Wings Over Scotland

Be a shame if anything happened to it.

We struggled to summon up much more than a weary sigh about a story in a couple of the minor papers today (the Herald and Express), about a micro-scuffle at Saturday’s pro-indy rally in Glasgow. The most interesting thing about it appeared to be that the Express had written its article several hours before the event took place.

But we weren’t quite right.

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Three years ago today, Scotland bottled it. Almost uniquely in world history, its people turned down the chance to take control of their own affairs forever without a drop of blood being shed. They did so on the back of a package of vague promises, not least one of “extensive new powers”, almost all of which have subsequently been broken.

The Secretary of State for Scotland has chosen the anniversary of the referendum to let it be known that on top of that, the most fundamental building block of devolution – the premise that any power not explicitly reserved to Westminster in the Scotland Act 1998 would belong to Holyrood – will now be torn up, in the light of the exit from the EU that Scots were promised a No vote would protect them from.

In poker we call that a rubdown.

(Buy Chris Cairns’ second great book of cartoons here. Plus cuddly Hamish!)

This was Scottish Tory uberdunce Jamie Greene a few weeks ago, bitterly attacking the SNP for spending £22,000 on consulting the public over a policy on which the party won a landslide victory in the 2016 Holyrood election.

You might think that a government pursuing the manifesto policies it was elected on was a pretty legitimate thing to do, especially when it was asking voters for their views in order to shape that policy. Perhaps Greene was confused because the Tories have been acting as if they, not the SNP, won the election. But that raises another question.

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A story from the Financial Times this week revealed the UK government’s latest act of sabotage against the Scottish renewable energy industry. It’s just one more in a long line stretching back to just after the independence referendum, when a string of “Better Together” promises were broken almost the minute the No vote was secured.

It was a particularly weak argument in the first place – if there’s a market in the rUK for Scottish energy, it’ll be there whether Scotland is independent or not. But it unravelled faster than most as soon as it had done its job.

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Today’s papers all report, with varying degrees of prominence and glee, this “story”:

But which internationally-regarded rankings are these, exactly?

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20 years ago today, Scotland voted to have a Parliament for the first time in almost three centuries, by an overwhelming margin (although with modest enthusiasm – less than 10% more people actually voted for devolution than voted for independence in 2014, at 1.78m and 1.62m respectively).

Just 20 months after the vote the Parliament came into being, and Scotland’s media has been complaining about how useless it is ever since.

Today’s newspapers commemorate the anniversary by unleashing the full pontificating weight of the punditariat – most of whom have been opining wearily on Holyrood’s failings for the entire period – to bleat with their customary single voice about what a disappointment it’s all been.

The weird thing is that after all that time, none of them can actually explain why.

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(Buy Chris Cairns’ second great book of cartoons here. Plus cuddly Hamish!)

A Scot living in the EU, and an EU national living in Scotland, discuss the implications of the Brexit being forced on Scotland against its will by the UK government.

The clock is ticking.

We have a contest, ladies and gentlemen.

If only there was some way to illustrate that revitalisation, eh readers?

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This week’s publication of party accounts by the Electoral Commission, along with a string of recent stories about election expenses, served as a reminder to anyone who might have forgotten that the SNP are still, despite 10 years in power, the massive underdogs in Scottish politics.

Labour and the Tories, in particular, can always rely on handouts from their UK parent parties, who are in turn funded by massive donations from trade unions and big business respectively. In 2016 Labour trousered almost £15m from donors (over and above their membership revenues of £14m), while the Tories pocketed almost £19m in donations from their rich pals.

The Nats, meanwhile, have to gather most of their money from membership fees, but have been able to stay competitive in the campaign-heavy climate of the 2010s (since the turn of the decade the SNP have had to fight three expensive UK general elections, two Holyrood elections, two council elections, a European election and two referendums – that’s ten major votes in seven and a half years) thanks largely to extra help from lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir.

And the fact that Scottish politics can be something like an even remotely fair fight still leaves Unionists raging furiously at the burning injustice of it all.

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