Wings Over Scotland

A serial offender.

We’re sure Ruth Davidson will act with her usual decisive swiftness.

Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Parliament yesterday:

The daughter of two teachers, there.

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Not our judgement, you understand, but that of Scottish Labour spokesclown Michael Kelly, former Lord Provost of Glasgow, speaking on today’s Good Morning Scotland:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 19 August 2015, 2h 47m)
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Here’s John “there will be no referendum” McTernan in today’s Guardian:

So there’s definitely going to be a second referendum, the No campaign is going to win it again and a shattered SNP will collapse as a result, sending Labour triumphantly back to Holyrood power. (Having now come out on top in not one but two internal elections, presumably Kezia Dugdale is now also a “proven winner”.)

It’s just that we feel like we’ve heard that before somewhere.

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Face, meet palm.

This spoon-faced howler was pointed out mirthfully by vile cybernats days ago, but we suspect that the person at Scottish Labour who knows how to work the internets only comes in on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s going to be a long road back.

You can kind of see why they don’t think Ian Smart is a problem.

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We’re still trying to get our heads round this:

The article in question, which we posted last night regarding the former Parliamentary Assistant to Scottish Labour deputy leader hopeful Richard Baker who’s just defected to the Tories, was entirely comprised of some of Stephen Anderson’s own tweets.

It carried no editorial commentary on them whatsoever, and none of the tweets had (of course) been doctored in any way, so the only way the piece could have been “filled with inaccuracies” would have been if the tweets themselves were drivel.

We wish Ruth Davidson the best of luck with her new recruit.

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The insulting thing is that they think it so soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the least self-aware human in Scotland:

Remind us how many Tories Scotland elected again? So why is it that Scotland has a Tory government? Oh yeah, we remember now.

Here’s Kezia Dugdale in the Scotsman:

“Too often in the recent past it has looked like we are only on the side of one group of people – the most vulnerable in society.”

Now, to be honest we’re not sure we remember exactly when that was. Was it when Scottish Labour were threatening to slash “something for nothing” public services? Was it when Rachel Reeves said “we are not the party of people on benefits” (which is almost half the country)? Was it when Tom Harris said “we weren’t set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society”?

All we do know is, if we were a prospective Labour leader and we were going to make comments like that at all, we probably wouldn’t choose to do it just hours before a Tory chancellor was going to produce a budget battering living hell out of the most vulnerable in society and throwing 500,000 children in Scotland alone into poverty.

Because, y’know, we might be idiots, but we’re not complete idiots.

The Englishman who wades into Scottish politics on either side, especially if he lives in England, is probably taking a huge risk of being disagreed with vehemently, no matter what he says. Nevertheless, the explosion of interest into the so-called ‘Clypegate‘ list has a Data Protection angle that I cannot resist.

To summarise, it seems that the Scottish Labour Party have assembled a list of supporters of the Scottish National Party who have said things on Twitter and Facebook that the Scottish Labour Party do not like. The list – inevitably tagged a dossier – has been passed to the tabloids to stir up some kind of frenzy about the so-called ‘Cybernats’.

Some of the statements are fairly strong, but I don’t doubt worse things are spoken in the average pub conversation about politicians. I’m certain every term applied to Gordon Brown and Donald Dewar has also been said of Alex Salmond by Labour supporters. As someone who voted Labour in the recent election, I can think of a few more constructive things that the smouldering remnants of Labour in Scotland could be doing with their time, but this is what they decided to do, so we are where we are.

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A casual observer might perhaps wonder if JK Rowling, no longer writing books about wizards for children, simply wants to be noticed.

Twice in the space of a few weeks she’s appeared on newspaper front pages bleating piously about the terrible hordes of cyber- and other-nats. Yesterday the Independent, Telegraph, Scotsman, Herald, Daily Record and more all ran dismal, whiny pieces about her (entirely evidence-free) claims that the SNP was infested with mad, bitter Anglophobes just waiting for a signal to invade Derby again or something.

No particular barrage of abuse appears to have been unleashed upon the former author to provoke the outburst, but seemingly for a lack of anything better to do with her time she had a good old moan anyway and the press lapped it up.

And the reason it’s all so very tedious is that the papers might as well run stories claiming that there’s a chance of rain tomorrow.

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