A guest article from retired lawyer Ewan Kennedy, a regular and valued commentator on Yours for Scotland. Ewan lives in Argyll.
Let’s stop the courts being used to shut down secret filming on fishfarms!
I’m writing to draw attention to the crowdfunder that has just gone live, accessible here:
https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-mowi-privatising-public-waters-in-scotland/
There are now court cases by three of the largest industrial salmon producers in the world, MOWI, Scottish Sea Farms, and Bakkafrost, against the single handed environmental activist Don Staniford. Together, these companies operate many, if not most, of the groups of cages that are now to be found in almost every inshore sea loch on the west coast. Staniford is one of a tiny group of dedicated environmental activists who have taken on work that government regulators, such as Marine Scotland and SEPA, have signally failed to do in recent years in monitoring what is going on in our coastal environment. Because of a combination of reduced budgets, restrictions on inspections during lockdown, and in the case of SEPA a catastrophic hacking, which shut down its entire computer system, these bodies have failed to keep a proper watch on a public asset.
The work done by Staniford and others has resulted in horrific images finding their way into the mainstream media with, currently, hardly a day passing without a new revelation. The evidence gathered has ranged from massive death tolls on units to instances of animal cruelty, to the use of seal scaring devices. When the full results are known, it’s likely that 2023 will prove to have been the worst ever for salmon dying before reaching maturity, with many million fish sent by road for chemical disposal, representing thousands of lorry loads on our West Highland roads.
Instead of addressing the problems on their sites, these large multinational companies have chosen to go to court. The cases have been brought in local sheriff courts in Argyll & Bute, with each company asking the court to grant orders of interdict, equivalent to injunctions in English law, the effect of which would be to create effective exclusion zones preventing Staniford and, by extension, any other member of the public, from approaching closer than fifteen metres from a fish cage. What is notable is that in none of the cases is there a suggestion that Staniford has caused any damage in the course of his investigations. His activities are conceptually quite distinct from those of protestors, such as Greenpeace and Extinction Rebellion.
Bizarrely, the three companies also seek to prevent Staniford from operating drones over their units, as if they can control not only our open seas, but the air space above it! He does not operate drones, but others have done so, and the footage that has emerged has been incredibly revealing.
As someone with a long term interest in our coastal environment, I have been happy to carry out basic research work as a minor support to Staniford’s legal team. I will not be taking any benefit from the crowdfunder, which is purely to cover court costs and provide some compensation to the professional solicitors and counsel, dedicated and principled men, who have to date put in hundreds of hours of work, totally unpaid.
MY COMMENTS
My thanks to Ewan for keeping my readers in touch with the latest developments on this important issue. Don’s appeal against the judgement from the Sheriff Court in Oban will be heard in Edinburgh at the start of February.
Apart from the environmental concerns I think we need to be wary of giving multinational corporations powers over issues that could potentially affect both our seabeds and even our air space. Those aspects do not form part of Don Staniford’s defence as far as I know but I think they need consideration and I plan to raise this within Salvo as they relate to the Crown Office in Scotland who are supposed to manage them on behalf of the Crown. In Scotland , the Crown is the Scottish people not any English Monarch. I think the “people” would take a dim view of handing these powers to large, multinational corporations.
I am, as always
Yours for Scotland
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I used to think that people were at liberty to sail the sea.
Commercial companies may have set up fish nets to pen in fish but what right do they have to create exclusion zones.
Of course what right to the hapless Scots collies have to know about what might be going on.
Big business and their state backers are out of control. And personal exclusion zones, slaps, the emasculating of so called protection agencies is all part of the Scottish coolies lot. But who are they anyway to worry about.
Scottish salmon, the chlorinated chicken from our not so pristine waters, folks should avoid it like the plague.
It’s a produce reputation destroyer and Scotland produces more than hormone fed lice infected caged salmon.
And as we know, reputations are easily destroyed, and hard to reestablish. British beef anyone?
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Absolutely agree, Willie, Not only do I no longer buy Scottish farmed salmon but I urge my friends to avoid it also, For recent, just 2 so far, Burns supper starters, I have made Smoked Trout pate as an alternaticv to anything salmon basaed, and explained my reasons.
