Wings Over Scotland

We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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No.12: Sophie, Dundee.

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Following the striking success of their tactical voting campaign at the general election of 2015, the Unionist parties are keen to repeat the strategy this year, and have once again deployed THE WHEEL.

There’s only one problem. They can’t quite agree on the colours of the spokes.

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Kezia Dugdale tells voters in the Borders, Highlands and a number of other areas that voting Tory is a better way to stop the SNP than voting for her own party’s candidates.

We assume she’ll be suspending herself shortly.

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I went to the dentist this morning, and boy was I ever in for a shock when I got back.

So I guess we’d better talk about this for a minute.

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If you weren’t listening to the Kaye Adams show earlier, and you probably weren’t, this was my call to Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie.

(The Kaye Adams Programme, BBC Radio Scotland, 18 May 2017)
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(Alert readers may have noticed that I had to adopt a wee bit of subterfuge to get on by saying – truthfully – that I was from Bathgate, because BBC Scotland don’t tend to take my calls when I say where I am.)

As you’ll hear, Rennie had no answer to the question (even when put to him again by Adams), trying to deflect the issue onto SNP BAD instead.

His position was that the British people should have the right to another vote in case they’ve changed their mind about Brexit, even though there’s been no material change of circumstances, but that the Scottish people SHOULDN’T have the right to another vote on independence even though there HAS been a huge material change.

All I can say is that I tried.

No.11: Kathi, from Bernburg, Germany.

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From today’s interview on Good Morning Scotland:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 17 May 2017)
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That needs transcribing for the record.

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Because in the 124-page Labour manifesto released yesterday, these 115 words are the entire amount of text devoted to Scotland:

(That’s not a fake screenshot, btw. The giant Union Jack is really there.)

So let’s take a very quick stroll through them.

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We were intrigued to hear Labour activist Duncan Hothersall tell radio listeners this morning that his party’s opposition to independence was rooted in “Labour values”, and most specifically by his assertion that “nationalism and socialism are opposites”.

So we thought we’d take a look back at our last Panelbase opinion poll, which we conducted in February, and see what the values of Unionists were.

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The Labour general election manifesto is officially launched today, as if it mattered. It will reportedly say that the party will block a second independence referendum if it’s in power at Westminster, which of course it won’t be.

And while Labour’s position on anything – particularly anything involving Scotland – is a complete irrelevance, it’s still quite fun to listen to them tying themselves in knots.

So with no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Duncan Hothersall.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 16 May 2017)
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Readers who’ve been following the ongoing avalanche of disturbing revelations about bigotry, sectarianism and racism among the ranks of Scottish Conservative politicians probably won’t need to be told that the party’s talent pool is desperately shallow.

More than a quarter of its Scottish candidates for the forthcoming UK general election actually already hold elected office – nine of them as councillors, four as MSPs, one as an MEP and of course the sole defending member, David Mundell.

(Several of the councillors have only been in their jobs for a matter of a few days and are already looking to scurry off to London for new ones.)

As for the rest, though – and following the discovery that at least two of its council candidates earlier this month had no idea that they were standing – the party’s clearly been doing some more hasty press-ganging.

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