Wings Over Scotland

This one rather speaks for itself.

(Data below from our latest Panelbase poll.)

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As alert readers will know, we’ve just done another Panelbase opinion poll. You’ll be hearing more about the results over the next couple of days, but we thought we’d give you the headline finding first.

The most interesting thing about those numbers is that as far as we can make out that’s the highest Yes figure Panelbase has ever returned for that question. (The last two times, for the Sunday Times in September and July, both came out 47-53.)

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One of the stranger criticisms regularly levelled at this site is that we don’t attack the SNP/Scottish Government enough.

That’s weird firstly because it’s not like there’s currently a shortage of hostile media scrutiny of Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues, and secondly because we’ve never in our four-year life claimed for a moment to be neutral.

But the reality is far more nuanced than that.

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What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.

Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.

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Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.

Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.

So we thought we’d see if it was true.

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Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

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Alert readers will probably already be familiar with the philosophical proposition of Schrödinger’s cat. (The less alert can click the link for a short and easy primer.) The hypothetical experiment posited by 20th-century Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has entered into popular culture. But increasingly and disturbingly, it’s also becoming the guiding principle of mainstream media journalism.

Certain viewers should steel themselves at this point, because we’re about to briefly talk about football before moving on to other things later in the article. You can consider that your trigger warning. We’ll let you know when it’s over.

The lines above were issued to the press yesterday by The Rangers International Football Club plc, a football club (the clue’s in the name) formed in 2012, yet which lays claim to the history and achievements of a previous club of a similar name which was liquidated for bankruptcy the same year, having been formed in 1872.

And eagle-eyed logic fans may have spotted something of a contradiction.

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We had an interesting conversation last night with someone who was prepared, quite legitimately, to credit Scottish Labour with a little more good faith over their proposed plan to mitigate Tory tax credit cuts than we were. But we had a lot of trouble coming to an agreement over the arithmetic, and we tend to think that backs up our cynicism.

Labour have presented their supposed funding for the policy in an incredibly dishonest and disingenuous way, and it seems to have confused the media to the point where nobody in the print or broadcast media has challenged what appears to be a huge and (to us at least) incredibly obvious gaping hole in the finances.

Let’s walk through it one more time.

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale back in August:

“Too many people in Scotland tell us that they just don’t know what Labour stands for anymore. Under my leadership there will be no doubt what we stand for and who we stand with.”

So thank goodness that’s all been cleared up.

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A convention of the world’s finest satirists pulling a 24-hour shift on Red Bull couldn’t come up with anything to beat Labour’s position on renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. Following an overwhelming vote at the Scottish Labour conference this afternoon, these are the current cut-out-and-keep standings:

But it’s even better than that.

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When we watched Kezia Dugdale’s toe-curling moment on this week’s Question Time, we were immediately reminded of a mesmerising passage in Jon Savage’s masterful 1991 history of punk rock “England’s Dreaming”, in which he gives an account of the last ever Sex Pistols concert, at Winterland in San Francisco in 1978.

And like the show, Dugdale’s week just kept getting worse.

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Asking the question is the easy bit: “If the all-new, super-autonomous Scottish Labour decides to oppose the renewal of Trident, and UK Labour continues to support it, which way do Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster vote on it?”

The answer, unsurprisingly, was a lot more difficult to ascertain.

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