There’s a lot going on at the moment, readers, and an awful lot of conflicting analysis and commentary to confuse people trying to make sense of it.
Luckily, as ever, Wings Over Scotland is here to cut through the bull and give you the straight answers to the burning questions of the day.
The short version is “Everything Tony Blair said was a lie”. The full report can be read in 58 sections at the inquiry’s website here, but in the quite likely event that it gets swamped today we’ve uploaded the entire thing as a single convenient RAR file here.
[EDIT: individual sections now compiled into the print version’s 12 volumes.]
We’re not naturally disposed to sympathy for Tories, but it must be hellish being poor Ruth Davidson at the moment. The poor woman doesn’t know which way she’s facing from one minute to the next. Here she is less than a year ago:
It’s okay, folks, we’ve got this all worked out.
Angela Eagle isn’t happy in the Labour Party and the Tories need a new leader. STV News Edinburgh may have jumped the gun slightly this evening, but this alternative career path makes a lot of sense.
BBC Scotland is hosting a live TV debate tonight.
Despite having an even number of participants, the panel is split 3:1 in favour of Remain and 3:1 against independence (surely the biggest specifically Scottish issue likely to arise from the Brexit vote, and which several polls in the last couple of weeks now show is backed by a majority of voters).
Half of the debaters are also Labour politicians, which means that the third-placed party which got 22% of the vote in this May’s election has as much representation as two parties who got 69% between them.
We’ve been racking our brains for a couple of hours trying to work out a way in which such a multiply-skewed line-up could be justified (other than flat-out trolling), and we’ve got nothing. Does anyone have any ideas?
If it was up to Vince from Hull, a fence should divide England from Scotland following the EU result #BrexitBritainhttps://t.co/Rq5VExlUCj
— Sky News (@SkyNews) July 4, 2016
Of the UK’s potential next Prime Ministers, Theresa May is the nice one.
We’ll just leave you to ponder that for a bit.
Boris Johnson is NOT standing for Prime Minister.
The UK is currently a non-functioning democracy. The Prime Minister has handed in his notice and has no nominated successor. The leader of the Opposition has just been served with a vote of no confidence by 80% of his own MPs. Parliamentarians are openly discussing overturning the result of a democratic referendum. People are pretending that Angela Eagle is a credible future Prime Minister.
The country, in short, has lost its mind.
We’re currently trying to write an article summarising the state of UK politics, but our brains keep exploding two sentences in. So in the meantime we thought we’d share this just-released image from YouGov with you, for the benefit of anyone dim enough to ever put any stock by bookmakers’ odds as predictors of the future.
Although, obviously, hardly anyone’s that thick.
We’ve been watching the news all morning, and there’s only one sane response.
The people (of England) have spoken, and their elected representatives are freaking out all over the shop.
Several senior Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have openly called for the result of a democratic referendum to be overturned by Parliament against the wishes of voters. The Prime Minister has quit, the Chancellor is expected to follow on Monday, and half of the Labour shadow cabinet is apparently doing it as we speak, after Jeremy Corbyn fired Hilary Benn for planning a coup.
(Apparently including Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish Secretary who’s also the only Scottish Labour MP at Westminster, putting the party in the farcical position of having to find itself a spokesman on Scottish affairs who either sits in an English or Welsh seat or is an unelected lord.)
Labour MPs are also demanding Corbyn’s head, in essence for the crime of his being hugely popular with the party’s membership for reflecting the old-fashioned left-wing ideology and views that they actually believe in, rather than the “moderate” neo-Tory position of Blairite parliamentarians. Corbyn shows no sign of going.
Two opinion polls, meanwhile, suggest that support for independence has taken the lead in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is quietly and calmly making arrangements with senior European officials to hold discussions about ways to keep Scotland in the EU – with the backing of Willie Rennie just in case any of the talks take place on a bouncy castle or a slide.
(The Daily Telegraph, which we must assume has been chatting to Alistair Carmichael again, is reporting that Sturgeon has joined the Tories and turned gay.)
It’s been suggested that the Scottish Parliament could in fact block any attempt by the UK to leave (though it seems unlikely). Britain faces a future without Milky Way Magic Stars. UK politics, to put it mildly, is in chaos. So what the hell’s going on?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
