Wings Over Scotland

Having failed over the course of several years to label the SNP “Nazis” and “fascists” (or, depending on which sort of newspaper you were reading, “Tartan Stalinists”), the party’s political and media opponents have a new(ish) meme to punt: that the SNP is a religious cult made up of credulous, fanatical zealots impervious to logic or facts.

The leader of this new front is right-wing columnist Alex Massie, who by our count has managed to flog someone this diatribe at least four times already this year – the most recent being in yesterday’s Times:

“With its group-think, blame culture and wilful blindness, the Teflon party has turned into a faith-based organisation”

But he’s far from alone.

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Alert readers can’t have failed to notice the media working itself up into a particularly dopey froth this week over the subject of a second independence referendum. First the press, short of actual news in the political silly season, pumped up Alex Salmond stating the bleeding obvious into some kind of hold-the-front-page revelation.

(Salmond has said, like, forever that he believes Scotland will be independent in his lifetime. That can only happen through a referendum. It therefore stands to reason that he must believe a second referendum is inevitable. Him saying so, for the 500th time, in response to a direct question is about as far from “news” as it’s possible to get.)

Then today all the papers reported David Cameron ruling out any possibility of another one while he’s Prime Minister, as if it was any of his business to do so.

(Should the SNP stand on a manifesto commitment to another referendum, and win a majority on that platform, it’d be not only an affront to democracy but politically idiotic to block it. Even those Scots opposed to independence, or to another referendum, still want their country’s democratic will respected.)

Luckily, there’s an easy solution to the problem.

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With David Mundell and Ian Murray both having appeared on today’s “Good Morning Scotland” singing the praises of the wonderful Scotland Bill and how it would deliver all a nation could ever dream of, it seems a good time to publish the results of our recent Panelbase poll on the subject.

The nation, it seems, has rather more ambitious dreams.

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From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:

It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?

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The battle-cry of right-wing Labour apologists all this week has been “realism”. It’s all very well people like Jeremy Corbyn having crazy old principles about what Labour is supposed to stand for, runs the argument, but you can’t argue with public opinion and public opinion is desperate for Labour to become Tories with a slightly softer edge.

“Mental John” McTernan, for example, told the readers of the Telegraph yesterday that Labour’s disastrous, shambolic abstention on the welfare reform bill was the right thing to do because the party “had to show the public it got the message over welfare”.

But what actually IS the public’s message on welfare?

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Tony Blair quoted in the Independent today:

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From “Record View” in today’s Daily Record:

If only there’d been some way of ensuring Scotland was never “skewered by political decisions made on the basis of English priorities”, etc etc.

We’re sorry to keep going on about this, readers, but we’ve been going over and over it in our heads and we just can’t get it to make sense.

Below is the failed Labour amendment to the Welfare Reform And Work Bill:

As you can see, its sole intended purpose was to refuse a second reading to the Bill. Labour voted for their own amendment (an achievement, we suppose), which means they didn’t want to see the bill get a second reading.

You’re with us so far, right?

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In fact he abstained, along with roughly 80% of his Labour colleagues.

(NB The glitch in the middle of the clip is on the original broadcast.)

After last night’s debacle in the House Of Commons, various Labour activists and cheerleaders have been scrambled on social and print media to firefight the appalled reaction from voters on the left to the party’s abstention on the Tory welfare bill.

And as usual, they’re talking cobblers.

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The government’s brutal, monstrous welfare reform bill passed its second reading in the Commons tonight by 308 votes to 124, meaning that somewhere in the region of 80% of Labour MPs abstained on it.

Half an hour earlier the party tweeted this:

Presumably as a joke.

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