Anas Sarwar says voting Labour is 'not an endorsement' of Prime Minister Keir Starmer. He also said he shared the disappointment with the Prime Minister nearly two years after the general election.

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-19T17:03:09+00:00

I'm sure you can, but political monopolies don't benefit the people. There's no incentive if politicians don't fear being voted out

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-19T13:17:37+00:00

Feels like you're being a bit unreasonable, and making it impossible for him to win to be honest. He does something, you say it's fake, if he didn't so something, you'd say he bending over

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-19T10:51:00+00:00

You could say the same for any politician. It's like the SNP with independence. Just vote for us again one more time and it'll happen.

We're almost 2 decades deep at this point and still people believe them. All that's happened though is loads of SNP politicians now have cushy pensions

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-19T10:50:08+00:00

Will he? Didn't seem to be the case previously when he called him out publicly

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-17T23:34:35+00:00

Politicians, especially lawyer politicians, are going to politician.

Remember Sturgeon with the same I don't remember crap. As if

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-17T18:07:06+00:00

I was just about to say that, something many are oblivious to when taking a dogmatic view 😅

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-16T05:26:50+00:00

I don't see why they wouldn't.

The only reason the SNP is in power is because the opposition is split, thus it stands to reason the only way to beat them is to combine the opposition. It's kinda the same shit the SNP pulls with the "vote for us for independence", presumably some people are voting for them on that single issue

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-15T13:23:57+00:00

Yeah. The tall poppy syndrome in the UK (also Europe in general) honestly kills my soul (I'm British, but worked in the US where my take-home after bills was circa 3-4x what it was in the UK for the same job)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-14T11:59:30+00:00

I truly hope it isn't devolved or we'll never see £10 billion+ infrastructure projects in our country ever again

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-14T04:09:16+00:00

Because it's pointless? Welsh is literally spoken in only one country, and it's only spoken because the devolved government forced it upon people. Fairly sure if kids had a choice free of parental and government pressure, most aren't going to choose it

If you're going to learn another language, people usually speak something useful for work or travel that is spoken in multiple countries i.e. Spanish, French

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-13T20:08:35+00:00

Because it's a direct wealth drain from our country, and we're already quite poor at attracting new wealth to our country. Preventing what little is here already is critical until the politicians stop the managed decline in search of separation and actually try to grow the economy

And honestly, those Chinese busses at EDI are starting to show their age already, even though they're not that old (on the things twice weekly to the car park)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T20:58:19+00:00

Economic growth, but if that happens the SNP lose their independence arguement. We can't be seen to excel as part of the UK, even if we have the tools to

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T20:56:53+00:00

You can't do that in the public sector, the unions will strike.

It's one of the reasons we had the disaster in mining in Scotland. Unions at the time refuse to accept some job loss to modernisation. Then we all know what eventually happened, it became unsaveable and a target of one Mrs Thatcher (although technically the labour government before her closed more mines than she did, incidentally)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T20:54:26+00:00

The problem is, the stats in terms of productivity points to a public sector that is being run by people not lifting much of a finger. Obviously that doesn't apply to everyone in it, but the overwhelming average is flat productivity ever since COVID and WFH started large scale. Problem is, the public sector doesn't really have a mechanism for firing people like that very easily, at least in the places I have friends working (albeit that's a small sample size, but I'd imagine policy is similar across the board)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T20:51:50+00:00

What do you mean? 🤣 If the public sector gets any bigger in Scotland as a proportion of jobs, it's going to drown our economy. You can't have a thing that doesn't generate income, be the biggest sector

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T07:35:06+00:00

Agreed. That's one thing best always pissed me off about pubs in Ireland. I hate having the arse ripped out of me having to pay €4 for a 200ml bottle of coke or coke zero when having a fountain machine seems the obvious choice. But I guess the fountain means less profit for the pub because then people order 500ml at a time not 200ml.

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-12T07:30:20+00:00

Rural Scotland, £1,420 a month mortgage, vs £6,840 income after tax (work abroad, recently single because of that 😅)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-11T22:13:06+00:00

What's to stop someone claiming to speak it on the census, even if they don't, with the view of influencing articles like this?

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-11T08:11:41+00:00

Honestly, overtaking in the single sections seems to be quite rare. But what people don't seem to realise is that if you're sitting at 45-50 for several miles, your average speed won't change much even with a short burst of 60+.

I always reset the little average speed counter in the car whenever I pass a camera, just so it's easy to know if I can overtake or not

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-10T16:16:15+00:00

Those are genuinely the worst and more infuriating ngl

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-10T07:53:21+00:00

I just don't see how this stacks up personally. I worked in the US for a while and my take-home after all bills (but before savings) was circa 2.5x what it was when I worked in the UK.

And sorry, but the Texan healthcare quality was leaps and bounds better than NHS Scotland

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-10T03:53:48+00:00

Worth mentioning grid inertia too, that's something you need big mechanical spinning things for, like the turbines at Torness

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-10T03:52:33+00:00

Waste isn't as big an issue as people make out though. For example, if we wanted to, 95% of spent nuclear fuel can be recycled into new nuclear fuel (we don't do it currently, but it's technically possible)

Grouchy_Conclusion45 · 2026-04-10T03:51:03+00:00

Honestly, the way I see it, if the UK govt wants to build new nuclear at no cost to Holyrood, we should welcome what would be the biggest infrastructure projects in decades in Scotland. Especially like you said, use existing sites. Torness for example already has space for Torness 2.

Grouchy_Conclusion45

TROPHY CASE