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Amount of money saved by Iain Duncan Smith’s “benefit cap” so far:
Amount of money wasted on Universal Credit welfare reform so far:
£120 million (or £140m, or £200m, or £425m)
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The UK government – saving you money on welfare by 2034! (If you’re lucky.)
There’s quite an embarrassing subbing howler in a story in the Sunday Times today in which the word “No” is replaced by the word “Yes”, which you’d have to put down as a non-trivial error. Fortunately the meaning is clear from context, as it’s part of a piece called “No campaign is branded as ‘amateur'” and containing the following fairly indisputable quote in respect of “Better Together” and its director Blair McDougall:
“There is no one regarded as a grown up in that campaign team.”
The entire article – which is accompanied by another in the same paper entitled “Unionists’ front man is nobody’s Darling” – is well worth a read. You can find it below.
We must confess ourselves perplexed by the Messianic awe in which much of the Scottish media appears to hold Douglas Alexander. The epitome of the modern career politician (as far as we’re aware he’s never had any sort of job outside politics), Alexander has risen without trace through the Labour ranks, and his Wikipedia profile is unable to attribute one noteworthy achievement to the former minister despite his having held some of the most senior offices of state.
We’re unable to recall a single instance of Alexander ever expressing a view on any subject that was anything other than 100% in line with the official orthodox party position, and in Scotland his name is perhaps most associated with the shambolic conduct of the 2007 Holyrood election.
Nevertheless, for some reason Scottish newspapers appear to regard him as some sort of intellectual powerhouse within Scottish Labour, and the fact that his speeches don’t consist exclusively of tangibly bitter, hate-filled attacks on the SNP also seems to have him marked down as the party’s great thinker.
Which means that roughly every two months we have to endure a vacuous torrent of middle-management duckspeak such as the one Scotland on Sunday has inexplicably chosen to make its front-page lead this morning.
And that’s something we can’t say every day.
That was always a pretty silly lyric. But anyway.
We had to switch the telly off after about 10 minutes of the news this morning. The piety was too much to take. So intead we’re just going to quote two things from the avalanche of comment that’s appeared this morning on the death of Nelson Mandela.
The Herald, 5 December 2013:
Last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight saw a clearly nervous, rambling and seemingly well-refreshed ex-Labour spin doctor Simon Pia called upon to defend “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling (“as good a frontman as I can imagine to save Britain”, said the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson in that extraordinary accent of his) from a series of attacks by his own side over his stewardship of the No campaign.
Pia played the usual cards that Labour types do when called upon to defend a man who is now distrusted by a majority of Labour voters. Darling was “substance not style”, a serious man with “cross-party appeal” (if you exclude Labour, the SNP and now seemingly a lot of Tories) who had “filleted” the White Paper (without reading it or understanding the one page he did look at) and saved the nation in 2008 “when we looked into the void”.
But not everyone shares Pia’s view of Darling’s integrity and competence.
Well done to the alert reader who spotted this 2006 Q&A with Jack Straw MP, former Foreign Secretary and then Leader of the House Of Commons, on the BBC website:
About 1,000 more and LFI will be bigger than Scottish Labour’s actual membership.
Surely that must be Project Fear at the bottom of the barrel now?
The lead story in today’s Herald, folks. If “story” isn’t putting it much too strongly.
Well done to everyone who correctly guessed that our Mystery Guest last night was indeed Ruth Davidson. If you’d like to listen to Ruth’s 2009 demo reel for voiceover work which accompanied the letter, click the image below.
From that to the leader of a major Scottish political party in just two years. Hats off.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
