David Maddox: Labour stir up the ghosts of Salmond's past and present in the hope the future will follow
It may be
that they think Alex Salmond (top left), the First Minister is wounded, but two motions went down in Holyrood today which suggest that Labour has properly regained its confidence in Scotland.
No doubt they hope that the ghost of his future will follow and visit its curse upon him in the forthcoming elections. Although, perhaps they have forgotten that Scrooge (played famously by Alistair Sim, right), the original one to be tormented by the three ghosts, learnt from his mistakes and had a happy ending.
that they think Alex Salmond (top left), the First Minister is wounded, but two motions went down in Holyrood today which suggest that Labour has properly regained its confidence in Scotland.The two not only revive the ghosts of recent and long past troubles for the SNP leader, but are clearly aimed at what many consider to be his weak spots - his ego and his grasp of foreign policy.
The first was put down by Lord George Foulkes (top right), Baron of Cumnock, First Lord of the Twittery, MSP to the Lothians, who rather cheekily accuses Mr Salmond of cronyism in office. One wonders if the term "Tony's cronies" for the Blair regime is such a distant memory to the noble one.
However, he has been buoyed by the genuine hit he had over revealing the £10,000 expenses paid to the SNP supporting pop singer Sandi Thom. And let's face it, Lord George and Wee Eck love poking fun at one another.
The s
econd is from Labour's Holyrood business manager, Michael McMahon (left), to remind us of the 10th anniversary of Mr Salmond's greatest foreign policy gaffe. The one where he condemned the bombing of the ethnic cleansing Serbs in Kosovo, allowing opponents to (unfairly) link his party with that sort of behaviour and describing the RAF as the Luftwaffe.
econd is from Labour's Holyrood business manager, Michael McMahon (left), to remind us of the 10th anniversary of Mr Salmond's greatest foreign policy gaffe. The one where he condemned the bombing of the ethnic cleansing Serbs in Kosovo, allowing opponents to (unfairly) link his party with that sort of behaviour and describing the RAF as the Luftwaffe.You may remember that the First Minister is sensitive about this and recently described veteran Lib Dem MP and foreign policy expert Sir Menzies Campbell as "a pompous ass" for reviving the same issue at the recent party conference.
The anniversary perhaps allows Labour to have some sort of repost to the constant battering about Iraq, although Mr Salmond's mistake only damaged his reputation, it didn't cost lives.
No doubt they hope that the ghost of his future will follow and visit its curse upon him in the forthcoming elections. Although, perhaps they have forgotten that Scrooge (played famously by Alistair Sim, right), the original one to be tormented by the three ghosts, learnt from his mistakes and had a happy ending.Labels: Alex Salmond, David Maddox, George Foulkes, Michael McMahon, Sir Menzies Campbell
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1 Comments:
...the 10th anniversary of Mr Salmond's greatest foreign policy gaffe. The one where he condemned the bombing of the ethnic cleansing Serbs in Kosovo
Two problems with the above statement. It wasn't a gaffe and the ethnic cleansing didn't start till the US starting bombing Serbia.
This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Nato attacks on Serbia in response to Serbia's failure to sign the Rambouillet Agreement which required it to recognize Kosovo as an independent country and to allow the stationing of Nato troops throughout both Serbia and Kosovo. (Appendix B in the Rambouillet agreement specically allowed Nato to go anywhere in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia they wanted).
The war against the KLA by Serb forces had been ongoing since 1997 when the CIA started to train and fund a heady mixture of nationalists, facists and gangsters in order to ramp up attacks inside Kosovo against Serbs and moderate Albanian Kosovars. The problem for the US was that the Serbs were winning.
A convienently forgotten fact is that the outrush of refugees only started after the US started bombing Serbia and and not before. The refugee crisis was caused by the removal of the OSCE monitors from Kosov and the fear of a massive Serb and KLA fight within Kosovo after the bombing of Serbia started. Many of the refugees who fled Kosovo were Serbs and at least 200,000 are still waiting to go home.
The result of the action has been to create a lawless semi-state on the borders of western europe which acts as the main transit point for heroin trafficking from the middle and east and central asia and is a hotbed of human trafficking.
The recognition of Kosovo by the West as a state has also been a trigger for the tit-for-tat retaliation by Russia against the West's ally Georgia in the Caucasus.
However, the US has managed to get its Camp Bondsteel into Kosovo so for them it's probably been worth it as the importance of the Balkans and Greece as a transit route for oil-pipelines which by-pass the Bosphorus tanker bottle-neck is increasing all the time.
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