Wings Over Scotland

Sundays have been the low point of Scottish political journalism for a while now. Traditionally a day when newspapers are heavy on comment and light on news (because politics tends to happen on weekdays), they unleash all the weary old dinosaurs who’ve been driving away readers for the last 30 years.

So you really have to stand out to be noticed for especially appalling hackery on a Sunday, which is probably why nobody from Scotland On Sunday wanted to have their name on this toe-curling piece of second-hand, lifted-from-another-paper garbage.

Professor Ronald MacDonald, you say? That name seems to ring a bell.

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David Davis on the Andrew Marr Show this morning:

MARR: “What would [Theresa May] need to bring back [from Brexit negotiations] to win you over?”

DAVIS: “She needs to bring back a clear ability on the part of the United Kingdom to be able to leave this treaty when it chooses to. There is no other treaty in the world I’m aware of where a sovereign nation undertakes to join up and can only leave when the other side says so.”

We’re pretty sure we can think of an example, David.

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Today is International Women’s Day, and we wouldn’t normally pay much attention to that fact because this is a Scottish politics website, not a feminist one. But the Scottish Government is currently putting itself at odds with women in a way it would have been hard to imagine when Nicola Sturgeon became First Minister, and since what Wings does specialise in is hard data – and at the request of a lot of women – we thought it was worth putting some solid numbers on a few things in our latest poll.

There wasn’t much ambiguity about them.

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Scottish Labour’s 2019 conference, which starts in Dundee tomorrow, isn’t taking place in the most auspicious of circumstances, to put it kindly. The branch office is trailing a breathtaking 22 points behind the SNP in the latest Holyrood polling, 8 points behind the Tories, and the gap is getting bigger.

Westminster polling isn’t a great deal better, with the SNP 15 points ahead despite having been in power for 12 years and doggedly attempting to commit electoral suicide with a raft of increasingly unpopular policies (more on that to come).

Donations have shrivelled to under £36,000 in the last year. (For perspective, the 2018 Wings fundraiser made over £153,000.) The North Britain branch has shed a fifth of its membership in a matter of months, has had to give away conference passes for free to try to fill seats, and is embroiled in a bitter spat over its EU policy.

So it’d be a tough time to be Richard Leonard, if anyone knew who that was.

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(Full series here.)

Yesterday afternoon the Labour list MSP Jenny Marra tweeted this allegation about Dr Drew Walker, the Director Of Public Health for NHS Tayside:

It wasn’t true. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

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In today’s Times:

Yeah, you read it right. He really said it out loud.

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Alex Cole-Hamilton’s reign was the shortest on record.

Unionists have been in a purple frenzy of rage in the last couple of weeks that the First Minister has dared to leave the country not once but twice in order to try to improve relations and trade links with Scotland’s business partners. Lib Dem MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton – a man who still thinks the Queensferry Crossing isn’t finished a year and a half after traffic started using it – tried a different tack.

And that’s a zinger of a point unless oh dear what’s this?

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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.