Alan Ferrier

@alanferrier Prediction: Nigel Farage will lead whatever remains of the Conservative Party into the 2029 #GeneralElection. 5:45 PM - May 22,2024

I still stand by this, with the proviso that "whatever remains of the Conservative Party" will already have joined Reform.

Scottish Conservative peer defects to Reform UK Malcolm Offord appeared at a rally alongside Nigel Farage in Falkirk on Saturday to announce the move.

There are two categories of Reform supporter: millionaires and fuckwits. Check your bank balance to discover the one to which you belong.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Bankrupt Britain and the Offord Affair It’s routine and monotonous to write about and point at corruption in British politics. It’s become mundane to experience astonishing levels of corruption and sleaze but the examples ke…

.@bellacaledonia's take on the oleaginous Offord. Worth a read to remind yourself of his extreme right-wing views and the dark money which enabled his political career. He's angling for a Holyrood seat, make no mistake.
bellacaledonia.org.uk/2021/10/03/b...

Scottish Conservative peer defects to Reform UK Malcolm Offord appeared at a rally alongside Nigel Farage in Falkirk on Saturday to announce the move.

Malcolm Offord of "Vote No Borders" infamy was also a vocal advocate of Leave during the #Brexit referendum. Parachuted into the HoL by Johnson on the unquestionably democratic pretext of making extremely generous donations to the Tory Party.

Snakes gonna snake.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"...on top of 91 prisoners freed by mistake between April and October in England & Wales."

Imagine the Scottish Prison Service mistakenly released 103 prisoners. Imagine the newspaper front pages. Imagine Reporting Scotland. Imagine Newsnight. Imagine Scotland Today. Imagine Call Kaye.

Happy #StAndrewsDay, troops.

Gaelic and Scots now recognised as official languages The milestone is one of a number of new measures taking effect on St Andrew's Day from the Scottish Languages Act.

This will drive all the right people bananas.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If a person is working full-time and has to be on Universal Credit, then the "benefits scrounger" is their employer.

Asylum seekers’ jewellery could be seized to pay for processing costs, says Home Office minister Idea borrowed from Denmark is latest attempt to reduce number of people seeking asylum in UK

Perhaps they could also have their teeth checked for any gold fillings.
www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

It was during the 1984-85 miners' strike that I first began to regard the BBC as an arm of the state. I've seen little to change my opinion since.

Reminder that Tim Davie, who's just resigned as BBC Director-General, stood in an election for the Tories in Hammersmith, was deputy chairman of the Hammersmith and Fulham Conservative Party and in 2020 spent his first day in the job visiting BBC Scotland in Glasgow.

A proposal to require property developers to include at least one “swift brick” in every new home to save swifts, house martins, sparrows, and starlings - all of which are in rapid decline - at a mere cost of £35 per building has been rejected by UK Labour.
naturalworldfund.com/labour-block...

You know what really boils my piss? Those using a disastrous #Brexit, forced upon a Scotland that didn’t vote for it, as an attempt to prove that Scottish independence would be equally disastrous. “We’ve fucked this up so badly you now have no alternative but to stay with us.”

Cameron's plea to Putin: help me stop Salmond

Awkward:

"When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o' our ain, we could aye peeble them wi' stanes when they werena gude bairns - But naebody's nails can reach the length o' Lunnon."
—Walter Scott (1771-1832) "Heart of Midlothian"

“We do not want an independent Scotland because we dislike the English, but because we want separation from that Union of financial, military and monarchic establishments calling itself Great Britain.”
—Alasdair Gray, “Independence: An Argument for Home Rule”, 2014.

If you believe in human rights but you don't believe they apply to everyone, then what you actually believe in is privilege.
bsky.app/profile/urc....

The hero of Huntingdon: Algerian train worker, 48, who saved multiple lives during horror train stabbing | LBC CCTV during the attack showed him acting

Bloody foreigners, coming over here, saving our lives.
www.lbc.co.uk/article/trai...

Take a look at this graph. It should be a rocket up our collective arses. It's time we took independence a lot more seriously than we are doing. Per capita, Scotland is as rich as Europe but leaks more wealth than sub-Saharan Africa.
www.thenational.scot/politics/255...

When you hear, "new information has emerged in recent times..." from a former royal press officer you know it actually means, "what the royals have known in full for years and which was so damaging they paid £12m to suppress it, is now coming into the public domain."

Wee factoid: the name “Mountbatten” was adopted on 14 July 1917, three days before the British royal family changed its name to “Windsor”, by members of the Battenberg family residing in the UK, due to rising anti-German sentiment during World War I. The name is a direct Anglicisation.

Since Scotland voted No, energy costs have increased by about £3,000.

General practice to receive more than £500m Announcement 'reflects the level of funding needed to stabilise and rebuild general practice across Scotland'

BMA Scotland welcomes £531m deal with Scottish Government - the largest investment in core GP services in Scotland to date - as a ‘significant step in the right direction’ to stabilise and rebuild general practice.

I'm sure Reporting Scotland will be all over this.
www.bma.org.uk/news-and-opi...

Dounreay waste particle 'most radioactive' find for three years The fragment has been categorised as

A wee nugget here regarding Dounreay which may have slipped under the radar: "The full decontamination of the site is expected to take *more than 300 years*"

12 generations. I wonder if they'll have "allowed" us another independence referendum by then.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

BBC Scotland News: Over £1m spent on sending ferry staff to Turkey.

One of the most blatant lies I can remember from BBC Scotland (and that's saying something.) Basically a copy/paste of a Scottish Tory press release. The actual figure involved was £23,000 over 3 years. The BBC has added wages that would be paid whether the staff involved were in Turkey or not.

Royal insider's blistering three-word rant about Prince Andrew speaks volumes A former royal aide has allegedly described Prince Andrew's attitude towards staff in a royal book.

Royal protection officers routinely give codenames to those they’re looking after. The late Queen was known as ‘Purple One’, for example, while Prince Philip was referred to as ‘The Greek’.

Prince Andrew's codename was ‘The Cunt’.
www.express.co.uk/news/royal/2...

White House demolition.

I seem to remember that the Yanks made a huge fuss about this when the Brits did it in 1814.

Oh, I bet she is.

Do you remember, back in 2014, when our unionist chums persuaded a majority of Scots that the UK was a stable country where decency, human rights, respect for the rule of law, internationalism and standards in public life were cherished?

Seems a long time ago. A generation, even.

Only a couple of decades ago, similar lines were spewed out by representatives of the National Front and British National Party for which they were, rightly, castigated from all sides. Now it's become normalised. How far the UK has fallen.
bsky.app/profile/theg...