Wings Over Scotland

85.1% of the Scottish electorate voted against the Conservatives in May. Scotland has a Tory government anyway, because of how England voted, because Scotland is part of the UK and so doesn’t get to choose its own governments. The people who ensured that could happen don’t get to whine about what that Tory government does.

So do everyone a favour and shut your mouths today, No voters. We warned you until we were blue in the face. This is what you wanted. This is what you got. Suck it up.

Here’s Kezia Dugdale in the Scotsman:

“Too often in the recent past it has looked like we are only on the side of one group of people – the most vulnerable in society.”

Now, to be honest we’re not sure we remember exactly when that was. Was it when Scottish Labour were threatening to slash “something for nothing” public services? Was it when Rachel Reeves said “we are not the party of people on benefits” (which is almost half the country)? Was it when Tom Harris said “we weren’t set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society”?

All we do know is, if we were a prospective Labour leader and we were going to make comments like that at all, we probably wouldn’t choose to do it just hours before a Tory chancellor was going to produce a budget battering living hell out of the most vulnerable in society and throwing 500,000 children in Scotland alone into poverty.

Because, y’know, we might be idiots, but we’re not complete idiots.

There’s a very strange feature in today’s Daily Record, and it’s not even one of their regular pieces of pioneering and hard-hitting investigative journalism about who’s the hottest guest ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The headline screams unequivocally that according to a new Survation poll, fear of the SNP influencing a Labour government was the reason that English voters swung back to the Conservatives, defying polls that said the Tories would be the largest party but be short of an overall majority.

(Weirdly it says that their goal in doing so was to “keep Salmond out of power”, even though (a) Alex Salmond is a humble backbench MP who doesn’t even lead the SNP group at Westminster, let alone the party, and (b) he won his seat anyway.)

The article then produces a flurry of graphs and figures showing that various numbers of supporters of the four UK parties switched their votes to various other parties after being polled (as always happens).

But then there’s something quite important missing.

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I started lurking on PoliticalBetting.com in the run up to the referendum and enjoyed reading the “robust” debates. A couple of months after the vote I got more actively involved and was immediately puzzled as to why many PBers, commentators, party strategists and – particularly – supposedly infallible bookmakers were all struggling to accept the accuracy of the Scottish opinion polls.

At this point the polls were already indicating that Scottish Labour was going to lose many of its 41 seats and could end up with fewer than five. I started commenting that from where I sitting in Stirling the opinion polls were accurate, the SNP surge was real and indeed that it had not yet peaked.

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We reported last night on the mealy-mouthed semi-correction the Daily Telegraph has finally been forced to grudgingly publish with regards to its incompetent and inaccurate creation of the “Memogate” scandal. The paper – we’re loath to prefix it with the word “news” – has now suffered the full weight, such as it is, of the press regulator IPSO, and will not have to answer any further for its actions.

And that just leaves us with the source.

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At 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, three months after publishing the original falsehood, the Daily Telegraph has finally quietly pushed out the sort-of admission that it told a lie before the general election about the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, wanting David Cameron to remain as UK Prime Minister – a claim intended to damage her party politically in the aforementioned election.

The toothless press watchdog IPSO has allowed the Telegraph to merely publish its adjudication by way of correction. No apology is offered to the First Minister, and the Telegraph can’t quite bring itself to concede that its facts were wrong, even though they’ve now been denied by every single party to the incident – Ms Sturgeon, the French ambassador, the French Consul-General and the former Secretary of State for Scotland who leaked a memo about their meeting to the press, Alistair Carmichael.

(More on him in a few hours, incidentally.)

Such, we must apparently accept, is justice for the British media.

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As the petition to save them is dismissed as a “social media experiment” and as Greggs announces it will persist in removing the macaroni pie from its line, I find that my hackles have reached hitherto unrealised heights.

Just who do these people – quislings and traitors to the cause of quality baked goods – think they are? Even the wonderful Nicola (may her name be praised) has expressed ambivalence as to their merits, preferring not to partake at a personal level.

I am no stranger to feelings of righteous indignation, but why does this issue drive me to print in a way that the recent rebuffs to Holyrood’s permanence and full fiscal autonomy did not? Allow me to explain.

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We’ll never tire of documenting the Daily Record’s increasingly panicked attempts to get David Cameron to enact the Record’s dodgy promise of last September and save it from having to answer for the pup it sold Scotland.

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The Daily Record has a major editorial in today’s edition bleating piteously about the way David Mundell and the Conservative government have – to everyone’s complete and utter astonishment, except not so much – ignored the wishes of almost all the MPs elected by the Scottish people just two months ago and blocked every single amendment to the Scotland Bill.

The picture above, by alert reader Neil Hepburn, seems to sum the situation up.

The Sunday Post’s lobby reporter James Millar noticed today that all the parties have submitted their nominations to sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster.

As has already been noted, the majority of the committee – seven from 11 – are MPs for English seats (list below). But one name in particular caught our attention.

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Two nights of political debate on the BBC:

Six unionists, two nationalists. What’s that all about, then?

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In today’s Scotsman, Peter Jones makes the case for why an independent Scotland would have been plunged into the same crisis currently affecting Greece (and making the case along the way for why George Osborne’s austerity is inevitable and we should just shut up and accept it).

He insists strenuously throughout the article that he’s doing no such thing and is simply highlighting the flaws in the idea of a currency union between Scotland and the rUK, but to anybody who actually reads the article, it’s patently obvious that that’s exactly what he’s doing.

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