Happy to contribute to the Crowd funder and i wish it all success and also to themove to educate people about the role of the Crown in Scotland. Good luck to that too
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You do realise that the trout will also be farmed fish,
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In the early 90s I worked for the largest smoked salmon company in the UK. Standards were sky-high. Salmon were raised in farms in the open sea, mostly on the West coast of Shetland. Tides washed away uneaten food, and salmon faeces. This was unlike the calmer waters of enclosed sea lochs, where damage from weather and tides was much less, but the rubbish piled up on the sea bed, as a source of disease.
The fish were traced from the egg to the factory door. The journey was monitored and the fish were quality checked on arrival. Fish damaged by sea lice, very few, were rejected. The factory was cleaner than the local hospital. I showed customers the complete cycle from tiny fry, parr, smolts, to the processes of curing/smoking and hand slicing of beautiful silver salmon. (Salmon were killed without stress, like Roman senators.)
The product was wonderful. The phrase. “from the pure, wild waters of the Atlantic” was created by me and thereafter copied by many others in a number of variations.
I no longer buy smoked salmon, for the reasons given above.
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Very interesting post. Thanks.
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Thanks to Iain, Ewan and Don for this post, an often forgotten about scandal. Common sense tells us that breeding in unnatural ways leads to dangerous outcomes cf mad cow.
I remember when fish farming was novel. I wonder what Tom Weir would think about it now?
What precisely are Gougen, SEPA and Marine Scotland for?
And as for cruelty?
Chemicals and waste?
What are the Greens doing about this? Ah yes, fingers in perverted pies.
The damage to Scotland’s wildlife is incalculable.
And yes Iain, Scotland is controlled by other countries. Has been for centuries. Signed our death warrant many years ago.
I wonder if this sheriff in Oban eats farm fresh lice munched Salmon?
Not content with stealing our oil and gas, they’re stealing our reputation.
It’s disgusting in the round.
Multinationals taking one man, obviously a good man to court? Stinks.
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Clearly this case is about animal cruelty, environmental damage, and freedom of right to roam. It needs to be fought. I just tried to pledge £25 + £1 tip but it did not go through. Crowdjustice invited me to try again BUT they said my donation was £35 + £7 tip so it seems there is a problem with their system at the moment. Sorry to mention this but I think you need to contact Crowdjustice to sort the problem out.
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Hello Sarah. Crowd funding demands a ‘tip’ and you can’t go forward unless you pay it.
Someone has to make money. A scam,but you can’t donate without paying the piper.
Disgusting but that’s how it works online.
I had to pay it too and it sticks in ma craw
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I DID add a tip so that wasn’t the problem!
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Did you follow the link on Iain’s blog?
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Yes, I clicked on the link in the article.
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Maybe reset your phone and start again
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I have asked the author to respond to any difficulties hopefully we will hear from him shortly with guidance.
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Thanks, Iain. I didn’t want to post an off-putting comment but thought what happened was so odd that it might have been an example of “interference” of some kind. I’ve never had a problem with Crowd Justice before.
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I have.
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I’ll try again when I see some successful donations. I was on my laptop so should have been OK.
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It’s this complete obsession with exporting and thinking it is a great idea to give your limited real resources away to others and get foreign coins in return. It is complete bonkers to choose an economic model that favours exporters over the domestic population.
It all stems from the tax payer money myth. That our taxes pay for stuff when the reality is they do nothing of the sort. This belief that we have to generate revenue via more business activity to pay for public services is the biggest lie of them all. Our income taxes are never used to pay for anything. They are destroyed after they are collected. NEVER end up in the Scottish Consolidated fund.
Just study the government accounts and see for yourselves.
https://new-wayland.com/blog/uk-government-spending-gory-details/
It is a complete waste of skills and real resources. There has to be many more important things that we should be using our skills ( people) for than sending our fish abroad. I can think of a hundred just off the top of my head.
The key point is that if a currency moves down so that imports become ‘more expensive’, then the ‘inflation’ that goes off is a distributional response that tries to eliminate some of those imports so that the exchange demands equalise. That also eliminates somebody else’s exports.
The important thing to remember is that when a currency goes down, all the others in the world go up in relation to it and nations that rely upon exports (export led nations) start to lose trade – which depresses their own economy.
