Wings Over Scotland

The Steve Bell cartoon in yesterday’s Guardian caused a fairly predictable reaction. SNP supporters and Yes voters were offended, some Guardian journalists drew ludicrous defensive comparisons citing Charlie Hebdo – as if people had called for Bell to be beheaded, rather than just expressed the opinion that the cartoon was nasty and racist – and lovers of comedy went off scratching their heads after fruitless attempts to understand what the joke was supposed to be.

(“It’s a quote!”, shouted quite a few people, naming about a dozen different historical figures as the alleged source of a line about trying everything once, but none of them offering anything by way of explanation on how that was connected to any comment or policy of Nicola Sturgeon’s or the SNP’s.)

Anyone naively thinking that the publication of the cartoon was just an unfortunate lapse or oversight will have been disappointed by today’s paper, which carries another painfully unfunny and incomprehensible Nat-bashing effort from Bell, although this time the offence is limited to the portrayal of Sturgeon and Alex Salmond as a pair of stereotypical kilt-wearing Jocks.

(The caption explains the strip as being purportedly about “Salmond and Sturgeon’s Highland fling”, but we haven’t a clue what that’s supposed to mean. We’re not aware of them having visited the Highlands recently and we can’t think of any characteristic of full fiscal autonomy that resembles a traditional dance.)

Unionists, meanwhile, indignantly pointed out to some complainants that attacking the SNP isn’t the same thing as attacking Scots as a whole. But as media hysteria about the apparently-unconscionable prospect of Scottish MPs influencing a UK government reaches fever pitch, that distinction is getting less and less meaninfgul.

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These are getting so numerous now we needed a place to keep track.

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As promised earlier, here’s the full glory of Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray’s stellar performance on Sunday Politics Scotland today.

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Lovers of blood sports enjoyed a very special treat on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland, as Gordon Brewer got his teeth firmly around the throat of hapless Scottish Labour MP Ian Murray and shook him like a rag doll for ten toe-curling minutes.

We’ll have the entire 18-rated clip for you later, but Brewer was having so much fun tormenting Murray by repeatedly demanding an answer to the question of whether his party would rule out an electoral deal with the SNP that he didn’t notice when, at about the 15th time of asking, he actually got one.

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Seemingly oblivious to the mockery of voters, the Labour and Tory sides of the media are today doggedly continuing with their quest to convince the electorate that voting for the SNP will let both the Tories and Labour in.

In the latest in a long series of hilarious diatribes from the right-wing English press, today’s Daily Mail (English edition only, natch) carries a mad rant from Max Hastings about “the SNP’s almost Stalinist agenda” imposing a nightmarish “socialist paradise” on the people of England via Ed Miliband and “Nicola Sturgeon, red in tooth and claw”.

Meanwhile, the increasingly hysterical Daily Record has an editorial leader – unbylined but with Torcuil Crichton’s stubby, inky fingerprints all over it – desperately screaming the official Scottish Labour line that the Nats are closet Tories, “the arrival of dozens of SNP MPs in Westminster would make a Conservative government more likely”, and that “without Labour, no one else will be able to stop Tory attacks on the poor”.

(It seems to have entirely escaped Crichton’s attention that Scotland voting Labour, including in 2010, has utterly failed to stop Tory attacks on the poor for decades.)

So now we know – voting SNP will bring about a socialist, Stalinist paradise of Tory governments attacking the poor. Glad we cleared that one up.

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Below is a tweet made by Scottish Labour yesterday.

For the true version, keep reading.

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Last Friday:

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In modern Scotland, you’ll struggle to find a politician from any party who won’t agree with two propositions: that Scotland is a nation and that devolution has, on balance, been a positive experience.

Debates about Scottish nationality are rare these days too. A substantial majority of Scots define themselves as “Scottish only”. Even UKIP has quietly ditched its plan to abolish Holyrood and now talks of forming a government.

But for all this consensus, Scotland’s inability to fully represent itself on the airwaves and onscreen remains one of the most critical issues we must now face up to.

The referendum created an eclectic range of alternative media. But, whether we like them or not, large media institutions like the BBC maintain a reach both online and offline that only a very select number of new platforms can begin to rival.

No single project can address this problem. Only a systematic renewal of Scotland’s media landscape will change the current reality of managed decline.

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The Daily Record is currently faithfully blaring out Labour’s anti-SNP “NHS in crisis” message, as part of the embattled party’s bizarre strategy of fighting a Westminster election solely on policies that are devolved to Holyrood, like health and education.

But an article on its website today dredges new depths even for the Record.

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Yesterday we noted that nothing had yet been heard from Scottish Labour’s policy review into universal services, launched amid much hoopla in September 2012 off the back of Johann Lamont’s infamous “something for nothing” speech.

The party has spent much of its time since then attacking the SNP over social justice, claiming that universal benefits are a middle-class subsidy, hurting the poor by spending money on giving the well-off free stuff they could afford to pay for.

Professor Arthur Midwinter, the Labour-friendly academic the party hired to lead the review, was widely reported by the press vowing to “devote at least two days a week for up to two years to prepare a series of reports for the commission, which is being co-chaired by Labour MP Cathy Jamieson and finance spokesman Ken Macintosh”.

Those two years have come and gone, and nearly six months more, and there’s been no sign of a single report from the commission. And it turns out there never will be.

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We love it when the UK government tries to get down with the kids.

The Smiths broke up in 1987.

We thought we’d just leave these here for the record.

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