giving Labour back benchers' the chance to make a bit as parliamentary consultants to these businesses or, better, lucrative directorships for Labour's front benchers. Everyone was doing well so party cohesion was not a problem and the Denis Skinner's could be ignored as simply grumpy and eccentric old men, out of place and out of step in 'New Labour's' trendy Britain. A Labour Party where 'loads a money', looking out for number one became the norm and the poor and vulnerable were expendable. A serial peadophile as a senior member of the party, no problems as the Tories were just a keen to keep a lid on 'kiddy fiddling' while all the UK spy agencies were concerned about was the possibility of enemy agencies using the information to gain secret information. There was the bonus as when Leon Brittain was Home Secretary he made damned sure all the skeletons of abuse in the 70's and 80's were well buried and reports about the abusive activities of Lords and MPs from the police or fellow parliamentarians never saw the light of day. In the 1990's the report into the peadophile Bryn Estyn abuse factory in North Wales was well and truly buried even when concerned Labour and Libdem MPs requested to see the unredacted report or requested its publication in full, from 1994 to the present day. Then it turns out Brittain was one of the 'kiddy fiddlers' along with a growing list of recently deceased Lords and parliamentarians of his era and the others who could not be mentioned because they were still alive.

It was all the fault of some northern local internet based news source the 'bodyguard of lies' had collapsed, who had ever heard of the North Yorks Enquirer? In their fight against what they saw as a corrupt Scarborough and District Council links between Jimmy Saville and certain councilors became clear. It took only a little bit of digging for the North Yorks Enquirer to discover complaints about Mr Saville's habits and those of local councilors had been made to the local police and apparently ignored (according to HM Inspector of Constabulary the complaints had been 'poorly handled and not given due care' by the North Yorks Force or as the North Yorks Inquirer put it more simply 'ignored'. In the aftermath of the Rotherham procurement ring's exposure what had been a Libdem or Tory problem became Labour's as the Labour appointed head of Social Work and Welfare (and past Labour candidate) was accused of levels of incompetence on the issue, almost to the point of suspicion of collusion in the cover up.

Then the sussurus of an organised cover up of long standing paedophilic behaviour in the Palace of Westminster became a whisper and then a clearer voice, until it ended up an angry shout from a UK electorate already well aware of the financial corruption endemic in the building amongst MPs and Lords.

There are many peccadilloes MP's may be forgiven but the abuse and molestation of children is not and never will be one. Still the Westminster old boys' club covered up, decried the paedophilia claims being made against their membership as injudicious, slanderous and a gross insult to Parliament. Even after the mess they made of the Westminster expenses scam cover up, they still had not learned. Even with the media in their pocket this longstanding sleaze leaked out. The next step was to claim that 'kiddy fiddling' members who were still alive were too senile to stand trial and the British Establishment with a nod here and a wink there, ensured the still alive abusers who had been named and shamed could avoid facing trial. After all a few expendable high profile paedophiles had been sacrificed to calm the mob along with two of the main providers of 'kiddies to the Palace' from Bry Estyn and Dolphin House days, luckily Leon Brittain died before he could blow the gaff on the cover up he lead on Thatcher's oblique instructions and of his own unpleasant habits.

All the while Labour went along with the cover up of this heinous crime, sought to dismiss the claims as unsubstantive, yet people carried on looking. Then a routine review of documents due for disposal at the Home Office, by National Archivists, blew the gaff, as papers which just a month before were claimed not to be present, suddenly were. An MP sent a new report with regards a fellow Labour MP's continuing predilection for small boys and the whole 'it all happened over twenty years ago' cover up balloon deflated catastrophically all over the British Establishment and the Palace of Westminster. The national media stayed horribly silent except from a nod here, a hat tip there.

Labour, the self acclaimed voice of the poor, the sick and the vulnerable of the UK stayed silent, too busy ripping itself apart while it argued it should be even more Tory in its policies to stave of its accelerating electoral collapse. Too busy thinking about its own narrow self interest rather than the needs of the UK electorate for an alternate voice to austerity. Too busy attacking a party it had more in common with simply because the SNP wiped it out in Scotland by being what Labour used to be. Voting for more austerity by default and calling it 'resistance'. To change from being minime Tories exposed the total failure of Blairism and the 'New Labour' way and could not be considered, as it exposed Labour's nearly 20 year lie. The first truthful thing Blair has probably said was comparing the current state of the Labour Party to the British Army after the initial Somme attack in July 1916. 

