The rip-off PFI fiasco continues

The Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has proven to be a disastrous policy for pretty much everyone apart from the profiteering corporate beneficiaries and the consultancy firms that rake in cash by helping them draw up their rip-off one-sided deals to extract vast sums of money from the taxpayer.

The idea of PFI is that instead of the government funding infrastructure projects directly (using their access to very cheap finance) they get the private sector to borrow the money at much higher market rates, then rent the infrastructure off the private sector on long-term contracts that end up costing many multiples of what the thing would have actually cost to build.

PFI is like the government turning to those parasitical Hire Purchase companies to buy things slowly at five times the price, rather than getting a low interest loan to pay a realistic upfront cost for what they're buying.

In 2011 The Parliamentary Treasury Select Committee finally got around to admitting that PFI is as an "extremely inefficient method of financing [public infrastructure] projects", yet one government after another has continued using them because, although they are a rip-off, they provide a means of hiding public spending off the public balance sheet by loading current infrastructure investment costs onto future generations.

The Tories began introducing rip-off PFI deals in the early 1990s and New Labour continued rolling them out because it helped them hide chunks of public spending off the public balance sheet in order to stick to Gordon Brown's absurd and arbitrary "Golden Rule" that public borrowing shouldn't exceed 40% of GDP (a rule the was quickly forgotten about when they found £1.5 trillion to bail out the banks that had gambled themselves into insolvency).

One of the recurring themes with PFI is that the opposition parties criticise it, then as soon as they're in power they begin using it to their own advantage. When the Tories introduced it in the early 1990s Labour politicians like Harriet Harman and Alistair Darling condemned it as a form of stealth-privatisation that burdens future generations with the costs of current investment. When New Labour took power these concerns were instantly forgotten about. Towards the end of New Labour, when they were signing up to one rip-off PFI contract after another, the shadow chancellor George Osborne began whinging on about PFI being a rip-off. When George Osborne and the Tories were enabled into power by the Lib-Dems, he simply re-branded PFI as PF2 and continued using the same kind of rip-off financing deals to load current infrastructure costs onto the shoulders of future generations.

Another recurring theme with PFI is the procession of disastrous projects. From NHS trusts crippled under the financial burden of servicing their PFI debts to local councils being forced to pay £millions in rent and service charges on completely empty PFI schools, PFI keeps proving to be a disaster to everyone but the corporate profiteers.

The latest in this long line of monumental PFI cock-ups is the closure of 17 PFI built schools in Edinburgh over safety concerns, which has left some 9,000 students stranded. The decision to indefinitely shut the schools came after the PFI consortium that operates the schools admitted that they couldn't ensure the structural safety of the buildings after serious structural issues were uncovered during repair work to Oxgangs Primary School where a huge section of wall collapsed in January 2016. 

The Edinburgh Schools Partnership consortium (Amey, Miller Construction & Bank of Scotland) who are responsible for this fiasco released a public statement that made it sound like they were doing the public a favour by investing why the schools they built are so structurally unsound that they have a tendency to collapse! They shouldn't just be accepting "full financial responsibility for investigating and resolving these issues", they should be accepting full financial responsibility for the alternative childcare arrangements made by the parents of the 9,000 kids who can't go to school because the profiteers who built and operate their school buildings have no idea if they're going to fall down or not.

It's easy to blame New Labour for this situation in Edinburgh because all of those buildings were built on their watch as part of a £360 million PFI, but it's important to note that the SNP government in Scotland has done their own huge splurge of PFI spending too:

● The Aberdeen western peripheral route: Capital cost £469m, cost of PFI payments £1.45bn 

● City of Glasgow College campus: Capital cost £193m, cost of PFI payments £604m  

● Scottish Blood Transfusion Service HQ: Capital cost £33.3m, cost of PFI payments £100m 

● Anderson high school, Shetland: Capital cost £41m, cost of PFI payments £102m

The Tories invented PFI; New Labour created far more PFI debt legacies than any other party during their 13 years in power; the Lib-Dems enabled the Tories back into power and helped them continue using PFIs; and the SNP have signed up to all kinds of rip-off PFI deals since they came to power in Scotland too.

