Paco

I’ve always seen the GE stuff as Sturgeon’s exit plan to be honest. If they don’t hit 50% she resigns in a similar manner to Salmond having “lost”, if they do hit 50% then after a few weeks or months of moaning she resigns in protest because there’s no legal route through. Sturgeon and the current frontbench SNP aren’t willing to go the Catalonia route. Which for me is the correct call, but I don’t see Westminster just suddenly buckling to a 50.4% SNP vote in the next election. Today has changed little in my eyes. The only possible avenue remains the SNP getting lucky holding the balance of power for a UK Government. A dreadful state of affairs but reality.

You can’t blame the Supreme Court for that, it’s clearly the right call. They judge solely on the law and the law is pretty clear that the constitution is a reserved matter. In a moral sense however it clearly isn’t right. What now?

There’s also absolutely no way the current tax bands stay where they are until 2028. Low-hanging fruit either for the Tories pre-election or for the incoming government. It’ll be a pretty small hit to most (and not even relevant in Scotland).

Something that Jeremy Hunt didn’t say yesterday is that Bulb going bust has now cost the UK taxpayer £6.5billion. That isn’t a typo - six and a half billion pounds. For context that runs HMRC and the Treasury for an entire year, or would give every single public sector worker in the UK a payrise of nearly £2,000. A reminder that Bulb hasn’t been ‘saved’. It is going bust, the taxpayer sees absolutely no reward for this at a later date as per RBS or Lloyds Bank. And Bulb had only 1.2 million customers. It costs every household in the UK £230, or an insane £5,416 per Bulb customer. There has been absolutely no regulatory change from Ofgen. If another supplier goes bust tomorrow, exactly the same process will be followed. The man in charge when Bulb went under? Mr Kwasi Kwarteng.

The Times has basically published the full thing already. Energy price cap moving to £3k on average with the grants scrapped, so an average annual increase of £900 in April. This is what drives essentially all of the UK’s inflation, and we’re still doing very little to sort it. For context the average bill on the price cap in March 2022 was £1,277, and most people weren’t even on the price cap. £1,800 in a year. Income tax rates all frozen for five years, so big chunks of those pay rises will be going straight back to HMRC. Council tax can be raised 5% rather than 3% as currently, which councils will almost definitely do as their budgets are getting cut. That looks like about it for the ‘man in the street’. Lovely stuff.

I’d be pretty surprised if we don’t just play Jon McLaughin if Gordon gets injured/suspended, regardless of whether he’s playing at Rangers or not. If you’re going to play a shit keeper, it may as well be an experienced one.

To be fair I’d be surprised if Dublin gets two spots from 10. Would leave 5 for England (Wembley, Tottenham, Old Trafford, St James, Everton?) assuming one each for Scotland/Wales/NI. I don’t like the idea of England giving token games elsewhere. They should just go it alone or choose one of us to make it a joint bid between two. A handful of group games and a last 16 match isn’t particularly exciting either. Presumably we’re just going along with it for the financial boost.

Inflation now averaging at 11.1%, driven mainly by fuel and energy. We’ll see what happens tomorrow but the chat is the Treasury plan to put up the energy price cap by at least £500, remove the £400 grant, and ditch the 5p cut to fuel duty. Problem solved.

We’ve went behind eight times this season in all competitions, and lost eight games. Only managed to score once while behind, in the 2-1 loss at Firhill. We won’t end up challenging for the play-offs if we can’t change that.

First time we’ve been expected to win a game this season. There was a bit of pressure on the Cove home match which we dealt with well, but I don’t think it was expectation. The fear is real.

Targett has started three EPL games this season, and none since September. He’d be a great option to have to battle it out with Taylor for third choice LB, but I’m not sure why he’s taking up so much of the debate. He’s certainly never going to be capped by England so I suppose it’s upto him if he wants to fight for a spot in the Scotland squad. I’d expect the usual sort of squad, maybe with Elliot Anderson and Tommy Conway as the wildcards. I don’t see anyone else out there banging the door down. Possibly Shankland but we know he’ll never be good enough.

An accident of geography means we’re in a pretty fortunate situation. However we’re making such a mess of it that housing costs for asylum seekers first few days alone costs the UK taxpayer £2.2bn per year.

