30-04-2025
Reality of challenging lives will push demand for Westminster's demise
Some observers wish to correlate this trend with the inflation in university graduates by a factor of four since the seventies, the implication being that we are smart enough now to manage our own affairs in a way that we were not hitherto! There may indeed be a correlation, but as with so many areas of life we have to separate correlation from causation if we are to find the truth.
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The 'causes' of the enduring and incremental appeal of taking full responsibility for the quality of our own lives in Scotland are increasingly apparent to all of us as we leave our front doors every day.
Town centres with trees growing out of the walls, run-down and abandoned housing and 'brown field' sites, the anxious demeanour of neighbours who have just traversed a fuel-starved winter and now prepare to pay enormous bills in a land of energy plenty. The transgenerational desolation of unemployment or the insecurity of the precarious non-unionised 'gig' economy.
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The resignation mixed with stifled outrage of those who have spent an hour attempting to get a GP telephone appointment three weeks hence for their distressed family member. The hobbling older folk on the waiting list for hip and knee operations and poor folk with obesity and diabetes through no fault of their own, chatting to thirtysomethings on methadone with no teeth just back from the funeral of a friend who ended their life at the end of a needle. Stressed care workers from all over the globe trying hard to help provide some kind of TLC to our elderly and disabled while Mr Streeting et al lunch secretly with private healthcare lobbyists who would add insult to our demographic injuries by surreptitiously creating a system of healthcare akin to the devastatingly ineffective and cripplingly expensive one in the USA. You know I could go on!
Hope springs eternal and the consistent and gathering momentum noted by the University of Edinburgh Constitutional Centre will almost certainly reach its apogee in an awakening of the citizenry sooner than many think so we can gradually reverse the decimation of so many of our children's prospects as outlined above. Neoliberal Westminster's demise is 'comin yet for a' that'; the united British nations and regions demand a better society and Scotland is, as ever, in the vanguard. In 2026 we must take the advice and counsel of our 'babes' and vote for a rededicated and humble SNP in our constituencies and Alba on the list so that recovery may begin in earnest, for all our sakes
Dr Andrew Docherty
Selkirk
BLACKROCK, the world's largest fund manager with assets worth $11.58 trillion, is buying up more 'undervalued' UK assets including Gatwick airport, farm land, homes, and renewable energy projects such as wind farms in Grimsby and solar power production in Pembrokeshire, controlling energy prices to millions of homes in the poorest regions of the UK.
An FOI request filed last week asks the Cabinet Office to release information about meetings between Starmer and BlackRock, which it has so far refused to do.
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It's not just Westminster politicians getting together with BlackRock. In 2022 Nicola Sturgeon met with its then head of Europe, Middle East and Africa, Stephen Cohen. The briefing note UK civil servants prepared ahead of that meeting advised Sturgeon to: 'Welcome the significant commitment BlackRock has made to Scotland through their operations in Edinburgh and investment in the wider Scottish economy.'
BlackRock's Scottish assets include: Edinburgh Airport; unknown quantities of Scottish farmland purchased through a £100m hedge fund set up in 2007; a 30% stake in private Peel Ports, which owns and operates several Scottish ports through its Clydeport division; £30 billion in Scottish Widows pension assets; the Tormywheel wind farm in West Lothian; the Glens of Foudland wind farm in Aberdeenshire; Whitelee Wind Farm through BlackRock's stake in Iberdrola, which owns ScottishPower.
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Let's be clear about what this means. All of BlackRock's profits are repatriated abroad – nothing is retained for the Scottish people and BlackRock has no incentive to invest in and improve these assets. Its only interest is in milking them dry.
The incessant and willing surrender of Scotland to vulture capitalists like Larry Fink by feckless, devolutionist, careerist politicians like Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney and Kate Forbes is a crime against the Scottish people.
Nothing short of a revolution can stop it.
Leah Gunn Barrett
Edinburgh
