Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We just had to put this up before packing in for the evening.

“Labour has also rejected proposals to devolve air passenger duty (APD), alcohol, fuel and tobacco duties, corporation tax and capital gains tax, to avoid tax competition with the rest of the UK and to avoid appealing to business interests.

Senior sources said the decision to reject devolving APD was also influenced by the loud applause from BA boss Willie Walsh and Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary for Salmond’s policy of phasing out APD after independence.”

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.

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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.

“The ‘Yes’ side sought to turn the table on their opponents over Europe by arguing that the potential 2017 [EU] referendum, which Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged  to hold if he can’t negotiate better terms for the UK, creates more uncertainty than a Yes vote.

But in one of the most eye-catching statements of the evening, [Alistair] Carmichael said, to gasps of surprise among the audience:

‘There is no question of there being a referendum. There is no mechanism for the Conservatives to deliver a referendum 2017. That is the hard political fact.’“

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!

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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.

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