Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers may recall a very recent incident where the Daily Record made baseless insinuations about a trip by former SNP MP Natalie McGarry to Syria, and whether its funding had been declared on the Parliamentary Register Of Members’ Interests.

(It had been, and the Record still hasn’t clarified its article to that effect.)

So here’s a thing.

Nil? Zero? Nothing at all? That seems… wrong.

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So now Scotland knows where it stands. Alistair Carmichael is innocent.

There’s officially nothing wrong with a minister of the UK government deliberately lying in an attempt to undermine the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland before a general election, smearing foreign ambassadors in the process, then openly admitting his wrongdoing but refusing to stand down, flicking two fingers at his own constituents and the whole country.

Right you are, then. Duly noted. On we go.

Earlier this year, a Secretary of State in Her Majesty’s Government leaked an untrue memo to the press, with the intention of undermining the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland and damaging her party in an imminent general election. He then went on national TV and lied about doing so, in order to protect his own reputation.

The newspaper he leaked the smear to printed it without making the slightest attempt to ascertain its veracity, for which it was nominated for an award (even after having been strongly censured by the press complaints watchdog). The “journalist” involved has never retracted or apologised for the story. Others have defended it.

The minister’s colleagues and other opposition politicians gleefully leapt on the smear and propagated it, mostly failing to retract their accusations after they were shown to have been false. Others shrugged that it was normal and fine for politicians to tell “brazen” lies and that complaining about it was “bullying”.

These facts are not in dispute. Tomorrow morning we’ll find out what they mean.

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The National today has a story we’ve been sitting on for several days while we tried to get some verifiable evidence in the form of links or screenshots to back it up.

But Labour aren’t the only people having trouble scaring up a candidate roster.

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This morning’s Daily Record, and also some newspapers, report that booze-ruined internet troll and convicted violent criminal George Foulkes – who’s spent several decades of his political career campaigning to abolish the House Of Lords, and all of the last one sitting in it as Baron Foulkes of Cumnock – has dreamt up a wizard new wheeze to enhance the Scottish Parliament by giving it its own chamber of peers.

The thirsty noble aims to avoid the undemocratic nature of the UK Lords by making the new “senate” an elected chamber. But in an uncharacteristic development that will shock innocent readers to their cores, he doesn’t seem to have thought it through.

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It’s probably time we had a series of these. So here’s #1.

scandal (noun) – a situation where no known crime has been committed and nobody has been interviewed by the police, yet which apparently contrasts in some way with other situations about which the exact same applies.

(Can often by identified by presence of Scottish Labour MPs/MSPs describing claims of entirely legal activity as “very serious allegations”.)

As the Scottish media winds itself up to full speed with “SNP BAD” columns about the Forth Road Bridge closure, an alert reader spotted an interesting old quote in Hansard featuring a gentleman you may recognise.

“Mr. Darling: Do the Government still want to proceed with the building of a second Forth road bridge, which would devastate the constituency that the Minister seeks to represent at the next election? Have the Government changed their tack? Do they now accept that there needs to be a co-ordinated public transport strategy to deal with the transport needs of Edinburgh and south-east Scotland?

Will the Minister make the Government’s position clear so that we know whether they want to build this ridiculous bridge?”

We invite anyone who may perhaps just be arriving at work after an unusually long commute this morning to imagine a Scotland where Mr Darling had been listened to, and the prospect of a replacement crossing was still several years away.

Tuesday, then Saturday:

Bless ’em.

This is Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, quoted in the Independent On Sunday on the 15th of November, just two and a half weeks ago.

That’s interesting, isn’t it?

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Tonight we watched as the conclusion of a “debate” in the UK Parliament saw the “opposition”, almost unprecedentedly, sum up the same case as the government, to roof-raising cheers and applause (which is now apparently permitted again) from the Conservative benches for a Labour shadow minister.

We were rather put in mind of a famous Neil Kinnock speech from 1985.

It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.

(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)

So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.

It turned out that we were wrong.

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The meme of the week among the Unionist media and politicians is once again that the SNP is a sinister Borg-like organisation where independent thought is outlawed.

Bewilderingly, this evening Labour MSP Neil Findlay bitterly tweeted a complaint that all of the SNP’s elected members apparently agreed with his own position on bombing Syria, the vile swine that they are. (Presumably he’d prefer if some of them voted with the Tories just for the sake of it.) But he’s not alone.

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