He took his head from his hands, sick to his stomach. The veniality, turbidity and sleaziness of what was once his party brought bile to his throat. What was the point? The usual suspects were in the process of making all the same mistakes all over again while ensuring the neo-liberal, austerity policy which brought them to this pass remained the Labour way. He turned to his wife, who was looking over the Thames, at the physically collapsing Palace of Westminster which more honestly reflected the majority of the politics and politicians it contained, and said,

It does not matter how I see it, love; Labour's lost.

The Blair Which Project

99 years ago, this month, the UK's political and military establishment were trying to sell the increasingly disastrous Somme Battle to the UK public as a great success. Today Mr Blair mentioned the self same battle in the context of what is happening to Labour in Scotland and the impact this is having on 'his' party in the UK.

Much like the British generals in 1916, Labour's answer remains to simply keep doing the same things that has brought them to this pass in Scotland, just even louder and ever more aggressively. Blair sits like a latter day Douglas Haig, convinced just one more big Labour push and the SNP will break, taking little or no account of how well positioned and dug in the SNP now are in Scotland. In an attempt to rally the demoralised and increasingly reduced troops he calls the SNP names. Today it is 'cavemen'.

Yet I am being unfair to Haig's general staff. They were forced into fighting a battle they were not prepared for, with men not yet ready for a frontal assault on German lines, on a section of the front they did not wish to contest because of the geographical advantage the German's held, all forced on them by UK politicians under a lot of stress from the French to 'help ease the German pressure on the French at Verdun' or lose the war. The tactics used failed, in part, because the British artillery sought to do a wire busting job with the shells which were available but unsuitable for the task, let alone one in four was a dud. In the aftermath of the Somme the British General Staff saw a number of the old guard shifted out and new tactics devised such as the rolling barrage used in the latter stages of 1916 battle, the integration of tanks with infantry and the use of close support from aircraft in a ground attack role. These combined tactics were used with some success at Cambrai in 1917 and were battle winners in the last hundred days of the conflict.

In comparison Blair continues to re-fight the equivalent of the first days of the Somme Battle, over and over again in Scotland. Refusing to accept his tactics are as out of date as the British General Staff's were in 1916 when they tried to fight a cavalry war of maneuver, in a landscape of an industrialised war. There is no appreciation from a Labour Party which remains trapped in the thrall of his Blairite general staff, such as a McTernan, Balls or a Murphy, that they are murdering their own troops. To shift to a different war, Labour HQ is currently more reminiscent of the 'Fuehrer Bunker' in March and April of 1945 with the leadership in increasing denial of the disaster they are bringing down on themselves, surrounded by party lackeys and hangers on who are not willing to point this out as they take as much as they can get while the going's good. In the background previously peripheral party members are maneuvering to be voted Fuhrer, in the background the 'successor' has already been decided but a pretense at having a democratic choice has to be played out. 

Instead of Russian 'untermensch' threatening the Thousand Year Riech, Labour's problem are the encroaching SNP 'cavemen' and yet the levels of hysteria, hyperbole and denial are much the same.

If the SNP are 'cavemen' then Blair's Labour can only be 'dinosaurs' and looking about I do not see many dinosaurs walking around today.

(I know, I said I was taking a break but there is just some Unionist crap which needs a reply.)

Taking a break ..

In my mind we Scots should now be discussing the new Scottish Constitution and whether to remain a constitutional monarchy or invite the likes of the Princess Royal or Tommy Sheridan to be the first Scottish President while the new constitution settled in and was shaken out.

Instead I look back over posts since I started this blog in 2010 and see a constant theme of warning Labour not to take the Scots for granted as the SNP significantly moved from right to well left of centre.

In the period since 2012 many of my postings have argued positively why the only escape for Scotland from the Westminster Austerity war on the poor, sick and vulnerable was to vote Yes in September 2014.

