This is prospective Labour leader Owen Smith on the Andrew Marr show this morning, explaining why he’ll be one of the 65% of Labour MPs voting in favour of the renewal of Trident next week:
Let’s just see if we can get this straight once and for all.
If there haven’t been as many posts on this site as people might expect at a time of such incredible political turmoil, it’s because Wings isn’t at heart a commentary blog. We don’t do a lot of flat-out opinion pieces, tending to concern ourselves more with measurable, empirical facts, and since nobody knows anything about anything at the moment, we haven’t had all that much useful to say.
But the closest thing there is right now to a certainty is that sometime quite soon, Unionist politicians in Scotland are going to have to grow up and deal with this:
And their problem is that there’s no possible way to.
The Scotsman reports a “blow” to Nicola Sturgeon this morning:
So the official Westminster line is that Scotland will HAVE to become independent if it wants to remain in the EU. We’re sure the FM will be absolutely gutted to hear that.
While we wait on tenterhooks to find out exactly how insane the Parliamentary Labour Party is, enjoy this jaw-dropping BBC Scotland news report on the trial of Labour MP Marie Rimmer for attacking a Yes campaigner at a polling station in September 2014.
Coming soon: Shooting Victim Denies Deliberately Damaging Assailant’s Bullet.
If your only source of news was the mainstream media, you could be forgiven for thinking that the consensus in the EU regarding an independent Scotland was bleak. Spain would, we’re told endlessly, veto Scotland’s place in the EU out of hand, and so, allegedly, would France.
And when Scotland’s First Minister went to Brussels after the referendum vote to meet with EU officials in regards to Scotland’s membership, we were told that this bold act of outreach fell on deaf ears.
The language of the press was hostile bordering on sadistic. The First Minister, acting to secure the democratic will of the people of Scotland, was apparently “running out of friends” and had to “beg” Ireland to help us out.
The reality, readers will be astonished to hear, is somewhat different.
Some of you will have missed this over the weekend:
Yes – Michelle Mone, of all the people on Earth, really did just go on TV and accuse Nicola Sturgeon of being all about ego. We’ll leave you to absorb that for a bit.
Earlier today we were moved to tweet our scepticism regarding a claim made by the Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale, as reported in the Guardian.
Even on the most casual glance, the numbers just didn’t seem to add up. If 62% of Scots voted to stay in the EU and 55% voted to stay in the UK, with no correlation between the two things, then the Venn-diagram intersection between those two groups seems pretty unlikely to add up to more than 50%, let alone a “vast” majority.
So as we like to do, we checked.
We’re not naturally disposed to sympathy for Tories, but it must be hellish being poor Ruth Davidson at the moment. The poor woman doesn’t know which way she’s facing from one minute to the next. Here she is less than a year ago:
BBC Scotland is hosting a live TV debate tonight.
Despite having an even number of participants, the panel is split 3:1 in favour of Remain and 3:1 against independence (surely the biggest specifically Scottish issue likely to arise from the Brexit vote, and which several polls in the last couple of weeks now show is backed by a majority of voters).
Half of the debaters are also Labour politicians, which means that the third-placed party which got 22% of the vote in this May’s election has as much representation as two parties who got 69% between them.
We’ve been racking our brains for a couple of hours trying to work out a way in which such a multiply-skewed line-up could be justified (other than flat-out trolling), and we’ve got nothing. Does anyone have any ideas?
The people (of England) have spoken, and their elected representatives are freaking out all over the shop.
Several senior Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have openly called for the result of a democratic referendum to be overturned by Parliament against the wishes of voters. The Prime Minister has quit, the Chancellor is expected to follow on Monday, and half of the Labour shadow cabinet is apparently doing it as we speak, after Jeremy Corbyn fired Hilary Benn for planning a coup.
(Apparently including Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish Secretary who’s also the only Scottish Labour MP at Westminster, putting the party in the farcical position of having to find itself a spokesman on Scottish affairs who either sits in an English or Welsh seat or is an unelected lord.)
Labour MPs are also demanding Corbyn’s head, in essence for the crime of his being hugely popular with the party’s membership for reflecting the old-fashioned left-wing ideology and views that they actually believe in, rather than the “moderate” neo-Tory position of Blairite parliamentarians. Corbyn shows no sign of going.
Two opinion polls, meanwhile, suggest that support for independence has taken the lead in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is quietly and calmly making arrangements with senior European officials to hold discussions about ways to keep Scotland in the EU – with the backing of Willie Rennie just in case any of the talks take place on a bouncy castle or a slide.
(The Daily Telegraph, which we must assume has been chatting to Alistair Carmichael again, is reporting that Sturgeon has joined the Tories and turned gay.)
It’s been suggested that the Scottish Parliament could in fact block any attempt by the UK to leave (though it seems unlikely). Britain faces a future without Milky Way Magic Stars. UK politics, to put it mildly, is in chaos. So what the hell’s going on?
We were startled to see an old face make a bit of a comeback to the Scottish political scene this evening, when BBC Scotland dug up the former “Better Together” campaign director Blair McDougall to urge Scots not to do anything hasty in the aftermath of the UK’s Brexit vote.
And it led us, by a circuitous route, back to this.
We thought we’d just leave it here for the record.
So it’s all over for the United Kingdom.
Scotland (overwhelmingly) and Northern Ireland (less so) have voted to stay in Europe while England (decisively) and Wales (narrowly) have voted to leave. Northern Ireland has its own choices to make, but Scotland must now hold a second referendum.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
