Wings Over Scotland

Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.

The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.

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The Guardian today reports the incredibly depressing news that “Labour voters [are] increasingly turning against the poor”, with growing numbers of the party’s supporters now blaming the victims of recession and austerity for their own plight.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the anti-poverty Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is quoted in the piece saying “The stark findings of this report highlight the increasingly tough stance people are taking against people in poverty. We appear to be tough on those experiencing poverty, but not tough on its causes.”

How can such a horrific, callous scenario, with the supposed party of the downtrodden and voiceless abandoning those who need the most support, ever have come to pass?

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While ploughing through hundreds of pages of hysterical drivel about Alex Salmond in the Scottish press this week, extra-alert readers may have also been aware of quite a stushie going on between the SNP-controlled Glasgow City Council (GCC) and a group of representatives and fans of Scotland’s newest professional football club The Rangers FC, such as Tory list MSP Adam “WATP” Tomkins (pictured below).

And it’s quite the alliance.

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Last month saw the first meeting between the UK Brexit delegation and the EU’s, and by many accounts it fell far short of the UK’s expectations. David Davis spent months drumming up the “strong and stable” approach which would see both the divorce deal and the subsequent post-Brexit trade deal negotiated simultaneously. He was told by everyone that this wouldn’t happen, but simply brushed off the warnings. When push came to shove, he finally accepted that he’d have to negotiate the divorce deal first.

This is just the latest in a long string of failures and ineptitudes over the course of the UK’s handling of the whole farcical process and it got me thinking. If Scotland had voted Yes in 2014, what would it have looked like if the Scottish Government had handled that vote the way the UK has managed Brexit?

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It’s now more than a year since we said this:

And it’s probably time to start keeping track.

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What does racism and separatism actually look like? How would we know it if we saw it? What are its defining characteristics? Who are its advocates?

Let’s see if we can find out.

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There’s been a running theme recently on Unionist social media.

It’s the claim that the No vote in 2014 was an anomaly – a rare victory of progressive, internationalist, inclusive politics over the anti-establishment, isolationist, separatist tone that won out in the EU referendum and now the election of Donald Trump.

This was the case back even before and just after the independence referendum, where the Yes movement was being compared to the far-right populist movements of England, France, and the Netherlands:

Of course, the alternative view is rather simpler – that perhaps the forces that won the EU referendum and 2016 presidency also won the independence referendum.

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So a few things need said about the events of the weekend.

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Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves on Sunday Politics.

Did you spot what she got wrong, readers?

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Our brain protected us from looking at the Scotsman yesterday, so it wasn’t until late last night that we noticed what we first thought must be some sort of elaborate spoof.

“Labour claim 1m may lose jobs after independence”, ran what we suspect may in the post-match analysis come to be regarded as the most deranged headline of the entire referendum campaign. There are fewer than 2.6m people working in the country altogether, which would mean Labour were threatening almost 40% of all the jobs in Scotland would be lost with a Yes vote.

It wasn’t until two thirds of the way down the article that we discovered the headline writer had in fact gotten a little carried away, and that Labour had once again just plucked the word “million” out of the air to sound scary, claiming that only “some” of the jobs were allegedly at risk.

But how many is “some”?

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In today’s Scottish Sun:

There’s nothing worse for a parent than your children seeing people as foreigners. We’re sure that Ed’s Belgian father and Polish mother would agree.

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Some considered thoughts on the evening’s events, then.

Yeah, nice work, Britain.

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