Wings Over Scotland

(NB The media is understandably mostly occupied today with the horrific events in Manchester. But life goes on – music websites are still talking about music, football websites are still talking about football, videogames websites are still talking about videogames. Any rational observations about terrorism made here would be screamed down as making political capital from tragedy. So let’s get on with the day job.)

If you apply to go on a televised political debate and then submit a question to ask a national leader, it seems a reasonable deduction that you want that issue to be raised and discussed. If you also make it personal by describing your own circumstances, it seems logical that you’d want those circumstances to be widely publicised, and to be asked about them so you could say more and tell your story to the country.

So it’s a bit odd that Edinburgh nurse Claire Austin has suddenly gone off the radar.

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We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Because in the 124-page Labour manifesto released yesterday, these 115 words are the entire amount of text devoted to Scotland:

(That’s not a fake screenshot, btw. The giant Union Jack is really there.)

So let’s take a very quick stroll through them.

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We were intrigued to hear Labour activist Duncan Hothersall tell radio listeners this morning that his party’s opposition to independence was rooted in “Labour values”, and most specifically by his assertion that “nationalism and socialism are opposites”.

So we thought we’d take a look back at our last Panelbase opinion poll, which we conducted in February, and see what the values of Unionists were.

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In the last few days we’ve been talking a lot about the bizarre perversion of arithmetic that now seems to dominate political campaigning in the UK, and which has the media so tied in knots that the poor Telegraph now thinks nothing of saying the SNP gained council seats, lost them and gained them again in the space of four paragraphs.

But numbers are confusing and we’re very hungry at the moment after some major dental surgery made eating difficult, so we weren’t really paying attention until Ruth Davidson started talking about pies.

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Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.

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When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.

So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?

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It’s come to a pretty pass indeed when the Telegraph is the bastion of truth.

Because if you listened to the Unionist opposition and media today, you’d come away with a very different impression of what’s just happened.

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Some manner of strange, alien vortex swallowed the very concept of arithmetic as we know it earlier this evening. The answer to the question “what is 431 minus 425?” was variously reported by the media as -7, -14, +31 and -30, with nowhere that we could find offering the seemingly obvious answer of “6”. But that was only the beginning.

Because language wasn’t immune from the sudden redefinitions either. The Tories, who finished 155 seats behind the SNP, nevertheless proclaimed themselves not only the winners of the election, but the sole winners.

So let’s have a quick review of the facts.

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With all 32 councils now having declared, the Scottish local elections are over and the SNP have won again, taking 431 seats. Last time round in 2012 they took 425.

You might think you know the difference between 431 and 425. But you don’t.

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On the occasion of the local elections.

Vote ’til you boak, readers. Seriously.

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We had a little fun last night at the expense of Ian Murray, the sole surviving Scottish Labour MP, who’d sent his constituents a list of his achievements in office that was actually a blank sheet of paper. And in fairness, he was extremely quick off the mark in response, producing a video tweet within four hours.

And it seems that he’s actually been keeping VERY busy.

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