Wings Over Scotland

This evening’s Question Time saw one of the most incident-packed passages on the show in recent memory. From left to right onscreen the panellists were Paul Marshall (hedge fund manager, head of a chain of academy schools and co-author of the Lib Dems’ infamous “Orange Book”), Alex Salmond, Tory minister Greg Clark, Labour’s shadow home secretary Andy Burnham and right-wing think-tanker Jill Kirby.

We’ll let you watch for yourself.

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We have high hopes.

Well, high-ish.

We’re looking forward to the publication of the Scottish Labour manifesto for next month’s election, which is due to be published on Wednesday, just eight days before the vote. We confidently anticipate that it will definitively clear up a few issues we’re still not absolutely sure of the branch office’s position on.

For a day or two, at least.

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With fears growing that hundreds of jobs may be lost in the Clyde shipyards as the UK government slowly backs away from the commitments made during the independence referendum campaign, Kezia Dugdale was full of righteous outrage last night.

But note how delicately that tweet is phrased. The clear implication – while not directly stated – is that only the Tories were responsible for the promises.

Is that the case, though?

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We’ve noted on numerous occasions previously that one of this site’s prime functions is merely to remember things – to serve as a repository of fact which can be referred to when politicians or the media try to mislead people about what happened in the past. It was a thought we were struck by again on reading The Times this morning.

Because as we beheld Kenny Farquharson’s account of the SNP’s manifesto launch, and how its emphasis on the word “RE-ELECT” was unfamiliar and “very different” to their last Holyrood manifesto launch, we were sure that wasn’t how we recalled it.

So we checked.

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This site has never told readers how to vote in Scottish elections and never will, partly because its editor has no vote there and doesn’t have to live with the consequences whoever wins. (Something that ISN’T true about independence, in which case Wings would relocate to Scotland, which is why we freely express a firm view on that.)

It’s in that context that we make the following observations about next month’s vote.

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The meaning of the word “reform” has taken something of a battering in Scotland this year. First the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust decided that it meant “bailing out a known liar in direct contravention of our own stated rules”. And today we have the strange case of the Electoral Reform Society.

“Make seats match votes”. Nobody could disagree with that, right?

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We were having a quiet night in, readers. (Living in a cul-de-sac, it’s quite peaceful here in the evenings, unless we’re hosting a soirée.) We’d just made ourselves a late snack of a tasty baguette – preceded by a small apéritif, and a few canapés serving as hors d’oeuvre – as the au pair is on holiday in Paris this week with the chauffeur, taking in some haute couture.

As we relaxed on the chaise-longue, pondering an indulgent dessert of a chocolate eclair or some crème brûlée, we glanced at Twitter, in the hope of being amused by a few bon mots in the milieu of the internet. Sadly, the reality was a cliché.

We’ve never felt so divorced from the zeitgeist.

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We tried to ring BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show, presented by Louise White, this morning in order to ask Ruth Davidson a question, but because we’re not Scottish Labour activist Scott Arthur (who appears on air most weeks, including both today’s and yesterday’s shows) we didn’t get picked, as we normally don’t.

It was a shame, as the question we wanted to ask was a good one – and also an entirely genuine one that we honestly don’t know the answer to. Furthermore, it’s a question that applies equally well to all three Unionist party leaders, so we’ll be trying to phone in and ask them too when they in turn appear on the programme.

We rather suspect we won’t get through unless we change our name, though, so if anyone else is interested in the answer perhaps they might like to try their luck too on behalf of everyone, whether it’s on the Radio Scotland phone-in or any other event where the public are allowed to question the leaders.

So the question is below.

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It’s a rare occasion when we feel compelled to salute Scotland’s mainstream media, but their restraint on discovering that a whole slew of PFI schools commissioned by Labour might be in danger of falling down at any moment was highly commendable.

Restricting themselves merely to excising all mention of Labour from their coverage, the press admirably refused to somehow contort the issue into a shape that could be used to attack the SNP.

They kept temptation at bay for a solid 24 hours before they cracked.

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The Unionist parties are taking such a kicking in the polls for next month’s Holyrood election that you could forgive them for not always knowing where they were.

The above tweet does indeed have the potential to be “astonishing”, given that (a) Ruth Davidson isn’t standing in Carnoustie, and (b) the 2011 result suggests that there are only around 700 Labour voters to find in the entire town behind the “1000s” of doors that 20 Tories have impressively managed to knock by teatime.

(Indeed, the area is so Labour-unfriendly that the Tories actually managed to come 2nd five years ago, getting over 50% more votes than the Labour candidate.)

But it’s not the only piece of geographical confusion afflicting the UK parties.

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