Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War 764


A particularly mendacious lie by Danny Alexander puts the institutional start-up costs of Scottish Independence at £1.5 billion.  That is a cool half billion pounds cheaper than Scotland’s share of the costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars, even on the Westminster government’s blatant under-estimate of the war costs.

So Scotland can afford criminal invasions killing hundreds of thousands to ‘bring freedom’, but cannot afford the smaller cost of its own freedom!!!

The £1.5 billion estimate is mendacious in two ways.  Firstly, it is a simple recycling of a Canadian lie at the time of the Quebec independence referendum, apportioning with no argument 1% of GDP to startup costs.

Secondly, as nearly all the money will be spent in Scotland it is not a loss at all, but actually an increase to GDP, as any but the most nutty neo-con would be forced to acknowledge.  And it would be the precursor of government money spent annually in Scotland rather than England for ever thereafter.

Thankfully Alexander won’t have a job much longer – and if he thinks a penny of Scottish public spending is going in future to support his huge arse and deceitful mouth, he is very wrong.

 


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764 thoughts on “Freedom Cheaper than Iraq War

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  • Ben-LA PACQUTE LO ES TODO

    Rehmat; I cringe as Craig emphasizes Scot Indie as the new Atlantis. That Murdoch is aligned with the idea makes one ponder the reasons why. It’s almost as though Marx’s dialectic would supercede Hegel’s and forever cease swinging once it reaches the apex. I doubt Craig’s optimism could accept this fallacy.

  • Dis∫

    What it comes down to is nobody needs these fucking effete ass-kissing limeys. Certainly not the peoples of Scotland. The pressure is so inordinate because nobody needs these shit-for-brains Washington knuckle-draggers, either. Certainly not the peoples of Yankeedom, the First Nation, the Midlands, the Left Coast, el Norte, or New France. Self-determination for Scotland would give the viable nations of America subversive new ideas.

  • guano

    Yesterday a large chunk of relevant discussion was deleted at the behest of Craig’s buddies in government. The iron hand of UK government has placed discussion of the war in Syria which it started for Israel by sending UK snipers to pick off people at random Off Limits.

    Crawling his way up the valet’s anus, Craig has taken a foppish, anti-Whig, anti-socialist stance in recent months over Ukraine.
    New Labour is now called the War Criminal party. The war crimes that have been committed by the civil wars in Libya and in Syria are off limits for the FCO in the run up to a general election.

    These ongoing crimes are the full responsibility of David Cameron, and I am sure they make very uncomfortable reading for the powers that be. Aangirfan recently found himself locked out of his blog for overstepping the line on high-profile paedophiles.

    Oh dear! Don’t let it go down in history that the last bastion of Conservatism in Scotland was former rectum of Dundee University, Craig Murray, who by skilfully editing the unpleasant truth about the Torer Fuhrer David Cameron, survived the blanket censorship of contemporary politics like the jolly old vicar of Bray, Sir!

  • Mary

    What! No helicopters on the roof for the Yanks in Libya? Shame.

    RIP Hugh Van Es. Hugh Van Es, the photographer who took the iconic “helicopters on the roof” photo of the fall of Saigon, has died at 67:

    [Van Es’s] shot of the helicopter escape from a Saigon rooftop on April 29, 1975 became a stunning metaphor for the desperate U.S. withdrawal and its overall policy failure in Vietnam.
    http://neoneocon.com/2009/05/15/rip-hugh-van-es/

  • Mary

    On topic!

    Scots Independence Costs ‘Badly Misrepresented’
    Government officials are accused of being “crude” in their calculations – and of overstating a figure by 12 times.
    http://news.sky.com/story/1270290/scots-independence-costs-badly-misrepresented

    ‘The Treasury has “badly misrepresented” a study on the cost of Scottish independence, the academic behind the research has said.

    Patrick Dunleavy, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics, says that when Treasury officials used his research to calculate the start-up costs of independence, they overstated the figure by 12 times.

    The criticism is an embarrassment for Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, who is due to present detailed figures on the economics of independence at an event described by Whitehall officials as a “major milestone” in the independence debate.’

  • Ba'al Zevul (I THink, Therefore No-one Listens)

    why has unprecedented UK public spending in the past few years not resulted in unprecedented levels of growth?

