Remember, kids – nationalism is bad. Stay away from the evil nationalists, or they might steal your Union Jack flag, Union Jack t-shirt or Royal Standard.
The only number that can be divided to end up with nothing is zero.
Yesterday, as the full (lack of) magnitude of Labour’s feeble devolution proposals became apparent, we wondered how they’d go down with the Union’s supporters in the media. We’d been detecting a certain anxiety over the last few weeks, a feeling that those in the press who back a seriously beefed-up settlement were uncomfortable with what it was becoming increasingly clear was going to be delivered.
So we were genuinely unsure which way the newspapers would leap. Would they flog Devo Nano for all it was worth, hyping it to the heavens as the only thing they had to go with, or would some be so dismayed at Labour’s quivering, lettuce-limp absence of ambition that they’d turn on the party in disgust?
The truth was somewhere in between.
Every time today that we’ve re-watched Johann Lamont’s multi-vehicular pile-up of an interview on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, we’ve seen something new in it that we missed previously and which makes us pull this face:
So (hngh) we’re going to have to get these down for posterity.
Among supporters of a Yes vote this site has often been an outspoken defender of Newsnight Scotland’s Gordon Brewer. Sometimes prone to lapsing into a poor impersonation of Jeremy Paxman, all hectoring and interrupting and not listening, on top form the BBC man is in our book the finest inquisitor of politicians in the UK, with only Bernand Ponsonby of STV capable of giving him a run for his money.
After last night, we’ve rarely felt more vindicated.
We just had to put this up before packing in for the evening.
Read that over to yourselves a few times, folks. Let it seep right in. Labour refused to devolve APD, a policy their own Devo Commission’s interim report had recommended, because it was an SNP policy that some major Scottish employers approved of.
Nothing to do with Devo Nano, just something spotted by an alert reader that we don’t recall being picked up anywhere in the press. And it seems, you know, interesting.
Shouldn’t that really be “ear-catching”? But we can’t help wondering whether Mr Carmichael has explained this rather pertinent fact to his cabinet colleagues or not. With the EU elections coming up, it might be something they’d want to know.
[NOTE: The content of this article will be added to Part 1 after today for easy future reference. This one will be left here so that comments will be preserved. Comment on either this post or the earlier one as you see fit.]
Let’s proactively synergise some more inter-operational solutions!
So, the wait is over. Two full years after announcing the setup of its “Devolution Commission” (comprising three MPs, three MSPs, one MEP, a pair of general-purpose office wonks and one increasingly-unhinged councillor), this morning Scottish Labour unveiled its final report, strikingly clad in the flag of, er, Shetland.
As we write, only the executive summary has been made available – a slim 14 pages including the preamble, reasoning and recommendations. These are our observations.
We’ve finally got hold of a copy of the long-awaited report (or at least, the executive summary) from Labour’s “Devolution Commission”. While we wade through the fine detail, we thought we’d quickly let you see the list of things Labour has decided that Scotland absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to handle for itself.
Analysis to come.
While we wait for the full detail of what look like being even more watered-down and insipid “Devo Lite” proposals from Labour than we were expecting, we suppose we might as well spend a minute on last night’s big “Better Together” announcement that Eddie Izzard was going to hold a benefit gig for the No campaign, putting the Union on a par with starving Ethiopians and earthquake victims.
Einstein is claimed to have said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (and readers hopefully already know our views on Quote Nazis), so we found a line attributed to Izzard in the press release particularly striking.
Here’s the footage of Alistair Darling’s interview in Glasgow with James Naughtie a few days ago. If you want to spend 35 minutes of your life watching a man totally dodge every question asked of him, it’s your lucky day.
Naughtie does ask a few decent ones, particularly on the currency and EU, but Darling just waffles his way past all of them (a particular trick we’ve noticed among Labour politicians lately is saying “Let me just say this and then I’ll answer your question”, whereupon they trot out some boilerplate and then don’t answer the question), and Naughtie doesn’t ever press him any further.
So, y’know, saving the £20 was probably the smart call.
Well, this is the month of the Mad March Hare, we suppose.
First we had Bernard Ponsonby telling us that the referendum was a choice between independence and a completely imaginary “more powers” option. Next up was Hamish Macdonell in the Spectator, oddly hallucinating that David Cameron had announced “devo max” when in fact he’d announced devo nothing at all.
At the weekend (and, we suspect, all this week) there were journalists insisting that Johann Lamont was offering Scots major advances devolution when in fact she was essentially offering the 2009 Calman Commission with a new ribbon tied on it.
But the winner is surely David Torrance in today’s Herald.
Our emphasis. But, um…
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