On Sunday night the local SNP constituency invited Aileen McLeod (a current South list MSP) to stand against the current incumbency which she was not far from tumbling in 2010. We wait to see who is going to stand after Alex Fergusson announced he would not be standing again, just one of two thirds of current Conservative MSP who are doing the same. Our greatest wish is it will be arch Thatcherite Finlay Carson who managed to upset his own Conservative support in May this year and is a less than effective local councilor. So a wee rest for the local SNP constituency party before once more engaging the gears to prepare for May 2016. The sad thing is the small number of SNP members crying into their beards about 'new' folk 'short cutting' their way into list and constituency slots, pontificating on why we should be like the other parties, select on the basis of 'Buggins Turn' and give the long serving 'stamp lickers' a chance.  I have a simple answer, look at the state of the Scottish Parties which follow the 'Buggins Turn' principle; three MPs and lagging the SNP by over 30% in the current polls for Holyrood next year.

So we are where we are, while all the folk in Scotland who believed their pensions, health service and the rest would be threatened by independence wake up to the real threat was and remains the failed institution which calls itself the UK Parliament where we have a 'Scotch' Conservative and Labour Unionist MP, who held on by just 760 votes, now playing at being the 'Scotch Viceroy', telling us Scots he knows what is best for us while being reliant on an unelected House of Lords to do the dirty on his behalf, a House of Lords which has little basis under Scots Law and constitutional practice. 

In the meantime the usual UK media suspects spend more energy pronouncing why the SNP are a failure at Westminster than addressing the extent of the Conservative's socially and economically corrosive policies or their failed austerity project. The self same media who are working themselves into a frenzy as to why Labour's only hope and future is as a Minime Conservative Party while ignoring the blind alley the Libdems have parked themselves in, having chosen 'holy roller', US 'Tea Party' Republican look a like, Farron, as leader - the Libdems would have been better off with Donald Trump.

Then there are the SNP's fair weather friends from Yes Campaign days who are now saying they have been betrayed, Sturgeon should be announcing Independence Referendum mark 2 at least or UDI at best. The failure to do so must mean the SNP MP Group have already 'gone native' at Westminster, this can be the only reason for inaction, they bleat. To them I say there is still some way to go before Scotland is ready to finally break from the UK Union, the time is coming but not yet. Ms Sturgeon has to see where the SNP actually stand in May 2016 before any such action could be successful, in the meantime she is quietly leaving the Conservatives to do the heavy lifting for her, making the case for independence, as the scare stories used in the No campaign against the independence movement become Conservative and Labour Unionist policy at Westminster.

So I am taking a break, the silly season for political trash and nonsense is upon us as seen in the ludicrous assumption made in the Sun about the Queen's latent Nazism. In the meantime some politicians in Europe are waking up to the realisation, the popular revolt in Greece against current EU austerity policy lurks just under the surface of their own public in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and other states which have had enough of the current EU project, establishment, bureaucrats and behind closed door 'deals'. Seeing their own economies run down to keep the value of the Euro low so Benelux and Germany can benefit from what is, in effect, a falsely devalued Deutchesmark.

Unless something outrageous happens I am off the air until September at the earliest.

No - doubts?

As the immortal Reverend I M Jolly once said, "Life is like an ash tray ..... full of little doubts."

Contrary to popular media opinion, Scotland did not vote definitively to stay in the UK Union, the vote was marginal, only requiring a future 6% swing to Independence to become a Yes. Yet time after time over the last few weeks we have heard the Conservative and Labour Unionist Party spokes persons make this claim as their English MPs voted to ensure the new amendments to the Scotland Bill, promised in the spurious vow and the Smith Report, were kicked into the long grass. In the meantime the Conservative part of the Union Party decided as well as ignoring the Scots request for fiscal autonomy or at least increased devolution, they should go the extra mile and change the UK Parliamentary rules so they could, in effect, ignore Scotland completely.

Today's budget from the odious Osborne confirms to me, at least, the fiscal back bone is being created to underpin the Tory Party's continuing program introducing their 'Nuremberg Law Lite' social division program to reduce the most vulnerable in UK society to 'untermensch' status while blaming these vulnerable people for the introduction of this neo-liberal, nay neo-fascist, series of economic penalties on those most unable to afford them. The effect being equivalent to telling the sick and disabled they only need three wheels on their wheelchair and as they are 'unproductive' they will not need support to wash or bathe as there is no point of washing, as they are not going to work anyway. Oh, by the way, if you sick folk turn up late for your DWP health for work assessment, on your three wheeled wheelchair or are too smelly because you can not wash yourself, you will be sanctioned by the DWP and lose all your benefits for as long as we at the DWP can get away with. Such is the warped logic of the Conservative Party Welfare reforms.

