Wings Over Scotland

Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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Because we have no words.

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Last night – at the insistence of the SNP – the House Of Commons held a six-hour emergency debate in the wake of the UK’s unquestionably illegal bombing of Syria at the weekend, under the supposed justification of a chemical attack that may well not have happened at all, far less have been the responsibility of the unfortunate country’s murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad.

(Loony left-wing conspiracy theorists casting doubt on Assad’s responsibility for what happened – or didn’t happen – in Douma include, er, Major General Jonathan Shaw, the former head of the UK’s special forces, and Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord under Tony Blair and Minister For Security And Counter-Terrorism in Gordon Brown’s government.)

The debate concluded with a token vote, not on whether the bombing was right or wrong but which merely asserted whether Parliament had “considered” the subject. (ie voting that it had NOT done so would have made a statement that the Prime Minister acted improperly by committing UK forces to a conflict without obtaining MPs’ assent.)

Faced with the opportunity to issue a symbolic public rebuke to the government for bypassing Parliament on a matter of war and breaking international law, the radical socialist opposition Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn… abstained.

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Scotland’s political opposition and media, today:

There can surely be no country on Earth cursed and plagued with a more pathetic shower of petty, whining, gossiping harpies in those roles than Scotland. And while we knew that already, barely a day seems to go by without them reaching a new nadir.

If you’ve got the stomach to hear about the latest low point, grit your teeth, lower your expectations of humanity considerably and read on.

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This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:

As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.

But that wasn’t the weird bit.

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“There now follows a party election broadcast by the…”

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The political broadcasts at election time are a time-worn tradition in the UK (as is our reaction to them) but not too many people really understand why political campaign broadcasts take this form, nor why it’s actually quite important that they do.

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Last week we dropped the Electoral Commission a short line to see if there’d been any progress in their investigation into our revelations of last December about the extremist loongroup Scotland In Union’s funding. Today we got a reply:

So just to clarify: an organisation whose specific stated purpose is to fight elections, and which has been a registered campaigner in several general elections, spending tens of thousands of pounds at a time, has raised over £600,000 in mainly large donations from wealthy and secretive donors since 2015 – a period where there has hardly ever NOT been an election going on in which spending and donations were regulated – and yet not one single penny of it has been declarable income.

That’s… interesting. We’ve asked the EC if any further detail will be forthcoming.

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There was (unintentionally, we presume) a very revealing turn of phrase used by Tory MEP Jacqueline Foster on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 28 March 2018)
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“Scotland held a referendum on independence a couple of years earlier, and if the Scots had won that referendum to leave the United Kingdom, they’d have left the European Union.”

We suppose it’s nice that even the Tories finally agree that Scotland lost by voting No. But it’s interesting to hear that apparently there has never been any way for Scots to stay in the EU – if they voted Yes in 2014 they were out, if they voted No in 2014 they were out, and even though they voted Remain in 2016 they’re going out.

Any fair-minded democrat would surely then accept that Scotland’s voters deserve one chance to actually make that choice in a meaningful way, no?