There was a time, readers, when Murdo Fraser was a bright young radical thinker who backed Full Fiscal Autonomy and even supported the idea of Universal Basic Income.
We think “committed Unionist” in this case is a euphemism.
Alert readers of the Scottish Mail On Sunday – if any such people exist, that is – will have noticed that the paper has of late been cutting both costs and the middleman by giving Tory MSPs entire pages to spout party propaganda for free rather than paying a journalist to slightly rewrite it.
First Ruth Davidson, and now the party’s finance spokesloyalist Murdo Fraser, have recently had free rein to say whatever they liked to the paper’s readership, and today Fraser chose to go with the topic of “waste”.
(Following on from a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail piece last month about which we’ll have some startling new information for you very soon.)
It seemed oddly familiar, with one rather significant alteration.
The media is aflame this morning with discussion of the agreement between the UK and EU with particular regard to Ireland, in which the UK essentially concedes just about everything including free movement, the thing most Brexiters voted Leave for.
We’ve largely avoided analysis of the Brexit negotiations here on Wings up until now, because there’s been a raft of people who are far more expert on the subject than us doing it at enormous length, very little of it directly concerned Scotland, and so nobody really needed our tuppence-worth. But this one’s big.
Yesterday at Holyrood the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in the name of Orkney MSP Liam McArthur, brought forward a motion of no confidence in Police Scotland, which was calmly but stingingly rebutted by Scottish Police Federation chair Calum Steele on Twitter. A debate went ahead in the chamber, of which the outcome was the below:
So the Lib Dems lost, Labour lost, the Greens lost, the Tories lost and the SNP lost. We’re glad that’s all cleared up and was a valuable use of everyone’s time, then.
What’s even the point any more?
Even if you don’t buy into any of the persistent health concerns about aspartame, there are already TWO chemically-sweetened Irn Bru brands (Sugar-Free and Xtra) for the people who can stomach the foul taste of fake sugar. But now nobody will be able to choose a version without it.
Alongside whisky, Irn-Bru is arguably THE iconic branded product of Scotland but now 120 years of history have just been casually crapped on and thrown aside in the name of the nanny state and corporate greed (aspartame is dirt-cheap compared to sugar, and Barr – having ruined Tizer, Red Kola and its other drinks the same way years ago – also wants to avoid the UK government’s sugar tax taking a bite out of its profits).
Let’s just shut down Holyrood, rebrand as North Britain and be done with it.
On today’s news that support for independence is back up to 47%, and that Henry McLeish is calling for federalism again, whatever that is.
(NB In 2009 apparently “home rule” actually meant “independence”. Keep up.)
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
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