CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO - STIRRING UP APATHY

The Tories have announced that their Scottish manifesto will offer £100 million more for drug adicts & ...... that is about it.

THE Scottish Conservatives have decided to ditch a number of key policies for this year's Scottish Parliament election and concentrate instead on crime and drugs, it emerged yesterday.

Annabel Goldie, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives, revealed she had dropped her party's pledge to axe the graduate endowment - the payment in lieu of tuition fees paid by students after they graduate.

The Tories have also dropped their policy of taking education out of the hands of councils and their commitment to cut council tax by 35 per cent for all households.

Miss Goldie also confirmed her intention not to offer any income tax cuts. Instead, the Conservatives will spend £100 million on drug rehabilitation and another £80 million rejuvenating crumbling town centres.

There has been much internal party debate on whether to use the so-called Tartan Tax, the parliament's ability to cut income tax by 3p in the pound, to lower taxes in Scotland. However, despite pressure from within the party, Miss Goldie has decided not to offer income tax cuts to the electorate this year.

Why would anybody want to vote for this? Scotland is in comparative economic decline. We have a depressing, incompetent Labour/SLD administration who can think of nothing more than windmills & nanny bans. Scotland is crying out for something new & all they can do is hide in a corner & limit themselves to a couple of PC tokens. They have given the SNP, ourselves & UKIP a free hand to stand for business tax cuts & Irish style growth.

One gets the impression they just want to get the election out of the way, lose a few seats & get back to sleep in Holyrood.

DIRTY TRICKS AT THE HERALD

The day following the Herald letter mentioned below they published a letter specificlycalling for a reply from me (in fact an apology) claiming my letter was provably wrong. The basis for that claim was that the writer said Scotland had already reached 10% of our electricity coming from windmills.

The true figure is 3-4% as everybody on the Herald with any knowledge of the field must be aware. Indeed a commenter on the Scotsman online mentioned it asking with amusement if I was answering it.

I had already done so & the Herald have refused to allow me any right of reply. I believe they have also rejected other letters pointing out this obvious untruth.

By using this writer as a catspaw & not allowing a defence the Herald have clearly made & deliberately maintained an attack on this party they know to be untrue.

If they wish to comment I will allow them the right they denied me.

HAS THE GREEN MOVEMENT KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN HITLER - YES

In many ways the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, about the way pesticides were alleged to be killing birds to such an extent that they would one day soon be wiped out, was the start of the modern environmentalist movement. It certainly introduced all the Grens' favourite hobby horses - unseen poisons, evil big companies manufacturing the aforesaid poisons, evil big companies lying about their poison being safe to make profits, catastrophe that ordinary people know nothing about but only the elite environmentalists do & the ever popular desire to ban things. Also the fact that the research denouncing DDT has been essentially disproved.

It was a hit & as a direct effect the Greens used their full power on western governments, who rarely object to excuses to throw their weight about, to enforce a de facto international ban on DDT.

By this stage DDT had already cleared malaria from the western world (the southern US particularly used to suffer) so they had no worries. Indeed the international campaign against malaria had managed to get deaths worldwide down to 50,000. It is now estimated at 2 million.

Since the supposed ban, two million people a year have died unnecessarily from malaria, mostly children. The ban has caused more than fifty million needless deaths. Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler.
State of Fear by Michael Crichton

There are many other cases one could use - the 25,000 pensioners in Britain who die of hypothermia annually due to fuel poverty when we could halve electricity costs by going nuclear. 150,000 who die from black lung & emphysema as a result of the coal industry, African children who suffer brain damage or death due to lack of protein when we have, but are banning, genetically modified rice with high protein levels.

The Greens are usually portrayed by our media as an ethical cuddly if somewhat weird bunch. Just saying you are nice, in the traditional manner of Tony Blair, is not enough. A movement must be judged by what it does not what it says it wants to do.

The Green movement has clearly killed more people than Hitler & restricted human potential far more. They must be judged on that record.

HERALD LETTER WARNING OF BLACKOUTS

Another letter in the Herald today:

To say that windmills work 90% of the time, as Kerr MacGregor of Scottish Solar does (January 13), is true but misleading. The amount of power produced varies roughly with the cube of windspeed up to the optimum of about 24mph. Thus a 6mph wind does indeed produce electricity, but only about 1/64th of capacity, which will not keep many lights on. This is why windmills overall produce about 27% of their rated power performance. Whenever you see another politician saying that such and such new wind farm will produce power for 50,000 people, it won't. Even with "planned downtime" - which, being planned, can be set for when demand is low - conventional generators are vastly more reliable.

Storing power is less feasible than suggested. The only serious method is the pump storage system we use at Cruachan which loses 25% of the power put into it due to inherent inefficiencies and is, in any case, comparable in expense to a new conventional generator. If onshore wind is already twice as expensive as coal generation and four times as much as nuclear, the additional expense of building more pump storage facilities can be imagined. As Denmark and Germany have found, the inherent instability of the system means that it is very difficult to get windpower above 10% of the grid.

All our political leaders know this and know that if we do not now start building the replacements for the 50% of our power produced by Hunterston, Torness and the high-emission coal plants due to close in the next decade and a half, we are going to have blackouts on a massive scale. Windmills are an expensive token to give the appearance of action. Despite the hysteria, nuclear is the safest and cheapest method of generating electricity, as well as being effectively CO2-free. If more of them do not find the guts to say so, we are going to have many more hypothermia deaths.

GROWTH THROUGH CORPORATION TAX CUTS / THE LIB DEM ALLEGED ENTHUSIASM & THEIR EXPULSION OF NEIL CRAIG

A letter in the Herald today:

The letter from Iain McMillan of CBI Scotland delineating the constitutional powers of Scotland was interesting. I agree with him that Holyrood could do far more to help economic growth (over the last 8 years its "contribution" has been a massive increase in regulation, a massive increase in the state sector & increased business rates, the latter being very slowly removed)) without going for corporation tax cuts. Nonetheless in criticising George Lyon for calling for such cuts he gives no actual reason why they should not also be made. If small moves, such as business rate cuts, will do a little good surely big actions are likely to do a lot. Certainly the case in Ireland, which he does not mention, is that corporation tax & regulatory cuts have lead to 16 years of 7% growth transforming them into one of the wealthiest countries in the world even ahead of the USA. Mr McMillan gives no reason why we cannot do the same & neither, it appears, can anybody else. So lets do something.

It is also good to see a Lib Dem MSP calling for corporation tax cuts. Such a change of heart is welcome, if barely credible. It is only a year since I was expelled from the Lib Dems for the political incorrectness of having had letters published in Scottish newspapers, including the Herald, calling for such corporation tax cuts & also for replacing our aging nuclear reactors. Before the lights go out. The party executive unanimously voted that such positions were "to right wing" to even be discussed & "illiberal". Could it be that there is an election coming up?
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
9% Growth Party

This is the first time any newspaper, except the Glasgow West End Times, has reported my expulsion. It will be interesting to see if anybody in the party is willing to write in & defend their position - from previous experience I suspect not. I will update if they do.

This is also the first occasion when a newspaper has used the 9% Growth Party name in the address to a letter of mine.