While some people get on with their incessant obsession with who said what to whom in the latest iteration of the conspiracy theorising about Sturgeon versus Salmond, or, as some would prefer it, Satanic Sturgeon vs Angelic Alex, the Conservatives are getting on with their important work of undermining Scotland’s chances of ever becoming independent and securing Scotland’s future as a silenced and politically neutered parking site for the UK’s nuclear Viagra. Because if you really think that David Davis is attempting to re-ignite a story that had started to quieten down and disappear from the top of the news agenda out of a deep and genuine concern for standards of propriety in Scottish Government, and an abiding concern for truth and justice, you probably also believe that he was a well prepared and well briefed Brexit secretary who had a deep and thorough command of all complexities and nuances of post Brexit trade negotiations.
Of course, David has the same concern for exposing the blatant corruption, the lethal incompetence, and ministerial misdeeds at the heart of the Tory Administration in Westminster. Oh wait, no he doesn’t. No, he doesn’t at all. He wants an inquiry into who knew what when about the allegations against Alex Salmond, he certainly doesn’t want an inquiry into how his party presided over 125,000 deaths and the greatest economic damage in Europe. He most certainly isn’t about to pop up with any whistle-blower reports denouncing the catastrophic collapse in fish and shellfish exports to Europe or the flight of £1.5 trillion in assets from the City of London since his beloved Brexit was implemented. Whenever a Conservative politician works himself up into a fit of moral apoplexy about another political party, the first question, indeed the only question, you need to ask yourself is – “What new Conservative outrage is he trying to distract us from?”
The Conservatives are desperate to keep this story going, because it sucks the oxygen out of discussion about their plans to increase the UK’s stockpile of nuclear Viagra. It was announced earlier this week in the British Government’s defence and foreign policy review that, far from the mealy mouthed platitudes that the British Government mouths about multilateral disarmament, the UK is in fact planning to acquire even more nuclear missiles. The decision shreds some three decades of efforts to gradually reduce the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The Johnson government wants to increase the number of nuclear warheads in the UK’s arsenal from 180 to 260, an increase of over 40%. It has been estimated that the detonation of just 100 warheads are enough to destroy all life on this planet (https://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2018/june/more-harm-than-good-assessing-the-nuclear-arsenal-tipping-point.html)
But Boris Johnson wants even more. This is because he wants us to believe that the UK is not sufficiently safe with just the ability to blow up the entire world and destroy all life on Earth a mere 1.8 times over. We’ll only be really safe when we’re able to destroy all life on Earth 2.6 times over. This Conservative government’s decision to boost the UK’s nuclear arsenal to 2.6 times what is sufficient to destroy all life on earth is the literal definition of overkill.
There is no new threat which requires this obscene increase in the UK’s destructive power. The likely threats faced by the UK which will require a response from the armed services remain those threats that arise from terrorism and the chaos that develops in failed states where the UK seeks to profit by selling weapons and tools of oppression to authoritarian governments. None of these threats can be neutralised or defended against with a nuclear submarine which carries eight missiles bearing up to five nuclear warheads each. Each of those warheads has a destructive potential eight times more powerful than the device which obliterated Hiroshima and killed over 140,000 civilians. The UK’s HMS Viagra for an impotent ex-empire carries a destructive power equivalent to 320 Hiroshimas.
Scotland will naturally be allocated its share of the costs of this massive and unnecessary expansion in the UK’s nuclear capacity. Scotland will be expected to cough up approxmately £1 billion so that the UK can keep up the pretence that it still remains a global superpower. That’s the only reason for this expansion in the size of the nuclear stockpile, it has nothing to do with keeping any of us safe and everything to do with allowing UK politicians to pretend to themselves that the British state remains an important and influential player in international geopolitics. The extra warheads will be stored at the UK’s existing facilities on the Clyde. There they will do nothing to protect the people of the West of Scotland except to make them a target and to guarantee their instant evaporation in the event that nuclear hostilities break out.
To return to David Davies, the Tories don’t give a toss about Alex Salmond, all they care about is doing the maximum damage possible to the SNP weeks away from a critical election so that they can ensure that Scotland remains an obedient parking site for the UK’s nuclear pretensions and they can get on with their task of neutering and undermining Scottish self-government. That’s what Davies' intervention is about, and that is all that it is about, not improving and strengthening the standards of government at Holyrood. Don’t be distracted. But keep a look out for what reward Davies gets for his 'concern'.
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