Wings Over Scotland

Much has been and will be written about David Cameron’s visit to Scotland today, during which he’s expected to vigorously advocate the continuation and renewal of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent”. Which didn’t deter Iraq from invading Kuwait, or Argentina from invading UK territory in the Falklands, but never mind.

(We’re also not clear on why North Korea or Iran would have any sort of beef with an independent Scotland anyway, as opposed to the UK. It seems to this website that the surest way for Scotland to avoid even the microscopically minuscule future prospect of an attack from either nation is to disentangle ourselves from Westminster’s much-hated foreign policy with all possible haste.)

But none of it will be as telling as a single line in the Telegraph today:

“Mr Cameron insists the Trident programme offers good value – at an annual cost of 1.5 per cent of Britain’s benefits bill.”

Could he have made it any clearer? The savage, failing austerity and welfare “reform” programme designed to annihilate the last remnants of civilised British society is explicitly contrasted with the “bargain” we’re getting by spending our money on a useless weapon system designed solely to murder millions in vengeance after we’re already dead. That’s what the United Kingdom stands for, Labour and Tory together.

The argument that Cameron is stealthily trying to sabotage the No campaign in order to shore up the Conservatives’ powerbase in England gets more convincing daily.

As the Arctic weather continues to grip much of Scotland and the UK, it’s nice to know we can always rely on the Labour Party for a ray of sunshine.

Several of today’s papers carry the news of how Scottish Government funding has largely eliminated (for Scots) one of the most absurd and debilitating aspects of rail travel in Britain – the labyrinthine, Kafkaesque fare structure that meant a passenger who bought their ticket at the same time and in the same place as the person sitting next to them might have paid almost twice as much for it.

While we can all doubtless imagine how the UK government would have chosen to solve the discrepancy – by doubling the cheap fares, thereby enacting “fairness” while also ensuring that disgusting poor people weren’t allowed to mix with nice Tory-voting types – the Scottish Government has gone about it the other way, slashing some fares by over 40% so that everyone gets the best deal without having to employ a team of forensic accountants to study the timetables for a week first.

Good news, right? Surely nobody could find a reason to moan about THAT?

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We’ve covered the privatisation of the NHS, and how it will impact on the independent Scottish NHS, at length previously on this site. But for those of you who think the extent and pace of privatisation south of the border is being exaggerated, the British Medical Journal has helpfully posted an article explaining what’s going on.

(We’ve just noticed Owen Jones has a piece in the Independent too, and there’s a chilling insight from an East London GP in the Guardian. Even the indefatigably Tory Telegraph is ringing alarm bells all over the shop.)

You can read the whole thing here. But the short version runs like this.

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After six years in kneejerk opposition, extending even so far as to abstain on or vote against budgets with their own amendments in them, Scottish Labour have apparently suddenly discovered the merits of mature, constructive consensus politics. This week has seen the party calling for unity in opposing the bedroom tax, and demanding that the Scottish Government should mitigate the effect on social-housing tenants by providing tens of millions of pounds from its own budget to bridge the gap.

There are numerous reasons why this isn’t a practical long-term solution, some of which we explore in the comments on this Labour activist’s blog post. But if anyone should be wondering why it might also seem politically unattractive to the SNP, perhaps it might be instructive to note what Labour’s reaction was when the Nats did that very thing a year ago, when finance secretary John Swinney found £40m to lessen the effects of UK government cuts forcing the poorest to contribute more Council Tax.

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There’s an isolated outbreak of proper journalism in the Herald today. A story by actual reporter Gerry Braiden (who must be relieved to have it offsetting a ridiculous puff piece about a 1p cut in beer duty prompting a crazed drinking bonanza in Scottish pubs over the Easter break) reveals that the head of Scotland’s largest police authority has been accused of the repeated harassment of a married woman.

“Phil Braat, chairman of the Strathclyde Police Authority, is the subject of complaints made to the force by a woman employee of a Glasgow City Council-related company last December.

The Herald understands that, despite the complaint being made almost four months ago, Mr Braat, a Labour councillor in Glasgow and a solicitor, has not been interviewed by the police regarding the accusations.”

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this perplexing mystery, we’ve added some emphasis to the quote above. For some reason we can’t seem to get a celebrated segment of an old TV chat show out of our minds.

We know you don’t have all day. Let’s see if we can clear this up in under 600 words.

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Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer got a bit exasperated on last night’s edition of the show as he tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to get Scottish Labour’s ever-smirking Jackie Baillie to give him anything resembling a straight answer to a question about Labour’s (lack of) policy on the bedroom tax.

As the well-fed welfare spokeswoman embarked on another pre-scripted soundbite of SNP-bashing rather than commit Labour councils to a policy of not evicting tenants for arrears related to the penalty charge, Brewer sighed (at around 12m 52s) that “I was vainly trying to take into consideration the people who might be affected by this” before giving up and moving on to his other guest.

Baillie was demanding that the Scottish Government instead bring forward legislation to make such evictions illegal – just a few days after Scottish Labour’s press office had strenuously denied to this very website that the party was making any such demands. But it’s easy to see why she’d be having trouble keeping track of her position, because to Labour the bedroom tax is little short of a delight.

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We’re not sure we can untangle this.

Perhaps you can help us out.

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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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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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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’re only just now getting round to watching last night’s special edition of Newsnight Scotland. It’s off to a cracking start. Great work there, BBC Scotland graphics team.