Wings Over Scotland

Scottish Labour won a council by-election in Fife last night, held after the long-serving Communist Party/independent councillor Willie Clarke (who can be seen on the last page of our Charlie Hebdo feature here) stepped down due to ill health.

The successful candidate Mary Lockhart was understandably jubilant, but there were a couple of what seemed like pertinent facts missing from the local paper’s report.

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This can’t be a good sign.

One thing you can always guarantee on GERS Day is that the latest set of figures for Scotland’s devolved economy inside the UK will trigger another uncontrolled spurt of “SNP HONEYMOON OVER” articles from the nation’s dogged commentariat.

Today we’ve seen already examples (links below) from two ex-Scotsman editors, Iain Martin and Magnus Linklater, the latter popping up in the Times by way of a rather crass and unpleasant analogy involving Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts.

And since we’d rather watch “Suicide Squad” again than spend any more time going over the arguments about GERS (and trust us, readers, we don’t say that lightly), we thought it’d be more fun if we finally got round to compiling a semi-definitive list of all the times the collective wisdom of Scotland’s media and opposition has confidently predicted the SNP’s imminent demise.

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We originally wrote this article in March, in response to the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (better known as GERS) figures for 2014-15. We’ve updated it to take account of events since that time, of which there’s been one rather major one.

Today saw the publication (just five months after the 2014-15 GERS) of the 2015-16 stats, which are again triggering a convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles across the media, as every Unionist in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.

And once again, everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how the figures – showing an essentially unchanged “deficit” despite an almost £2bn fall in oil revenue – destroy a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.

So let’s recap the truth about Scotland’s financial books. Because for all the complex arguments, mad graphs ludicrously pretending Scotland is a less viable nation than Greece or Latvia or Cyprus or Malta and endless arrays of incomprehensible charts and tables, there are (now) only six things you really need to know about GERS.

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“Black hole” grows by £2.4bn in the space of four minutes:

Hopefully we’ll soon have the sort of totally definitive clarity we got last time.

“CRISIS-HIT POLICE TO AXE 300 OFFICERS”, blares the front-page lead of today’s Scottish Daily Mail. (Along with some exciting Prince Harry not-news.)

“SECRET cuts to police numbers will see hundreds of officers axed as the single force faces a deepening cash crisis. The Mail can reveal controversial proposals to reduce frontline manpower – while violent and sex crimes are increasing”, it continues.

So let’s see what this worrying-sounding story actually DOES reveal.

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Kezia Dugdale in yesterday’s Daily Record on the subject of Jeremy Corbyn:

“We can’t pin our hopes on a leadership who speak only to the converted, rather than speaking to the country as a whole.

I don’t think Jeremy can unite our party and lead us into government. He cannot appeal to a broad enough section of voters to win an election.”

So let’s be absolutely clear: if Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election next month, as almost everyone expects him to, the UK (and therefore Scotland) is doomed to Conservative rule until at least 2025.

That’s not our view, but the official public position of the leader of Scottish Labour.

Should there be a second independence referendum in the next few years, Scotland’s choice will be a clear one: a generation of brutal Tory austerity, isolated from Europe (losing out on billions of pounds in funding) and the protections of the Human Rights Act, or taking responsibility for ourselves.

And every time Kezia Dugdale or her Labour colleagues in Better Together 2.0 protest that there’s another option she’ll be contradicted not by angry nationalists, but by her own words. So we’re sure everyone on all sides of the debate in Scotland will be watching the outcome of the leadership contest with interest. There’s a lot at stake.

The BBC’s most prominent politics presenter Andrew Neil, today:

There is, as there is so often, just one small problem.

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Today’s Sunday Times didn’t bother with any subtlety in its signalling of how people should expect the Scottish media to handle next week’s GERS figures.

So we’ll just leave these here:

The limitations of GERS

The five key facts about GERS

The wishful believers

Gazing into the black hole

There’ll be nothing but repeats of all last year’s articles in the papers, so there doesn’t seem to be much point in re-writing all the rebuttals. We’d advise readers not to expect to hear any of the facts or arguments in any of the above articles aired on TV or radio discussions of the new figures either. For the sake of your blood pressure, it’s probably best to stick to old QI repeats on Dave for the next eight days.

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For several years now this site has been drawing attention to the weird phenomenon of phantom news – stories presented by the media without even a shred of supporting evidence yet treated as unquestionable empirical fact. And recently there have been more phantoms around the Scottish press than an episode of Scooby Doo.

The thing Alan Roden – who prefers intimidating ordinary members of the public by doorstepping them and vilifying them in his paper – links to in that tweet is an article on the Herald website last night. And it’s a weird article, because it’s an extensive, quote-laden story about something that doesn’t appear to have happened at all.

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Alert readers may have noticed reports in the press that the famous French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo this month carried a four-page feature on the state of politics in Scotland, having sent two of its senior staff – accompanied by their French police bodyguard – over to conduct a series of interviews.

We thought you might like to see it, so we commissioned a translated version.

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Here’s the BBC reporting Kezia Dugdale’s speech at the opening session of the new Scottish Parliament, less than three months ago:

It seems the Scottish Labour leader’s had a change of heart since then.

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