One of the stranger criticisms regularly levelled at this site is that we don’t attack the SNP/Scottish Government enough.
That’s weird firstly because it’s not like there’s currently a shortage of hostile media scrutiny of Nicola Sturgeon and her colleagues, and secondly because we’ve never in our four-year life claimed for a moment to be neutral.
What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.
Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.
At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.
Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.
Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.
When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:
So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.
It’s been such an exciting, action-packed week for Scottish Labour since a dynamic and thrusting PPB launched the 2015 branch-office conference that we worried there might be a danger people had forgotten it already. So we’ve brought it back for a curtain call, in a version a bit more appropriate for what remains of their core vote.
This is amazing, readers. It’s an extract from this afternoon’s The Big Debate on Radio Scotland, in which a journalist – the BBC’s Gordon Brewer – finally gets round to asking someone from Scottish Labour how they can make the extra £500m they need to fund their tax-credits “policy” while keeping all taxes the same.
You might have to listen through a few times to get your head round it, because that really is what a grown woman actually tried to get away with in front of a live audience.
Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.
The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.
In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.
This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.
It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.
Iain More on Shield Of The Phantom: “I am not going to hold my breath that Swinney will stop appeasing Trump even though it is becoming more…” Jan 31, 03:25
Cynicus on Shield Of The Phantom: “Indeed! You may have encountered this before: in the heyday of ‘ordinary- language philosophy’ at the University of Oxford, student…” Jan 31, 02:07
Cynicus on Shield Of The Phantom: “Indeed! You may have encountered this before: in the heyday of ‘ordinary- language philosophy’ at the University of Oxford, student…” Jan 31, 02:06
Willie on Shield Of The Phantom: “Thanks for the comments Sven. I wasn’t aware that David Toshack’s daughter now lives as a male. That may well…” Jan 30, 23:31
DaveL on Shield Of The Phantom: “…silence came the reply… Although he did manage to spew some nonsense in a later post of mine concerning his…” Jan 30, 22:44
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: “Here you go, Bob. Ben Bulbin (Sligo) Ben Lugmore (Mayo) Ben Gorm (Mayo) Ben Baun (Galway) – part of the…” Jan 30, 19:21
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: “Naw, Dave, that’s nae richt. I’d hae wrote Camel Shaggers. And ye forgoat ane. In an Independent Scotland, the untermenschen…” Jan 30, 19:00
robertkknight on Shield Of The Phantom: “The Picts, christened thus by the Romans who were apparently impressed by their tattoos, left plenty of evidence of their…” Jan 30, 18:35
DaveL on Shield Of The Phantom: “Choice! And that coming from the man who’s variously named vast populations as: Covid spreaders Orcs Camel jockeys Rag heads……” Jan 30, 18:14
DaveL on Shield Of The Phantom: “Wee Adolf! You never cease to amaze. You wrote ‘Chinese’, that’s probably a first and way off your standard referencing…” Jan 30, 18:03
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: “Beautifully painted windows on her! She’s sailing under the flag of the UK, a fictional country. Hope the Ukies don’t…” Jan 30, 17:43
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: “It’s an interesting idea, Lorna. But it comes up against the unimpeachable fact that no parliament can bind its successor.…” Jan 30, 17:36
agentx on Shield Of The Phantom: “For anyone interested the new ferry built in Turkey – Isle of Islay is currently sailing down the east coast…” Jan 30, 17:26
Lorna Campbell on Shield Of The Phantom: “100 to 200 women die at the hands of men each year in the UK – considerably more than ‘trans’…” Jan 30, 16:19
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: ““So what have you ever achieved?” No mirror needed, James, to see I’ve achieved the writing of a simple statement…” Jan 30, 16:15
Lorna Campbell on Shield Of The Phantom: “Absolutely agree, James. Any changes to the basic Treaty Articles is tantamount to resiling the Treaty because the changes have…” Jan 30, 16:05
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: ““communicate the kind of neutrality that taxpayers expect of civil servants” Odd. I thought we all understood that Scottish civil…” Jan 30, 15:40
Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh on Shield Of The Phantom: “PEER: CI CIVIL SERVICE CASE HIGHLIGHTS DANGERS OF ‘POLITICISED POLICING’ Baroness Fox of Buckley has commended The Christian Institute’s legal…” Jan 30, 15:24
Hatey McHateface on Shield Of The Phantom: “I believe that one of the Voyager spacecraft has just marked a major and unique achievement. It is now one…” Jan 30, 15:24
sam on Shield Of The Phantom: ““In our study, we looked at how genetically similar the Pictish genomes were to other ancient genomes from Britain and…” Jan 30, 13:57
sam on Shield Of The Phantom: “There was frequent contact between the Gaels and the Picts. The Gaels brought Christianity from Ireland into the west of…” Jan 30, 13:46
Sven on Shield Of The Phantom: “Willie @ 12.26. Whilst it’s the same basic principle, former Army medic, 51 yr old David Toshack whose on daughter…” Jan 30, 13:24
Aidan on Shield Of The Phantom: “So you think that constitutional legal questions are determined by reference to vague anecdotes and metaphors and without reference to…” Jan 30, 13:12
Southernbystander on Shield Of The Phantom: “Both Sun Ra and Karlheinz Stockhausen said they were from Sirius, so the Picts hailing from somewhere in the Andromeda…” Jan 30, 13:08
James on Shield Of The Phantom: ““So what have you ever achieved?” Look in a mirror and ask yersel that, ya fucking roaster. But I expect…” Jan 30, 13:03
James Cheyne on Shield Of The Phantom: “The parliament of the Great Britain or Uk cannot add a reservation or alter its original dates on the treaty…” Jan 30, 12:46
Cynicus on Shield Of The Phantom: “Lorna, I think this comment belongs elsewhere.” Jan 30, 12:43