It turns out that the Green Party are the biggest political party in Scotland to actually oppose these appalling rip-off PFI deals. The Green candidate for Lothian Andy Wightman is calling for a full review of all PFI contracts in Scotland. Here's what he said:

"The Edinburgh school fiasco opens up a massive can of worms as to what the true legacy is of years of private financing of core public services. That is why Green MSPs, in the new parliament, will be demanding a root and branch review of all PPP/PFI contracts."

The SNP look set to win a landslide victory in the 2016 Scottish Parliamentary elections, so it looks like PFI will be there to stay. Given their pro-PFI histories it seems very unlikely that the Tories, Labour or the Lib-Dems would be able to effectively hold the SNP government to account on PFI, so if I was a Scottish resident I'd definitely be looking into who my local Scottish Green candidate is at the very least.

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Scottish independence, a tale of hope against fear

In just a few days the people of Scotland will go to the polls to decide the future of their nation.

I'm not Scottish, I'm a Yorkshireman, and I don't live in Scotland. However I have written extensively about the Scottish independence referendum because I passionately believe that Scotland could be a better country if they had a smaller, more democratic and more accountable government, instead of being ruled over by the corrupt, self-serving and unaccountable Westminster establishment down in London.

A message of hope

The Yes campaign has attracted support from all kinds of people, from all different walks of life, and all different political persuasions. In my view the one thing that unifies them all is the idea that an independent Scotland has the potential to do things better. It's the hope of a working to create a better Scotland.

This hope for a better Scotland isn't just an idle optimistic fantasy because there is already plenty of evidence that a better Scotland can be achieved through the localisation of political power. Thanks to the existence of the Scottish parliament, access to university education in Scotland hasn't been commodified and financialised as it has been in the rest of the UK. Scottish students from poor and ordinary backgrounds aren't forced to assume huge debts, which are then repayed through a 9% aspiration tax on their disposable income, that for millions will not be payed off, even through an entire lifetime of work.

Thanks to the devolution of power over the NHS and the education system, Scotland has remained immune to the waves of Tory ideological privatisations that have seen £1.5 billion in NHS contracts handed out to Tory party donors, and over 3,000 English schools simply given away to unaccountable private sector interests.

The success of an independent Scotland is by no means guaranteed. If the Yes campaign wins the vote, the people of Scotland can't just sit back and relax at a job well done, It is absolutely vital that the amazing spirit of political engagement that has been awoken by the independence debate is kept alive.

In order for an independent Scotland to "do things better" the ordinary people of Scotland will have to engage in the process of constitutional renewal, work hard to hold their politicians to account, and work together to make sure that the issues that are important to them stay at the forefront of the political agenda.

A Yes vote isn't the objective in itself. The real objective is for the people of Scotland to give themselves the opportunity to hold the Scottish government to account, in a way that has been simply impossible to do through the corrupt and antiquated political system that has allowed the Westminster establishment to ruthlessly enforce their agenda of austerity and privatisation against the will of the vast majority of the population.

A message of fear

The No campaign has promoted a very different message, a message based around the basic animal instinct of fear. The Westminster establishment and their allies in the mainstream media have bombarded the public with one scare story after another.

The No campaign has constantly fearmongered about how Scottish oil is going to dry up, even though the experts are divided on how many billions of barrels remain untapped, and how many hundreds of billions of pounds that will be worth to the Scottish economy. The only consensus between the experts in the oil industry over how much oil remains seems to be that the figures publicised by George Osborne's Office for Budget Responsibility are extraordinary under-estimates.

The No campaign has fearmongered about Scotland not being able to defend itself. Who could forget the former Secretary of State for Scotland George Robertson (who now occupies a seat in the anti-democratic House of Lords) demeaning his own country by referring to it as "a minor entity in the north of Britain" as he tried to fearmonger about the threat of Islamist extremism to an independent Scotland. In my view the threat of Islamist extremism in Scotland would be severely diminished if future governments of the nation avoid participation in the invasion and occupation of predominantly Muslim countries.

The No campaign has fearmongered about the major banks relocating their headquarters to London, presumably because they assume that the Scottish public are such a bunch of feckless halfwits that they'll have completely forgotten that it was the banks that created the economic crisis in the first place with their massive fraud schemes and their incredible binge of reckless unregulated gambling. Even if some of the banks do relocate their headquarters, they can't just take all of their jobs and tax revenues with them. Taxes on financial services provided in an independent Scotland would go to the Scottish government*, no matter where the official headquarters of the bank that provides them. 