Any one of those other economies can intervene in the foreign exchange markets, purchase the ‘spare’ currency and that will halt the slide for everybody. And all exporters to an import nation have a central bank with infinite capacity to do that.
Export-led nations have to constantly provide liquidity into the rest of the world to allow others to buy their goods. Otherwise the rest of the world runs out of the particular money that is needed for the export transaction to complete and the export never happens (UK buyers buy Chinese goods with GBP, but Chinese workers are paid in Yuan. The relative shortage of Yuan due to the export differential has to be provided by the Chinese or Chinese goods become, in absurdum, infinitely expensive).
So the important insight,, is that exporters need to export and the central banks that support that policy with ’liquidity operations’ will ultimately halt any slide for any important export destination – either explicitly or implicitly through their own banking system.
Every analysis I’ve seen analyses the situation from the point of view of the currency that is being depressed. Almost none look at it from the exporter’s point of view. So where are the goods they no longer can sell to the importer going to go in a world where overall export growth is fundamentally limited by the increase in world income? In a world where ’export led growth’ is the insane mantra, that is a mistake and leads to a mistaken view and mistaken policy recommendations.
So its a bit like borrowing from a bank. If you import a little then the exporters own you. If you import a lot then you own the exporters – because they then have nowhere else to go.
The shift to manufacturing in the 3rd world has generated a huge export overhang with the West. They need to export to the West or their economies collapse. And that is one of the reasons why the Western currencies have remained valuable – because the Eastern countries are forced to run up huge stockpiles of the stuff to enable their economies to work.
And that will continue until they realise they are being had, eliminate the export overhang and move to domestic consumption. You’ll note that the Japanese have only just done that, so it ain’t something that is going to happen overnight. China has just announced they are moving to a more domestic consumption model. Russia is being forced to by the sanctions.
For me the policy response to sliding currencies is to control the distributional inflation by temporarily banning the import of ’luxury’ items. That forces the problem onto the exporters, which they can relieve by systemically intervening and fixing the currency imbalance. Forcing them to do what they normally do through the course of trade.
No country has an automatic right to import any more than it exports. The corollary to that is that no country has an automatic right to export more than it imports. It has to buy that right – either by stockpiling foreign financial assets or by convincing a bunch of dumb countries into a monetary union so that it can export its unemployment to them – EU uber alles style.
We should just be fishing to feed our own population, period. Allowing our fish stocks and sea beds to recover. Rather than using our skills and real resources to send our fish abroad they could be used to protect our fishing instead. Create thousands of more jobs while doing so.
In any national economy there is the pile of stuff you can make yourself, then there is the stuff you can get from somewhere else which makes the pile bigger (imports), and after that there is the amount of stuff you have to give to somewhere else which makes your pile smaller (exports).
The only reason to export is because you can’t get imports for promises (currency). If there are no imports on offer, then you may as well keep what you would have exported for yourself – redeploying real resources and skills as needed to other areas.
Domestic first and foremost. Imports second with ‘structural autarky’, ie diversity of supply across trading blocs focussed on discretionary items with supply sufficient to withstand a failure of one supplier. With Exports very much at the back of the queue.
Where imports of needed items are required (we have no more iron ore for example) then that has to be matched with exports the rest of the world will find hard to substitute. I’d suggest green energy exports would be the best there – synthesised fuels created from the excess generation of nuclear power stations for example.
People who say – If you make exporting more difficult you will eventually make importing more expensive as foreign reserves are depleted and borrowing foreign currency gets more expensive (and or the pound devaluates).”
Nope. That’s fixed exchange rate thinking. Bretton Woods ended in 1971.
The globalists and internationalists of both neo Conservative and neo-liberal persuasion won’t like it. But they have failed us and their day is done.
The future is independent states of people operating democratically in co-operation with each other, not world government by an aristocracy of the arrogant liberal elite in thrall to bankers. As explained here
https://new-wayland.com/blog/running-a-modern-money-economy/
If we just fished to feed ourselves we wouldn’t have these problems. It is this inane obsession with giving our real resources away and using our skills to do it. That causes this mess,when we should be using both on far more important things that need doing.
