In many ways, the Supreme Court did us a favour yesterday. At least we know for definite where we stand and it ain’t what Westminster would have us believe.

For those who have not read the full ruling, let me tell you something you may not know and was certainly a surprise to me. Deep within the ruling, you will find these words.

The purpose of the proposed Bill is to hold a lawful referendum on the question of whether Scotland should become an independent country, that is, on ending the Union and the sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament over Scotland.”

Note the highlighted words which were repeated three times.

So according to this ruling it is the Westminster Parliament who has Sovereignty over Scotland, not the People of Scotland!

When did this change?

Only a couple of years ago Westminster ruled that it was the People of Scotland who were Sovereign according to the Claim of Right. This was also confirmed when King Charles took an oath and signed a Declaration saying he would uphold it.

One thing is for sure, yesterday’s judgement certainly fanned the flames of the Independence movement as thousands gathered in cities across Scotland from Orkney to Dumfries.

My own Twitter line also had many comments from people in England who felt embarrassed at the judgement citing the absence of Democracy.

So, let us not be disheartened because knowing the truth is the first step to freedom.

The plan now should be to work together on a route that can encompass all Independent Parties to walk the same road, hand in hand.

Section 30 is dead and buried, there are other routes.

The goal is Independence!

Last week I read a report that indicated a large number of Transwomen prisoners revert to being male upon being released from Women’s prisons.

This poses two questions to me. Firstly how many times can or should a Transperson be able to change their Gender? Or to put it bluntly, should flip-flopping be allowed?

This is an important question because if it is more than once then the disruption caused to several services would be quite significant not to mention the public in general.

Secondly, with regards to ex prisoners. Does reverting to ‘male’ suggest their motives were not entirely truthful in the first place?

I suppose this leads on to another question, should Transwomen even be in female prisons? If the answer is yes, then what happens if a woman is raped by a Transwoman? Please don’t say it never happens because this is a regular occurrence . Who is ultimately responsible for the safety of women in prisons, and are their rights protected by law or does nobody care?

This all may sound anti Trans but it isn’t. I don’t care what a person wants to be but I do care about the changes in Law that activists are trying to force through and their consequences to others.

These huge changes have consequences for everyone so it is important to get the Law right because bad Law comes with its consequences.

I have spoken about ‘Activists’ before, they generally have an agenda of their own and do not define Transpeople as a whole not to mention the destructive way they are trying to abolish the LGB movement.

If Scotland does not get this Law right and in line with the Equality Act then hundreds of battles will end up in court costing millions. Monies that should be spent combatting the cost of living crisis or going into the SNHS.

I would rather Holyrood would return to a consensus government again than have a party running it where it is being held hostage by another who is pushing their agenda through instead of the priority which is Independence.

I never thought I would live to see the day when a woman wearing a scarf made up of Suffragette colours would be asked to remove it or leave Holyrood .

This is not satire folks it is real in 2020 in our Parliament today!

I am beyond angry!

All of these women sitting around this table going through the GRA amendments are there because of what the Suffragettes did as are many more in different professions.

The right for women to vote was just the start, but today in Holyrood their hard-fought rites we trampled on by this SNP/Green Government.

I am left wondering if I really want to live in a Scotland run by an SNP GOVERNMENT.

A government that by the way even silenced one of their own for protesting at this move.

And you think only Westminster is run by a dictatorship!

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/equality-regulator-briefs-msps-gender-recognition-reform

All this is still being rolled out despite the above, how much more cash is Nicola going to splash on something she can never win?

How Laywers love her, jobs for life as far as Nicola is concerned!

It’s November, but not the November we are used to.

Plants are re-flowering, and people are back in t-shirts. The winds are up but they are warm.

We may be enjoying these conditions but something is wrong, very wrong and sometime down the line we will pay for the Climate chaos that is impending.

Be it through flooding, or drought, the world’s food crops and infrastructure will bare the brunt.

Promises have been made again at COP27, yet we haven’t even managed to meet last year’s targets, and even worse the UK has been in a rush to issue more licences to extract even more oil out of the North sea.

Corporate greed disguised as the need for energy !

Yes, we need energy, green energy, but then there’s not much profit it that, so oil it must be. This by the way is the oil Scotland was told in 2014 was running out!

As a child, I remember the hard cold winters. In those days we had four very distinctive seasons, now they just seem to blend into each other. And believe it or not, that is not good for our health or the Planet.

