Wings Over Scotland

The media is in full-on spin mode today, reporting Ruth Davidson’s miraculous Damascene conversion to the principle of “more powers” for the Scottish Parliament, just 18 short months after her Churchill-esque declaration of devolutionary defiance to the effect that the petty tinkering of the Scotland Act was a “line in the sand”.

Most of the papers, of course, feign critical analysis by highlighting Davidson’s U-turn. But what we haven’t seen in a single one is any sort of actual examination of the content of Ms Davidson’s speech to a micro-audience of literally several people in what appeared to be the corridor of an Edinburgh hotel yesterday.

We suspect that’s because anyone who did would be very hard-pressed indeed to credibly describe the measures she proposes as representing “more powers” for anything. In fact, they’re the opposite.

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Remember how Unionists endlessly cite World War 2 as the definitive example of great British “togetherness”? Turns out they might be over-egging that one a bit. From today’s Scottish Daily Express (print edition only):

Of course, that was a long time ago. Things are different now.

So. Wow. Where to start? Lead with the number, we suppose.

Did we say “Wow” yet?

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Running total (updated daily): £28,920 of £29,796 (97.1%).
Donations in last 24 hours: £886.

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We don’t know about you, viewers, but when we tune into a two-hour TV programme called “Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013”, we sort of expect the large bulk of that show to be, well, the Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013.

With the UK’s state broadcaster, though, that isn’t necessarily the case.

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Apologies for the lack of posts today, readers – been working on a small practical project and getting into an argument with a No voter who might just be persuadable, among other things. But amid it all we stumbled across this on the BBC website.

It’s a 2011 interview with Noel Gallagher about the English riots. Gallagher was one of the cultural figureheads famously invited to Downing Street by Tony Blair during the short-lived “Cool Britannia” phase before the shine wore off the New Labour project.

“Running up to the last election I wasn’t going to vote, until my wife said ‘You’ve got to vote’, and I’ve got to say it’s the first time I’ve picked the most ludicrous thing on the list – some guy who was gonna dress as a pirate.

But the Labour Party have managed to prove themselves to be just as sleazy and horrible as we all know the  Conservatives are. There’s nothing left to vote for any more.“

We empathise. But there’s still one part of Britain where that’s not true.

The BBC’s coverage of the SNP spring conference has finally started. You can watch it on BBC2 Scotland or on this live web stream, and discuss developments below.

We can only assume that Scottish Labour member and “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall somehow got lost in the blizzards sweeping the country and accidentally stumbled into the Scottish Conservatives conference this morning.

Warmly applauded, apparently. That’s nice.

We suspect that for the vast majority of our readers, it’ll be quite hard to get to grips with the fact that the Scottish Daily Mail intends this headline as a criticism.

In 18 months’ time, Scots will have the chance to decide whether they’d rather spend their money on pay rises for public-sector workers or on tax cuts for the rich and bribes for them to buy second homes and inflate another housing bubble with. We must admit to being quite surprised that there’s a debate about it.

We already know that Labour, particularly in Scotland, have no policies on just about anything. But in the light of the past week’s glut of abstentions, we decided to see if we could find out if the party had any remaining principles either. The results were startling, by which we mean not startling in the slightest.

Below are just a few of the votes that Labour has abstained on, at both Westminster and Holyrood, in recent memory. What, we ponder rhetorically, is the point of having an Opposition that doesn’t ever actually oppose anything?

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We must admit that we didn’t see this one coming. Johann Lamont made a rather surprising admission 3m 16s into last night’s Newsnight Scotland special.

“There’ll be many people who voted SNP but don’t believe in independence who will breathe a sigh of relief, like me.”

Well, that goes some way to explaining the size of the SNP’s majority, at least.