From today’s Sun (English edition only, natch).
This is how Scotland is seen in the largest part of the UK today. There’s nothing at all new about Scots being portrayed as “stealing” money rightfully belonging to England, of course, nor in the stereotype depicted by the Jimmy hat. It’s the word on the placard that tells the story: “immigrant”.
A lot of people this week quoted a line supposedly from the former Labour cabinet minister Roy Jenkins, which runs “a statement is only interesting if a sane man could say the opposite”. We haven’t been able to verify if he ever really said that or not, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s true either way.
So where that leaves this mess is anyone’s guess.
If you ask them on social media, Labour MPs and activists will all hotly deny that the party signed up to the Conservatives’ plan for £30bn of austerity cuts in the next five years. It’ll be interesting to see whether they try to continue doing so in the light of Ed Balls’ appearance on the Andrew Marr Show this morning.
More than two weeks still to go. We don’t really know what to say, readers.
Alert readers will have noticed that this week we’ve been fascinated by the differences between the mostly-identical Scottish and English editions of The Sun. For example, the editorial below from today’s English edition doesn’t make it across the border.
But that’s not the most interesting discrepancy.
Here’s a clip from last night’s Question Time from Leeds, in which Anna Soubry MP for the Conservatives, Lucy Powell MP for Labour, Charles Kennedy MP for the Lib Dems, ardent Unionist Ian Hislop from Private Eye and various audience members spent 20 minutes attacking the SNP, with no SNP representative present.
(The closest thing was Natalie Bennett, leader of the Greens in England and Wales, who was relentlessly mocked, derided and harangued from all sides for most of the programme’s duration, including by the “anti-establishment” Hislop.)
It seems to us that the solution to the problem is simple.
For some time, readers, we’ve been puzzling to ourselves about quite why the idea of having to work with the SNP in the UK parliament enrages the Labour Party quite so much. Because it doesn’t make any rational sense.
Indeed, on any intelligent analysis the arrangement currently suggested by opinion polls is a dream outcome for the party. Think about it logically for a moment. Minority government lifts the burden of responsibility from your shoulders – there’s always someone else to blame if you bail on a manifesto promise, because you can say “We didn’t have a majority to push it through”.
(The SNP, it should of course be recorded, took advantage of this benefit of minority government more than once at Holyrood between 2007 and 2011)
But in Labour’s specific case in 2015, there’s what seems an even bigger boon.
Unionist politicians, journalists and trolls have barely been able to contain themselves with glee at today’s figures suggesting that Scotland’s economy was weaker in the last fiscal year than in previous years (though still healthy). We’ll keep this short.
Is the Scottish NHS protected by devolution, or is it in mortal danger?
We’re expecting that answer any minute now, honestly.
With apologies to Jason Donovan, we felt we should probably have a look at the latest election leaflet Scottish Labour are putting through people’s doors.
We wouldn’t want voters to have too many broken hearts.
We’ve only just recently begun checking out the English edition of the Sun to see what appears in it that’s mysteriously excised from the Scottish one, readers.
Perhaps we should have started sooner.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