    I know the answer to that one. Because propping up the banks (which had they been in any other business would have been forced to declare bankruptcy) has actually reduced M(0): the basis of Keynes’ approach is that the ordinary punter should be encouraged to spend more. Since the ordinary punter had been spending like a drunken sailor, on his credit card, for the years leading up to the crash, and is now constrained, Keynes is powerless to influence the result. In any case, “growth” is an intentionally misleading term. If I transfer £1000 to your bank account every Monday, and you faithfully return it every Friday, we have between us grown the economy, under the current definition of growth.

    But nothing of value has been produced. The epitaph of the post-Thatcher economy.

  • John Goss

    Ba’al 28 May, 2014 – 8:25 am

    It is encouraging to see that somebody understands the meaning of growth. But can you please transfer your £1000 to my account. Thanks. 🙂

  • Ba'al Zevul (I THink, Therefore No-one Listens)

    Ben – good one of yours @ 0212. Another good argument for the UK to revisit nuclear power.

  • Ba'al Zevul (I THink, Therefore No-one Listens)

    But can you please transfer your £1000 to my account.

    Just give me your account details and PIN number, no problem…actually I hope to be supporting the engineering industry with it, as I need to get my latest bike’s clutch modified. Sorry.

  • mike

    Horrific pictures on RT. The Kiev Nazis are slaughtering old women, by the looks of it. Of course not a cheep from the BBC. What a shameful organisation, so in tune with neo-con thinking now.

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Mike

    “The Kiev Nazis are slaughtering old women,”
    __________________

    Perhaps the fascist thugs and gangsters fomenting secession in eastern Ukraine should be denounced for deliberately putting women, children and old people in the firing line for propaganda purposes (and against their will).

    ***********************

    Support the Take Mikes to the Firing Line Campaign

  • mike

    Oh, you are a naughty little imp, Habby!

    Good to see you haven’t lost your edge. I was starting to worry about you, for a while.

  • John Goss

    Terrible slaughter in Donbass Oblast, 100 dead, and Pravy Sector and other extreme fascists in control of military. No peaceful future. How much better it was under Yanukovich. The US has brought nothing but death to Ukraine.

    http://nsnbc.me/2014/05/27/ukraines-poroshenko-promises-war-100-killed-in-kievs-new-campaign/

    Here’s one for Craig, the chocolate manufacturer who is pummeling the Donbass region, is also exploiting slave labour in West Africa for his chocolate supplies.

    http://nsnbc.me/2014/05/28/poroshenko-ukraines-candy-king-sticky-fingers/

    Despite the trolls on this blog who glory in the death of ordinary people and attempt to misplace the blame, the people in East Ukraine know who is responsible for the slaughter, and will remember what it was like with the former government before the fascist took control. I see people making comments who have shown themselves to be against the German holocaust against Jews but in favour of other holocausts figure-headed by Jews.

  • DoNNyDarKo

    Another war in Europe, 100 people killed and more injured in bombing ,strafing runs by helicopter gunships and it didn’t even make front page news.Doesn’t even make it to the memory hole.It just didn’t happen.
    Not a peep from Hague.Guess he thinks Willie Wonka is doing the right thing and that all civilians that don’t like chocolate are terrorists & Donbasstards.

  • Ba'al Zevul (I THink, Therefore No-one Listens)

    It’s not white hats vs black hats, John. Both sets of hats are a dirty grey. It’s unklikely Poroshenko would be shooting if he hadn’t made reasonably sure that Moscow wouldn’t get deeply involved first. In fact I’d be interested in your source for the 100 dead. The pro-Russians appear to have looted and burned a hockey stadium (why?) and there’s a pro-Russian miner’s demo of some sort, but I’m not getting Kievists running wild at the moment. Links please.

  • YouKnowMyName

    Yes Jives: The Iraq & Afghan wars that cost UK £29B & over 100,000 collateral dead, according to RUSI, who also commented “Today, AQAP and other radical jihadist groups stretching across the Iraqi-Syrian border, pose new terrorist threats to the UK and its allies that might not have existed, at least in this form, had Saddam remained in power.”

    This rings true as whilst recently landing in the UK at a small regional airport, I was surprised to see 2 hardline “border police” officers, **after** passport control, obviously scanning the tourists for returning jihadis. Good Luck MI5 – you can tidy the blowback up!

    For Guano: I noticed a perturbation of some parts of the internet in February 2011, when (fake) anonymous hackers called Telecomix popped-up to support (cause or effect?) the wide Arab Spring with phone/fax/modem numbers in Hamburg, Stockholm & Paris.

