Keep Calm, and Wear a Nappy

Breaking News – it’s spring!

We arrive at that time of the year again when we can nod sagely at television news bulletins reminding us we’re all grossly overweight. Humpty Dumpties, the lot of us, candidates for size 46 trousers, while we get gorging on ghastly chocolate eggs, and watch a television commercial showing a halfwit who prefers to make love to a crème egg.

Ah, well, be happy with what you have. There are fat children starving in London.

Once again the great political cuckoo of Britain’s spring calls its plaintiff lament: recumbent English MPs joined in the dawn chorus of, “Give us back our daylight hours.” They scorn Scottish farmers who ‘live in the dark north, and cook tundra to sup with the hollowed-out horn of elk antlers, while they live in burrows.’ Scots farmers are a minority, they suggest, in the same way Westminster troughers who care about their constituents are a minority.

In fact, switching clocks back and forward was introduced early last century to save coal, not to assist the Scots see in front of their nose, or annoy people living in Somerset or Suffolk. Coal, which couldn’t be produced in enough quantities to keep warm the squalid English masses trying to keep warm over long cold winters. Of course, we don’t bother with coal these days. All coal mines are closed.

The first MP to complain about daylight hours was barrage balloon Boris Johnson, but his whinging did nothing to divert attention from the coruscating, skin removing critique handed out by another Tory,  to the affect Johnson is an idiot, and somebody should say so and anyhow, he just did, so there! If Boris had any chance of becoming Prime Minister after Cameron leaves office it has all but evaporated on being called a tube who tells seriously bad jokes.

Steel Capped Toes

It’s time to feel sad at the imminent loss of England’s steel industry, and feel smug Scotland managed to save the last remnants of its industry. ‘Vote Yes, you separatist scum, and your steel industry is in peril’, unionists warned. Well, we voted No to stay with those warm-hearted  jesters and our steel is the only bit saved.

It is time to say ta-ta to Tata.

Unaware the steel industry was about to go belly up, Prime Minster David Cameron rushed back from his holidays in Lanzarote to announce Indian conglomerate Tata was losing a billion pounds a week, and no longer wanted to share the UK pound sterling.

Stop worrying. Stuff happens. There’s always a crisis

Cameron was asked what his Government intended to do to keep steel in production. Steel is needed to construct more killer submarines with no warheads, aircraft carriers with no planes, fighter jet aeroplanes with no engines, and Superman, man of steel without steel.

Cameron ruled out nationalisation, cherry picking  the best plants, subsidising the price of steel, banning the import of cheap, inferior Chinese steel, (70% steel, 30% noodles) creating any new projects requiring steel, giving a grant to prospective buyers till they got on their feet, or saving Private Ryan. (He was advised Private Ryan was not Welsh.) “We gave you Dr Who to make”, he said exasperated. “Isn’t that enough, you ungrateful sods?”

The UK government is facing claims it blocked an EU measure which would have tackled the “dumping” of Chinese steel in Europe – one of main handicaps facing UK producers. Cameron rejected the assertion, adding, “You’re confusing me with somebody who cares.”

A smart man would lay low after admitting he had bugger all up his sleeve, but Cameron instead sent in his sidekick Tonto to Tata, to face workers, and inflame them even more.

Like daffodils sprouting from Caernarvon Castle’s Royal slopes, the UK Business Secretary Sajit Javid, unaware until today steel was destined to go down like lead, rushed back from his holidays in Australia, (there’s  pattern here) to talk to protesting steel workers at the Port Talbot plant, his ministerial car right behind him engine running for a quick getaway.

The newspapers headlines roared: “Steel workers calmly probe Sajit Javid over closures.”

Well, if the plants can’t be saved workers can always take up a new vocation as proctologists. “Don’t let us go to the wall”, they shouted as if the Tory party would ever think of lining them up before a firing squad.

Mr Javid was similarly sober and grave.

“Lechyd da, boyos. How’s the greyhound racing going? Come on, let’s see a smile. Wave them leeks. Keep calm, and carry on down the Job Centre. How about a chorus of ‘Bread of Heaven’? Cat got your tongues? Where’s that Charlotte Church when you need her? Eh?”

