The new Scottish ALBA party - led by Salmond announced just now. Wowzer ‼️

youtu.be/V0OQCfMM4-o

An explanation of the Scottish voting system.

It is always said that civil wars are the nastiest.

Someone (neither female nor a Scot) sent me this yesterday.

He was tried by jury. The majority of them were women. I remembered being comparatively surprised at the relatively trivial nature of some of the charges. Eg he may have touched a woman's leg while sitting in a car in front of witnesses. Some of the charges were more serious - the ghastly 'sleepy cuddles' incident. He sounds like he's always been a bit 'handsy' but you'd think Sturgeon would have been well aware of that despite her amnesiac turn at the harassment committee.
Whatever. They are both very dodgy and best avoided.

M0nica

I would have deep doubts about the Scottish legal system that tries and acquits a man who admits to behaving inappropriately towards women and also seems to be closely tied up with political decisions made by the government and arrives at surprising judgements there.

I mean it’s not as if then English legal system ever finds a man not guilty of sexual assault is it ( behaving inappropriately is not actually a criminal offence per se).

I agree with Alegrias, neighbour support can be a great help.

When I sold a relation's house after they died the new owners applied to build a bungalow in the smallish back garden. The neighbours contacted me to ask if I would respond to the application simply by reporting the great difficulty we had with parking and the number of times, the police had to be rung when we were unable to get out of the drive because of cars parked across it. The application was turned down. It then went to appeal and I repeated the exercise and it was turned down on appeal as well because of the impossible parking situation in that road.

"Behaving inappropriately" isn't automatically illegal, however distasteful it is.

How the legal system is tied up with the government, that is something that needs fixing.

Me too M0nica

I would have deep doubts about the Scottish legal system that tries and acquits a man who admits to behaving inappropriately towards women and also seems to be closely tied up with political decisions made by the government and arrives at surprising judgements there.

Many people commenting here don't understand the voting system for the Scottish Parliament.
There's a complicated arrangement for allocating votes on the regional list, based on how well each party did in the constituency vote.
Alba is going to have candidates only in the regional lists.

Very short video here :
youtu.be/17w5mPb9Uog

Agree wholeheartedly... Thank you for that

There was an interesting discussion on R4 this morning on The Today programme with a male supporter of AS... who was in no way going to answer a crucially important question re: AS' improper behaviours towards women, which he admitted moreover it is evidenced that too many women do not report such behaviours, just like they do not report rape, inappropriate comments or touching... I suggest both men and women google the experiences of women who experienced As' behaviour, much of which is documented. My view is that when folk make decisions on men we need to carefully examine their behaviour towards women... this being a signifier of many serious issues which resurface in the future.

So it's a Yes.

M0nica

Do all Scots Nats party leaders have to have fish surnames?

If you were to take the h and t away from halibut......you’d have

Yes, its a rule.

Just like the one that says someone will always come along and make a joke about it as though we've never heard it before.....

Do all Scots Nats party leaders have to have fish surnames?

Aveline I'm sorry to hear about your daughter and I apologise that what I said appears to minimise the effect on people like her who caught the virus as a result of that conference. That wasn't my intention.

I look at the stats all the time. I know our 7-day case rate is currently higher than the rest of the UK, and has been since early March. I hope that we can get it down soon.

The name made me think of Albion.

Just pondering if he may be a candidate that people will loudly say they would never vote for , but in private do

An NHS nurse friend votes Conservative. Her choice. However being on the receiving end of awful comments about how dreadful she was she has never owned up about it since. She actually left that hospital. An experienced ITU nurse. Their loss.

There's a lot of silent Conservative/Brexit voters out there. We just don't know who they are.

I imagine the same will be true for Salmond.

I will be very surprised if Sturgeon doesn't win though.

I’ve done a quick ring round this morning. Not one of my female friends will vote for any party headed by Salmond.

Choice of Alba is interesting, associations with "whiteness" of course.
I don't think anyone in Scotland would make that association - it's the Gaelic name for Scotland.

Why give the Nike conference a rest? My DS caught it from a delegate there. So I won't give it a rest because it's true!. Our population density is much less than that of England. Currently Scotland has the highest rate of coronavirus. Just look at this week's stats.

Covid deaths per million in the UK overall: 1,856

Covid deaths per million in Scotland: 1,387

I wish it was zero. Its not. Other countries have done better. Many have done worse. But somebody handled it better in Scotland than the rest of the UK, despite having to put up with consistently being overruled on travel and being ridiculed for keeping restrictions longer than other countries. Give it a rest about blooming Nike!

The Scottish government failed those women miserably. Alex was tried in court and a jury with a majority of women acquitted him. The whole debacle was in edifying and cast all parties in poor light especially the Scottish govt itself with its constant and suspicious refusal to release documents.
If Nicola had come clean about the 70 cases at the Nike conference in February 2020 then how many lives might have been saved? Similarly, discharging elderly people with Covid to care homes was criminally irresponsible. So no. I don't think Nicola handled Covid well at all in Scotland (among many other failures)

I quite like Jess Phillip's tweet on the matter.
Oh to be able to fail up with such entitlement.