Wings Over Scotland

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.

The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.

“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.

But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.

Read the rest of this entry →

We’ve had no answer from the BBC’s Andrew Neil to the question we asked him at the weekend. There has, however, been an interesting development in the debate over whether there have been severe real-terms cuts to the Scottish Government’s budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

The extremely highly-respected economic analysts Jim and Margaret Cuthbert (the former of whom was Chief Statistician for the Scotland Office) have today written an article for Bella Caledonia seeking to establish the truth of the argument between Mr Neil and ourselves. Their conclusions are expert, detailed and very clear.

Read the rest of this entry →

Labour put out a press release yesterday a few hours before the tax credits fiasco. It concerned the much-ballyhooed new arrangements for Scottish Labour “autonomy”, of exactly the sort that the branch office has been telling us it already had ever since the election of Johann Lamont as leader in 2011.

We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.

Read the rest of this entry →

So tonight the Labour Party tweeted this:

It’s a lie.

Read the rest of this entry →

From today’s Daily Record:

“When the major new powers are transferred to Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament will be responsible for decisions about our schools, hospitals, transport, policing, justice and housing, as well as setting income tax rates and developing our own social security system.”

This one is, in fairness, mostly true. Technically. Sort of. Well, not really.

Read the rest of this entry →

Kezia Dugdale in yesterday’s Scotsman:

“There’s three sort of tests being set for me, and that I’m setting myself.

I have to prove the Scottish Labour Party is autonomous. I have to show we have a belief, a vision of what the future of ­Scotland might look like. And then there’s the question of whether or not I am credible enough to hold the position I have.”

So how are those looking 24 hours on?

Read the rest of this entry →