Wings Over Scotland

(Buy Chris Cairns’ second great book of cartoons here. Plus cuddly Hamish!)

One of the handiest things for truth-seeking political commentators (admittedly a rare breed) is that the three component nations that make up Great Britain currently all have different parties in government, so it’s always possible to measure the rhetoric of the main parties against their actions in the bit they’re actually in charge of.

So when Scottish Labour, for example, try to grab the credit for the SNP ending the public sector pay freeze by claiming that they’re “following Labour’s lead”, it’s a simple matter to look to Wales – where Labour run the Assembly – and note that the pay freeze there is very much still in place, with the Labour executive, unlike the Scottish Government, refusing to find the money to end it from its own budget.

(The same is true for many other policies the Scottish Government has implemented to fight Tory austerity, like free university tuition and mitigating the bedroom tax.)

And the Tories are no less hypocritical.

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A Scot living in the EU, and an EU national living in Scotland, discuss the implications of the Brexit being forced on Scotland against its will by the UK government.

The clock is ticking.

We have a contest, ladies and gentlemen.

If only there was some way to illustrate that revitalisation, eh readers?

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This week’s publication of party accounts by the Electoral Commission, along with a string of recent stories about election expenses, served as a reminder to anyone who might have forgotten that the SNP are still, despite 10 years in power, the massive underdogs in Scottish politics.

Labour and the Tories, in particular, can always rely on handouts from their UK parent parties, who are in turn funded by massive donations from trade unions and big business respectively. In 2016 Labour trousered almost £15m from donors (over and above their membership revenues of £14m), while the Tories pocketed almost £19m in donations from their rich pals.

The Nats, meanwhile, have to gather most of their money from membership fees, but have been able to stay competitive in the campaign-heavy climate of the 2010s (since the turn of the decade the SNP have had to fight three expensive UK general elections, two Holyrood elections, two council elections, a European election and two referendums – that’s ten major votes in seven and a half years) thanks largely to extra help from lottery winners Colin and Chris Weir.

And the fact that Scottish politics can be something like an even remotely fair fight still leaves Unionists raging furiously at the burning injustice of it all.

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The Times today carries an article sparking the annual revival of one of the evergreen mysteries of Scottish politics: just how many (or more accurately, how few) people are in the Scottish Labour Party?

The piece sees leadership contest avoider Alex Rowley crowing about a fall in the SNP’s membership income, based on this year’s party accounts as just released by the Electoral Commission.

So we thought we’d take a look at some numbers.

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Ruth Davidson finally emerged today from a summer of hiding from press stories about her racist and sectarian councillors and MSPs to give a bizarre, nervy and gabbling interview to Good Morning Scotland.

Highlights included calling Show Racism The Red Card an “anti-Semitic” organisation and proposing the building of eight entire new towns in Scotland (the funding source and potential locations for this colossal undertaking were not specified), all filled with social housing which would nevertheless be for sale under Right To Buy.

(Which if it could somehow magically be done would of course lead to the homes being quickly sold at heavy discounts, leaving councils insufficient money to fund their replacements and creating another massive housing bubble and crisis.)

But our very favourite bit was when (at 2h 17m) she said this:

“Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say to a bloke in the pub who’s half-cut with a broken glass, six foot tall and five foot wide.”

To be honest, readers, if we encountered a 30-sq-foot drunk waving a broken glass around in a pub, we’d just be looking for the door as fast as possible. But clearly Ruth Davidson frequents different sorts of bars to us.

So just for a bit of light-hearted Friday fun, we thought we’d ask: what WOULD you say to that person in that situation?

Last year:

That’ll definitely have been done, then, right?

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When all the media spin – and boy are there ever some examples around today – is said and done, one cold fact will remain: Kezia Dugdale inherited the main opposition party in Scotland, and bequeathed her unlucky successor a third-placed irrelevance.

Before Dugdale took over two years ago this month, Labour had NEVER finished third behind the SNP and the Tories in a Scottish election in its entire 100-year-plus history. By common consensus her predecessor had left the party at rock bottom, but Dugdale immediately got out her shovel and started digging furiously.

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