Wings Over Scotland

We watched the Labour leadership hustings this week with interest. The most striking aspect in our eyes was the warm reception afforded by the audience to left-wing outsider Jeremy Corbyn, who’s been almost uniformly discounted, sneered at and worse by the commentariat (with the notable exception of the Guardian’s Owen Jones) as a suicidal option fit only for a return to the days of the Militant Tendency.

The main reason cited by pundits for dismissing Corbyn out of hand is a perceived failure to speak to “aspiration”, which seems to have been defined for the purposes of the argument as “poor people who want to become Tories”.

The thinking runs that the unemployed and low-paid don’t want to be that way forever (reasonably enough), and that therefore there’s no point in Labour trying to redistribute wealth downwards, because nobody wants to see themselves as still being poor in the future, so they won’t see any benefit from it.

There are all manner of things morally and ideologically wrong with that approach, but they’re pretty obvious so we won’t bother spelling them out here. Perhaps a more compelling one, though, is that it’s a really stupid way to try to win an election.

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Unionists got very excited last week when the Office for Budget Responsibility once again downgraded its long-term North Sea oil revenue forecasts (which in 2011 it was predicting at £131bn) to just £2.1bn over 20 years. The new figure was as usual treated as a gospel fact and deployed to attack both independence and full fiscal autonomy by proving that Scotland couldn’t afford to run its own affairs.

We and others pointed out the numerous flaws in that argument, but of course those are just points of view. We could all debate it all day and all night and never achieve a consensus. There is, however, an easy way to settle the matter, by which supporters and opponents of independence and FFA alike can both put their money where their mouths are and everyone will be happy.

It really couldn’t be simpler.

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Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:

The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.

Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.

(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)

A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.

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We’ve already noted that today is a confusing news day. But when we were listening to the radio this morning we thought we maybe hadn’t woken up properly.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 June 2015)
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The segment concerned a report by the Tory-leaning think tank Reform Scotland, and saw both the organisation and Labour MSP Hugh Henry trying doggedly to find a bad spin on the news in the fact that crime in Scotland is at a 40-year low. So desperate were they to do so that they ended up denying the existence of arithmetic.

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So first of all there’s this (click pic for full story):

…in which the figures appear to show that Iceland’s policy of imposing justice and imprisoning the greedy bankers who caused the world financial crash – rather than just shovelling money at them and letting them carry on robbing everyone – actually saw its economy recover at least as well as anywhere else’s.

But then things get more complicated.

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The Daily Record’s conscience is evidently still bothering it.

Having sold Scotland a pup back in September, the paper has spent much of the time since then frantically trying to present itself as the doughty and fearless champion of home rule. But it’s hard to see what it’s getting itself so worked up about.

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There’s an unmissable piece in today’s Guardian about the last days of the general election campaign, as seen from inside the headquarters of the Labour Party.

The reason it’s fascinating isn’t because (as it claims) it provides an insight into why Labour lost the election, but because it reveals how the party’s most senior staff, by pathologically avoiding any non-stage-managed contact with actual voters, lost all grip of reality and sleepwalked into their most crushing defeat in decades.

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Most of today’s papers quote an unnamed Scotland Office spokesman on the subject of the Scotland Bill 2015, and in particular its clauses concerning welfare powers:

“It is factually wrong to claim there are vetoes in the Bill. These are sensible, practical arrangements to ensure the transfer of new powers smoothly.”

We’ll let readers judge for themselves.

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Earlier today we noted that the indyref had empowered the Scottish people to an extent that they seemed very reluctant to give up on. But plutocracies don’t become the establishment by giving up their thrones lightly, and so today we get this:

The above is a passage we selected completely at random from the Scotland Bill 2015, the administrative manifestation of “The Vow” and the Smith Commission. It’s entirely typical of the full 77-page document (PDF), which is essentially an unreadable wordspew completely impenetrable to normal people. And that’s no accident.

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STV’s Stephen Daisley yesterday penned one of the more thoughtful analyses we’ve seen on the future of Labour, both UK and Scottish varieties, although it’s perhaps a bit heavy on “they should do things that are popular and will make people vote for them” and a bit light on what those things would actually be.

But there’s also this.

It’s a bit like watching a rabbit on a motorway explain that lights can’t hurt you.

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Many pundits are of the opinion that the new Tory Max government will be actively hostile to the BBC, which the party has long believed is an expensive public-sector hotbed of right-on lefties. So when we did our latest poll, it seemed worth finding out how much the people of Scotland valued the state broadcaster.

There were, let’s say, some interesting quirks.

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The reasons for Scottish Labour’s obliteration at the hands of the electorate last week are manifold, and most of them were very thoroughly explored in the weekend’s press, for example by Kevin McKenna here and here.

But as is our wont here on Wings, we wanted something a little more empirical to get our teeth into, so a few days before the election we commissioned a poll of 1,013 Scottish voters from Panelbase covering some of the subjects the regional office had campaigned on under its branch manager Jim Murphy.

The results were fascinating.

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