Wings Over Scotland

The Labour general election manifesto is officially launched today, as if it mattered. It will reportedly say that the party will block a second independence referendum if it’s in power at Westminster, which of course it won’t be.

And while Labour’s position on anything – particularly anything involving Scotland – is a complete irrelevance, it’s still quite fun to listen to them tying themselves in knots.

So with no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Duncan Hothersall.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 16 May 2017)
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This week the Scottish media went in quite heavily with the news that Ruth Davidson had signed up “Scottish fishing industry leaders” to back the UK government over the Scottish Government, after the latter had warned that Westminster planned to sell out the industry again during Brexit negotiations.

To be honest we didn’t pay it a lot of heed, assuming that “Scottish fishing industry leaders” just meant Bertie Armstrong again – a longstanding ultra-staunch Unionist and Leave supporter with a track record as a reliable anti-independence rentaquote – and nothing in the coverage led us to believe otherwise.

But then we saw a picture:

Mr Armstrong is the white-haired and bearded chap standing immediately to the right of Davidson in the photo, with his hand on the top corner of her pledge. But who’s the fellow immediately to the left of her?

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When our dear old pal the Scottish Labour super-goon Duncan Hothersall tweeted this earlier today, we just couldn’t resist a wee fact-check. We love to see people take the moral high ground, but numbers are fluid these days and you can’t be too careful.

So exactly how “accurate” are we talking here?

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Alert readers will be aware that we’ve been running a series of posts pointing out the gap between opposition rhetoric about the Scottish Government’s supposed failure to grow the economy, and their (total lack of) practical suggestions about what it should actually be doing, given that by design the Scottish Parliament controls almost none of the country’s economic levers.

And we thought a story fed to the press by Labour this week about job creation since the Tories came to power in 2010 was going to be just another case in point, until we spotted something else about it.

Now, we can’t claim to be exactly astonished that the Tories have mostly focused on creating work in London and the South-East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK. That’s pretty much their thing. But Scottish Labour’s noted rentahonk Jackie Baillie was hopping mad, and not only at the Tories.

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One of the most famous tales of the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint is that concerning James Inglis, a murderer who in 1951 sprinted the short distance from the condemned cell to the noose, enabling the entire execution to be concluded just seven seconds after Pierrepoint had first laid hands on him.

We can’t help thinking of it today.

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It’s the holidays, so the papers are desperate to fill space and the political parties are all trying to help out by sending them helpful press releases which can be slotted directly onto pages, titled “PARTY X CONTINUES TO SUPPORT POLICY Z WHICH IT HAS ALWAYS SUPPORTED. ALSO, THE OTHER PARTIES ARE BAD”.

Scottish Labour’s contribution is a piece in most papers today reiterating their demand for the Scottish Government to hike the top rate of income tax – a policy on which Labour stood at the last Westminster and Holyrood elections and which was quite stupendously comprehensively rejected by voters, but which Labour inexplicably feel the SNP should implement anyway.

And that’s all very well and good, because Kezia Dugdale gets paid the best part of £80,000 a year by taxpayers and she’s got to say something all day to justify it. The trouble, as we’ve noted at great length on this site, is that so many of the things she says aren’t actually true.

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Conservative list MSP Murdo Fraser is Scottish politics’ undisputed king of rejects. He’s had a 16-year career in the Scottish Parliament without once winning any sort of election, trousering close to a million pounds of taxpayers’ money in the process, and there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do to get him out of it.

First of all he was firmly rejected by the electorate of East Lothian in 1997, picking up under 20% of the vote. Then when the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999 he tried his luck at winning its North Tayside seat and was rejected again. He had a go at the Westminster version of the seat in 2001, and was rejected there too.

He hadn’t managed to come in the top three of the Tory regional list either, but when one of the list MSPs who HAD been elected resigned later that year after a bout of pneumonia, Fraser got to walk into his vacant seat unopposed, elected by no-one.

He tried to win North Tayside again in 2003 and 2007, and was rejected both times. (In the four attempts he made at the seat, his vote share decreased every time. The more people saw of him serving as an MSP, the less they liked him.)

By 2011 North Tayside had been abolished and replaced by Perthshire North, which Fraser contested in that year and in 2016, but was rejected twice more. In between he stood for leader of the Scottish Conservatives, but was rejected by Tory members.

After eight humiliating failures out of eight, though, today Murdo finally won one.

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A terrible article in today’s Observer nevertheless helpfully provides the most utterly categorical refutation yet of the endlessly-repeated Unionist lie that Spain would veto an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

The piece ran under the blatantly untrue headline “Spain drops plan to impose veto if Scotland tries to join EU” – it has NEVER had such a plan – and went on to propagate a whole series of further falsehoods asserted without any basis by reporter Jennifer Rankin, but such a spectaculary direct and unambiguous quote bangs yet another nail into a coffin that only the very stupidest of the nation’s pundits are still trying to insist contains a living occupant.

So let’s collect everything in one handy place.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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There’s a new hot buzz-phrase in the Yoonstream: “GERS deniers”.

It’s actually been around for quite a few months – coincidentally since this site started exposing the true nature of the figures – but has become a constant mantra recently, in particular since the intervention of an actual proper expert who doesn’t sell cat litter for a living, Professor Richard Murphy.

Ever since he set tongues and tails wagging by writing a series of hard-hitting articles for his widely-renowned Tax Research UK blog last week, rubbishing the quality of the data, Unionists have been in an increasingly shrill flap about it.

And it’s not hard to see why.

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Sigh.

None of the tweets below are true.

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Judging by the first 24 hours, we’re in for a two-year festival of utter horror from the UK and Scottish media. Yesterday saw a never-ending parade of metrosplaining idiots dragged willingly in front of cameras and microphones to pontificate their clueless and mind-numbingly ignorant drivel about Scotland.

It wasn’t possible to keep track of it all, because it was frequently happening on five channels at once, and it was harder still to watch it for any extended period of time without hurling a brick through the screen in frustration at the offensive stupidity of it.

Feeding into that was a stream of Scottish politicians who actually did know better, but who are too catastrophically dim to adapt to changing circumstances and had no strategy other than to endlessly repeat the same cretinous soundbites over and over.

(Adam Tomkins in particular was ubiquitous, spending what felt like several hours on various airwaves reciting the same brainless 10-second schtick forever.)

The constitutional politics of the UK and Scotland are in flux, and many aspects of the situation are complicated. But quite a lot of them aren’t, and if we’re all going to make it through the next two years without stabbing each other in the throat, it’d be a lot better if everyone accepted the things that are definite, empirical, indisputable facts.

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