Wings Over Scotland

This week’s Scottish budget threw the opposition parties and the media into panic and disarray. Evidently having expected considerably more swingeing tax hikes than the extremely modest increases that were imposed on higher earners, they’d built up a head of steaming fury that had nowhere to go, and have been reduced to frantically scrabbling around for extreme (or flat-out wrong) examples to try to generate outrage.

Today’s politics lead in the Scottish Mail On Sunday is a case in point.

By going through all the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, the SMoS has managed to pick out a tiny anomaly around National Insurance thresholds, and portrayed it as hitting people on a very healthy but not exactly super-rich salary of £45,000 with a total tax-and-NI rate of 53%.

The small print, as ever, is rather less dramatic.

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Something remarkable happened in the last couple of days, readers. After we told you about the imminent delivery of the print edition of the Wee Black Book, there was a flurry of orders for several thousand more copies. And that extra influx of cash took the independence movement past a significant milestone.

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Today’s papers are full of a report from right-wing thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies proclaiming that an independent Scotland would be even more unaffordable than the last time it was completely unaffordable, tax increases, public spending cuts, plagues of frogs, yada yada yada.

(We’re paraphrasing the Executive Summary there somewhat, but that’s the gist.)

We’re just not sure everyone’s got their sums right.

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Last month there was a mild flurry of activity in the press about the so-called “missing million” – Scots entitled to vote, but who choose for one reason or another not to. Catchy as it is, the phrase seems a significant understatement. Around four million people in Scotland meet voting criteria, but fewer than half of those turned out for the 2011 Holyrood election, and under 2.5m at the 2010 Westminster one.

Obviously that’s a bad thing in principle in its own right. But it could also be seriously distorting polling for the independence referendum, because – perhaps for the only time in their lives – an awful lot of those missing millions ARE going to go out this September and put a cross in a box. And nobody knows which one.

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Crivvens, we do ramble on a bit, don’t we?

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We suppose we should thank Mrs Thatcher for giving us the last nudge over this rather special landmark, thanks to our second all-time-high pageview record in two days:

It seems fitting somehow.

There’s an isolated outbreak of proper journalism in the Herald today. A story by actual reporter Gerry Braiden (who must be relieved to have it offsetting a ridiculous puff piece about a 1p cut in beer duty prompting a crazed drinking bonanza in Scottish pubs over the Easter break) reveals that the head of Scotland’s largest police authority has been accused of the repeated harassment of a married woman.

“Phil Braat, chairman of the Strathclyde Police Authority, is the subject of complaints made to the force by a woman employee of a Glasgow City Council-related company last December.

The Herald understands that, despite the complaint being made almost four months ago, Mr Braat, a Labour councillor in Glasgow and a solicitor, has not been interviewed by the police regarding the accusations.”

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this perplexing mystery, we’ve added some emphasis to the quote above. For some reason we can’t seem to get a celebrated segment of an old TV chat show out of our minds.

We apologise for running two horn-tooting stories in one week, but we’re blown away, we really are. Back at the start of August we predicted, in all sincerity, a big drop-off in pageviews for this site, because the June and July figures had been inflated by a hefty sprinkling of Rangers stories as that particular circus ricocheted between slapstick and farce on an hourly basis. We were linked from many dozens of different football sites and forums as far apart as Inverness and Portsmouth, and thousands of readers with little to no interest in Scottish politics arrived for a brief visit.

There was indeed a fall in August as we stopped covering the Great Govan Debacle, but a much tinier one than we’d anticipated – just 4% (and more on that in a moment). And this month, to our considerable amazement, we’ve not only recovered the losses but hit another record high: up over 15,000 to 265,203. We only broke the million-views barrier in August, and in September (albeit the 29th) we passed 1.5 million. Wow.

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Everyone even remotely connected to Scottish politics has known for months that the below is the case. It’s an open secret.

But what’s playing out right now is something much bigger than the fate of one or two or three individuals. It’s the entire future of the credibility of Scotland’s justice system.

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When times are quiet in Scottish politics, as they currently are, our favourite genre of story is “mainstream press belatedly catches up with Wings Over Scotland”. And so to this morning’s front page splash in the Sunday Mail.

The rumour mill has been grinding about Operation Branchform developments again in the last few days, although we’ve seen too many false dawns now to get overly excited about that. But the Mail’s story sounded awfully familiar.

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We’ll be honest, folks, we’re not 100% sure this is how you build unity.

But what uplifting and powerful alliances might we be missing out on?

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Scotland’s energy rip-off continues unabated, and its impact on Scotland is merciless. GB Energy is to put up a plaque on an office in Aberdeen whilst Scottish pensioners can’t afford to put on the heating. Oil continues to boost the UK coffers as a senior British business figure calls Scottish renewables “a golden ticket for UK growth”.

But as Scottish pensioners freeze, Scottish industry’s being devastated, and workers are being made redundant.

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