The Sunday Ishmael 10/04/2022 - Scotland again

  

Edinburgh City Council  has imposed a ban on sex entertainment venues - Gentlemen's Clubs, strip clubs and lap-dancing bars - after accepting representations from women's groups that such venues are breeding grounds for violence and toxic attitudes towards women. This will drive out of business Edinburgh's Pubic Triangle:

 causing outrage amongst prostitutes, (def. Prostitute - a person, in particular a woman, who engages in sexual activity for payment), who stated that they will take to the law to demand the right to continue to exploit men for money. Danielle Worden, of United Sex Workers, said the trade union would aim to overturn the ban by judicial review. What? Really? Have I strayed into some strange alternative universe?

Oh yes - it's called Scotland.

This is the ferry, Glen Sannox, "launched" by Nicola Sturgeon in November 2017 with  no windows on its bridge. What appear to be windows is actually black paint. The painted-on windows were a clever ruse to disguise the fact that the ferry was not finished. It still isn't. The latest estimate is that the ferries will be five years late, and will cost up to £250 million - more than two and a half times the original budget of £97million. Gnasher has told MSPs that "the buck stops with me" in the row over the contract for Glen Sannox and her sister ferry - both delayed and way over-budget. She doesn't mean it, of course - she has been trying to pin the buck onto disgraced former transport minister Derek Mackay. You remember him - he's the one  resigned as Finance Secretary in February 2020, after the Scottish Sun reported he had messaged a 16-year-old boy on social media, describing him as "cute" and offering to meet with him. Mrs Fish indicated that the decision to go ahead with the ferry contract without the normal financial guarantees was taken by Disgraced Derek.

In 2014, Glasgow shipbuilders, Fergusons, went bust and was rescued by a Scottish National party adviser. It was then awarded a £97 million government contract to build two ferries. Ferguson's shipyard was nationalised in 2019, with the SNP government  tied into paying the extra costs of the ferries project - which are astronomical. It was reported in Holyrood this month that many of the cables installed in the Glen Sannox were too short, delaying the delivery of that ship by eight months, and the other ship by six months, adding £8.7m to the overall bill. A sum of £3.5m has also seen set aside to renew expired warranties on equipment already installed. And the shipyard has warned of "the risk of further unknown legacy issues" putting the project back further, saying they would only know if there was damage or deterioration to key systems once the ships are launched and tested. Or launched and sunk.
Douglas Ross, leader of the Scottish Conservatives and opposed to Scottish Independence, has had a field day, saying the award of the contract was "an absolute shocker" and calling for a public inquiry to be held. He said: "This is one of the worst public spending disasters since devolution. It's a reckless waste of Scottish taxpayers' money - but we still don't know exactly who signed off this disastrous contract. Audit Scotland can't find a shred of evidence to justify the government's decision to charge ahead with this contract against expert advice. In the SNP's secret Scotland, all the evidence about this decision has gone. We're left with Nicola Sturgeon dodging responsibility and desperately trying to throw her ex-minister Derek Mackay under the bus."

On the 1st April (What? Really?), ScotRail was nationalised. Sturgeon said: “This historic and momentous occasion marks the delivery of a key milestone in our ambitious Programme for Government to support a greener, fairer, more prosperous Scotland. Everyone involved has worked extremely hard to deliver the smooth transition of ScotRail into public control and ownership. This new beginning creates a real opportunity to deliver a railway which is for the nation, and fully focused on being run for the benefit of its users – customers, staff and stakeholders, as opposed to shareholders.” 

D'you think this is going to cost as much as the Nationalised Ferguson Fiasco Shipyard Disaster?
The SNP's Secret Scotland is characterised by piss-poor planning, wilful waste and a complete absence of accountability during the SNP’s 15 years in power.  It's centralisation is such that all major decisions are expected to be signed off by Sturgeon’s office.  The Scottish Government (did you notice when it ceased to be the Scottish Executive in a neat little PR move? ) has a communications staff of 175 spinning merrily away, at a cost increased by 50% since 2018. 

Scotland's Parliament (parliament = partial men anag.) has a one-house system, supposedly in the interests of speed and efficiency. Effectively, it means there is no scrutiny. Further, MSPs do not enjoy the protected speech that their colleagues in Westminster have - during The Alex Salmond Trial MSPs were warned that they could be prosecuted by Sturgeon's lawyers should they say anything in the Holyrood Chamber that Mrs Fish objected to. Last year's Salmond inquiry showed the blurring between the SNP, its government,  civil servants and legal officers. Mr Sturgeon is Peter Murrell, the SNP’s chief executive. Leslie Evans,  against whom allegations of serious misconduct were made by Salmond about her handling of accusations of sexual misconduct against him, is the recently departed head of the civil service, and married to Derek McVay, a prominent SNP activist. In England, the Crown Prosecution Service is independent of the government. In Scotland, the chief prosecutor – the Lord Advocate – sits in Gnasher's cabinet. Did this present a conflict of interest when Salmond alleged that she conspired to put him in prison on false charges to remove him as a political threat? Hell, no.