Another word or words for spectrums is ‘wide variations’.

When people, particularly professionals talk about Spectrums they do so about facts. Take for instance Autism.

Autism is a recognised illness, a fact, and where austitic people are on the spectrum or ladder varies from mild symptoms to severe. It is the same with Mental Health which can range from mild depression to suicidal.

In Scotland at the moment there is much discussion about the so called Gender spectrum. There are those that are trying to change the word ‘sex’ for ‘gender’.

Gender however is not a fact as sex is.

Gender is an ideology and yes it has its own range of characteristics, but these are mainly about language where nouns are assigned to different categories.

Gender is something that has been socially constructed.

In law, gender characteristics do not replace sex and therefore cannot usurp sex based rights for women.

A man or woman for that fact can choose to call themselves any sex, they can even dress as so but that does not mean they are legally so in all matters. They may even have a transitioning certificate which may give them some protections, and rightly so but scientifically and medically they remain the sex they were born with.

Trans people have been around for many decades so why all of a sudden have they come to the forefront? If you cared to have a discussion with a trans person you would find the answer to that question is the same as many other group these days. The answer is Activists!

Activists come in two groups, those who genuinely have a grievance about something and want to bring it to everyone’s attention by peaceful means and those who have a chip on their shoulder or have another agenda altogether. The latter can be very dangerous angry people.

As far as some Trans activists are concerned you can also tell who they are by their hatred towards women. The question I have to ask is, why are some transwomen, who say they want to be a woman hate women so much? To me, the two don’t colerate which in turn makes me very suspicious about their agenda.

I have just spent a couple of days South of the Border visiting a few friends.

Normally Politics is a no-go area but this time it was different, they all wanted to say something and of course I obliged!

To say services are bad is an understatement, they are dire, in particular, Health and Education.

In the city, the availability of being able to see a Doctor is almost zero and if you need elective surgery your only hope is to agree to go anywhere in the country.

If your child has Mental Health problems your up a river with no paddle! Even if that child has tried to commit suicide and has other health problems. For any treatment to begin you must have a diagnosis, you will wait months in some cases years for that. My friend had to go private to have her grandson seen by anyone.

To add to the problem, the local Health Authority has spent millions building a new Health Center, it is absolutely huge almost like a small hospital. Within it they will bring all the cities Doctors, together and have a number of specialised clinics. Sounds great, but here’s the rub, it’s not on a bus route and the bus companies say they are not going to start one due to narrow roads in that Industrial Estate which incidentally is situated on the outer edge of one side of the large city…….not central!

Which in itself is not very helpful if you are elderly or have no transport!

Planning……what planning?

With regards to Education, if your child is not of average intelligence or has any kind of medical or mental health problem they are stuck at the back of the class and forgotten, and I mean forgotten to the point that even their teachers only know them by a name on a register but not personally!

Guess what, I am talking about a City which is Tory!

If people don’t start speaking with their FEET there will soon be no services left.

We in Scotland are marginally better off, but if Sunak starts interfering with our finances then we too will be down that river with our neighbours.

Never in my whole life would I have expected the Tories to decimate the country in this way.

They may look after their own in Westminster but that does transfer to the country or even their own constituencies.

Lest anyone has forgotten we still hold the Chair of COP and he should be there to officially hand over.

What does this say to the rest of the World?

We don’t care anymore, it’s no longer a priority and I’m not letting The King come either!

The policy now seems to be to get and use all the fossil fuels we can and to hang with it!

We will pay for this recklessness through adverse weather systems and loss of life.

The cost of this recklessness will be more than the cost of the Climate policies. The policies we are making today are being made because of the disastrous economic decisions made over the last year or so, not to mention the vast amounts of cash wasted and lost through COVID still not recovered.

This is reactionary politics. The kind of decisions made in panic mode.

Word is that we are to be hit with enormous tax rises and cuts. In other words, we will be paying for their mistakes for many years to come.

For those of us in the twilight of our years that means austerity until we die!

Not a lot to look forward to then!

Change of topic!

When it comes to education we don’t always get our priorities right. Over the past few years, the benchmark of success by any government has been to raise the numbers of pupils getting into University above all else.

Yes, it was important to make the path easier for those from different communities to enter that level of education.