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That was a long one. I appreciate your reply. Lost me at certain points. Bottom line is that Scotland can be self sufficient. Absolutely we can.
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Scotland can be self sufficient.
Exactly and we need to drop this EU uber alles, neoliberal export your way to growth nonsense.
Domestic first, look after our own, with our exporters at the back of the Queue when it comes to using our skills and real resources. We use them first for everything we need and On public purpose. Our exporters are left with what’s left over. Which shouldn’t be much as we don’t want to over produce.
Introducing a job guarentee will get us all the imports we ever need. Other countries will be standing in line trying to sell us their stuff as everybody in Scotland will be employed on a living wage as a standard.
Overall we won’t have to export to get the imports we need as a nation. Go hunting for them. Other countries will be trying to sell them to us and get some of that demand created by a fully employed independent Scotland.
We will only have to export to get specialised imports we need by offering very specialised exports to them. So ideally to increase our real terms of trade we should be running trade deficits most of the time.
Let’s begin with the example of a Scottish consumer buying a German car. In an independent Scotland with our own fully sovereign free floating currency.
If the Scottish consumer pays cash for it, the consumer’s bank account in a Scottish bank is debited and the German carmaker’s account is credited, thereby increasing foreign savings of Scottish financial assets. Total deposits in the Scottish banking system remain unchanged.
If the consumer borrows to buy the car, the bank makes a loan to the consumer, which results in a loan on the asset side of the bank’s balance sheet and a new deposit on the liability side (loans create deposits). After the car is paid for the German car company has the new bank deposit. Consumer borrowing increased total bank deposits and funded foreign savings of the Scottish currency.
That’s what the finance behind the trade gap is all about – foreigners desire to net save financial assets and sell goods and services to Scotland to obtain those Scottish financial assets.
Following the above transaction the foreign holder of the Scottish bank deposits may instead desire to purchase Scottish Treasury securities (Scottish debt ). At the time of purchase, the seller of the Scottish Treasury security becomes the new holder of the bank deposit, and the foreigner the new holder of the Treasury security. (If the foreigner buys securities directly from the Treasury the result is the same.)
The new Scottish government is now said to have foreign creditors, and Scotland is now said to be a debtor nation. The neoliberal , neo Conservative myth.
While this is true as defined, a look past the rhetoric at what the Scottish government actually owes the holder of the Scottish Treasury security is revealing. What the government promises is that at maturity the foreigner’s security account at the Scottish central bank will be debited, and his bank’s reserve account at the Scottish central bank will be credited for the balance due.
In other words, the Scottish government’s promise is only that a non-interest bearing reserve balance will be substituted for an interest bearing Treasury security. This is not a potential source of financial stress for the Scottish government. It is nothing more than an asset swap.
So we as a Scottish nation get all these German cars meaning we don’t have to use our own skills and real resources producing cars. We can use our skills and real resources doing more productive things than building cars.
In return they get our blips which they horde in our Scottish central bank. Which they keep as a reserve balance or held as a Scottish treasury security. They’ll exchange some to send back to pay their employers who built the car. However, the majority will remain in Scotland held at our central bank.
It’s a win, win for us.
Because what else can they do with our own currency, apart from save it or spend it on our own goods and services that is for sale in our own currency.
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That’s why China and Germany and Russia and the BRICS countries end up with trillions of government bonds from other countries.
Large exporting nations just end up hoarding foreign coins at different central banks.. Leave them there gathering dust. The Norweigan wealth fund is the same.
China has over a trillion treasuries sitting at the FED. America enjoyed all the goods and services China produced that increased America’s standard of living. China ended up with all these US treasuries they can’t spend.
Russia now has rupees coming out of its ears since the sanctuons. Russia exports tons of goods and services to India but gets very little Indian goods and services in return that it needs. So Russia ends up hoarding all these Rupees at the Indian central bank.
It’s like when you come back from a Spanish holiday and throw your foreign change into a back of drawer and forget about them. They are your asset but they never effect how you live in Scotland.
Countries will sell us imports and then just throw most of their Scottish currency into the back of the drawer of the new Scottish central bank. If they can’t get any Scottish goods and services in return.
We will enjoy all those imports that improve our standard of living.
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I will let it go this time but I cannot allow long posts that are barely relevant to the article go on much longer.
