Wings Over Scotland

Tuesday, then Saturday:

Bless ’em.

Here’s our old pal John McTernan, angrily condemning Labour’s shadow Chancellor John McDonnell quoting Chairman Mao to make a point in the Commons yesterday:

And for once he’s right. What sort of vile cretin would go around quoting Mao?

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The media, bless it, has finally spotted the elephant.

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Of course, that particular problem is easily solved. All the SNP needs to do is decide NOT to offer an alternative, at which point one will magically be created out of thin air.

And has no more luck this week with hapless Scottish Labour list MSP Claire Baker than he did with her habitually mendacious colleague Jackie Baillie last week:

(The Big Debate, BBC Radio Scotland, 13 November 2015)
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Brewer’s weary sigh at 2m 14s speaks volumes.

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When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.

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Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

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The call:

“BMA Scotland is calling on all political parties to stop using the NHS as a political tool and to make realistic and honest pledges to ensure the future of high-quality healthcare in Scotland.”

The response:

“Opposition parties used the publication of the manifesto to attack the SNP government’s record.

Labour’s public services spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said: ‘A crisis in family doctors has erupted on the SNP’s watch.’

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Jim Hume said: ‘Whether we are talking about cancer treatment times, A&E problems at flagship hospitals or the GP recruitment crisis, it is clear that our NHS is in need of intensive care after eight years of SNP government.'”

So that went well. Nice try, BMA.

The award goes to…

Edinburgh Pentlands Constituency Labour Party!

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale back in August:

“Too many people in Scotland tell us that they just don’t know what Labour stands for anymore. Under my leadership there will be no doubt what we stand for and who we stand with.”

So thank goodness that’s all been cleared up.

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As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.

The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.

“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.

But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.

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Earlier today we made an observation about the overblown way the media has been covering the Scottish Government’s underspend of 1.3% of its budget (a figure about which the David Hume Institute today cooed approvingly “Even Mr Micawber could not budget more accurately”).

To nobody’s great amazement, Scottish Labour rentahonk Jackie Baillie – fresh from making a complete idiot of herself over the Michelle Thomson case – couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon.

Quite aside from the fact that it means no such thing – there’s no less money, it’s just that some of it will now be carried over and spent this year instead – we suppose the tweet does at least mean that Scottish Labour’s policy position is clear: the Scottish Government should always spend every penny of its budget. Right?

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