We’re very confused today.
Okay, so that’s all straightforward enough. The SNP are bad because they’re going to hit “middle Scotland” with more tax. Bunch of dangerous tax-and-spend lefties. Right?
From the Scotsman tonight:
As previously, we’re having quite a lot of trouble understanding the difference between “independence” (39%), and “the Scottish Parliament should make all the decisions for Scotland” (51%). We’re going to drop the SSAS a line and see if they’ll ask for us.
Barring some sort of unforseeable apocalypse, Scottish Labour aren’t going to win the Holyrood election in May, so it doesn’t really matter what their policy proposals are – they’re never going to happen.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty much our job to examine stuff like their plan to “scrap council tax”, and it’s more fun than watching the news today, so let’s give it a go.
Even by the low, low normal arithmetical standards of the Scottish media, yesterday’s Scottish Sunday Express humiliated itself with the most stupendously factually wrong articles we’ve seen in a newspaper for some time.
James Kelly on Scot Goes Pop! has already eviscerated its comically inept bumbling in detail, but we thought we’d just quickly give you a visual version.
From Kezia Dugdale’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference yesterday:
So hang on – only people born in Scotland are “Scottish”? Bit controversial. But then again, given Scottish Labour’s constant pejorative use of the word “foreigner” in recent years, we probably shouldn’t be shocked.
From a BBC report on the 2004 Scottish Labour conference:
And to give the former First Minister his due, he wasn’t wrong.
The Scottish Daily Mail has been working itself into a froth this week over the idea that the Scottish Government doesn’t intend to match George Osborne’s increase in the upper-rate income tax threshold from £42,000 to £45,000.
Central to the complaint is that rejecting the increase will hurt what the Mail calls “the squeezed middle” and “middle earners”, including “nurses, teachers and police”.
There are, of course, several ways of defining “middle”.
We thought quite a lot of you would probably like to see this:
This headline appears in The Times today:
It’s an absolute lie. But that’s not the interesting thing.
We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.
But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:
Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.
(Which is lucky, as they’re going to do it with money that doesn’t exist.)
They want to run the economy, folks. And there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland prepared to vote for them. We live in zany times.
A significant groundswell of opinion, perhaps:
Oddly, the Scotsman’s report on the story contains not a single further piece of data about how numerous these opponents of a second referendum are.
From today’s Scottish Sunday Express:
“Please, Scotland, stay with us” seems a long time ago, doesn’t it?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