This, then, is the UK Parliamentary system of government we Scots were told by the nice people in the Unionist Conservative and Labour Party we could not do with out because, if we did, we would make a right hash of it, turning Scotland back to the Iron Age and we would all end up living in round huts, raiding other nearby settlements for cattle and women.

It is therefore a bit of a surprise when Blair McDougall, the mastermind behind the 'Scare old folk in Scotland shitless with a load of second rate lies' campaign in Scotland, turns up on Twitter parping on his Moodie Tuba saying, 'See you Tories, its naw fair pal', as the whole 'UK Union is best for Scotland' unravels around his ears, his trousers drop round his ankles at a high rate of knots and his pants catch fire, while Osborne trumpets his budget for the rich and wealthy, to make them even richer and wealthier.

So here we are, we pawky Scots, lurking in the ashtray of an English Party Politics dominated UK Parliamentary Union amongst all the doubts staying in the Union was supposed to resolve, waiting for the Tory Party to stub out the big fat Churchill cigar, they are puffing away on, in our faces.

No doubts?  It seems to me there are more than ever before and we Scots are about to be tipped into the waste bin along with them.

So sad you are angry?

A friend asked the other day is it possible to be so sad you are angry?

I answered, "Yes - it is called depression."

I have had a down week during which I wrote my post to the English Electorate because part of my sadness is my anger at the inability of the English left to organise itself to effectively oppose the neo-liberal orthodoxy of all England's elected parties. They are waiting around for Labour to 'see sense' with a complete lack of awareness of Labour's Oxbridge complicity in the English political elite to ensure the status quo. My rant was one of sadness at the pathetic hand wringing which represents much of the English left's action against against this corrupt and self serving plutocratic elite. Sometimes a rant gets stuff off your chest but lurking away underneath is the sadness driven by the repetitive failure to mount any worthwhile campaign against the destruction of the UK's Welfare system, an act which is inflicting severe damage not to the 'feckless', beloved by the Daily Mail, in any shape or form but the UK's most vulnerable in ever increasing numbers.

I could take you back to Hitler's Nuremberg Laws of 1934 to demonstrate the last time such a government lead system of sanctions against the most vulnerable - the sick, the disabled, physically handicapped or mentally handicapped - was enshrined in the law of a country. Under the name of eugenics the German Medical and Welfare System became the first mass murdering unit of the Nazi machine. 

From 1934 'feeblemindedness' became a legitimate medical reason for forced sterilisation with some 300,000 to 400,000 undertaken between then and 1945. In 1935 Hitler gave the green light to euthanising the physical and mentally handicapped under this scheme and some 70,000 were killed between 1941 and 1942, the peak year of this 'mercy killing', according to the Nazi's own meticulous reports. It was the methods used to gas these unfortunates and the associated problems in handling large numbers of corpses which lead to the drawing up of the plans and the development of the Zyclon B gas for the mass murder of any race or religion the Nazi's deemed eugenically 'untermensch'. A development which culminated in extermination camps at Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor. Folk say this sort of thing can never happen in the UK, home of the 'Mother of Parliaments', a land of democracy and fair play and yet, bit by bit, death by deliberate government action, since 2010, is.

The Tory welfare policy has more in common with the Nazi Nuremberg Laws than most would care to admit. If you are disgusted at the 30,000 forced sterilisations a year under the Nuremberg Laws how do you feel about the average number of 31,000 deaths a year between 1937 and 1945 under the euthanasia program of the most vulnerable for the alleged benefit of German Society by ridding them of unproductive mouths. 

According to disabled charities in the UK over 60,000 UK citizens died between 2010 and 2015 as a direct result of DWP Welfare sanctioning carried out by the Tories under Duncan-Smith's regime which is some 12,000 deaths each year over the five year period.

If you consider the Nazi's actions sterilising the sick and vulnerable were despicable and an abomination, just where does that leave a supposedly, civilised and compassionate UK Tory Government on your list of moral incompetence or even deliberate cruelty at the 12,000 deaths a year directly related to the Tory Welfare cuts?

