Only two sleeps to go comrades. Two sleeps until I splurge your hard earned taxes on launching my White Paper at expensive roadshows around Scotland. Two sleeps until I spend even more of your taxes on ensuring the SNP sends out the 670 page document to every household that wants it.
If I'd been even handed then I'd have ensured that last week's IFS Report was made available on the same basis but playing fair is for softies and, anyway, it's not my fault that Better Together haven't got two beans to rub together. Ha! If they could only see the £ 6m of donations and taxpayers money that I have ready to unleash when the campaigning begins. We'll see what happens to the polls then comrades.
Sure, there'll be cries of foul play. Moving taxpayers money from Scottish Water to my "strategic communications" fund; spending the budget on "Homecoming" in Scotland as opposed to on foreign tourists in the US and Canada; all the time blurring the division between our role as the Scottish Government and the fanatical Yes Campaign.
Such matters do not concern me. The end justify the means. Don't you agree?
As I sit here in Castle Stuart golf club, having my e mails read to me by a trusty underling and dictating replies to said scribe, one thing does bother me. As you know, politicians are generally mistrusted by people. They sit alongside bankers and estate agents as the most loathed professions. Self serving, sly and duplicitous are merely three adjectives that the average Jock would apply to this unholy trinity. Personally I get the estate agent bit but I'm at a loss with the others. Fred Goodwin was a good mate of mine and I still recall that note I sent him encouraging him to pay all that money for ABN Amro. Anyway, I digress.
The point of my sermon, dear plebs, is that the most trusted professions are doctors, academics and business people. I was genuinely rattled by the 2,000 Scottish academics standing up to voice their opposition to my proposed Tartan Nirvana by forming Academics Better Together. The cybernats launched a suitably poisonous volley of e mail abuse at said academics and my minister Senga McRubbish threatened one of their leaders but still they stand against me. Just because their budgets will be cut if I win absolute power. How churlish.
So what of the doctors and the business fraternity? So far so good. Silence on both fronts. I'm told the business people don't take me seriously and assume I will lose this vote. Excellent. That plays right into my hands as the underestimated underdog.
They have never pointed out that the Scottish financial services sector will move to London en masse if I win in 2014. They have never bleated about the 61% hike in business rates that Big John has got lined up in the budget; nor the necessary new taxes I will impose on the oil companies, on VAT and higher rate income. They have yet to bleat about the fact that cross border trade with England will become far more difficult; that breaking commonly held UK regulations and governance will exclude Scottish companies from working with UK companies who are legally bound to award work to UK and/or EU affiliated suppliers. Nothing about the fact that many of the UK's 55m consumers will regard Scotland as a departed, antagonistic and ungrateful divorcee and therefore take their trade to UK based brands and suppliers - just as will happen with shipbuilding. No more UK contracts awarded to yards in Free Calbania results in a massive boost for rUK shipyards that would otherwise have lost out on orders to a UK Clydeside or Rosyth. So it will be with business. Not that I care. Power is more important than this mere inconvenience.
"Let them pay tax!". As Her Nippiness Princess Nicola would say.
The silence of these business based lambs to the slaughter is playing into my hands beautifully comrades.
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