Wings Over Scotland

It’s never a good look for a politician to have fewer principles than UKIP. When Tory MPs Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless defected to Nigel Farage’s party, both stood down from their seats and fought by-elections to establish whether their electoral mandates were personal or owed to the party. Both of them won. (Though both men subsequently lost at general elections and Reckless has now returned to the Tories.)

The seven Labour MPs who resigned from the party today have no such honour and no such respect for the electorate. They’ve quit the party but not their cushy and lucrative jobs as opposition MPs, and will bring about absolutely no practical difference other than sitting a few feet further to the left in the Commons voting exactly the same way as they did before.

Labour MPs already regularly rebel against the whip anyway – just last week 40 of them broke ranks to back an SNP amendment on Brexit. So nothing will be achieved by Chuka Umunna and six people nobody in the real world has ever heard of splitting under the meaningless umbrella name “The Independent Group”, whose claim that “politics is broken” was neatly illustrated by its website at their big launch moment.

The seven claim that Labour values no longer represent them, yet they’re happy to remain in the seats that Labour’s manifesto and brand secured for them. Nor do they wish to stay in the party and fight for the values they think it should have. They’ve chosen the most cowardly, meaningless form of protest possible: keep cashing the paycheques but carp from the sidelines.

There are already three MPs elected as Labour but who now sit as nominal “independents” – Frank Field, John Woodcock and Ivan Lewis – and the fact that most people’s reaction to that fact will be “Who?” tells you all you need to know about the impact and power of not-actually-resigning “resignations”. Jeremy Corbyn’s reaction will be a shrug. Oh no, fewer Blairites in his party. Not the briar patch, Brer Fox!

And Theresa May? Theresa May won’t even notice. Why would she? TIG poses no kind of threat to her. The idea that any MPs from other parties are going to change their vote on anything just because there’s a new gang of would-be cool kids in the cafeteria who’ve given themselves a name is laughable in its tin-eared arrogance.

Indeed, mention of Brexit – the only political issue anyone in most of the UK cares about right now – was startlingly conspicuous by its near-total absence from the group’s press conference. Instead there was an almost endless parade of petty personal gripes and grievances in which the Labour Party was decried as a shambolic, racist, anti-Semitic entity posing a mortal threat to the nation’s politics – yet not one bad enough to actually take a stand against at the ballot box.

The 400-odd words we’ve written here already indulge the TIG “rebels” with far more attention and significance than their empty, craven gesture merits. So we won’t waste your time and ours with any more.

In this site’s view, the proposed new employee-parking levy which the 2019 budget will enable local authorities to implement if they choose to  – but which is in no sense being imposed on anyone by the SNP, who don’t have a majority on a single Scottish council – is a pretty rotten idea, which will do nothing to combat climate change or congestion and will punish ordinary workers purely to make Greens feel important, but that’s neither here nor there. Councils can answer to voters if they use it.

What we’re a lot more worried about is the rampant Zimbabwe-style hyper-inflation that’s apparently running wild across Scotland, at least if you listen to Olympic-grade imbecile Jamie Greene MSP.

That was at 10.18 yesterday morning. But by halfway through lunchtime the situation had become far more serious.

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Another slow news day, so here’s one from the archives:

Don’t worry, we’re not going to make you try to read it that size.

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This tweet, from a little over a year ago, remarks on the second consecutive speaking appearance on the BBC’s flagship Question Time of Billy Mitchell, a flute-band Loyalist and former UKIP candidate (an impressive 34 votes in Coatbridge, Chryston & Bellshill in 2013) whose standard contribution to the national debate is an incoherent shouted rant against the SNP and all they stand for.

It was comment-worthy because it’s actually quite a feat to get on Question Time twice. The audience is vetted on numerous grounds and the show deliberately discriminates against people who’ve previously come through the heavily-oversubscribed ballot, so that the widest possible range of voices get a chance to be heard.

So the odds of not only getting on twice but then being selected to speak twice are extremely long – an absolute minimum of 1,000 to 1 depending on the size of the venue. The chances of managing it three times are astronomical.

So we tip our hats to Eileen from Glasgow tonight.

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This is Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald on today’s Andrew Marr show:

While she doesn’t say so explicitly, McDonald appears to strongly imply that the SNP’s MPs would be as well to boycott the UK Parliament, as Sinn Fein’s have always done.

And that’s an interesting idea.

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Earlier on today we reported on a case of a Scottish Labour MP being inadvertently unacquainted with some quite pertinent facts regarding a public pronouncement they’d made. While we’d assumed this to be an isolated incident, it’s in fact our sad duty to report another example within the Northern Branch Office.

That’s the pro-Brexit former Labour minister Tom Harris, there, making just the sort of statement that this site like to fact-check. So let’s see the most recent data.

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We had a brief exchange with Scottish Labour MP Paul Sweeney last night.

But the thing is, he’s exactly, diametrically wrong about that.

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One thing that pretty much everyone agrees on is that an independent Scotland, like almost every nation on Earth, would face financial challenges. Like almost every nation on Earth, it would probably have to run a deficit. And the main reason for that is the decades of stupendous mismanagement of its oil resources by Westminster.

Had the UK managed North Sea Oil as well as Norway handled a very similar amount in the same period, it would be currently sitting on a sovereign wealth fund in the region of £750 billion, generating many billions of pounds in investment earnings in most years – in 2017 alone Norway’s fund returned a staggering £100 billion, over three times the Scottish Government’s entire annual budget.

Even with Scotland sharing that money with the entire UK, that would have meant around £9bn extra in Holyrood’s coffers for a single year – by coincidence roughly the size of the so-called “fiscal transfer” that Unionists insist is a gift from the generous UK, even though it’s actually a loan Scotland has to pay back – and a rainy-day fund of close to £70 billion for years when times were bad.

(For perspective on how much £9bn a year is, the most optimistic estimate of the extra money that would be raised by hiking top-rate income tax to 50p is about £0.1bn.)

All of that, of course, is now spilt milk. But there are decades of oil left in the North Sea yet, with huge new finds still being made, and an independent Scotland would have the opportunity to show that it could do a much better job of shepherding its precious wealth, and in particular hopefully investing it in harvesting the nation’s near-limitless potential for clean renewable energy.

And yet there are those who would throw it all away for an empty gesture.

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Because it looks like you’re going to need them.

If the Scottish Government can’t pass a budget it’ll fall, and with no majority for any alternative administration that’ll leave no option but to hold a general election.

Meanwhile, at Westminster, the UK government is running out of time to get a Brexit deal through Parliament, and facing all kinds of procedural shenanigans which may very well lead to a UK general election.

Should that happen, the UK will likely ask the EU for an extension to Article 50, which would take us past the European elections in May, which would mean that the UK would have to take part in those elections  too (because you can’t have a country that’s still an EU member state having no representation in the European Parliament).

Scottish or UK general elections could lead to a new independence referendum, a new Brexit referendum, or both, sending Scots to the polling stations up to FIVE times (and the rest of the UK up to four) in a matter of months, with all the attendant campaigning, colossal expense, economic uncertainty and governmental standstill that such insanity would bring about.

Good luck, everyone.