We’ve just endured two soul-withering hours of Labour’s 2014 Scottish conference. We thought you might like to meet someone who enjoyed it almost as much as we did.
An extraordinary front-page headline in today’s Herald blares “Miliband pledges positive case for Union as No inject love into debate”. (We apologise to any readers we may have just inadvertently upset with the thought of Ed Miliband “injecting love” into them while they’re still digesting their breakfast.)
The article’s rather shy on details of Ed’s positive case, but luckily the Guardian has it.
For those who missed it, Labour’s official explanation of the “40%” figure.
You’re right. She CAN’T have really said that. Watch it again.
The SNP has made hay with the damning appraisal of Scottish Labour’s “Devo Nano” plans which was delivered this week by charity think-tank Reform Scotland, and in particular its rejection of Labour’s claims that the proposals would mean Holyrood raising 40% of its own budget.
(As we’ve noted before, we’re not very sure why anyone’s meant to find that exciting anyway. You don’t make a difference to society by changing the address of the tax office, you make it by changing what you spend your money on.)
Because it looks, not for the first time, as if Labour’s got its sums wildly wrong.
Continuing our trawl through the “Devo Nano” report. No squirrels this time.
Labour, of course, immediately trumpets any anti-independence opinion from big business, but suddenly treats anything welcomed by industry with great suspicion if it’s in line with SNP policy, so no shocks on that front. But not for the first time, the party seems to have rather misunderstood the entire concept of devolution.
All this week we’ve been mockingly referring to Scottish Labour’s devolution proposals as “Devo Nano”, nano- being a mathematical term meaning “one billionth”. The implication there is that the amount of actual power being devolved would be very very small. We’re not subtle. But as we dig down into the full 298-page report, it’s beginning to look as though our sarcastic description is in fact somewhat over-generous.
Labour’s full Devo Nano policy document is now available, at an artery-clogging 298 pages. We’ll be having a good old wade through it today, because despite Johann Lamont’s comprehensive explanation of its contents on telly on Tuesday night, we still have a couple of minor queries over the precise details that we’d like to get definitively cleared up, and this should do it.
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
