THE Westminster-based party political system is rotten to the core, completely debased, and utterly beyond the pale. And let’s not beat about the bush here; it is the Tories who have jet-propelled us on our journey to this rotten sewer. We must get out now. There can be no positive outcome for Scotland in remaining in this cesspit.
If nobody believes me, if you think BJ’s performance at the leaders’ debate wasn’t bad enough, in how he tried to shoehorn “getting Brexit done” into every single evasive “answer”, just take a look at his performance at the Conservative party manifesto launch.
READ MORE: Boris Johnson caught 'lying' about First Minister at Scottish Tory manifesto launch
When asked if he thought changing the Tory press office name to “FactCheck UK” for the purposes of the debate with Corbyn was acceptable, he first of all claimed not to know about it, then dismissed social media as being no big deal, and finally, when forced to acknowledge there was a trust issue, tried to claim that the biggest issue of trust in the UK today was that the Labour Party were deliberately trying to stop Brexit, and that we “have to get Brexit done” to move on to a brighter future.
A shorter, more frank answer would have been: “don’t know, don’t care, **** you!” This is what political discourse has come to under the Tories in 2019.
This is quite apart from issues like misleading the Queen into suspending parliament on a false pretext; suppressing a report on allegations of interference in the political process by the Russians, aided and abetted by the Tories; candidates sacked/ suspended for allegations of assault and proven history of Holocaust denial, Islamophobia, homophobia to name but three, and faking a claim to converting a floating voter.
And that’s before we come to the biggest elephant in the room. The real reason the Tories are so keen on “getting Brexit done” is that tougher new EU anti tax-evasion measures kick in on January 1 2020, which mean that it will be much harder for the likes of Rees-Mogg, Duncan Smith and all the others to squirrel away their personal fortunes while paying next to no tax here.
We can and must do better. Independence is now a moral imperative.
Alastair Naughton
via email
GIVEN the General Election campaign, what has sadly gone largely unrecognised is the disgraceful failure of the UK to meet a UN-appointed deadline to hand the disputed Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean back to Mauritius.
The UK leveraged the islands away from Mauritius in 1965, when it was still a British colony, in return for £3 million and, Mauritius claims, independence. Only to then team up with the US and use some prime real estate on Diego Garcia to agree on building a joint military base, despite the fact that the island was already inhabited by 1,000 Chagossians.
Never mind this inconvenience, they were simply evicted between 1967-73, sent off to Mauritius and the Seychelles 1,400 miles away and have never been allowed back. Many of these people have since moved to the UK.
The UK’s actions will not have gone unnoticed by the other 116 nations who backed Mauritius’s claim to sovereignty over the islands earlier this year, with only six opposing it.
Particularly after the Brexit vote, contributing to the UK’s international reputation falling, the UK’s traditional allies in the international community have started to desert Britain, to abstain or to vote against it at the UN. The UK no longer has a judge on 14-seat International Court of Justice in The Hague, and it’s going to start to see UN maps reflecting the legal fact that the UN sees this islands as belonging to Mauritius.
With the UN General Assembly, the UN High Court and 116 nations opposing this illegal occupation, the Brexit-bamboozled British Government must do the right thing and right one of the wrongs of history.
Alex Orr
Edinburgh
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