Jim Evans @magicbuzz

The incompetence of the SNP is now the defining feature of Scottish government.

Bernie @Artemisfornow

a day ago

Suck it up tax payers … the Scottish government built a “net zero” prison. The cost estimate was £52 million. It’s now 7 years late, cost £209 MILLION and can only hold 200 prisoners! Oh and the net zero claim is a bit misinformationy …. they installed a ground source heat

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@martinfife I always thought his second was a better goal, top man is JB

Why does Scotland need so many politicians?? We have 3.6 x more politicians per head of population than England. The Scottish civil service has tripled since devolution and we are now saddled with an ever growing welfare bill and a completely bloated public sector! The question Scots should be asking is: Has devolution with all the extra layers of bureaucracy and cost to the taxpayer delivered better outcomes for ordinary Scots, or has Holyrood simply become an expensive, self-perpetuating disappointment that Scotland can no longer afford to treat as beyond criticism? We should be asking why debates about gender ideology, foreign policy, Net zero, Palestine and constitutional issues remain front and centre stage when concerns about healthcare, education, public infrastructure, economic growth and government accountability remain unresolved?

SEXED UP AND COVERED UP Imagine starting a war because you copied and pasted someone's old university paper and forgot to fix the typos. You don't have to imagine it. It happened. In September 2002 the UK government published a dossier claiming Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. Almost no evidence behind it. A second dossier followed in February 2003. Colin Powell quoted it at the UN as proof of Iraqi deception. One day later Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) found large parts of it were copied almost word for word from a thesis by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a PhD student. They even copied his typos. Alastair Campbell (@campbellclaret) had already demanded the first dossier be "sharpened" and made "revelatory." John Scarlett's intelligence committee went from admitting there was "very little intelligence" to signing off firm WMD claims. No new evidence appeared in between. David Kelly knew the difference. The government's own weapons expert told @BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan (@mragilligan) the dossier had been sexed up. He was named as the source, grilled by MPs on live television, and found dead days later. Hutton ruled it suicide. Doctors and MPs have disputed that verdict ever since, and no inquest was ever held. Parliament voted 412 to 149 for war anyway. The Chilcot Inquiry took 13 years to confirm what a journalist and a dead scientist had already said. Nobody went to prison. Blair runs a think tank now (@InstituteGC). Kelly doesn't get that choice. Sources @Channel4News @BBCNews @guardian @mragilligan Others.

This is how ruins should be displayed

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As everyone knows, the longest river in North America is the Mississippi. From its source just south of Lake Itasca in Minnesota, it runs south for 2,350 mi (3,780 km) into the Gulf of Mexico/America. However, the Mississippi technically isn't actually the longest at all. 1/n

@padraig_h @ScottishOpen @DPWorldTour Sun is here ☀️ good luck 😉

@martinfife Burger at the Crabtree, he must have signed a big 💴 contract

The folic acid petition has hit 20,000 but we need five times as many for a parliamentary debate. Please encourage friends and family to sign. Who could be against a debate on this subject? N.B. There has not been a debate in parliament yet. petition.parliament.uk/petitions/7695…

Yes, Minister was all the political education we needed. If we were paying attention to the script, of course.

@PintsBeauty Best in uk

@RanTeeThree Worlds missing Sean 😢

@FulhamRetro2 @WhiteNoise1879 Yes pls

This American learning a new Scottish phrase is quite brilliant, even though she doesn’t quite get it right because it’s entirely possible for someone to be a ‘specky cunt’ and them not actually wear glasses.

@theiaincameron You’ve clearly never been on a Silent Gliss training course then!

say what you like about Peter Murrell using the SNP’s funds to spend £85 on gourmet beans, at least he didn’t waste the money trying to make an economic case for independence

A tenant farmer in the Cairngorms says land that sold for £500 an acre a few years ago now goes for £5,000. He is being moved off ground his family has worked for generations, because he cannot outbid the people buying it. The buyers are corporations, and they have no intention of farming a single acre of it. Here is how the trick works. A company keeps emitting carbon exactly as before. Same factories, same flights, same supply chain, same product. Then it buys a Scottish hillside, plants some trees, and announces to the world that it is now carbon neutral, or, if it is feeling brave, carbon negative. The emissions never fell. It simply bought a landscape to point at. Take BrewDog. In 2020 it bought a 9,300-acre Highland estate, propped up with public grant money, and promised a million trees and the crown of the world's first carbon negative beer business, removing twice the carbon it emitted, forever. By 2023 roughly half of the 500,000 trees it had managed to plant were dead, killed by drought, with critics noting the planting was drying out the peat and releasing carbon of its own. The advertising regulator ruled its carbon-negative claims misleading. In 2024 it quietly dropped the badge and dismissed the entire carbon credit market as a flood of cheap schemes whose benefit was "questionable, maybe even non-existent." Then it sold the estate to a firm whose actual business is selling carbon offsets. That is the whole model in one story. Public money in. Dead trees out. A green halo worn for four years and then dropped. The farmer who used to be on that land, gone. The hillside passed to a company that exists purely to sell other people the right to keep polluting. This is no fringe case. In one recent year, half of every estate sold in Scotland went to investment funds, corporations and charitable trusts rather than anyone who would farm it. A third of the deals for plantable land are now done off-market, in secret, precisely so the local community never gets the chance to bid. So this is what net zero looks like on the ground. A man who produced food is priced out of his own glen. A corporation that produced emissions buys the glen, calls itself a force for good, and sells the carbon. The land stops feeding anyone. Nobody's emissions actually went down by a gram. The food was real. The farmer was real. The carbon saving is a line in a slide deck. And we have somehow decided the villain in all this is the man with the sheep.

🤦‍♀️ Nicola Sturgeon is setting up a strawman in her interview with @bbclaurak. Nobody was complaining of embezzlement in 2021. What we were worried about was financial mismanagement & lack of transparency. She demonised us for those concerns & should take responsibility for that.

There's simply no way back from this. All the attempted defences by NS supporters evaporate like mist on a summer's day within the first minute of this.

Denise Findlay 💚🤍💜 @gracebrod1e

3 months ago

When the finance & audit committee &the treasurer & Jo Cherry resigned because they had no access to the books & no answers on missing funds And Peter was flush with cash & spending extravagantly Sturgeon had no suspicion Today came as a complete shock?

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@martinfife @1966MJG Don’t think ESR has ever wanted to be here, sadly.