Obviously Javid was aiming to be pop culture savvy in the hope nobody notices he has fewer ideas than Cameron to save the steel industry, but is just as callous. “I’m honoured to have met such wonderful men and women,” he said on his departure. “The suckers.”

Lie for Big Cash Prizes

Meanwhile to our shock and consternation we discovered the useless Lib-Dems, reduced to a rump party at Westminster, and led by an oversensitive chump with protruding teeth, (a rump chump who takes the hump) has what some might describe as a slush fund to bail them out when the going gets rough. Man, that’s gangsta stuff.

The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, (maybe it’s ‘truss’) an offshoot of the Rowntree Charity but not connected to it, handed £50,000 cash to the discredited MP for Orkney and Gomorrah, Alastair Carmichael, to help pay for the fees he had accrued from his court case. The Trust don’t want him to jump off the nearest oil rig.

In reply to various challenges over its decision to award money to an admitted liar and dissembler, the trust got shirty, pointing out they were helping a Liberal keep his head above murky waters, poured around him by the electorate of Scotland. For them a people’s democracy is a word that has no meaning.

The Trust parted with the readies despite one of its strictest criteria for selection stating it will not pay grants for legal fees. “That’s just a guide not a rule”, said a trust official.

Well, in that case Carmichael is not an honest man who made an error of judgement, he’s a jail bird who’s narrowly escaped a term of imprisonment.

Kezia Dugdale goes all Fluffy

To absolutely no one’s surprise, the leader of Labour’s ramshackle group of MSPs has come out as gay. Ruth Davidson, her Tory opponent, also gay, put up her hands to disclaim the occasion had anything to do with her.

‘Going to bed’ with Labour against Scotland’s civil and constitutional rights was exactly that and no more. She and Ms Dugdale had no intention of adopting an orphaned Eastern European child – after all, they didn’t believe in welcoming refugees to Scotland.

Ms Dugdale said her private life was hers, and immediately launched into an open discussion about it. Press hacks set to work discovering who her partner is, and what she thinks of Ms Dugdale. Considering how often Ms Dugdale flip-flops on political issues there’s every likelihood she’ll announce next week that she’s straight.

As an item of news the most the issue has to offer is the knowledge that at last Ms Dugdale is probably not as shallow as she likes to make out. At the very least she’ll be able to inject more interest into her late night sexting.

Ms Dugdale is the fourth openly lesbian, gay or bisexual Scottish party leader, reportedly making Scotland the only country in the world truly hip where the majority of its mainstream party leaders are out of the closet.

Either that or it’s something in the water.

The others are Conservative leader Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Green party Patrick Harvie, and Ukip’s David Coburn, the latter Scotland’s only Ukip  EU parliamentarian, and all-round dope. (All-round, as in spherical.) Dugdale follows in the bedroom slippers of Secretary of State and last Tory standing, Dame ‘Fluffy’ Mundell.

A unionist thug just back from beating up some independence supporters in George Square, Glasgow, said, “What the *@!!! is going on? I didn’t die in the last war for this!”

Election? What election?

The Scottish Parliament went into spring recess, but the SNP forswore sleep to go into battle instead and prepare for the impending election. Television wannabee Paxmans hosted ‘leader debates’, lining up every politician who could string a sentence together and state their name, if not their social security number.

But there was only one leader of any substance in the line-ups, Nicola Sturgeon, fresh from her stint on the heritage show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” It turns out she is, as opposition MSPs have hinted for years, directly related to Queen Boadicea, the first Brit to add aftermarket scythes to her wheels.

With an election looming the SNP’s opposition parties are girding their loins – or would if they had enough steel – to battle for second place, third if they can get it. They have  BIG problems. They are surrounded by SNP successes, and an increasing support from voters way past 50%.

One example of SNP dynamism, rejected for years by the Labour group, is the new Forth road bridge. It’s coming along nicely, a decidedly monumental example of Scotland’s ability to get things done when it makes its own decisions for itself.

Looking at the bridge taking shape in all its majesty, Labour remarked, “Oh, shit. There’s no way the public are going to overlook that. The SNP are doing this to us deliberately.”

And on that note of despair they looked around for an SNP MSP to smear.

If all this plus chocolate eggs makes readers queasy, keep calm, and wear a nappy.

The new Forth bridge – like sailing ships in the mist