Wings Over Scotland

It’s Siobhan again, readers.

Ever since Scottish Daily Mail political editor Alan Roden jumped ship to go and rearrange the deckchairs for Labour, his former paper has very noticeably toned down its hysterical “SNP BAD” content. We can go through the Mail for days on end now without finding some ludicrously distorted misrepresentation or screaming outrage piece about how a Nat MP found 20p down the back of their sofa without declaring it to HMRC or such.

Happily, as we’ve been noting recently, the Daily Express has leapt into the breach.

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Because the party is still stuffed with braindead cockroaches like this:

People of North Ayrshire, you’ve got a real prize there. Well done you.

The next Scottish council elections are in May next year.

To be honest, readers, we gave up on taking any notice of David Torrance‘s mundane attempts at trolling in the Herald some time ago. But some alert readers pointed us towards this week’s column, suggesting that it was a bald rewriting of history some way beyond their usual bland irritancy.

This was the passage they objected to:

It’s a patronising piece of “shut up and eat your cereal” condescension for sure. But to be fair to Torrance, it does also happen to be true. Wait, not true. The other thing.

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The starting pistol hasn’t actually been fired on the two-year Brexit process yet, but now we have a clear statement of when it will be: this morning on The Andrew Marr Show, the Prime Minister pledged that it would happen before the end of next March.

When she gave a speech to the Conservative conference later, Theresa May did even more than that. By the common consensus of the punditariat – whatever that’s worth these days – May’s message was that the UK was heading for the “hard” version of Brexit, with the single market sacrificed for control of borders.

(We might end up broke, in other words, but at least we’ll be good old British broke, with none of those awful smelly foreign Euro-Johnnies around to see it.)

And nobody was getting a sick note.

And for supporters of independence, that’s about as good as news gets.

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From a ridiculous piece by Hadley Freeman in today’s Guardian:

Actually, we’re pretty sure it isn’t and we can.

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Low-wattage Labour list MSP Neil Findlay (rejected by the electorate of Almond Valley by a thumping 8,393 votes in May) puffed himself up to maximum socialism this week and attacked the SNP’s rather more popular Paisley MP Mhairi Black over a Scottish Daily Express story about travel expenses.

It might have been an idea if he’d read the piece all the way to the end.

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You can see the full unedited Kezia Dugdale interview with Gordon Brewer on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland at this link, so you can verify that the shortened edit below isn’t misrepresenting anything. But if you don’t have time or attention span for the full 20 minutes, this’ll give you the gist without all the desperate waffling.

We think readers will agree that there can no longer be so much as a scintilla of doubt over whether Kezia believes Jeremy Corbyn can lead Labour to victory.

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This is the longest piece of continuous TV exposure Kezia Dugdale will get between now and next year’s crucial council elections. Judge for yourself whether she seized the opportunity, readers.

A Sunday Times/Panelbase poll released today put Scottish Labour’s support at 16%, with the SNP on 50% and the Tories on 21%. 

Kezia Dugdale isn’t even trying to make our life difficult.

“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.” (22 August 2016)

“I believe that Jeremy can unite the Labour Party [and] win a general election.” (24 September 2016)

We’re sure that the media will pin Dugdale down over this weekend and we’ll get a detailed and convincing explanation of exactly what it is that she thinks changed about the fundamental nature of Jeremy Corbyn over that solitary month.

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It’s long been a bone of contention for Scots – and not just nationalists – that the UK government, by common agreement, wasted the vast wealth windfall of the North Sea on funding Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s programme of deliberate de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and bribes to the working class in the form of Right To Buy.

It did so rather than investing the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund, as demanded by the SNP (and some elements of Labour) and practiced in Norway, whose fund – only set up in 1990 – is now a literal embarrassment of riches.

But the reality is even worse than that. Because according to a 2015 report by the National Resource Governance Institute that’s just come to our attention, the truth is that if the UK had managed its North Sea treasure better, it could have done both.

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With the greatest of reluctance, and only in the absence of anything even remotely more interesting, then, let’s have a few words on Scottish Labour’s latest solemn and sincere declaration of its full, total, complete and utter autonomy.

Because while the media is reporting the development that UK Labour has decided to extend a few extra inches of lead to Kezia Dugdale’s branch office as if it had the slightest importance to anything, it seems oddly reluctant to ask the obvious question.

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