RBS, which is 82% owned by the taxpayer, threatening to leave an independent Scotland in order to try to influence the outcome of the referendum just goes to show the desperation of the Westminster establishment. What on earth is a publicly owned bank doing trying to interfere with a public vote? 

Even though the No campaign has been losing ground in the debate as the referendum has drawn nearer, they have stubbornly refused to change tack. And in the final week, ludicrous stories were circulated about how the supermarkets would impose massive price rises in an independent Scotland. Fortunately there was someone with the good sense to actually write to the supermarkets and ask them. The response from all four of the supermarket giants was the same; that they have no plans at all to raise prices in an independent Scotland.

It beggars belief that the leaders of Better Together can't see that their fearmongering has been driving undecided people into the arms of the Yes camp, and with just days to go before the vote they still haven't tried to present anything resembling a coherent positive case for continued union. All they seem capable of doing is pressurising their corporate buddies into talking down the prospects for an Independent Scotland in order to constantly snipe that "Scotland just won't be able to hack it on it's own". If I was a Unionist (which I'm not) I'd be utterly dismayed with the risible Better Together campaign and the hopelessly complacent debating strategies they've used.

Perhaps the biggest fearmongering campaign of all is the insistence by the Westminster establishment that Scotland will not be able to use the Pound, which is of course, as Alistair Darling himself admits, an impossible threat. Scotland can use the Pound because it is a freely tradeable currency. The only thing that the Westminster establishment can do in reality is to rule out a formal currency union between Scotland and the remainder of the UK.

In my view a long-term currency union wouldn't be in the interests of an independent Scotland anyway (look at the Argentina-US pegged currency union and the Eurozone), however a temporary fixed-term currency union in order to ensure economic stability during the process of constitutional separation would have been by far the most pragmatic option from an economic perspective, because economic uncertainty leads to economic instability (risk aversion, market panics and the development of economic crises).

Such a short term currency agreement would have mitigated some of the worst effects of economic uncertainly on either side of the border during the constitutional separation, however such a pragmatic stance was never going to be adopted by the Westminster establishment because uncertainty over the future currency of Scotland is one of the pillars of their anti-independence propaganda campaign. The fact that the Westminster establishment would put a political propaganda narrative above the stability of the economies on either side of the border just goes to show how terribly unfit to rule they really are.

Conclusion

I know it's not possible to imagine that all pro-Independence people are hopeful optimists, nor to tar all anti-independence people as cynical and fearful pessimists, because that would be the kind of naive absolutist thinking I so often argue against in my work. However, in my view it is fair to describe that the propaganda strategies employed by the two campaigns as a battle between hope and fear.

The spirit of hope must be stronger than fear, because what optimism can we have for the future if, even after the amazing political reawakening of Scotland, the majority still choose fear over hope? What optimism can we possibly have for the future if the positive, complex and very human spirit of hope can be defeated by the negative, simplistic and animalistic sensation of fear?

I'm hoping that later this week I'll be able to celebrate the rebirth of the Scottish nation, and drink heartily to the future of Scotland, rather than having to lament that the people of Scotland passed up the greatest opportunity of their lifetimes to effect real political change because they allowed the animal instinct of fear to overpower the human spirit of hope.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

* As long as the Scottish people are prepared to pressurise the Scottish government into clamping down on tax-dodging.

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How the anti-independence campaign is falling apart
        
Scottish independence and uncertainty
           
Scottish independence, vote Yes because we don't need your pity
                     
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Why is the Better Together campaign such a shambles?

In the last couple of weeks before the Scottish independence referendum I've covered the subject in some detail on my blog. Two of the core themes of my work have been the complacency of the Westminster establishment, and the astonishingly poor campaign strategy of the anti-independence camp.

In the article I wrote about the failings of the anti-independence campaign I identified four key areas of failure. The strategic error of ruling out Devo Max in order to play an "all or nothing" gamble with the constitutional future of the UK; the incessantly negative fearmongering tone of the No campaign; the risky and economically destabilising "you ain't keeping the pound" game of economic brinkmanship; and the unedifying spectacle of the three establishment party leaders making a haphazard dash to Scotland to make some undeliverable last minute promises.

