Wings Over Scotland

For our money – and by an admittely wafer-thin margin over the likes of Annie Wells, Miles Briggs, Alex Cole-Hamilton and James Kelly – Tory list MSP Jamie Greene is still the lowest-watt bulb in the Scottish Parliament’s festival of lights.

(Our alerter readers may have spotted that that’s an official watermarked Scottish Conservatives pic, so that’s them making him look as intelligent as they can.)

But being really properly brainless isn’t just a matter of not knowing which powers are devolved before you attack the Scottish Government for your own UK administration’s failings or not being able to do basic arithmetic.

To stand out as especially doltish in a group of epic dolts like the current Tory cohort in Holyrood, you also need to be incapable of following simple logical trains of thought. So let’s see if we can illustrate with a topical example.

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It’s probably time we started collecting all the media articles from the last couple of weeks about our ongoing legal battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, because it’s getting increasingly hard to plough through them all.

The story that Labour were pulling Dugdale’s legal funding was first broken by the Huffington Post on 19 September. Below is all the coverage we’ve found between then and now (most recent first). As best as we can recollect, incidentally, we’ve been asked for quotes for TWO of these stories.

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We honestly don’t think they even see it, folks.

We truly don’t.

We’d hoped not to have to write any more about this for a while, but a story broke this evening on left-wing Labour website Skwawkbox that we thought those of you not on Twitter would want to see.

Following a previous piece casting huge doubt on Dugdale and the Scottish media’s version of events, the site got hold of a letter (dated yesterday) from Labour’s general secretary Jennie Formby to Mary Fee MSP, who’d sent a complaint about the party’s decision to stop funding Dugdale’s legal costs.

And it’s quite the read.

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Three days ago, the Daily Record’s political editor and Kezia Dugdale’s chief media cheerleader Davie Clegg tweeted that Scottish Labour had “expressed full support and solidarity” for their former branch manager in her court battle with this website.

It seems fair to say that the tweet hasn’t aged well.

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Politics in 2018 is almost impossible to satirise, and nowhere more so than in Scotland, where at least two of the main parties are currently campaigning on the principled policy of “any referendum we lose should be re-run, and any we win must never ever be held again because the decision was final”.

So it’s quite understandable that the Dateline 2018 team – Scotland’s only currently operating satirists of any kind (which is, madly, true) – opted not to bother with any Scottish content in their last series. But they’ve totally promised that they’ll absolutely definitely do some this time, honest, if you fund them for another one.

Yeah, we’d be sceptical too. But they only need £7,500 by tomorrow to carry on, and if they don’t reach the target you get your money back, so if you just got paid and can spare a couple of quid then fire it their way by clicking on the pic, because frankly we don’t like to think about what they’d get up to if we don’t keep them occupied.

We hadn’t been intending to talk about this again today, but the John Beattie show on Radio Scotland just ran a segment that we really can’t let go unremarked.

Here’s the whole thing. Some of that’s going to need interpreting for the sane.

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We’ve been keeping coverage of our ongoing court battle with former Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale to a minimum on the site, partly because little of any material impact has actually happened yet.

However, there was a mildly interesting development last night, which was scooped and accurately reported by the Scottish Sun.

Reactions to the party’s statement have already seen serious amounts of what we’re generously going to call “misinformation” generated and circulating around social media, so we’re going to have to clear some of it up. Apologies.

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From today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

Sounds terrible. Let’s take a look in more depth at this rising tide.

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Tory MSP Miles Briggs was yesterday cleared of sexual harassment claims by an internal Conservative Party inquiry process. We haven’t the slightest idea of what the facts of his specific case may or may not be, and as such express no view on it, but the nature of the process has been severely criticised by Rape Crisis Scotland, and with what in this instance appears to be extremely good reason.

An obvious question does rather leap to mind, though.

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We’ve been watching the Labour Party annual conference today, at which North British Branch Office manager Richard Leonard apparently gave a speech.

Unfortunately the BBC News coverage wasn’t very helpful with its captioning, so we have no idea which of the people below is him. Can anyone help?

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Labour policy, Thursday morning:

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