Wings Over Scotland

Today, on the shortest day of the worst year in recent memory, the people of Catalonia will vote in an election under the control of a brutally repressive government which has unjustly dissolved their devolved parliament, imprisoned their democratically-elected leaders, viciously beaten hundreds of voters for no crime other than trying  to vote, and banned almost all types of expression of public support for Catalan independence, including outlawing colours of the rainbow.

All this has happened within the borders of civilised free Europe, and the other nations of that great continent have largely either turned a blind eye to Catalonia’s suffering, or actively sided with the Spanish regime. Many people fear that today’s election will be rigged, or that if pro-independence parties win the result will simply be ignored and the election re-run until the “right” result is arrived at.

The UK media has barely acknowledged the election is taking place, even though it appears that many of the most cherished and fundamental human rights and freedoms of the West are at stake in it. (Or perhaps precisely for that reason.)

For members of peaceful self-determination movements across the world, including in Scotland, the stakes could barely be higher. Madrid has demonstrated in the starkest possible terms that power devolved is power retained, and events in Barcelona today could be events in Edinburgh tomorrow.

(And if that seems overly melodramatic, ask yourself who would ever have imagined a 21st-century democracy sending in riot police, in full view of the eyes of the world, to literally drag blood-soaked elderly women out of polling stations by the hair?)

All we can do is watch and hope that justice prevails, and that the darkest hours do prove to be those that come before a bright new dawn.

The Scottish press and opposition have had it in for the baby box ever since the idea was mooted, but this is a pretty spectacular new low in barrel-scraping.

“Almost half”, eh? How many are we talking about exactly?

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This week’s Scottish budget threw the opposition parties and the media into panic and disarray. Evidently having expected considerably more swingeing tax hikes than the extremely modest increases that were imposed on higher earners, they’d built up a head of steaming fury that had nowhere to go, and have been reduced to frantically scrabbling around for extreme (or flat-out wrong) examples to try to generate outrage.

Today’s politics lead in the Scottish Mail On Sunday is a case in point.

By going through all the numbers with a fine-tooth comb, the SMoS has managed to pick out a tiny anomaly around National Insurance thresholds, and portrayed it as hitting people on a very healthy but not exactly super-rich salary of £45,000 with a total tax-and-NI rate of 53%.

The small print, as ever, is rather less dramatic.

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(Just 24 hours left to buy cartoon books for your friends in time for Christmas! Hurry!)
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The revealing reaction of the Tory benches in Holyrood to Derek Mackay’s deft budget changes in tax, which ensure that 70% of Scots will pay less tax than they do now, and the lowest 55% of earners will pay less income tax in Scotland than they would if they lived elsewhere in the UK (and get better public services for it), while still generating extra money overall from slightly increased rates on higher earners:

There was a time, readers, when Murdo Fraser was a bright young radical thinker who backed Full Fiscal Autonomy and even supported the idea of Universal Basic Income.

We think “committed Unionist” in this case is a euphemism.

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Alert readers of the Scottish Mail On Sunday – if any such people exist, that is – will have noticed that the paper has of late been cutting both costs and the middleman by giving Tory MSPs entire pages to spout party propaganda for free rather than paying a journalist to slightly rewrite it.

First Ruth Davidson, and now the party’s finance spokesloyalist Murdo Fraser, have recently had free rein to say whatever they liked to the paper’s readership, and today Fraser chose to go with the topic of “waste”.

(Following on from a bizarre Scottish Daily Mail piece last month about which we’ll have some startling new information for you very soon.)

It seemed oddly familiar, with one rather significant alteration.

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Another then-and-now classic.

(Source 1, source 2)

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(It’s nearly Christmas! Buy cartoon books for your friends, unless you’re a vile monster.)
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The media is aflame this morning with discussion of the agreement between the UK and EU with particular regard to Ireland, in which the UK essentially concedes just about everything including free movement, the thing most Brexiters voted Leave for.

We’ve largely avoided analysis of the Brexit negotiations here on Wings up until now, because there’s been a raft of people who are far more expert on the subject than us doing it at enormous length, very little of it directly concerned Scotland, and so nobody really needed our tuppence-worth. But this one’s big.

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Yesterday at Holyrood the Scottish Liberal Democrats, in the name of Orkney MSP Liam McArthur, brought forward a motion of no confidence in Police Scotland, which was calmly but stingingly rebutted by Scottish Police Federation chair Calum Steele on Twitter. A debate went ahead in the chamber, of which the outcome was the below:

So the Lib Dems lost, Labour lost, the Greens lost, the Tories lost and the SNP lost. We’re glad that’s all cleared up and was a valuable use of everyone’s time, then.

What’s even the point any more?

Even if you don’t buy into any of the persistent health concerns about aspartame, there are already TWO chemically-sweetened Irn Bru brands (Sugar-Free and Xtra) for the people who can stomach the foul taste of fake sugar. But now nobody will be able to choose a version without it.

Alongside whisky, Irn-Bru is arguably THE iconic branded product of Scotland but now 120 years of history have just been casually crapped on and thrown aside in the name of the nanny state and corporate greed (aspartame is dirt-cheap compared to sugar, and Barr – having ruined Tizer, Red Kola and its other drinks the same way years ago – also wants to avoid the UK government’s sugar tax taking a bite out of its profits).

Let’s just shut down Holyrood, rebrand as North Britain and be done with it.