There is plenty of detail and analysis in the original article, but for reasons of space I chose to leave out more detailed analysis of why I think Better Together has been such a strategic mess, which is the reason for this secondary article.

Let's get this absolutely clear before I go any further. Even if the swing to Yes is halted and reversed in the last week before the referendum, and the No campaign somehow manage to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, the anti-independence campaign has been completely inept. With the full weight of the political establishment and the corporate media behind them, the anti-independence campaign has still managed to lose control of the way the debate is being framed, and consequently they're losing the debate in the streets and in public meetings across Scotland.

Given the huge advantage of having the mainstream media on their side, the only way to explain the appalling failure of the No campaign is to look at the key personalities and decision makers. In my view the two most obvious politicians to blame for the strategically inept nature of the anti-independence campaign are Alistair Darling and George Osborne.

Alistair Darling

Other than the fact that he is an MP for a Scottish constituency, it's extremely difficult to think of any reason why Alistair Darling was selected as the leader of the anti-independence movement.

It's almost as if the political establishment imagine that the public are such a bunch of feckless halfwits that we'll simply have forgotten that he was the man who rescued the insolvent financial sector with £1.5 trillion in bailouts (over 100% of the GDP of the entire UK at the time) and demanded virtually nothing from the banks in return.

After years of New Labour turning a blind eye to the catastrophic decline of the UK manufacturing sector, Darling's bailouts for the insolvent banks were by far the biggest state subsidies in history.

What makes this grotesque example of "socialism for the rich" so much more offensive is that in his youth Darling was a Trotskyist and a member of the International Marxist Group. It doesn't matter if you're a left-wing or not, a guy who changes his stance from outright communism, to one of blatantly serving the interests of the capitalist financier class at the expense of the public, is clearly not a man to be trusted at all.

George Osborne
      
George Osborne may not be at the forefront of the anti-independence campaign, but his fingerprints are clearly all over it. The most notable influence he's had is the economically risky game of "you ain't getting the pound" brinkmanship.

Most well informed people know that George Osborne hasn't had a proper job in his entire life other than short stints at data entry and towel folding, and that he has no economics qualifications at all either. What a lot of people don't know is that aside from being the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he is also the chief strategist at Tory party HQ. Osborne has been deeply involved with Conservative Central Office since his decision to become a career politician in 1994. It's worth noting that since Osborne has been involved in Tory party strategic planning, the party has endured its longest run in history without achieving a majority government.

Since the Liberal Democrats helped the Tories sneak into power in 2010 George Osborne has been working tirelessly to extract the costs of Alistair Darling's bankers' bailouts from the poor and ordinary in the UK, causing a huge drop in public spending power, and the flatlining of the UK economy. Osborne's ideological austerity experiment is conclusive evidence that the man is oblivious to, unable to understand, or willfully ignorant of basic macroeconomic theory.

The flatlining of the UK economy that Osborne's ideological austerity experiment has caused, has resulted in him borrowing an incredible £200 billion more than he claimed he would back in 2010. In fact, Osborne has created so much extra debt during his four years as chancellor, that he's added more to the national debt than every Labour government in history combined!

Given that Osborne is so evidently clueless about macroeconomics, it's no surprise at all that he seems to have another blank spot when it comes to uncertainly, which is a hugely important factor in economics.

Nobody with the slightest understanding of how important economic uncertainty is, would ever consider deliberately seeding the Scottish electorate with fear over the future of their currency with "hard man" threats like "No ifs, no buts, we will not share the pound if Scotland separates from the UK" as George Osborne has been doing.

The problem with uncertainty is that it doesn't just affect Scotland when ridiculous threats like this are made, it destabilises the whole United Kingdom economy because economics doesn't exist in a vacuum. If you introduce uncertainty about the future value of the pound, you're clearly going to destabilise markets either side of the border.

In order to minimise the effects of economic uncertainty, the two sides should have sat down together and negotiated a short-term currency union during the process of constitutional separation in the event of a Yes vote. This would have been for the best of both economies, but George Osborne and the anti-independence crew clearly give much higher priority to making threats in order to intimidate the Scottish electorate, than they do to minimalising economic uncertainty, and avoiding the worst of its economically destabilising side effects.

