A timely reminder about how much 85% of British people (or to put that another way, English people) really value the rest of the UK.
“Lead us, Scotland, don’t leave us!” is going to be a pretty hard sell next time.
Last week, just a day after we highlighted the disastrous sales collapse of the Daily Record during almost certainly the most tumultuous and eventful seven-year period in Scotland’s peacetime history, the paper’s editor-in-chief Murray Foote apparently took the Scottish newspaper industry by surprise by suddenly resigning his position.
(We’re sure, incidentally, this is entirely unconnected with the recent advertising of some senior media vacancies in Scottish Labour.)
Rival hacks dutifully issued a series of glowing tweets about what a smashing guy Foote was and how much he’d improved the paper during his 27-year tenure there in various positions, most recently editor-in-chief, group editor and deputy editor.
So even though Foote accused this site of “debasing public life” with “sewage politics, conspiracy theories, hatred and paranoia” when we forced his paper to reluctantly and belatedly correct a massive front-page lie, we thought we’d join in the salutes.
We still have no reliable internet, just occasional five-minute bursts or a shonky 4G phone connection, but there’s a BT Openreach man in the garden and as soon as he gets hold of a different kind of all-terrain BT Openreach man we’re hopeful that the problem will finally be fixed by the end of today, after two weeks.
In the meantime, we couldn’t help but be struck in passing by the collapse of talks on reopening the Northern Ireland’s devolved Assembly, which has now been closed for over a year following the failure of an election to deliver a workable administration.
If there’s a better illustration of just how limited the powers of devolution in the UK are than the fact that the region seems to have muddled along just fine for 13 months without the parliament, we’re having a hard time thinking of what it might be. The old saying that “power devolved is power retained” has never been more visibly true.
If Scotland wants to thrive, it can only do so with all the meaningful powers of a nation under its own control, and at the end of the day there’s only one way to get those.
Not to discuss the UK government’s Brexit impact report on Scotland, of course. Not a single senior Scottish Tory will face the media about that, having all viciously rubbished the Scottish government’s assessment just last month as “scaremongering”, even though it turned out to be almost identical to the UK government’s version that we’re still not allowed to officially know about.
(Some hapless minor goon was dispatched to make a fool of himself today instead.)
But it seems she’s got plenty time to go on the radio if it’s something important.
Between that, Kezia Dugdale swanning off to the jungle for a few weeks in the middle of a Parliamentary session, and Douglas Ross squeezing the occasional bit of MSP work in between linesman gigs, it’s getting harder and harder to keep a straight face when the opposition go on about the SNP sticking to the “day job”.
The Scottish Conservatives have taken us all on quite a ride with regard to the UK government’s Brexit impact analysis on Scotland. In October, David Mundell told us it definitely existed. Then just a week later he told us it definitely didn’t. And this month he finally admitted it did.
But his Scottish Tory colleagues knew one thing for sure all along – if it did exist, then it certainly wouldn’t resemble the ridiculous, over-the-top, hysterical scaremongering figures conjured up by the Scottish Government.
You know where this is going, right? Let’s all save some time.
So it seems we opened quite a can of worms when we broke the story of the Scotland In Union donor leak last month. Yesterday saw the disturbing tale of police armed with battering rams seizing computers and phones from David Clews of right-wing Unionist group UK Unity, a former SIU member suspected of being the source of the leak.
For the record we have absolutely no idea if he’s the source or not (and we don’t know who is – the file was passed to us anonymously through a now-deleted email account), but however much of a mad zoomer someone might be we find ourselves rather uncomfortable with the deployment of such an excessive display of intimidatory police force in the defence of the interests of the wealthy establishment.
Clews might be a Unionist – and a fairly unpalatable one at that – but we very much doubt it was ever going to be necessary to smash his door down, and it’s striking to see the magnitude of the state’s reaction against one of its own the moment they might step out of line and do anything to displease either the titled and landed gentry who provide most of SIU’s money, or their loyal bootboys.
So having been subjected to a ridiculous arrest (and completely spurious, months-long confiscation of electronic equipment) ourselves last year for doing our job, we didn’t view the raid with quite as much schadenfreude as readers might expect.
But it wasn’t the most disturbing thing to arise from the story.
Because sometimes you just can’t even.
Let’s all take a moment and imagine Labour stepping up to that situation, shall we?
We’ve had extremely poor internet at Wings HQ since Thursday of last week, which our telecoms company is trying to get to the bottom of. (We’re typing this on an iPhone via very flaky 4G.)
We’ll be back with you ASAP. In the meantime, we’re being baffled by this assertion from the Financial Times that’s been doing the social-media rounds again recently.
Um, that isn’t “difficult” at all. That’s what maritime borders are for. That’s why the UK took the precaution of stealing (or reclaiming, depending on where you’re looking at it from) thousands of square miles of Scottish waters in 1999.
But other than any possible attempts to renegotiate that boundary, there’s nothing to debate. One side of the line is ours. The other side is yours. The end. We’re not at all sure why the FT would ever try to pretend otherwise.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