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Sarah. This situation has happened to me in the past and I haven’t a clue?? Just try again with the link. It worked for me today and got an email confirming my donation. Good luck
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In an independent Scotland you could bring life back to the Clyde and all the old fishing towns and villages around our coasts.
With our own fully sovereign free floating currency. We could build 500+ ships and give the contract to our own ship builders and these could be used to police our waters and study our sea beds and create a generation of marine biologists. Anybody coming into our waters to fish will be chased out.
It would create thousands of jobs and in areas that used to rely on commercial fishing that caused this mess. They would be paid to protect our coasts and sea beds and fishing stocks instead of plundering them. Stop the brain drain from rural areas to the cities and the central belt.
How would we pay for it as an independent Scotland ?
Is the wrong question to ask. As the money will simply be issued by the Scottish Treasury using an index finger and a computer keyboard like any fully sovereign free floating currency.
A spending bill is passed by the Scottish government and the votes that passed the bill funds it. The Scottish currency will then simply be credited into the bank accounts to those who provide the skills and real resources to get the job done. By the new Scottish central.bank.
If you issue somebody £100, they spend it which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with £80 as income. They then spend that £80 which is taxed at 20%, leaving the next person with £64 as income. And so on until the entire £100 disappears and creates £100 of extra tax. All without changing the tax rate one single percent
The result is lots of extra sales and income for people down the spending chain they wouldn’t otherwise have received. It’s a straightforward geometric progression.
There is no reason to raise taxes if there is significant unemployment. In fact if there is unemployment then by definition we are overtaxed for the size of government we have and we should be looking at cutting taxes, not raising them. Taxes don’t fund anything as the Issuing always comes first. The tax collection always comes second from the currency that has been issued.
Issue ———> then collect ————> then destroy what has been collected for inflation purposes.
In short for every printing press there is a shredding machine. Print and Shred is how the system works. All modern monetary systems work this way, no matter how much they try and hide the fact. And if you ‘fire up the printing press’, you automatically ‘fire up the shredding machine’ to the same extent. As is it is a straightforward geometric progression. Until ultimately all the money that has been issued equals how much has been shredded by taxes. What isn’t shredded are our savings what we all save for a rainy day and our pensions. When we spend them they also get shredded and returned to the issuer of the currency where it is destroyed.
Government spending is always with created money. All of it all the time. What happens is the government makes a payment from the Consolidated Fund at the Bank of England and that turns up in the account of anybody the government pays. And that happens every day – without limit because government owns and issues the currency. In an independent Scotland it will work in the exact same way. Using our own newly created institutions.
If the skills or unemployed are available for sale in the new Scottish currency the Scottish government can buy them. The question is only whether they should. If the skills and real resources are not being used by anybody else, then there is, effectively, no cost. To build the new 500 ships and staff them. Build what the marine biologists need and train them. To police our waters and fix the sea beds.
So the only question to ask is not how we are going to issue the new currency which is very straightforward. The question to always ask is how are we going to resource it ?
Where are we going to get the real resources from to build the ships. Where are we going to get the skills and people from to staff them. What are they currently doing ? What happens if other sectors of the economy are hoarding them ?
Then that’s what taxes are for. You increase taxes on these other sectors to release the real resources needed so that the government can then buy them for the project. You can start with these parasites who are destroying our fishing and tax them into extinction. That then releases both skills and real resources that could be used on the project. That’s what taxes are for not for generating revenue.
As Beardsley Ruml, the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and published in a periodical named American Affairs. Explained very clearly in his paper – Taxes for revenue are obsolete below.
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=9281
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Are you a first year economics student?
Fair question imo.
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Economic students get taught in GROUPTHINK.
Gold standard, fixed exchange rate GROUPTHINK as a matter of fact.
So I wouldn’t accept one of their degree’s if you gave it to me for free.
I studied modern money the money we all use today. I studied the government accounts, the commercial bank accounts and central bank accounts and what ACTUALLY happens in the real world. I’ve studied it now for nearly over 20 years. Longer than any fraudulent economics degree.
Set up MMT Scotland and was interviewed on the BBC regarding the Scottish budget and growth comission. As we brought the top MMT economists to Scotland and held conferences at Edinburgh international conference centre and the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
Helped with setting up The Gower Initiative of MODERN MONEY studies which is an independent, non-profit organisation in London.