Yes we need the degrees and the brains that go along with all of the high-level occupations, but you don’t need a degree to work in a supermarket or Just Eat where unfortunately so many ex-students with degrees end up.

This country has become a low-productivity country because we have lost the technical skills we once had and need desperately to regain.

Today I read about a young man who desperately wanted to be a cabinet maker but was pushed into University by his family and teachers, today, with degrees he works in a supermarket! So many years lost, so much pressure, so much unhappiness. Getting a degree does not always put you up the social ladder if that was the motive for it.

What our country needs is people who can not only use their brains but also their hands. The makers, the fixers.

2 yrs ago I bought a well known make of lift away Hoover, the other week the brushes stopped working, I know what the problem is, but here’s the thing I can’t get in to fix it and what’s even more disturbing is, there is no one in Glasgow can fix it either!

We have become a thow away society, if it’s broke chuck it!

It is Technical skills that keep a country moving, it is cooking skills that keep a country eating, it is farming skills that produce the food we eat.

Cheap imports made in sweatshops do not enrich our country.

Many small towns in Scotland have become but a shadow of their former selves because cheap imports have replaced the finest of materials.

Materials that lasted years, not months!

This country has the ability to become self sufficient but lacks the political will not because there are no profits in such goods but because the profits are not high enough for investors.

It is corporate greed that has destroyed this country, not the workers, the grafters who kept it going.

The difference between levels of skills does not equate to the number of brain cells but how you choose to apply them. A mechanic is as gifted as someone who works on the floor of the Stock Exchange they just use their gifts differently.

Each to their own but it should never be seen as one class above the other!

The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.

First mistake and it’s a huge one!

Today the new PM spoke about integrity, sadly that word can not be used in the same sentence as Suella, or is it Cruella Braverman. Because she is the most cruel, heartless person on this planet.

Apparently, she dreams of sending people on a plane to Rwanda.

Another strange one is ‘Coke man’

Maybe he was rewarding him for telling Boris to go a couple of months ago.

At least there are some fresh faces and at least Coffey has been demoted, I am pressuming that Environmental Polices and Climate Change plans will end up on a shelf until further notice. The NHS however might benefit from that move.

Given the amount of time she spent in number 10, I think some bargaining went on.

And so the powerful Tory machine keeps chugging along, how many more times will it stop and start before it ends up in the junkyard?

A miracle is required and Rishi is no God, not even a Saint. He will be desperate to make some notable moves forward before the next Election, that kind of pressure could lead to more monumental mistakes just like his predecessor.

Turning the economy around is going to take time, a long time and time is the one thing they haven’t got.

But I will not fault him for trying……yet!

The Good.

The first Asian PM showing diversity is alive and well, although I do believe it is by accident rather than design. Out of all three runners, he in many respects seems the most adept.

Hopefully no more Rees-Mogg, Coffey or Boris ever again. The question however remains, has the ERG lost it’s control of the Tories? [Europeon Research Group] They have already declared they will not endorse Sunak and remain a very powerful group.

He may however foster a better relationship with the EU, in particular with France bringing a more successful ending to the NI Protocol problem.

The bad.

He’s still a Tory.

He is very right-wing but probably less so than the ERG. In the past, he has shown his true colours with little empathy for those on Benefits.

He is a very wealthy man but the UK does not benefit from that through taxes. His wife and his fortune are registered elsewhere therefore he is likely to continue to favour the wealthy in his policies.

He has been crowned not by the people or even members of his own Party but by a small clique of MPs, this will not go down well with members and could rebound on him later down the line. Many are already calling for a GE.

The very ugly..

The Tory Party is at war with itself, how much mischief his opponents will get up to remains to be seen but it could all get very ugly and we will pay the price. Even with 2/3 of a majority of his MPs, he does not command overall authority within Parliament. All the other 1/3 have to do to bring him down is to either abstain or vote with Labour and many of his enemies are angry enough to do that.

He has but a narrow line to walk. Like Truss, he will have to keep his backbenchers happy, with no hard Brexit. I say that because despite what Boris said Brexit is not done, there are all those rules to deal with. Rees-Mogg wanted to burn them all with nothing to replace them but many were good and protected us from things like food poisoning, and dirty drinking water through to workers rights. You don’t throw the baby out with the bath water!

To do all this and get the economy onto a better footing whilst always looking over one’s shoulder is no mean task. Is he strong enough has he got the character?

Only time will tell but will there be enough time?