Wings Over Scotland

It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.

(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)

So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.

It turned out that we were wrong.

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The meme of the week among the Unionist media and politicians is once again that the SNP is a sinister Borg-like organisation where independent thought is outlawed.

Bewilderingly, this evening Labour MSP Neil Findlay bitterly tweeted a complaint that all of the SNP’s elected members apparently agreed with his own position on bombing Syria, the vile swine that they are. (Presumably he’d prefer if some of them voted with the Tories just for the sake of it.) But he’s not alone.

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This is the lead Politics story in morning’s Herald:

And, y’know, we’re fairly confident that’s true.

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To mark the day that we both appeared in the Herald’s “Power 100” list of “The leading Scots who shape our lives” – and she had another go at trolling us – we’d like to dedicate this wonderful tune sincerely to the popular children’s author JK Rowling:

We’ll try to understand her problems more sensitively in future.

From tonight’s Evening Times:

We’re not aware of a single elected Scottish Labour official previously expressing unequivocal public support for independence. Is this a small, self-interested one-off, or just the first cracking of the dam? We can only wait and see.

We were considering having a day off today, readers. There’s absolutely nothing of any note happening in Scottish politics, and the papers have been reduced to scraping up all manner of barely-reheated leftover dregs to fill their pages.

But then someone drew our attention to something in Scotland On Sunday about the ongoing Women For Independence fiasco, and we were too annoyed to let it lie.

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For reasons which defy all known science, John McTernan remains the first number on the BBC’s speed-dial list when they need a commentator to represent Labour views. It’s a remarkable editorial decision, given that McTernan despises the party’s current leadership almost beyond words, and it doesn’t seem too fond of him either.

But on today’s Good Morning Scotland, McTernan really kicked it up a notch.

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At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale oddly chose to spend her entire allotted time not on any current issues affecting Scotland, but on attacking the SNP’s 2013 White Paper on independence, seemingly unaware that the referendum was held 14 months ago and resulted in a win for the No side.

Happily for Scotland, that decision resulted in a huge £200bn oil bonanza.

Hang on, let’s just double-check that to be sure.

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We tweeted this yesterday:

Increasingly, the line between satire of the Scottish media and reality is non-existent.

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The Daily Record has this on its front page today.

And that’s fine. The tale of a five-figure sum of money which might (or might not) have gone missing from the accounts of Women For Independence, who’ve promptly called the police to investigate an apparent discrepancy between their donated income and their expenditure, is entirely legitimate news.

But we couldn’t help wondering something.

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On the left, the Daily Record two years ago.

On the right, the Daily Record today.

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For over two years now, this site has been warning that the UK government will take the earliest opportunity it thinks it can possibly get away with to abolish the Barnett Formula, the funding mechanism which the No campaign sold as the biggest benefit of Scotland remaining in the Union.

The Formula is hated almost everywhere else in the UK, by both politicians and the English (especially) public, who see it as an over-generous subsidy to the scrounging Jocks, and with the threat of independence theoretically removed after the referendum there’s very little protecting it.

Neither Labour nor the Tories – with just one Scottish MP each – would have much to lose politically from reducing Scottish funding by billions of pounds they could use to bribe swing voters in England instead. Barnett’s partial survival was the only solid commitment made in The Vow, but it’s set to be slashed by the Scotland Bill, and the smaller it gets the less resistance there will be to its total removal.

This week the House Of Lords made lots of headlines by highlighting the shambolic, half-baked state of the Bill, which hasn’t yet come up with a “fiscal framework” to replace the bulk of Barnett. But make no mistake – the Lords want it gone just as much as everyone else does.

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