Jack Perry, the former head of Scottish Enterprise, last year explained how Scottish companies ‘get shot down instantly and boycotted’ if they cause trouble for the SNP.  A 2018 newspaper investigation revealed that companies working for the Scottish government risk having their contracts terminated if they are disobliging about the SNP.  Charities have been subject to ‘gagging orders’ that prevent them from criticising SNP policies or backing rival campaigns to qualify for state funding. Ambulances, police, schools and social care are all under increased central control.
Before the pandemic, the country’s Information Commissioner warned that the Scottish public sector’s obsession with secrecy was a problem, with ‘serious systematic’ failures in the handling of freedom of information requests. These are routinely vetted, in spite of a legal requirement for them to be ‘applicant blind’. One was recently rejected on the grounds that it ‘would prejudice’ Scotland’s global relations if a critical report on the SNP’s school reforms – ‘Curriculum for Excellence’ – was published in full.
Data Divergence refers to the SNP's policy of changing measurement criteria so that data cannot be compared with England. For example, the Health Foundation in 2014 said that it was not possible to compare health outcomes across the four nations of the United Kingdom because Scotland had changed the way it collected data. It is likely that Scotland has the worst health service within the UK - but it cannot be proved. Drug deaths are the highest in the developed word. Sturgeon said that she takes full responsibility for that.

Youngster Saved from a lifetime of Addiction!

Cristiano Ronaldo broke young fan's phone(allegedly)

Heroic Ronaldo, who plays football for Manchester United at a salary of £480,000 per week, has put his career and income on the line in a bid to save a youngster from a miserable, wasted life of slavish addiction to what is jocularly known as the beautiful game by the gang of ruthless international capitalists who mastermind the footie. Ronaldo's sacrifice is under investigation by Merseyside Police. We can only hope that 14 year old Jake Harding, whose phone was heroically sacrificed by Ronaldo, will never go near a squalid futba den again, saving thousands upon thousands of pounds on season tickets, strip, brightly coloured shoes and plane tickets to foreign locations to support what addicts refer to as their team.

 

mr ishmael went to a football match once, taken by his dear old friend, Dick, who couldn't believe that once exposed to the magic, mr ish wouldn't fall helplessly under its spell.  Dick reported back that ish-a-mael had spent the entire match watching the crowd and was more fascinated by the piss flowing down the terraces than by the action on the pitch. Here's a little piece by mr ishmael posted on 11/10/2010 about the industry:

Keep Right on to the End of the Money

Boris Johnson's favourite provincials, the Scousers, are wetting themselves again, this time  over the fate of what it is pleased to call its football team. Not enough that the blessed John Lennon would've been seventy this week, probably have graced us with another thirty years of drug addiction, bullying, petulance, nude self-portraits, intolerable, twelve-bar druggy doggerel and peace activism, in bags, or beds. And that's not to mention all the avant garde horseshit from the  horrid, stupid, tight-fisted Nasty Nip  which he would have co-produced or co-created,  them being artists and everything. As if John,  fab mopster, Liverpool's favourite dead absentee, being dead wasn't bad enough, his fellow Americans have only gone and fucked-up the footy team.

I don't pay enough attention to football to know if the Liverpool squad contains even one local player, or even one English player, for that matter,  but my guess would be that it's loyalty will be not to the boneheads who turn up chanting and weeping in  expensive replica strips, about Dalgleish and Shanks, but to whichever gangster cartel, or whichever arm of skymadeupnewsandfilth, signs their hundred- grand-a-week paycheques,  that their loyalty will not be to local but to international sponsor.  No matter to Frank Scouse, that his team is owned by Money Inc, football is more important than life or death, isn't  that what they said, or realism.

We have waxed long and sentimental, here, in our broken-down, old leftie way, about the historical importance of the Football Association to towns and cities and counties up and down the land, how some of them were called this or that Wednesday because that's when they played, on the half-day, about how the players would travel on the same bus to the game as the supporters, how it was all a jolly good thing, relatively decent sportspersonship, a healthy outlet for ancient, male hostilities, a sanitised, often good-natured tribalism, how fans would follow their local team from cradle to grave, singing their inventively  scatalogical anthems down the pub before and on the stands, a torrent of piss flowing down the steps, a steaming Bovril imbibed against the cold. And how, now, globalised, the beautiful game is  just another  branch of consumerism, many of its players as wretchedly, thuggishly amoral as city traders, or wealth creators, as we who are about to be cut, must salute them.

It's shit, all this Liverpool stuff, one gang of billionaires or another finagling for ownership, each masquerading as sporty philanthropists, whether it's porn baron David Sullivan at wherever he is - West Ham? -  Russian  gangster,  Abramovich, at Chelsea or this pair of yanks and now a Singaporean billionaire,  entire football-mad communities, generations of them,  line up to be fleeced for season tickets and merchandise, heedless that the elastic loyalty, the foul play and the heart-stopping greed of those whom they worship, Spic, Dago, Kraut, Paddy, Tall And Tanned And Young And Lovely Boys From Ipanema and even the odd Zulu,  together with the  shit which happens when telly gets involved, these are the problem, not the owners;  the problem is the players; money-love, sponsorship deals, unpunishable gang-rapes,  coke-snorting morons in Bugattis; working, in retirement, for Morrisons, selling crisps and beer. And the fans, bewilderingly needy, sentimental, short-sighted and stupid. Locked together with the New Global Centurions, Whore-Banging Imbecile Potato-Man Rooney or Buy My Cosmetics Beckham, the Liverpool fans currently whining can at least console themselves with the thought that for as long as Stupidity has the price of a ticket in its pocket, they will never walk alone.

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Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - anthologies of the work of mr ishmael and stanislav, the young Polish plumber - can be purchased  from Amazon or from Lulu. 

 

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Fuckenell