No plan B

With inept clowns like Alistair Darling and George Osborne behind the anti-independence strategy, it's no wonder that it's so absolutely hopeless. Neither is it surprising that despite the extraordinary bias of the mainstream media, the Yes campaign are winning the debate on the ground.

One of the biggest indicators of the strategic ineptness of the anti-independence movement is the fact that David Cameron's official spokesperson has openly admitted that the government has made absolutely no contingency plans in case the Scottish electorate choose independence because "The government’s entire focus is on making the case for the UK staying together".

That the government has absolutely no plans should Scotland choose independence other than "they ain't sharing the Pound, no matter how much economic damage it causes either side of the border" reveals their endless repetitions of the claim that "Salmond has no plan B" as the nonsensical and profoundly ironic nonsense that it is.

If these people had any strategic nous at all, they wouldn't be automatically assuming that they're going to win, they'd have a contingency plan that amounted to more than "hard man" threats over the future of the Pound, and they certainly wouldn't be using "No plan B" as a favoured propaganda narrative, when it's absolutely clear that they themselves are the ones without anything remotely resembling a contingency plan.

Conclusion

Alistair Darling and George Osborne are clearly two of the most inept Chancellors in history. One was responsible for the biggest display of "socialism for the rich" in economic history despite having once been a Marxist, and the other has created more debt in four years than every Labour government in history combined, and clearly hasn't the faintest clue about important economic stuff like uncertainty and elementary macroeconomics.

With strategic incompetents like this arguing the case for union, it's absolutely no surprise at all that despite all of their advantages, they've run an appalling campaign driving countless moderates and undecideds into the arms of the Yes campaign.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of revenue for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. 

If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, 

it would be massively appreciated.

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ANOTHER ANGRY VOICE    
    
How the Better Together campaign is failing
       
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Scottish independence and the complacency of the Westminster establishment

How Labour dropped the ball on Scottish independence
             

How Labour dropped the ball on Scottish independence

Whoever devised the hardline Labour party stance on Scottish independence was clearly a strategic novice. In this article I'm going to explain why it was such a poor strategic error for Labour to openly side with the extremely unpopular Coalition government and the desperately endangered political species that is the Scottish Conservative Party. Then I will go on to explain what I think the Labour leadership could have done differently.

How Labour dropped the ball

The debate over greater autonomy for Scotland could have been a great opportunity for Labour to showcase their differences from the Tory party. Instead they have chosen to "dance with the devil" by openly siding with the Tory party in order to oppose greater autonomy for the Scottish people.

It's not like this is the first time that Ed Miliband has decided to openly collude with the Tories either. Back in March 2013 Miliband allowed Iain Duncan Smith to table a vile piece of retroactive legislation as "emergency legislation" so that it could be passed through parliament in a single day, and then ordered his MPs to abstain from the vote, in order to allow Iain Duncan Smith to retroactively cover up the fact that through his sheer incompetence he had unlawfully forced thousands of people onto unpaid labour schemes. In July 2014 Miliband and the Labour leadership sided with the Tories once again by ordering Labour MPs to vote in favour of a Tory bill to allow the security services to continue dredging the private communications data of millions of innocent people.

One of the clearest illustrations of the stupidity of choosing to sing from the Tory hymnsheet is the way that Labour have been forced to present two completely different narratives on the NHS either side of the border. Down in England the Labour Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has warned that "NHS privatisation is being forced through at pace and scale" and called for a halt to NHS privatisations until the 2015 General Election. Meanwhile, north of the border Alistair Darling (who like all Scottish Labour MPs is a man who is fighting desperately for his job not to be abolished) has tried to ridicule people's concerns over NHS privatisation as "scaremongering". The hopelessness of Labour's mixed messages on the NHS are a direct consequence of their decision to side so closely with the Tory party.

The Labour decision to unify with the Tories and Lib-Dems in a battle against greater autonomy for Scotland has also strongly reinforced the the impression that there is essentially no difference between the three Westminster establishment parties. Whichever one you vote for, you'll get virtually the same policies. The only difference being the colour of the tie of the politician who is voting to sell off your public services on the cheap to their corporate mates, voting in favour of new draconian legislation to restrict the freedoms of the public in order to protect the interests of the establishment class, and all the while fiddling their expenses to make sure they make as much money as possible out of the Westminster gravy train.

