It wasn’t easy to find a positive side for this.
But we suppose that it’ll at least be bleakly funny, whenever the second independence referendum comes round, watching Labour try to sell a vote for the UK as a vote for internationalist brotherhood and solidarity.
Kezia Dugdale isn’t even trying to make our life difficult.
“I don’t think Jeremy can unite our party and lead us into government. He cannot appeal to a broad enough section of voters to win an election.” (22 August 2016)
“I believe that Jeremy can unite the Labour Party [and] win a general election.” (24 September 2016)
We’re sure that the media will pin Dugdale down over this weekend and we’ll get a detailed and convincing explanation of exactly what it is that she thinks changed about the fundamental nature of Jeremy Corbyn over that solitary month.
It’s long been a bone of contention for Scots – and not just nationalists – that the UK government, by common agreement, wasted the vast wealth windfall of the North Sea on funding Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s programme of deliberate de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and bribes to the working class in the form of Right To Buy.
It did so rather than investing the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund, as demanded by the SNP (and some elements of Labour) and practiced in Norway, whose fund – only set up in 1990 – is now a literal embarrassment of riches.
But the reality is even worse than that. Because according to a 2015 report by the National Resource Governance Institute that’s just come to our attention, the truth is that if the UK had managed its North Sea treasure better, it could have done both.
With the greatest of reluctance, and only in the absence of anything even remotely more interesting, then, let’s have a few words on Scottish Labour’s latest solemn and sincere declaration of its full, total, complete and utter autonomy.
Because while the media is reporting the development that UK Labour has decided to extend a few extra inches of lead to Kezia Dugdale’s branch office as if it had the slightest importance to anything, it seems oddly reluctant to ask the obvious question.
Exactly two years ago today (how time flies), we wrote this:
It doesn’t seem overly immodest to say that we pretty much nailed it. But if that was then and this is now, what of tomorrow?
The Sunday Times has a new Panelbase poll out today, and it borrows a question that was first asked by this website (via the same pollster) 14 months ago. These were the results this month:
They broadly show little change from when we asked last year (for the five options the changes are +1, 0, -3, +8 and -5), suggesting that the main practical upshot of the EU referendum campaign was to halve the number of Don’t Knows, which was achieved by shifting almost all of them straight onto the Leave side with the Remain camp’s abysmal recreation of Better Together’s “Project Fear”.
Nevertheless, the chart is a fascinating and pertinent one. Because while there’s only one of the four non-DK groups in the list who definitely can’t get what they want, there’s another one whose decision will be a lot harder than Yes supporters would like.
The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.
But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.
We’ve already highlighted the abominable state of the Daily Express this week, but an article in today’s edition is surely some sort of record-breaking low.
Hold onto your hats, folks, you won’t believe this one.
The tone of coverage deployed by the Daily Express (Scottish and English editions alike) with regard to the First Minister of Scotland in recent weeks has been both bizarre and disturbing. Yesterday the paper ran this “story”:
It’s a load of gibberish, obviously. But if the FM was preparing herself for a punch-up, you could hardly blame her given what’s apparently been going on.
Supporters of Scottish independence have known for years that the civic “nationalism” espoused by the Yes movement bears no relation to the so-called “blood and soil” varieties found in many other countries. Every racist or ethnic-nationalist organisation in Britain – the BNP, the EDL/SDL, the National Front and so on – was stridently No.
But a YouGov poll released today puts numbers on it for the first time.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
