Wings Over Scotland

Of all the tropes of the 2014 independence referendum, few were fought over more repeatedly and bitterly, or more dishonestly by the No campaign, than the saga of the Type 26 frigates. The UK government promised Clyde shipbuilders hit hard by years of neglect and job losses that it would build 13 of the state-of-the-art vessels at BAE’s Scotstoun yard, but only if Scots voted No.

Once that vote was secured the number very swiftly dropped to eight, accompanied by a whirlwind of misinformation insisting that there had in fact been no reduction. (As keen social media users will know, this brazen lie was pushed particularly hard by the militarist website UK Defence Journal.)

So we were interested to see a story in today’s Scotland On Sunday which showed how desperate the Unionist side is to cling on to the ships as a future blackmail tool.

The paper has chosen to present the news with a super-positive spin, as you can see from the headline. But the text of the article tells a very different story.

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…on last night’s article.

Because the Daily Mail isn’t standing for any of this confusion. It’s absolutely 100% clear that what’s happened is that the First Minister has U-turned and abandoned the prospect of a second independence referendum.

And also that she’s absolutely refused to do exactly that.

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The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.

Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.

(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)

But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.

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Brexit is already a shambles. Everyone south of Manchester is unhappy because it’s too suffocatingly hot to move, and everyone north of Manchester is unhappy because they’ve not got the sunshine. We could all, for various reasons, do with a chuckle.

So without further ado, readers, enjoy the “clueless metropolitan hacksplaining” hit of the summer: Kezia Dugdale, Comeback Queen.

Vote for the funniest line below.

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…which we felt it important to preserve for posterity lest anything happen to it. We’d charitably blame it all on the Telegraph, who made it, were it not for the fact that the Scottish Conservatives have posted it on their own Facebook page.

It’d be awfully embarrassing if they had a poorer-than-expected election result, eh?

…for one idiot and an occasional cartoonist talking to a country of only 4m adults.

And one of us DOESN’T EVEN LIVE THERE!!!!!

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The spanking new issue of Viz, which is totally still a thing, is out today at all good newsagents. The cover promises a “FANTASTIC FREE VOTING AID” inside, and we thought you’d be at least mildly and fleetingly amused by the Scottish aspect. Of it.

Pop out to the shops and buy a Viz*, readers. (Or subscribe to try three issues for a mere £1.) It’s just as funny as it used to be but much less popular, so it’s cool again.

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*Wings Over Scotland has no connection to Viz or Dennis Publishing Ltd and has received no inducement for this endorsement. Although we’re open to offers.

(NB The media is understandably mostly occupied today with the horrific events in Manchester. But life goes on – music websites are still talking about music, football websites are still talking about football, videogames websites are still talking about videogames. Any rational observations about terrorism made here would be screamed down as making political capital from tragedy. So let’s get on with the day job.)

If you apply to go on a televised political debate and then submit a question to ask a national leader, it seems a reasonable deduction that you want that issue to be raised and discussed. If you also make it personal by describing your own circumstances, it seems logical that you’d want those circumstances to be widely publicised, and to be asked about them so you could say more and tell your story to the country.

So it’s a bit odd that Edinburgh nurse Claire Austin has suddenly gone off the radar.

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We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Below is a clip from last night’s Reporting Scotland. It features regular election loser Christine Jardine, an ex-BBC journalist who the Lib Dems have tried unsuccessfully for years to crowbar into Parliamentary seats all over Scotland (like Aberdeenshire East in 2016, Gordon in 2015, the European Parliament in 2014, Aberdeen Donside in 2013 and Inverness and Nairn in 2011).

She’s currently contesting Edinburgh West, which the party has some credible hopes of winning, having held the seat for almost 20 years prior to 2015. And it seems that her former employer has decided to try to give her a helping hand.

And, y’know, they’re really not allowed to do that.

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Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

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Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.

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