Wings Over Scotland

This weekend’s Scottish Mail On Sunday carries a column from UK Cabinet Office minister Damian Green which, if anyone was still in any doubt, rings just about every warning bell imaginable in terms of the Tories’ plan to use Brexit to cripple devolution both in principle and in practice.

It’s tucked away on page 27 and doesn’t appear on the Mail’s website, but you can read the whole thing by clicking the pic above. And below, we’ve pulled out the key sentences that should have the blood of devolution-loving No voters running cold.

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We’re not saying it’s been a slow news week in Scottish politics, but this is what the Scotsman’s going with today:

We might go for a walk.

It was nice to see an old friend back in the Scottish media today.

How times change.

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Be a shame if anything happened to it.

For anyone who thinks it’s safe to wait until after 2021 for another indyref.

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We struggled to summon up much more than a weary sigh about a story in a couple of the minor papers today (the Herald and Express), about a micro-scuffle at Saturday’s pro-indy rally in Glasgow. The most interesting thing about it appeared to be that the Express had written its article several hours before the event took place.

But we weren’t quite right.

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Three years ago today, Scotland bottled it. Almost uniquely in world history, its people turned down the chance to take control of their own affairs forever without a drop of blood being shed. They did so on the back of a package of vague promises, not least one of “extensive new powers”, almost all of which have subsequently been broken.

The Secretary of State for Scotland has chosen the anniversary of the referendum to let it be known that on top of that, the most fundamental building block of devolution – the premise that any power not explicitly reserved to Westminster in the Scotland Act 1998 would belong to Holyrood – will now be torn up, in the light of the exit from the EU that Scots were promised a No vote would protect them from.

In poker we call that a rubdown.

The Daily Record have continued to run Kezia Dugdale’s weekly column despite her resignation as Scottish Labour branch office manager (North British division), and this week we were interested to note her assessment of the devolution years, which could be summarised neatly as “Labour devolution good, SNP devolution bad”.

We raised an especially quizzical eyebrow at the claim that the 1999-2007 Labour/Lib Dem administrations had apparently ended homelessness. So we thought we’d do that thing we do when Kezia Dugdale claims something.

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This was Scottish Tory uberdunce Jamie Greene a few weeks ago, bitterly attacking the SNP for spending £22,000 on consulting the public over a policy on which the party won a landslide victory in the 2016 Holyrood election.

You might think that a government pursuing the manifesto policies it was elected on was a pretty legitimate thing to do, especially when it was asking voters for their views in order to shape that policy. Perhaps Greene was confused because the Tories have been acting as if they, not the SNP, won the election. But that raises another question.

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A story from the Financial Times this week revealed the UK government’s latest act of sabotage against the Scottish renewable energy industry. It’s just one more in a long line stretching back to just after the independence referendum, when a string of “Better Together” promises were broken almost the minute the No vote was secured.

It was a particularly weak argument in the first place – if there’s a market in the rUK for Scottish energy, it’ll be there whether Scotland is independent or not. But it unravelled faster than most as soon as it had done its job.

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Today’s papers all report, with varying degrees of prominence and glee, this “story”:

But which internationally-regarded rankings are these, exactly?

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20 years ago today, Scotland voted to have a Parliament for the first time in almost three centuries, by an overwhelming margin (although with modest enthusiasm – less than 10% more people actually voted for devolution than voted for independence in 2014, at 1.78m and 1.62m respectively).

Just 20 months after the vote the Parliament came into being, and Scotland’s media has been complaining about how useless it is ever since.

Today’s newspapers commemorate the anniversary by unleashing the full pontificating weight of the punditariat – most of whom have been opining wearily on Holyrood’s failings for the entire period – to bleat with their customary single voice about what a disappointment it’s all been.

The weird thing is that after all that time, none of them can actually explain why.

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