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.
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.
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.
We tweeted this yesterday:
Increasingly, the line between satire of the Scottish media and reality is non-existent.
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.
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.
We’ve been pondering this week whether or not to hold a quick fundraiser to pay the £750 fine levied on us recently by the Electoral Commission for being a bit late with some indyref paperwork, readers.
(Our feeling is that there’s still plenty money left in the Wings War Chest from this year’s big crowdfunder, but lots of people have specifically asked for one for the fine, mainly to make a point to both the Commission and the little army of Unionist trolls who almost exploded with glee when the news came out late last month.)
But we’re not sure we can compete with this.
The Unionist media has leapt on former SNP adviser Alex Bell’s blog post about the economic case for independence this week like a starving dog thrown a sausage.
It’s been wringing articles out of it for days, the latest being Torcuil Crichton’s column in today’s Daily Record, in which the unembarrassable hack (last seen trumpeting an entirely imaginary £20bn increase in Holyrood’s budget from the Smith Commission proposals) rather audaciously takes someone else to task over an economic “lie”.
Bell’s article is such self-evidently weak sauce that we haven’t bothered with it until now. But as it seems clear that the papers are going to talk about nothing else for the forseeable future, we may as well point out the obvious.
The Additional Member System by which the Scottish Parliament elects its MSPs is a fascinating construct. One of its functions, at least in theory, is to ensure that every party gets its best and brightest talents into the Holyrood chamber, by providing them with a “second chance” in the form of the regional lists.
The Conservatives, for example, would be hard pushed to ever get their leader elected if they could only contest constituency seats. