IN THESE DIRE TIMES, DO YOU EVER LOOK BACK TO THE 2014 INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM AND THINK 'IF ONLY?....' I DO!

 

I did an interview for 'Scotland Tonight' yesterday evening. It was actually rather a bizarre experience - High tech and low tech all rolled into one.

The high tech part involved a mind boggling link which enabled my ugly mug to appear on a large screen in the STV studio in Glasgow via my Iphone. The low tech part was setting the aforesaid Iphone up on a dusty old paperback and the shut down screen of my laptop whilst all the while storm Dudley rattled away at the windows.

My role was to state the blindingly obvious. The party line for every front line charity trying to mitigate the endless nightmare of London rule.

Since 2008, real wages have gone down.

Slowly but surely, millions of families have been sliding down into a kind of grinding survival mode. A place where the incomings are never quite able to square up to the outgoings. A place where the end of the month gap keeps on getting that little bit wider, only made bridgeable by money borrowed from family or squeezed into the last remaining space on the plastic.

Like slowly boiled frogs.

There is new economic name for the people who are stuck in this slow moving nightmare.

The Precariat.

So let's take a precariat family in 2019.

Incomings - £20,000

Outgoings - £21,000

How did they bridge the gap? Let's say £500 from mum and dad and £500 onto Barclaycard.

Not great.

In June of the year in question, the annual MOT had rolled in at £543 including VAT – an eye watering £342 over their rather optimistic budget of £200.

This meant three months of frantic belt tightening and multiple visits to the foodbank.

So how are things looking now?

Aye right.

A couple of modest pay rises have lifted the family incomings up to £20,500.

And the outgoings?

Oh my god the bloody outgoings.....

What is 7% of £21,000?

It's £1470.

Which brings the pot to the boil and duly completes the long term task of killing the frog

£22,470 - £20,500 = £1970

As in two thousand quid bar the shouting.

And mum and dad are broke as well.

And the Barclaycard is all maxxed out.

And so the foodbank is the only show in town and it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Working in a foodbank in February 2022 feels a bit like living on some island in the path of a coming hurricane.

You know it is coming and there isn't a damned thing you can do about it.

Only two questions await answers.

When will it arrive? And how bad is it going to be? Will the roof stay in place or will it be blown clean off?

So in a nutshell, I stated the obvious.

And once the director up in the studio bid me a good evening, I couldn't help but wish I had been able talk about a far bigger picture.

Well this isn't an STV interview and I don't have to wear my sensible foodbank manager's hat. Instead I can don my 'YES' hat and let off some steam.

Imagine, as the man once said.

Imagine 'YES' had won in September 2014. We would have been fully independent now and the world would look like a very different place. We could all be watching the antics of the pound shop Fascists in Westminster and thinking 'there but for the grace of God....'

It would be very easy to go on and on and on about how much better things would be, but I haven't got the time and neither have you.

So I will contain my rant to a couple of things.

Fair enough?

OK.

As we all know only too well, right now there are 130,000 Russian soldiers on the Ukrainian border. Only one person on God's green earth knows the answer to the big 'will he/won't he' question and that person of course is Vladimir Putin.

What does or does not happen in Ukraine isn't really our business and even if it was, there isn't a whole lot we can do about it.

And yet it is our business in a very big way.

Right now, somewhere under the world's oceans, a Trident submarine is gliding silently through the dark waters. On board are multiple nuclear warheads, each and every one targeted at a Russian city. On board is the capability to wipe out tens of millions of Russians should the word be passed down the line to the captain.

This inescapable fact leads to another inescapable fact. Right now, one of the first targets on the Russian nuclear hit list will be the nuclear sub base at Faslane. And should Faslane be vapourised, then Glasgow will become collateral damage.

So all of a sudden, any sudden escalation in Ukraine is very much our business.

Had we voted 'Yes' in 2014, the nukes would have been away by now. Would any town or city in an Independent Scotland be worthy of being high up on a Russian nuclear hit list? It seems highly doubtful.

Of course a large majority of Scots don't want to play host to Britain's last vengeful vestige of Imperial power. But we have no choice in the matter. The word from our lords and masters in London is to put up and shut up. Defense of the Realm is and always will be a reserved matter and Big Dog is the duly anointed great leader with the authority to kill off all those tens of millions of Russians. 

It is for us to learn to stay quiet and deal with it.

And if Glasgow gets wiped clean off the map? Well, them's are the breaks I guess. It's all part and parcel of being a colony.

We voted for it, right?

Anyway. Here's a bunch of facts. I will leave it for you to piece them all together.

How would these facts have come together had we voted YES back in 2014?

OK. Here goes.

In France, the Government has control over EDF, it's main energy provider.

This means President Macron has cracked the whip and told EDF it can only put up its prices by 4%

Unlike the 50% increase we are about to suffer.

Oh and by the way, French electric prices were a whole lot lower than ours before this bloody nightmare started.

Next.

In 2020, Scotland's wind farms produced 97.5% of Scotland's power needs.

Where this power goes is a reserved power. Every last kilowatt of electricity we produce belongs to London. Lock, stock and barrel. We are required stick it into the National Grid and we are charged top dollar to buy our own renewable power back.

Between 2020 and 2022, the price of Scottish wind has not risen by so much as a penny.

In 2020 the cost of Scottish wind was £0.

In 2022 the cost of Scottish wind is still £0. There has been zero inflation when it comes to the price of Scottish wind.

Vladimir Putin has no ability to lift the price of Scottish wind, no matter how many nukes he has.

In fact, Scotland is one of the very few countries on earth with the ability to be able to withstand a huge spike in global gas and oil prices.

Had we voted Yes back in 2014, our First Minister would now be in an even better position than President Macron.

How many companies would be eyeing up a move to Scotland right now?

How many people would be eyeing up a move to Scotland right now.

We would be vibrant newly independent country powered by a source of energy free at the point of use...... forever.

And ever.

But we didn't vote 'YES'.

We voted 'NO'.

We voted to be 'Better Together'.

We voted for the right to go down with the London ship.

We voted for the right to think 'if only.....'

Surely we couldn't possibly be so utterly brain washed and stupid when we get the chance to vote again?

Could we?

If you're interested on my efforts on STV you can get there via the link below. The piece arrives after 14 minutes but the adverts are non negotiable. Check out the state of the First Base ceiling!

STV - 'Scotland Tonight'

SAVE BIG DOG? OH PLEASE, PLEASE DO!

A few months ago I found myself in what I guess might be called a double pinch myself moment. You know the kind of moment, right? As in this is all so utterly extraordinary I really must be dreaming.

Some context.

Liverpool were in the midst of their annual journey into the beating heart of the Evil Empire.

As in Old Trafford, that great crumbling, boxy monstrosity squatting like a malevolent Soviet era eyesore in the heart of Salford.

As in Mordor.

Complete with a full complement of 76,000 baying Orcs.

Sixty minutes on the clock and there were words and letters on the TV screen I never thought possible.

Manchester United 0 - Liverpool 5.

Yup.

Not a fever dream on the back of a tab of acid.

Cold, hard, actual, really happening reality.

Manchester United 0 - Liverpool 5

Pinch, pinch, pinch.

I pinched until my flesh was bruised and still I didn't wake up to a world more familiar.

Not only was it it five nil, it looked like at any second it would be six. Then seven. Then eight. Nine?

The forces of darkness were imploding in front of my disbelieving eyes.

A result for the ages was in the making. Half a century's worth of bragging rights.

My mind wandered back a couple of years to one of my more bizarre experiences of watching the lads taking the East Lancs road to Mordor.

I was in front of a big TV in the bar of a somewhat threadbare lodge in Queen Elizabeth Game Park in South West Uganda. 

Rift Valley. Ruwenzori Mountains. Eighty degrees of heat undeterred by the lazy rusty fans on the paint cracked ceiling.

People had driven in from far and wide to take advantage of the rare satellite signal. Sky Sports in the heart of Africa.

The much vaunted global tribes of two clubs followed by hundreds of millions.

The two guys beside me soon revealed themselves as Mancs as Marcus Rashford opened the scoring and sent the Orcs in the stadium into overdrive.

Both were well fed and watered and they wore the clothes of the Ugandan one percent. Maybe politicians? Maybe policemen? Definitely well heeled Government.

At one point, the guy next to me cocked an ear to the screen and picked out the song the Orcs in the stadium were belting out.

Our song with their words.

He grinned and lent in to me to spell out the words in his rich African voice.

"Sign on, Sign on with hope in your heart and you'll never get a job...."

Seriously.

Half an hour or so later Adam Lallana equalised and Liverpool grabbed an undeserved draw.

We went on to win the league.

They didn't.

Just for the record.

Anyway.

Back to my pinch myself moment of a few months ago. 0 - 5 with thirty opportunity rich minutes left on the clock.

It was at this moment I arrived at pinch myself moment number two as the cameras zoomed in on the ashen face of the United manager.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

The one time 'Bay Faced Assassin'.

Three years into the role and doing the kind of job for Mordor Robert Mugabe once upon a time did for Zimbabwe.

Every day he hung on meant more long term damage.

Every day he hung on to his job was a day of joy for us.

Every day he hung on to his job was a lingering nightmare for the Orcs.

Would he survive 0 - 5? 

Doubtful, but there was a sliver of a chance.

Would he survive 0 - 8?

Not a prayer. Not in a million years.

So what to hope for? Settle for 0 - 5 and the chance of a few more catastrophic weeks in Mordor?

Or go for the utter blissful nemesis option?

Short term gratification or long term damage?

A actually surprised myself by choosing the long term strategic option and had no complaints when the lads played quiet disdainful keep ball for the last thirty minutes and allowed the scoreboard to be frozen at 0 - 5.

For all of history.

And now in the grey cold of January it seems a kind of Groundhog Day has arrived.

Another Mordor is under siege. A different Mordor. A Mordor sited two hundred miles south of Old Trafford.

A Mordor at the heart of another vindictive, shrunken dark empire.

The Mordor of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and all his hideous cronies.

My utter contempt for Johnson is as absolute as contempt can get. I knew plenty like him at college. Preening, entitled Etonian twats. But he is next level. 

This is an article he signed off on when he was Editor at the Spectator.

"The extreme reaction to Mr Bigley's murder is fed by the fact that he was a Liverpudlian. Liverpool is a handsome city with a tribal sense of community. A combination of economic misfortune — its docks were, fundamentally, on the wrong side of England when Britain entered what is now the European Union — and an excessive predilection for welfarism have created a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche among many Liverpudlians.

They see themselves whenever possible as victims, and resent their victim status; yet at the same time they wallow in it. Part of this flawed psychological state is that they cannot accept that they might have made any contribution to their misfortunes, but seek rather to blame someone else for it, there by deepening their sense of shared tribal grievance against the rest of society.

The deaths of more than 50 Liverpool football supporters at Hillsborough in 1989 was undeniably a greater tragedy than the single death, however horrible, of Mr Bigley; but that is no excuse for Liverpool's failure to acknowledge, even to this day, the part played in the disaster by drunken fans at the back of the crowd who mindlessly tried to fight their way into the ground that Saturday afternoon. The police became a convenient scapegoat, and the Sun newspaper a whipping-boy for daring, albeit in a tasteless fashion, to hint at the wider causes of the incident."

Yeah.

Over fifty? It was ninety six in case you're remotely interested. Ninety seven now.

I was one of those fans at the back of the crowd. Not drunk by the way. Just there. Alive by the roll of a dice.

There are no words.

I have never truly hated a politician before. But believe me, I truly hate Johnson. I have reached the stage where I can't even stand to look at him any more.

The good people of Liverpool are not alone when it comes to being the butt of a pathetic Johnson joke.

Here are some more words the bastard signed of on during his days at the helm of the Spectator. This time the good folk of Scotland are in his pig eyed sight.

"The Scotch – what a verminous race!

Canny, pushy, chippy, they’re all over the place,

Battening off us with false bonhomie,

Polluting our stock, undermining our economy.

Down with sandy hair and knobbly knees!

Suppress the tartan dwarves and the Wee Frees!

Ban the kilt, the skean-dhu and the sporran

As provocatively, offensively foreign!

It’s time Hadrian’s Wall was refortified

To pen them in a ghetto on the other side.

I would go further. The nation

Deserves not merely isolation

But comprehensive extermination.

We must not flinch from a solution."

Yeah. He actually thought this vicious drivel was funny. Fit for publication. "The nation deserves not merely isolation but comprehensive extermination. We must not flinch from a solution."

I think I should repeat the last line 

"We must not flinch from a solution."

Is it a bit too Adolf Eichmann 1942 for your taste? It is for mine.

So believe you me I am enjoying every second of watching his slow and dismal demise. I am relishing the sight of every knife being eased into his flailing carcass.

But do I want to see him yanked out of 10 Downing Street and tossed unceremoniously onto the street?

Well, no, actually.

I'm back to a 0 - 5 shaped dilemma. I keep telling myself to look beyond short term gratification and to focus on the bigger picture.

The 'Yes' campaign will never have a greater asset than Johnson. Every day he clings to power sees a few thousand more make the move from 'No' to 'Yes'. 

Every day.

A few more months of Johnson might well be enough to seal the deal. 

Forever.

So 'Operation Save Big Dog'?

Absolutely! Bring it on. And please let it succeed in spades because a few more months of this uniquely hideous human being will surely be enough to make an Independent Scotland a nailed on certainty.  

STATUE THOUGHTS

 

On the day the Colston Four were found not guilty by a jury of their peers, I was delivering a week's worth of food to a guy in Gretna. It has become part of my routine. A couple months ago I returned a call to his support worker to pick up the referral. She explained how ill he was. Just out of hospital and barely capable of anything. I duly read between the carefully drawn lines. It wasn't just any kind of ill. It was ill of the terminal variety.

It certainly seems that way.

Every week it takes my man a little longer to come to the door.

Every week he is a few pounds lighter.

Every week the stretched skin of his face is a lighter shade of grey.

Britain 2022, right?

But I am digressing here.

As per usual.

Back to the Colston Four. Back to statues.

In case you have been residing in a cave for the last couple of years, the Colston Four were the guys picked out from a crowd of 3000 and put on trial for pulling down the statue of a bang to rights slave trader and tossing it into Bristol harbour.

Priti Patel and her fellow culture warriors were quick to demand the very harshest of punishment for this wicked crime against our glorious imperial past. Unsurprisingly I didn't see it that way. My two sons are descendants of the desperate souls Colston and his ilk bought and sold. The government in Westminster has come up with a new way of describing the whole slave trading thing. They now call it the 'Carribbean Experience'.

Seriously.

Like surviving the Middle Passage was akin to flying across the Atlantic with Virgin and dancing to Eddie Grant in beach front night club.

It seems worth giving a serious shout out to the lawyers who came up with a defense case good enough to ensure the Colston Four are now able to enjoy their liberty.

They didn't have an easy task. The might of the Establishment was baying for blood and the right wing press was with them every step of the way. 

Seriously adversaries.

Their clients openly admitted their obvious guilt to the crime of pulling down the statue and tossing it in the drink.

So how do you come up with a defense good enough to persuade the jury to let them off and allow them to go back to living their lives?

Well, here's how it was done.

They called up a witness with expertise in the valuation of historical artifacts.

It went something like this.

In your judgement, how much was the statue worth when it was sitting on a plinth in the city centre? How much cash could Bristol City Council have raised had they decided it was an asset they wanted to cash in to help pay for more bin men?

A few thousand. Maybe £10,000. No more than that.

OK. Noted.

Now. Once the statue had been duly sprayed with graffiti, pulled down, rolled along the street, tossed into the water and then dragged out by a crane and sent into a museum, surely it can't have been worth much more than the scrap metal price?

Well. No, actually.

Before the Colston Four and their fellow travellers did what they did, the Colston statue was basically unheard of outside Bristol. Taking a dive into the harbour in such spectacular fashion turned the statue into something of a worldwide superstar. For a week or two, it's celebrity status was right up there with the Statue of Liberty.

So what kind of cash would Bristol City Council raise were they to cash in today?

Oh loads. A least half a million. Maybe even a million. There would be an awful lot of potential buyers with seriously deep pockets.

So. Let's just put things into proper perspective. The Colston Four are accused of committing criminal damage causing a material loss to Bristol City Council. And yet the result of their actions is a million pound boost to the balance sheet of the aforesaid Council.

I mean, come on guys! The public purse is the big winner here.

Well this gave the jury all the wriggle room they needed to allow the Colston Four to walk free and thereby sticking two fingers up to Patel and the right wing press.

It's nice when the good guys win for once.

On this day of statues, my attention was drawn to the one at the top of the page.

A Gretna statue. I guess you could call it a statue to the unknown munitions worker.

Unlike the Edward Colston statue, this was not erected in Victorian times. It is only five years old. I guess it was the hundredth anniversary of the Somme which lay behind the commissioning decision.

Before tens of thousands of soldiers obeyed the sound of the whistle and jumped out of their trenches into a hail of machine gun fire, the Brits had landed the greatest artillery barrage in history on the German trenches. It went on for a week and involved one and a half million shells.

A lot of bang and a lot of buck.

A large percentage of these shells were filled and primed in the vast armaments factories which were built along the Solway Coast. Tens of thousands of young women manned the assembly lines to fill the shell cases with what they nicknamed 'The Devil's Porridge'.

It was grim, dangerous work and there were industrial accidents a plenty.

The High Command had high hopes for the million and a half shells the lasses filled and primed. They were supposed to herald a march all the way to Berlin.

They didn't of course.

Instead they heralded 20,000 dead on the British Army's darkest day.

Did the Generals learn the lesson?

Not a chance. For the next two years the factories on the Solway Coast continued to send millions of shells to the Western Front and the German machine gun nests continued to make No Man's Land a place of biblical carnage.

In the spring of 1917 the High Command turned up in Downing Street with plans for more of the same. In their judgement, a million and half shells hadn't been enough. Not nearly enough. In order to smash through the German lines they would need more. A whole lot more. Enough to keep the lasses on the Solway running for twenty four hours a day for weeks on end.

But there was a problem. A big one.

The main reason tens of thousands of young Scottish women had flocked down to the coast to pull twelve hour shifts working the Devil's Porridge was the money the Government was paying in wages. Munitions work offered the equivalent of four or five times the going rate. And a chance to get away from mum and dad and lives of utter drudgery.

Which of course was all well and good so long as the Government had the wherewithal to keep meeting the payroll.

By the spring of 1917 this was no longer the case. Britain was pretty much bankrupt. The coffers were bare and nobody was interested in lending us any more money. All the credit cards were maxed out.

So the Generals were given the bad news. Six million shells for the third battle of Ypres? In your dreams lads.

No more overtime on the Solway.

Until a certain Mr Balfour came up with a cunning plan which was duly adopted.

He caught a boat across the Atlantic and sailed past the Statue of Liberty into New York harbour. He did the rounds of the big Jewish banks on Wall St and peddled what has to be one of the dirtiest deals in history.

His pitch was pretty straight forward.

If you guys lend us the cash we need to pay the lasses on the Solway to fill enough shells for the Third Battle of Ypres, we will promise to make Palestine a homeland for the Jewish people.

The dirty deal was duly shaken on.

And the shells were duly dropped on the German lines. They churned the ground into a sea of mud where over a million men perished in what became known as the battle of Paschendaele.

And the overtime on the Solway was paid in full.

And thirty years later the Palestinians were issued with an eviction notice.

You could say the rest is history.

So what to make of the statue?

I don't know really. The young women who worked the Devil's Porridge certainly played a big part in us eventually winning the most pointless war in mankind's dismal history.

I guess we should wonder how we would feel if the boot was on the other foot. I wonder what the Daily Mail would have had to say if the Germans had unveiled a similar statue somewhere in the Ruhr to celebrate the munitions workers who filled the bombs the Luffewaffe dropped on London in the Blitz?

Something tells me the Mail would have filled the front page with spitting outrage.

A heavy price was paid for all those millions of shells. By the poor sods they landed on and the poor sods who died in the sea of mud they created and by the people of Palestine who were driven from their land.

Is such epic misery worth celebrating with a statue?

Maybe not.

FIRST BASE HAS RECEIVED A CHRISTMAS CARD FROM THE VICEROY! BUT WILL ALISTER BE THE LAST VICEROY?

 

Once upon a time First Base used to get lots and lots of Christmas cards. My, how dim and distant this particular past suddenly looks. The salad days of New Labour when there was a quango for everything from the Methadone programme to anti social behaviour. I could easily have attended two meetings every single day, each and every one complete with a £20 a head budget for a finger buffet fit for Royalty.

Bloody hell. Asbos! The quango wallahs loved nothing more than to call a meeting to chew over the Asbo fat. Surely never in history have so many Vol -Au-Vents been consumed whilst fat has has been chewed to such pathetically little effect.

Anyway.

The point.

The civil servants tasked with heading up all those New Labour quangos were always furnished with a generous budget for Christmas cards and did they ever use it!

So we received stacks of cards and bugger all funding. Those who spent their days trying to starve us out for the crime of exposing inconvenient truths in the press were more than happy to use up a bit of their budget on wishing us a Happy Christmas.

Well, those days are very much a thing of the very distant past and the age austerity means barely a card lands on our mat any more.

I dare say it won't come as any surprise to hear we ain't exactly shedding bucket loads of tears.

So far this December, First Base has received a grand total of four cards.

Which is absolutely fine by us because we have received an overwhelming number of food and cash donations.

But one card was a very special card.

Oh yes.

First Base received a card from the Viceroy.

The Right Honourable Alister Jack MP, the Secretary of State for Scotland and our very own Colonial Master.

Now.

A spot of reality checking is very much in order here.

Has First Base received a card from the Viceroy as an official recognition from our lords and masters in the Imperial capital? Have these particular seasons greetings come from the very beating heart of the heart of the Empire!

Well, no, actually.

Instead all of my dealings with Alister have been entirely local. And they were particularly productive. Alister and his local team went out of their way to help two families First Base was supporting who were in imminent danger of feeling the full force of the Hostile Environment. One family was from Nigeria, one from Tunisia. Both were destitute and both faced the prospect of deportation to a fate worse than death.

Well Alister went out to bat for them and he saved their bacon and for that we will be forever grateful to him.

But things have changed somewhat. Moved on.

When our modern day version of Mad King George was installed on the throne in 2019, he appointed Alister as his Viceroy to rule over the five million pesky and disruptive subjects north of Hadrian's Wall.

And this is the context in which Alister's card dropped onto our mat.

And it duly got me thinking.

Because in a way it says a lot about where Imperial rule is sitting right now.

Imagine First Base was a wee charity in India in 1925.

Let's say in Nagpur.

A small charity managed by a very public follower of Mahatma Gandhi who was forever penning leaflets extolling the virtues of Indian Independence?

Would the aforesaid manager have received a Christmas Card from the Viceroy?

Not a chance. Instead he would have been beaten black and blue and imprisoned without trial.

It would have been the same story for a hypothetical charity manager in Nakuru in 1954 who was publicly backing the Mau Mau.

But add a few years onto each scenario and the story might have been rather different.

Lets say India 1946 and Kenya 1963.

By then, a very different picture had emerged and it was clear to every man and his dog Independence was only a matter of months away.

At this point I have no doubt the two Viceroys would have been frantically sending Christmas cards out to all an sundry in a desperate bid to curry a bit of favour for the future relationship between the soon to be ex Imperial power and it's soon to be ex subjects.

When John Mclean was packed off to Peterhead Prison to be ground into the dust for the crime of railing against tens of thousands of Scottish soldiers being fed into the meat grinder of the Western Front in the cause of defending the Empire, there would have been no chance of one of his supporters receiving a Christmas card from the Viceroy.

Instead, any supporter of John Mclean was more likely to join him up in Peterhead.

Well.

Things have changed.

Scottish Independence suddenly feels a lot more like 'when' than 'if'.

The last significant colony is slowly but surely slipping from London's grasp.

And a hard reality must be settling in. A hard reality which shines a light on a future world where this particular ex colony is home to the UK's nukes and the source of 20% of England's electricity.

Ouch.

Which means it is time to start making nice.

Just like it was in India in 1946. Just like it was in Kenya in 1963.

It's a time for Christmas cards rather than a rat infested cell in Peterhead jail of a bunk bed in a concentration camp in the shadow of Mount Kenya.

Am I reading rather too much into a single Christmas card from the Viceroy?

Probably. When all is said and done, I am a purveyor of pulp fiction so maybe you can embrace the festive spirit and give me a break.

The bigger question I guess is this.

Is Alister about to make like Lord Louis Mountbatton and Malcolm McDonald?

Not just the Viceroy, but the last Viceroy?

Maybe one day our Christmas card might just become something of a collector's item!

THE JOY OF PEOPLE POWER IN THE MIDST OF A SEA OF TROUBLES

 

I can't say there will be much structure to this blog. You are not about to be taken on a careful, well structured journey from A to B to C. Instead it's going to be a bunch of random observations of a pandemic drenched world where the lunatics are running the asylum into the ground.

Every day brings forth facts which a couple of years ago would have been utterly inconceivable. Unthinkable.

I guess it is what Britain 2021 has become.

Unthinkable. All of it. The stuff on the news. The stuff in day to day life.

I was chatting with Kerr the other day. He owns the Little Bakery in Dumfries and he supplies us with two and a half thousand of his award winning pies a month at a price which is quite frankly ridiculous.

Anyway.

He was talking bills. Right now, as 2021 draws its final few breaths, he is paying 14p a unit for his electricity. Then 1 January 2022 will land on the mat. And does it ever.

The brave new year will see Kerr's electric costs go up from 14p per unit all the way to 33p per unit.

Just like that. Over night.

And he uses plenty electric. It's a factory when all is said and done. His flour supplier has been round to slap a non negotiable 20% rise on the table. His insurance provider is wanting a 100% increase.

It's not so much death by a thousand cuts as death by a thousand machete slashes.

And of course there are only two outcomes. Kerr can keep his prices where they are and slowly but surely fade away into bankruptcy. Of he can pass on all the increases to you and me.

This isn't just a hint of inflation. This is a complete nightmare. Right there in black and white. Across the board.

And yet even at these ever rising prices, ordering in fifty tins of tinned spaghetti generally doesn't go well. Some days we are lucky to receive half a dozen. And this has somehow become normal.

Where will it all end up is the $64,000 question.

Christ knows.

Lets take a ride up the A76 to the village of Thornhill. Is it a village? I'm not entirely sure. Population of 2000 or thereabouts with a Co-op and a high school. Does this make it a small town?

Maybe.

Whatever. For those of you who don't know Thornhill, it is a postcard kind of a place. The high street is still home to well appointed expensive shops for well appointed customers who park up their gleaming 4x4's cheek by jowl. The venerable red stone buildings sit in front of a glorious backdrop of Scottish hills. Add in a seasonal sprinkling of snow, and the place positively gleams.

Our food parcels have been available for collection from the small library for many years. Once upon a time, a busy month would see three parcels picked up. A quiet month would mean a big fat zero. From time to time, I would get a call asking me to pick up parcels containing items which had slipped by their sell by date.

Well that was then.

I think it is fair to say things have changed somewhat.

The pandemic closed the library for book business but Dumfries and Galloway Council gave us a set of keys and allowed us to use the space for emergency food. I am truly chuffed to be able to report this arrangement is now permanent.

We are open once a week. On a Sunday. From 10 am to Noon. A brilliant team of volunteers runs the show from top to bottom. I turn up once a week with a van load of top up food to supplement what the local community donates. Which is lots by the way.

All of which brings me to last Sunday morning.

Our volunteers provided emergency food for 55 people.

In two hours.

In Thornhill.

In an affluent village/town of 2000 souls.

Yeah.

I know.

If this is a canary in the coal mine, we are about to be absolutely swamped when the biting cold reality of January arrives like a bunch of Russian mercenaries.

In balaclavas.

Happily other unexpected 2021 things are rather more encouraging. We are now nearly two years into the era of Covid and still the local community never ceases to be completely amazing. Every day sees food and cash donations pour in. Every week I turn up at Morrisons to pack my van to bursting point. I would like nothing more than to ramble on for page after page thanking all the people to are helping us to do what we do.

But that would be really, really boring.

And you would stop reading.

So the thank you will have to be scatter gun and general, but completely heartfelt all the same.

But I think three cases do warrant a spotlight.

Let's face it, power companies are not exactly flavour of the month right now. We see them as giant, faceless corporations who are draining our bank accounts and wrecking the climate.

As in bad guys. Wall to wall bad guys.

Well I am going to buck the trend here and give a shout out for three local purveyors of power who aren't such bad guys after all.

In truth, nobody in their right mind would ever call the Wood Fuel Co-Op in Dumfries bad guys. They sell a wide variety of eco friendly, re-cycled products designed to make open fires and wood burners environmentally acceptable. You know the kind of thing. You see these kinds of products stacked high in petrol stations where they are sold at double the prices the guys at the Wood Fuel Co-Op charge.

Their name of course gives the game away.

They are a Co-Op and here is how things work. When you pitch up, they will ask if you would like to become a member and thereby be eligible for a discount on the fuel you purchase. You don't have to say yes, but the member's discount makes it kind of hard to say no.

So. How much?

Well it's as much or as little as you like.

And where does the money go?

Well, that would be to us, actually. To First Base. To the local food bank.

And every month members are encouraged to give a donation when they stop by for their fuel.

And every month the proceeds are sent our way via our JustGiving page.

£710 this month.

How good is that?

If Heineken did green fuel businesses........

Next.

An e mail. Not asked for. Not solicited. Not begging lettered.

An email from out of the clear blue of cyber space.

It was from E'on. From their Steven's Croft Biomass power station in Lockerbie. The company had made funds available for the staff to give to charity and the staff had chosen First Base.

Could I furnish our bank details?

I could. I did. And £995 duly landed in our account,

Next.

Another email. Not asked for. Not solicited. Not begging lettered.

This time from Scottish Power.

Every year the company provides the staff with a fund for Christmas parties. By the way, this particular email landed before Christmas parties became quite such a thing as they are as I pen these words.

Well this year the staff got their collective heads together and decided the money would better going to hard stretched front line charities rather than cakes and ale. They decided to allow staff from across all regions vote to identify their chosen charity.

The email was happy to inform me that hundreds and hundreds of staff working in the South West of Scotland had voted for First Base.

Which meant some cash would be headed our way once I filled in a couple of boxes and provided our bank details.

So could I call to talk things through?

Of course I could. And I did and within a minute or so I damn nearly fell off my chair.

£10,000.

Seriously. Ten thousand bloody pounds.

I was completely speechless.

This is the kind of thing which counts double for us. Treble. When I fill in an application and get a 'yes' letter in response, it is good. Obviously.

But this is different. Hundreds of people have voted for First Base on the back of what we have been trying to do for the last twenty years.

I guess you can imagine how it makes us feel.

Humbled. Honoured. Motivated to keep on doing what we do.

It is worth remembering how behind the smug corporate logos lie millions of real living and breathing human beings. People power. The optimistic Ying to the scary corporate Yang.

I heard the CEO of some massive global investment fund interviewed a while ago. His outfit was managing tens of billions of pension fund cash and they were announcing to the world that from here on in the money was heading into renewables. Of course he made a long term economic case and warned of stranded money lost in the untapped oil wells of the future.

But then he went personal. He talked of his teenage kids. And he explained how he really didn't want his teenage kids to hate his guts.

He explained how this was one of the main reasons why his fund was sticking two fingers up to the likes of Trump and Bolsonaro and piling tens of billions into a better future for our grand kids.

People power, right?

Long may it last.

THE FIRST BASE ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

THE VIEW FROM OUR FOOD BANK IN A DEEP AND DARK DECEMBER

 

It's 7.45.

Not even close to getting light.

Rain streaming down the window.

Wind shaking the pane.

And an old line from a Simon and Garfunkel song.

“A winter's day in a deep and dark December.”

Deep and dark.

Sounds about right.

For some months now, working in a food bank has felt a little like living on a Caribbean island in the path of an incoming hurricane.

The weather reports all point in one direction. Everyone agrees a storm is on the way. And everyone agrees it will hit. There is only one unanswered question. The $64,000 question.

How bad will it be? 

Will we manage to ride it out? Or will it just smash up everything in sight no matter what we do?

I have been doing this job for twenty years now and never have there been so many warning signs.

Is it worth a list?

Yeah. Why not? Get it all down on paper. All the elements of the coming storm. The avoidable and the unavoidable. The acts of God and the self inflicted.

Before starting the list, it is maybe worth creating a fictional character to play a lead role in our December 2021 drama.

He's an ordinary Joe so we'll call him Joe.

A couple of months ago he was living the high life on £93 a week of Universal Credit with all of his rent covered. Most of his Council Tax was taken care of too, but he was still setting aside £7 a week to cover his share.

So. £86 a week of disposable income.

Well the Johnson regime clearly thought this was the kind of lifestyle the likes of Joe had no right whatsoever to become accustomed to.

Well of course they did.

Don't you just love it when an old Etonian who describes the £250,000 a year he was trousering for penning right wing poison for the Telegraph as 'chicken feed' decides in his great wisdom that £93 a week is rather over generous for the likes of our Joe.

So Joe was duly issued with a 20% pay cut which took his disposable income down to £66.

50 inch TV's and holidays in Benidorm?

Maybe not.

A year ago Joe's weekly shop set him back by £25. He was actually pretty cute when it came to getting the maximum nutritional bang from his limited buck. He got by on the likes of tinned spaghetti at 13p a tin and own brand 'value' Corn Flakes at 55p a box.

Suddenly it isn't so easy to find three meals a day out of £25 a week.

Not when the cheapest spaghetti is 32p.

Not when the Corn Flakes are 90p

Mere pennies to Johnson.

Ten pounds a week to Joe.

Because the government's headline 10% food inflation does not exist in the value ranges. In the value ranges its 33% if your lucky.

Which is why Joe's weekly shop tends to come in at £35.

Leaving him with a disposable income of £31.

And the temperature is dropping. Well obviously. It's winter. A deep and dark December.

Two months ago Joe never used so much as a cubic centimetre of gas. But now the flat is cold enough to eat into his bones. Especially now he is trying to cut back on his food intake. Because Johnson and his courtiers have told us all to embrace the spirit of 1940 when Polish pilots saved our bacon and everyone tried to convince themselves whale meat was anything but utterly disgusting.

This time last year, Joe was just about able to eke out his life on £20 a week's worth of power.

Now he can't seem to get it below £23.

But it's only three quid.

If £250,000 a year is chicken feed, then £3 a week is micro organism feed. Fair enough. Because when all is said and done our Joe is very much one of the little people.

A little person with a disposable income of £8.

Except it isn't.

Because once upon a time Joe took and advance on his Universal Credit and now they deduct £5 a week to bring him back up to speed.

Leaving a disposable income of £3.

Except it isn't because once upon a time Joe got himself into rent arrears which means £5 a week is deducted to bring him back up to speed.

Leaving a disposable income of …..

Ah.

Something has to give. Any chance of driving down those pesky variable costs like a sharp penciled manager of a private equity firm?

No?

Oh dear Joe. What are you going to do? Going to heat or eat? That most December 2021 of questions.

Any chance of a leg up with the heating side of the equation?

Nope.

Well it's time to make your way into First Base for the first time in a year.

Joe's is the story of three of the storm warning signs. The 21% pay cut at a time when food and fuel inflation are wearing flares and perming their hair an doing the whole 1970's immersive experience thing.

And yet the list goes on.

And on.

Mental health referrals are so off the scales that it even Yorkshire Ripper levels of raging insanity probably wouldn't be enough to be deemed to be enough to justify fast track treatment.

Alcohol dependency referrals have risen five fold.

Credit card interest rates are being jacked up on a weekly basis.

Petrol prices are smashing records.

The cost of a plumbing emergency has doubled as tradesmen adopt a policy of 'think of a number' pricing.

And all the while, the rest of the world watches the Westminster clown show like some some kind of tawdry but addictive reality TV show and they just laugh their socks off. I seem to recall there is a very German word to describe this. 

Schadenfreude.

But this doesn't matter, right? Not to the likes of Joe?

What has the Chinese and French having a right good laugh at the idiots running our country got to do with Joe and his disposable income?

Well quite a lot when the value of the pound graph goes in the polar opposite direction to the value of a loaf of bread graph.

See where I'm coming from?

It's quite the storm warning when you are standing behind the counter of a food bank.

It's crystal clear things will be bad.

How bad?

I literally hate to think.

Thank God the public still have a much better sense of the nightmare all the millions of Joes are facing up to than the clowns in Westminster have.

Food and cash donations are still amazing. Every week my van gets filled up and emptied out on multiple occasions.

So for the umpteenth time, a huge thank you is required to each and every person who continues to help us to help the likes of Joe. We are only as good as the community who support us.

Will it be enough? I hope so. It has always been enough before. In twenty years, First Base has never turned anyone away due to us having no food to give out. So of course we will do all we can to keep this proud record in tact when the storm escalates.

Will it be enough?

We'll find out soon enough I guess.

Well it's light now. Barely.

Time to head across to Annan Tesco to fill up the van. And then empty it. Again.

If you are minded to offer us a small leg up, we would be hugely grateful. You can find our online fundraising page by following the link below.

THE FIRST BASE ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE

OCTOBER 6 2021 WILL GO DOWN AS A DAY OF SHAME. THE DAY THE TORY PARTY QUAFFED CHAMPAGNE IN MANCHESTER WHILST KICKING THE POOR IN THE TEETH.

 

Over the last few months I have been asked time and again about the impending £1000 per annum cut to Universal Credit. And my thoughts on the subject have been totally consistant.

They ain't going to do it. Not a chance. Not in a million years. Even this lot couldn't possibly be so cruel. Even this lot couldn't be so utterly stupid.

Well that prediction went well.

Here we are. October 6^th . The date has loomed for long enough and now it is right here, right now. The clock has run out. The time for Tory rebels to call an emergency debate in Parliament has come and gone.

As of today, the threat has become a brutal reality. And the brutality all but beggars belief. Our world suddenly resembles a work of dystopian fiction. Reports from Manchester say the champagne is being quaffed like never before. There is an air of triumphalism. They are queuing up to bow and scrape at the feet of their moronic Sun King.

I listened to a journalist talking last week. He is just back from Afghanistan. He had been on the phone to an Afghani colleague. How are petrol stocks in Kabul? The Afghani reporter was surprised by the question. Stocks are fine. All the petrol stations are working normally. Why do you ask?

The rest of the world is watching the empty shelves and fighting at the petrol pumps with open mouthed amazement. What the hell is going on with Britain? And let's face it, they're having a right laugh. Can you blame them? I can't.

Feel familiar? It should. It's the way we all felt when watching America descend into chaos in the dog days of Trump. Now the joke is on us.

In 2008, a bunch of casino bankers in London and New York damn near crashed everything. And of course we were all expected to put on a brave face when they needed £50 billion's worth of bailing out. £1000 each to those of us who pay tax. £1000 each for the privilege of being able to use a cash machine.

And then Cameron and Osborne decided it was all the fault of the poor. All of a sudden the reason Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock had crashed and burned was all down to people living off benefits.

And my oh my, how they squeezed the pips. The famous Welfare Reforms. The Bedroom Tax. A cap on benefits. A cap on kids. The sick were deemed to be healed. The mentally ill were deemed to be potential rocket scientists. Benefits were frozen like mammoths in the Siberian permafrost.

Brutal.

And First Base went from handing out 80 emergency food parcels per month to handing out 600 emergency food parcels per month. Just like that. In the blink of an Etonian eye.

And all the while, we heard talk of workers and shirkers. Right from the top. A cartoon view of the the world as seen by men who had been educated to the tune of £40,000 a year. You can see lots of shirkers when you gaze down from your Ivory Tower. They are much harder to spot from behind the counter of a foodbank. From our counter, we see very different people from those whose lives are so vividly described in the pages of the Daily Mail.

Sick people. People with mental health problems. Drug addicted people, Alcohol addicted people. Single mums with no family to look after the kids. Carers looking after slowly dying partners. 

Disabled. Depressed. Disorientated.

Fit for work? Only in fevered dreams of the Department of Work and Pensions.

Inconvenient statistics. Inconvenient people. But people all the same. People who still need a place to live and some warmth and something to eat.

And then came Covid and a panicking government saw millions of people flooding onto Universal Credit. People who had bought what the Government and the Daily Mail had been selling for a decade. Tales of a cosy, dream of a life to be had on benefits. A life of constant takeaways and as much booze as you can drink. Holidays in Ibiza and a new 60 inch tele every six weeks.

For millions it was a hard landing. There ain't many holidays in Ibiza to be had on £73 a week. In fact £73 a week isn't even close to being enough to pay for the basics of life.

So they panicked and bumped the basic Universal Credit up to £93 a week. Hardly a fortune. But slightly better.

That was March 2020, when First Base paid 13p for a tin of own brand spaghetti and 14p for a Kilowatt Hour of electricity. A litre of diesel was 99p.

A lot has changed in the last eighteen months. Now if First Base is lucky enough to find anyone willing to sell us tins of spaghetti, they tend to cost 40p and the new price for a Kilowatt Hour of electricity is 24p. A litre of diesel is £1.40.

Food and power inflation are both running at 12%. Or so they say. The inflation we are seeing is way higher than that. But what do we know?

So £73 now buys at least 12% less than it bought in March 2020. £73 now is the equivalent to £64 then.

We haven't seen food and power inflation like this since Egyptian Army rolled their tanks into the Sinai back in 1973.

And the Government has chosen this exact moment to kick the very poorest people among us in the teeth. Mind boggling. And they are right now swaggering around Manchester waving bottles of champagne. No wonder the French media can't understand why we're not out on the streets setting the world on fire.

A smug faced Sunak told the gathered disciples about half a billion quid's worth of sticking plasters being made available to cover a £6 billion gaping wound. 

Nobody bothered to raise the fact that the £6 billion would have helped to  keep all kinds of businesses afloat in the very small struggling towns the Government pretends to care about. The people who were getting the extra £20 per week aren't the kind of folk to salt it away in shell companies registered in the British Virgin Isles. Hardly. Instead they spend every last penny in local shops or on heat and light. A good half of the cash finds its way straight back into Government coffers in the form of tax, VAT and customs duty.

The malicious idiocy is genuinely hard to comprehend.

And there were a few sentences which were missing from Sunak's speech. He might have said something along these lines. In an alternative universe.

“This Government is very much aware of the contribution foodbanks have made over the last eighteen months. Even when the Covid 19 virus was at its most terrifying, Britain's foodbanks made sure nobody starved.

'And now, as a result of my decision to take £20 a week away from the very poorest people in the land, I know foodbanks will once again have to find a way to feed hundreds of thousands of extra mouths. The sick. The mentally ill. The carers. The over borrowed. The inconvenient.

'So to all of the foodbanks out there, I have clear message. We appreciate what you do. We would hate to have to attend the G7 or the G20 and have to explain why people in Britain are starving in conditions of dire poverty. So know this, all of you foodbank wallahs. You have our respect. And we know you're going to need lots of help if you are going to feed all of the people who are going to need feeding through the cold months of the coming winter. I am therefore delighted to announce a new fund to help the foodbanks of Britain …...”

Aye right.

No flying pigs. There never are.

Yet again foodbanks will have to find a way. We're remarkably good at managing what at first looks impossible.

In March 2020 First Base issued 600 emergency food parcels.

In August 2020 First Base issued 2600 emergency food parcels as the Covid crisis peaked.

We did it. I have no idea how, but we did.

February 2022? God only knows what the world will look like then. It is very clear that no help will be headed our way from this vicious Government in London who swig champagne whilst throwing millions headlong into a winter of hunger and cold.

And fear.

And utter misery.

Like every foodbank in the land, we are going to need all the help we can get over the coming months. If you are maybe willing to provide us with some support, you can find our online funding page via the link below.

THE FIRST BASE AGENCY ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE