It turns out Scotland isn’t the first country to be too wee, too poor and too stupid for independence from the mighty and benificent United Kingdom.
This week Scottish Labour have been attacking the SNP’s rather timid plans for the reform of Council Tax, which is an entirely fair and legitimate opposition pursuit.
But as is their wont, Kezia Dugdale’s branch office just can’t help overplaying their hand and doing it in a highly dishonest way.
An alert reader just found this. It’s quite something.
We especially liked this bit:
“The growing practice of the socialist government is to take decisions vitally affecting Scotland in Whitehall… this is a process which we have every intention of setting in direct reverse.”
(1m 46s)
The dogged determination of Scottish Labour to insult the Scottish electorate is a source of constant slack-jawed astonishment to us. Over the years we’ve lost count of the number of times the party’s politicians have effectively said “People are just too stupid to vote for us”, in the apparent belief that abuse is the way to win back support.
But it’s not always so overt. The subtler ways in which the party treats voters like morons include the assumption that people’s memories only go back to yesterday’s newspapers, and there can surely be no more stark illustration than its recent adoption of the attack line that the SNP are standing “shoulder to shoulder with the Tories”.
The slow news year in Scottish politics continues. These are all from today:
Sound familiar?
The title of this article is a phrase that people use when publishing a transcript of someone’s intended speech, to signify that this is what they INTENDED to say, but that the reader should verify it with the actual speech to check whether they did, because sometimes there are last-minute changes or the person simply forgets bits.
The above is Kezia Dugdale’s scripted speech to the Scottish Labour conference in October 2015, just 94 days before calling for an income tax increase for “hundreds of thousands of working Scots”.
Sometimes leaving stuff out by accident looks like the smart move.
It’s been a fair few months since we last documented the Daily Record’s increasingly panicky attempts to save its own hide over its infamous eve-of-referendum “Vow”.
In its growing desperation, the paper bizarrely turns today to First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, demanding that SHE should be the one to fulfil a promise that the Record made specifically in order to thwart Sturgeon’s lifelong goal of independence.
Referendum day, 18 September 2014:
Let’s hit the fast-forward button again.
Remember the scary old days, readers?
Thankfully, Scotland voted No and pensions were saved forever.
The Labour Party has today published Margaret Beckett’s report into why it lost the 2015 general election. We were rather struck by this line:
Let’s just go over that one again to be sure: Labour believed that an SNP victory in Scotland would make it “impossible” for the Tories to form the government.
Which is weird, because that’s not quite what we remember them saying.
As we noted on Tuesday, Scottish Labour’s opening election salvo for 2016 has been to blame the Scottish Government for unaffordable house prices.
Of the 450 most obvious flaws in that argument, not least the extraordinary efforts a 13-year Labour government went to to keep the housing bubble inflated, the one that caught our eye was that in the past three years we were regularly told of one thing that definitely WOULD bring prices down dramatically, but which Labour pathologically fought every step of the way.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