    Syria DEFINITELY wasn’t a UK-SIS/Cameron-led operation. I suppose they/he might have been consulted as the widespread Color revolution teams got under-way sometime in 2010, but “discussion of the war in Syria which it(UK) started” (actually didn’t start) is obviously allowed as no-one has yet deleted this post

  • Mary

    Danny Boy is giving a press conference being carried by Sky. He looks rather shifty and uncomfortable. He says that it will benefit every person in Scotland by the sum of £1,400 to stay in the union.

    PS Is he the son of Lord Robertson? Some similarities. Only joking.:-)

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Mary

    “Danny Boy is giving a press conference being carried by Sky. He looks rather shifty and uncomfortable.”
    _________________________

    I’d give a lot to see your mug of a morning, Mary, when your eyes alight on the latest turpitude of the West as relayed on online BBC Radio 4. Pure joy, I should imagine! 🙂

    Have a great day now!

  • Habbabkuk (La vita è bella) !

    Mr Goss

    “Despite the trolls on this blog who glory in the death of ordinary people and attempt to misplace the blame, the people in East Ukraine know who is responsible for the slaughter,…”
    ________________

    Not glorying in the death of ordinary people, John, just standing up to the Big Lie as propagated by stool pigeons like you by putting the blame where it actually lies, ie, with the fascist bully boys and Mafia-style thugs attempting to create havoc in eastern Ukraine (aka, laughingly, as “separatists”)~. Even rasPutin seems to have abandoned them (and rightly so).
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    “I see people making comments who have shown themselves to be against the German holocaust against Jews but in favour of other holocausts figure-headed by Jews.”

    _______________

    You’re not getting back to that old idea of yours that the ousting of the corrupt, authoritarian, thuggish Yanukovich was all a Jewish conspiracy, are you?

  • Peacewisher

    @Ba’al: I agree with you that Putin is strangely quiet and unsupportive of the Donbass people at the moment. That doesn’t make it right for Kiev to launch or even threaten to launch a “shock and awe” on its own people just because they can, any more than it was justified to bomb Baghdad or Belgrade because their leaders were murderous dictators. I notice that “EuroMaiden” now saying that #SaveDonbassPeople” is just the work of Russian Trolls.

    Regarding the chocolate billionaire.. in true Berlusconi fashion, he is the owner of a TV station, CANAL5. He said he would revoke it… now he seems to have changed his mind. In case you didn’t read my previous link, he has also helped to negotiate the use of land across the Donbass for fracking with Joe Biden’s son’s company.

  • Jay

    @ John Goss

    That’s terrible John, what the hell is going on. It’s all politics and it’s corruptions.
    Get round the table quick! And seek diplomacy!
    There should be no borders just evaluations and outcomes!

    Danny Alexander on Nick Cambell just after 8am this morning.

    Big up for Nicky Cambell.

  • Ba'al Zevul (I THink, Therefore No-one Listens)

    Peacewisher –
    No, Poroshenko isn’t very nice. Neither’s Putin. Pity, that. It would be so nice if everybody was nice. On the realpolitik front, if armed opponents of the state as presently constituted decide to occupy a major airport, and if their foreign supporters have recognised the legality of the present state, then in the interests of sending a clear message as well as retaining a vital transport hub, the state IMO has a right to use force majeure. Don’t want to get shot at? Don’t occupy airports. Even Putin understands that.

    Remember Chechnya?

  • jake

    Danny Alexanders figures are wrong. They are wrong by a factor of 12.
    This has been picked up by Sky and reported in the FT.
    What prominence will this be given by the BBC I wonder, very little I suspect unless Farage has some comment to make about it.

  • Peacewisher

    I agree, Ba’al, and they are both politicians so no surprise there. Taking the airport at that time was stupid, but it shouldn’t bring about the bombing of civilian areas. I know there are terrible things going on in other parts of the world, but terrifying your own civilians on a mass scale like this is absolutely not the way a newly-elected leader should behave.

  • Jives

    Habbabkuk,

    Fascinating you taking on the mantle of exposing the Big Lie when most of the time you and your fellow NeoCon claqeurs and tag team troll buddies spent most of your time here defending the real Big Lie of our time.

    You Panglossian fool.

  • Jay

    @ jake

    Although should Danny Alexander be commended for standing by his party and leader and arguing for that which he is in no doubt would be the best for his comrades.

    Danny Alexander should be commended.

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