There are two truths here - the UK’s immigration policy is completely broken beyond repair, and Braverman and the Tory Party are genuinely awful, awful c***s. Unfortunately I suspect the court of public opinion will be with Braverman. A cost of £2.2bn per year for hotels to house refugees arriving in small boats is completely ludicrous, and I can see the ire being focussed on the people arriving rather than the idiots who’ve landed us in the position where the costs are necessary.

Sunak refusing to attend COP27 and demoting Alok Sharma, ‘Secretary for COP’ (somehow a thing) from cabinet is a pretty clear attempt to cut one of Farage’s routes to a comeback off at the knees. He’s been making noises about starting a No to Net Zero party of late and was latterly furious at Johnson for somehow being “in thrall” to “green zealots”. Which was clearly made up but there we are. Farage and his ilk have a real hard-on for Sunak for some reason (I mean I could take a wild guess) so I do think his return for the next GE is fairly likely, at this stage I’d imagine as ‘The Borders Party’ or similar. But clearly it’ll be yet another Conservative leader dancing to the tune of the far right. To be honest while I was never going to vote for him, I did think Sunak might be the boring PM we probably need right now. Everything I’ve seen from him since his first Downing St address suggests Johnson with a nicer suit.

Yep, if anything we need less fixing in favour of the big teams with everyone in the cup early doors. If Rangers draw Celtic in October so be it, if they can run a separate Colts team in the Lowland League they’ll be fine for an extra couple of cup matches. Drawing a team in the same league is shite but it’s just the luck of the draw. Seeding is terrible and ruins a cup.

What an absolute gift to Labour that is, at a time where Sunak is trying to be appear credible he appoints a woman who broke the law literally last week to the role she was forced to resign from. She emailed a confidential document from her personal email address to a backbench MP and attempted to also send it to his unelected wife, which would’ve been a resignation offence in itself. But she sent it to a random punter instead. Then denied it all. I shouldn’t be, but I’m genuinely surprised Sunak is this stupid.

I think we need to consider what the ultimate banter option is here, because that’s probably where we end up. Sunak getting the vast majority of MPs, and Johnson absolutely point-blank refusing to stand aside under huge pressure from the party after scraping 100 is probably the starting point. Beyond that Johnson winning handsomely amongst members in a sham of an online vote with it being proven anyone from anywhere could vote if they paid their £25. Resignations galore, putting us either in GE territory or a collapse of the government days after it’s formed. If it turns out Tories are too spineless for that (quelle surprise) then Johnson getting banned from the Commons with a potential by-election for his seat in a couple of months seems completely inevitable. Spineless c***s like Sharma, Jenrick and Lewis return to insist while they ‘disagree with the decision’ the PM getting banned from the House of Commons for deliberately lying is perfectly normal stuff.

Ben Wallace is a legitimate imbecile. Truss became popular with Tory members with the world’s easiest job, copying and pasting EU trade deals with Pacific islands and passing them off as huge economic victories. Nobody really knew who she was but they liked her ‘results’. Wallace is in a similar position, running around Whitehall in military fatigues like a pound-shop Captain Mainwaring because there’s a war on in Europe. As soon as he’s asked to open his mouth on anything other than nasty man Putin he’ll embarrass himself.

How many players do Caley actually have out, and who are they? I saw a post the other day where a guy was claiming 8 but he included two players who started on the bench on Tuesday night. Which is a weird way of counting. We’ll obviously find a hilarious way to blow this, but it’s nice to build up the hopes.

This hasn’t even left my deleted items folder from the last time it was used.

The Labour Party needs to face economic reality, says Truss. [emoji23] She is so incredibly bad. Banging on about railway strikes in retaliation to questions about people paying £500 more on mortgages.

It’ll be a load of fantasy island stuff about Labour being the reason people are striking, something about denying Brexit and possibly one about them being the reason people are gluing themselves to roads. Combined with ‘we made mistakes but we’ve fixed them’ and other robotic cliches. She’s probably stupid enough to parrot her line about solving the energy crisis as well.

This was only last month!

The Dorries WhatsApp shows exactly how it’s going to be framed. ‘We’re stuck with Truss or an election, the people simply won’t accept another leader they haven’t voted for… oh, but hang on…’ Enter Johnson from the nearest fridge.

I found it interesting to see Nicola Stirgeon calling for an election, having seen Ian Blackford earlier in the day doing his absolute best to avoid saying it. Would mean the next General Election - potentially the ‘independence’ election - being held in late 2027 or early 2028, at least a year after the next Scottish Parliament election is due.