The vision of Labour MPs like Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown sharing a political platform with the Tories is appalling enough for those of us who live in the rest of the UK, but to the people of Scotland it's much, much worse. The Tory party is widely despised in Scotland for many reasons, most notably the pilfering of Scottish oil revenues in order to hand out huge tax breaks to their wealthy backers in the City of London, Maggie Thatcher's Scottish Poll Tax experiment, the deliberate ideological attacks on Scottish workers and Scottish industry, the privatisation of so many Scottish services against the will of the Scottish public, and more recently the hated "Bedroom Tax". For Labour to ally themselves so closely with a toxic brand like the Tories like this is a huge mistake that the Scottish Labour party may never live down.

The fact is that should Scotland achieve independence, the SNP would lose their raison d'etre, but due to Labour's ridiculous hard line stance against greater autonomy for Scotland, surely nobody could consider them suitable rulers of an independent state that they have been so fervently opposed to?

So what should Labour have done differently?

The decision to share a political platform with the politically toxic Tory party was an extremely poor one for the reasons outlined above, but what could the Labour party have done differently?

In my view, the biggest mistake the Labour party made was the decision to continue backing the Tories, even after David Cameron ruled out a Devo Max option on the referendum.

Devo Max would have transferred more political powers to Scotland, but kept the Union in tact when it came to defence policy and foreign affairs. The evidence is absolutely clear that Devo Max would have been the preferred option of the Scottish electorate. When asked to choose between Devo Max and full independence, the Devo Max option won 61% to 39%. When asked to choose between Devo Max and continuation of the status quo, Devo Max won by 62% to 38%.

When David Cameron ruled out Devo Max in order to hold a gun to the heads of the Scottish electorate in a "with us or against us" binary choice, he ruled out the option that the overwhelming majority of Scottish people would have preferred.

The Labour stance should have been to continue arguing in favour of Devo Max, instead of siding so closely with the Tories. This would have allowed Labour to preface every single pronouncement on the independence issue with a strong attack on the Tory party for ruling out the option that the majority of Scottish people actually support.

The Labour message should have been "we want what the clear majority of Scottish people want, but David Cameron is forcing Scotland to choose between the two less popular options".

Adopting this stance would have given the Labour party the platform to talk up the achievements of the Scottish Parliament, and their own role in its creation. They could have spoken of how greater autonomy for Scotland has protected the Scottish NHS and the Scottish education system from the appalling mass privatisations of the English NHS and thousands of English schools. The narrative that devolution of power has been great for Scotland is one that would have resonated strongly with the Scottish electorate, and built the foundation of the argument for further devolution of political power.

If Labour wanted to show their support for the Union they could still have done so, but without sharing a political platform with the Tories. The Labour party could have made a commitment to offering the Scottish people the Devo Max referendum that they actually want the next time they come to power in Westminster, or in the Scottish parliament. This Devo Max stance would have established three important things.

1. It would have demonstrated to the Scottish people that Labour is "in tune" with what the majority of Scottish people actually want. 
2. It would have put clear distance between the Labour party and the Tory party.
3. It would have given the majority of Scottish people a strong reason to vote for the Labour party.

In deciding to side with the Tories, the Labour party has done a very large amount of damage to their reputation. In my view a much more sensible option would have been to steer well clear of the Tories and the "Better Together" fearmongering campaign, and to adopt a political stance that set them clearly apart from the Tories, and actually represented the will of the clear majority of the Scottish electorate.
  
Conclusion

I've tried to keep my strongly pro-independence views out of the above analysis in order to provide some reasonably balanced strategic analysis of Labour's woeful decision to jump into bed with the Tories, instead of carefully spelling out their own vision for the future of Scotland.

Had Devo Max been an option on the Scottish referendum ballot, I would have been forced to make a very difficult decision between supporting greater autonomy for Scotland or supporting full autonomy for Scotland. The fact that David Cameron decided to play a ridiculous "all-or-nothing" gamble with the constitutional future of Scotland by ruling out Devo Max has left me with a very easy decision indeed, to favour full autonomy for Scotland over the continuation of the unacceptable status quo.

 Another Angry Voice  is a not-for-profit page which generates absolutely no revenue from advertising and accepts no money from corporate or political interests. The only sources of income for  Another Angry Voice  are small donations from people who see some value in my work. If you appreciate my efforts and you could afford to make a donation, it would be massively appreciated.

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