I will debate with anybody anywhere in the country when it comes to money and how it really works. Economic students don’t even look at the balance sheets. They don’t even look at where your taxes end up after they have been paid. What happens to them.
So we produced this to help them. What happens from start to finish instead of media sound bites and brainwashing in Schools.
Finally after 50 years the truth is finally starting to be revealed. All the brainwashing and myths are now being challenged by the facts and what ACTUALLY takes place.
A film is coming to a cinema near you called – finding the money – it will also be on Netflix and winning awards across America as we speak. If you get a chance I would watch it if I was you.
https://stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/mmt-the-movie-coming-to-a-festival
The movie will be shown at the Scotonomics economics festival in Dundee. The tax payer money myth will be killed off once and for all.
No matter how much the neoliberal and neoconservatives try and hide it and keep Thatcher’s tax payer money myth alive.
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Thanks Iain. Saves brain fatigue 🙃
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Sorry for the lengthy post above Iain.
However, I think it is very relevant and the crux of the issue why all these fish farms are there in the first place and all the problems they have created.
Even if they were most healthiest place on the planet for fish why have them ? – that is the debate to be had.
How many skills and real resources do you think we have. Not enough when our communities have been hollowed out and our public services destroyed and our infrastructure falling apart. There’s a million things to do as we decide to skill up and train our limited skills ( number of people) and put them to use with our real resources before we even think about them being used to sell our fish abroad and the destruction it causes. Fish farming needs to be at the back of the queue, if not eradicated.
You could just as easily replace the word fish with our trees. It is happening everywhere. It is Thatcherism/ neoliberalism 101. Which is that government is just another organisation in the system that has to compete for resources by price. Business and banks and exporters always get first choice of skills and our real resources and government has to make do with the scraps. Who believe the bankers and businesses and exporters should be in charge and that the population are just factors of production to be shifted around, like ingots of steel, as business requires. That’s why we have so many of them.
My own personal view is you have to solve the crux of the issue. That is an independent Scottish Government will take first choice of both skills and our real resources for the public purpose, then allow business and banks to work with what is left, before local communities finally hoover up any left over unemployed and real resources with a Job Guarantee on a living wage and pension and free childcare.
If the private sector wants to hire people away from the job guarentee. Then they have to better the offer of the job guarentee. The job guarentee can be what we want it to be. Living wage, pension, free childcare. So we set the base case of what we think employment should look like. The private sector will then have to match it, offer a better job and compete for workers for the first time in 50 years.
Or innovate instead, if the private sector doesn’t want to compete with the job guarentee they can innovate. That improves our productivity and improves our standard of living. Frees up even more skills and real resources we can use for other more important things than fish farming. Like fixing pot holes and the other million things that needs doing.
As far as I’m concerned. Our priorities are all wrong and they are wrong because they always say we can’t afford to do these things. Taxes would have to rise on households to pay for it. Which is the biggest lie ever told to the public. That lie is used so that Business and banks and exporters get first dibs and everybody else suffers. As they rent seek after getting their hands on them. Or in this case build these monstrosities just so a few owners get rich off the back of it.
Even if they were most healthiest place on the planet for fish why have them ? What is the reason for them if you are going to send 90% of what comes out of them abroad ?
Is the debate to be had to get right down to the nuts and bolts of the issue. If you attend that debate you will very quickly see how many people don’t understand modern money and trade. When in real terms imports are a benefit and exports are a cost. They have that backwards.
Even if coal mines and tin mines were the most healthy places to work on the planet ? Why have them if you are going to send 90% of what comes out of them abroad ?
Even if our forests were the most healthy places to work on the planet ? Why cut most of them down if you are going to send 90% of what comes out of them abroad ?
Is this really what we want the people of Scotland to be doing when we become independent ? This obsession of sending our real resources away to increase the standard of living in other countries while it destroys our own environments and we get a bunch of foreign coins in return if we can’t get anything worthwhile back ourselves.
It’s the crux of the issue. Needs to be debated properly. With a complete understanding of modern money and trade. Just highlighting the monstrosity and state of these farms misses the point and the big picture. Even though it is the right and morale thing to do.
