Wings Over Scotland

We had a bit of a debate at the weekend with ITV’s generally pretty decent Scotland correspondent Peter Smith, after he tweeted this:

It wasn’t the curious choice of picture we objected to, nor the fact that the £14.8bn figure is a notional sum which is totally meaningless in the context of an independent Scotland (because it represents a vague estimate of the disaggregated finances of a Scotland that’s inside the UK and subject to UK government policy choices).

Nor was it even the implication that a £14.8bn “black hole” was an inherent permanent feature of the Scottish economy rather than an unusually bad year.

What chafed with us was the idea that it was somehow Nicola Sturgeon’s fault.

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Hardcore nutter collective Scotland In Union are already the de facto unofficial No campaign group for the second independence referendum.

Evidently very well-connected and already flush with cash from sources unknown, the limited company recently raised a reported £300,000 for itself at a “charity” dinner attended by such luminaries of the great and the good as Lord Alistair Darling, Lord Dunlop and (um) Willie Rennie, auctioning off exotic high-end goodies like hunting trips to Africa, polo parties with the Maharajah of Jodhpur and Alpine holidays described in the lavish 60-page auction catalogue as featuring:

“A fabulous chalet and a family home, with six bedrooms sleeping 12, all en suite. Although the chalet does not come with a chalet girl, we will provide one for you.”

(There were also some signed JK Rowling books for the paupers.)

So that’s nice. Extremely wealthy people – just getting into the dinner was £250 – who are doing very well out of the way things are, donating big wads of money to some other people trying to ensure that the rich folk stay that way. No law against it. But just who are the true believers rushing bravely to the defence of the Union’s elites?

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There was a rather comforting predictability about the headlines the Scottish media greeted the first day of the SNP conference in Glasgow with.

Unsurprisingly, the Express’ lead story was a piece of fabricated drivel based on alleged quotes from an unnamed source claiming that the Scottish Government would resign in order to force an election and win a mandate that it already has.

(The SNP’s manifesto this May, on which it won a third landslide election victory in a row, clearly reserved the right to call a second referendum should there be a serious material change in circumstances, explicitly citing the Brexit scenario as an example.)

The Daily Mail, meanwhile, puffed up a load of entirely fact-free press-release foaming from some Tory list MSP nobody’s ever heard of into “news”, in the process somehow managing to twist the economic consequences of the Brexit vote caused by his own party into a bewilderingly illogical attack on Scottish independence.

Both articles are essentially the sort of comedy pastiches of terrible journalism one might create as a cautionary example in a media studies degree course, so we’ll waste no more of your time on them. The Herald’s piece, though, is at least marginally more interesting.

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It’s Siobhan again, readers.

Ever since Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden jumped ship to go and rearrange the deckchairs for Labour, his former paper has very noticeably toned down its hysterical “SNP BAD” content. We can go through the Mail for days on end now without finding some ludicrously distorted misrepresentation or screaming outrage piece about how a Nat MP found 20p down the back of their sofa without declaring it to HMRC or such.

Happily, as we’ve been noting recently, the Daily Express has leapt into the breach.

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Because the party is still stuffed with braindead cockroaches like this:

People of North Ayrshire, you’ve got a real prize there. Well done you.

The next Scottish council elections are in May next year.

We fully endorse this message from LBC’s James O’Brien.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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