Wings Over Scotland

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.

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So tonight the Labour Party tweeted this:

It’s a lie.

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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.

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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?

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We’ve been having a bit of a ponder over the effective passing into law of English Votes for English Laws, which has been remarkably little mentioned in Scotland’s media today. The BBC website has nothing about it at all on its Scotland front page, forcing readers to dig down into the politics section for some coverage.

The Daily Record, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have a word about it – nothing in the print edition and nothing online, even though as we write this it’s gone 3pm the next day, around 21 hours after the vote was passed in the Commons. The Scottish Daily Mail relegates it to a small feature taking up barely a third of page 12, even though the move supposedly ends the Union.

The Scotsman gives it a tiny corner of the front page and half of page 6, and only the Herald treats it as a lead story, although even there it only gets a couple of columns, less space than that devoted to a picture of David Cameron and the Chinese president Li Xinping having a pint in a pub.

All of which is remarkable, because it’s arguably the most radical change made to the UK constitution since the creation of the devolved Parliaments 16 years ago, and perhaps more significant even than that.

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The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.

First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:

This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.

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This month we’ve been noting a sudden avalanche of factually-questionable articles in the media attacking the SNP’s record in government. At the weekend and yesterday we also picked apart a highly misleading and disingenuous claim by Andrew Neil on the BBC’s Sunday Politics that there had been no cuts to the Scottish Government budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

And today we can see why.

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We weren’t going to take Professor Adam Tomkins’ hysterical “NATMAGEDDON!” article for this week’s Spectator seriously enough to pull it apart line by line.

But once we’d wiped the tears from our eyes we thought we’d better do our job.

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As readers may have noticed, it’s been an extremely slow news week this week. The papers, having strung out the Michelle Thomson “crisis” beyond all endurance, have been reduced (in the case of today’s Daily Mail) to printing shock-horror pictures of her still sitting beside SNP MPs in the Commons, so little else is there to report.

(As far as we’re aware the Commons doesn’t have an official naughty step, so even if Thomson HAD been found guilty of doing anything wrong she’d have had to sit on the opposition benches just the same.)

But it seems the dastardly Nats have been getting up to something even worse than associating with a (currently) former colleague.

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After this, this and this we were really hoping we’d never have to revisit the subject of the D’Hondt Method and get our calculator out again.

But OH NO!

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Much has been made this week of the Scottish Government’s decision to award a water services contract for council buildings, schools, prisons and some other public facilities to an English company (Anglian Water) over the bid by Business Stream, a wholly-owned subsidiary of publicly-owned Scottish Water.

Opponents of the SNP have claimed that the awarding of this contract means that the Scottish Government has somehow privatised the provision of water in Scotland.

Readers may not be completely astonished to learn it’s not true.

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Most of Scotland’s news outlets, including the Times, Herald, Daily Record, Daily Mail, Express and the BBC, run today with the story that one in three Police Scotland officers intend to leave the force in the next three years, according to a recent survey for the Scottish Police Authority.

(The print edition of the Scotsman makes it the front-page splash, although the article has mysteriously vanished from its website.)

But a couple of pieces of important information are inexplicably missing.

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