Iain, they’ll hit you over the head with ” the job losses” their crocodile tears, if you try to change these fish farms. Which they would never get away with if a job guarentee was in place. As their is no unemployment with a job guarentee. Workers could be sacked, or simply walk off the job, from these fish farms on a Friday and start work on the Job guarentee on the Monday. So that big threatening stick could very easily be removed from their hands by day 1 of independence.
If you believe this has absolutely nothing to do with the article then I’m clearly in the wrong place. I wish you all the best in the future.
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An improvement Derek. More relevant to the topic see my comments about this.
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TBQH Iain I appreciate Derek’s comments are overly lengthy but I can also appreciate his dedication and enthusiasm for the subject matter , IF his proposals have merit and are supported what exactly would the problem be , we have ALL witnessed and suffered greatly the continued pandering to the current economic setup where the same individuals and groups seem to be the only ones who benefit , WHERE is the proof that it is the best and only economic setup that is available , in an independent Scotland I personally believe that EVERYTHING should be done to benefit the majority rather than individuals and large companies and large organisations
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The problem is that they often do only very barely relate to the topic of the blog that day and therefore, particularly because Derek’s comments are often very lengthy, it interrupts the flow of the comments section.
Derek’s writes fluently but the comments section is there to reflect comment on current articles not on other topics.
Like everyone else he has the option to write an article ( of no more than 1500-2000 words ) and I will consider publication as a main article.
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Hi Iain I wasn’t being critical of your suggestion to Derek which I do respect , after all it is your blog and everyone here is merely a visitor and TBQH I appreciate another outlet to vent our frustration at the total betrayal and clusterf++k that politicians have done to Scotland and Scots, Derek’s findings are astonishing if they are correct but it unfortunately relies on honesty and integrity from economic experts and politicians with honesty and integrity to implement it , and being someone who despises politicians and their unfailability to engage in lies and corruption I suspect we will never see the truth of Derek’s proposals
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No probs.
It is very difficult to put what I have learned over 20 years into layman terms so I do wander off a bit and go round in circles as I try not to miss out the key insights I have learned . Believe it or not, I am getting better at it over the years lol. Government finance is not an easy topic.
All I am trying to say using the facts and actual government balance sheets is the reason for these fish farms and exporting in excess is not what they say it is. Which is generally to increase business activity to generate more tax revenue to fund the government and public services. Which is NEVER the case. Yet, you hear and read this 24/7 in our media. They lie through their teeth about it.
They’ll say jobs wouldn’t exist in these rural areas unless these fish farms are there. Again another myth . An independent Scottish government could hire all of the unemployed without touching the tax rates..
Norway sells us oil and fish in return for etchings of HM King in our notes which it puts in a pot that can never be spent. It then discounts that into Kroner via the banking system. Due to reporting currencies it all looks like it is in Kroner on the balance sheet.
But because it is discounted they can’t get rid of it. But they must hold it or they can’t net export – as exchange rates would move to close the gap. What that tells us is that we don’t have to pay the Norwegians Interest to hold Sterling. They will be happy to hold sterling anyway to keep the oil and fish going and keep their people employed.
The currency area is a closed system. It’s the real production system that it induces that is not. In my view the Norway model is not something we should get over excited about.. Again, it is not what people think, as their wealth fund does not give them more to spend.
EVERYTHING is all linked to the neoliberal model. Why I end up going round in circles and wandering off a bit. If you put all of your excellent articles from your blog Iain into a book you would very quickly see the theme that runs through them like Blackpool rock. That theme is the crux of the issue the economic model.we have chosen and what we have decided to do with our skills and real resources.
When I do wander off and go round and round in circles on some articles I am trying to address and highlight the big picture and root cause of it all. That generated your article and the anger by independent voters in the first place. No matter what article you write on this blog it will be linked to the economic system we have chosen. This is the root of all our problems and it is built upon gold standard, fixed exchange rate myths.
If I can put some good ones together that represents your blog and doesn’t let it down Iain and is easily understood in layman terms. I will send you them. If you like them, feel free to to do with them whatever you like.
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My email is iain.lawson27@gmail.com send in Word format thanks and also an appropriate photo.
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