If you consider the war against Hitler's Government a 'just war' against a cruel regime, why is it permissible to allow a UK Government away with this cavalier and inhumane process, directly causing the deaths of UK citizens, simply because it is wrapped in a tissue of lies called 'austerity'?

How do you justify the turning of Scots and their representatives in the UK Parliament, under Cameron's Evel proposals, into second class UK citizens?  

How is this all any different from the 1934 Nuremberg Law's treatment of 'untermensch' and their civil rights?

Folk may hum and haw, suck on their pencils and seek to justify the unjustifiable, tell me I am a bit over the top, it is not happening, I am just deluded - surely?

The facts are plain to see, the level of deaths directly related to DWP sanctions is probably worse than the charities' estimates which is why the DWP do not want the real figures released. Meanwhile Labour are so far up their own backsides the lump in Harman's throat is their collective nose and the UK is left reliant on 56 SNP MPs to protect not just Scotland's but the UK's most vulnerable people. 

This is a state of affairs which is now past pointless hand wringing or inaction and is getting towards that dark point in many peoples' souls, beyond powerlessness and loss of all hope, which only answers to violence in the streets of the UK against the Tory leadership. A leadership which will then use such violence to ever increase its state control, censorship and further removal of civil liberties for the 'greater good' of their bent, foul and twisted democracy.

All that does is make me even sadder and more angry.

An open letter to the English Electorate:

I doubt you will have been following the farce that is the 'debate' on the new Scotland Bill nor the way the undemocratic the newly formed English Conservative and Labour Party, has been voting down the principles stated in the scabrous 'Vow', made to the people of Scotland last September by Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.

Neither will you have seen reports of the lunatic cheering by members of the English Conservative and Labour Party when they gallantly win votes by 540 to 58 to prevent the Scots wishes for more fiscal autonomy and devolved powers from going ahead.

You will have heard Cameron and his new deputy, Ms Harman, banging on about how unfair it is for SNP MPs to vote on English only issues and how their vote could swing the issue (i.e. stop the Conservatives from doing what ever they want) but I ask how 56 out of 650 MPs could manage this without the support of English MPs who would also be against the legislation?

Unfortunately for the English Conservative and Labour Party, SNP MPs do not zip up the back of their heads and when Mr Carmichael sought to flatter to deceive over the matter of the UK's withdrawal of the ECHR, pretending it could not happen while actually arguing the opposite case, we were not fooled, not in the lsightest. You see, conforming to ECHR is a devolved power under the Scotland Act 1998 as Holyrood has sole power and authority to undertake changes to Scots Law and Scots Law must conform to the ECHR judgements and statutes.

It follows Gove can not take the UK (aka England) out of the ECHR with out terminating the UK Union as he will be in breach of article 19 of the Treaty of Union and its empowering acts. Such a decision could only be taken by the original sovereign parliaments of England and Scotland who are signatory to the original Treaty. This requires the suspension of the relevant Acts of Union to permit these parliaments their recall. Given the anger growing amongst the electorate in Scotland with respect to Cameron and Harman's ignorant and cavalier attitude toward Scotland, I would doubt the Scottish Parliament or its electorate would agree to any resumption of the Acts, thus ending the Treaty of Union by default.

The Scottish branch of the Conservative and Labour Party understand their coats are on a shoogly peg to the extent two thirds of the Scottish Conservative's current MSPs are not standing in May 2016 for Holyrood while Labour accepts they are facing another kicking of May 2015 GE levels and are likely to lose control of their Scottish council fiefdom in 2017.

Cameron may think he is singing the third and rarely used verse of the UK National Anthem, ' ..rebellious Scots to crush...' but pressure is growing on the SNP leadership to commit to a new referendum to end the Union in 2017 whether Westminster agrees or not and be independent by 2020 at the latest.

The English electorate via ignorance, vindictiveness, apathy or sense of powerlessness has brought us all to this point by the election of a UK Tory Government - time to consider just what are you going to do about the shit heap you have dumped us all in because we Scots are looking to dig our way out as fast as we can. When we go, the English Establishment seems intent on re-establishing serfdom for the large majority of people in England outside of London and the SE - good luck with that.

Yours, in greatest sadness of what is coming to pass,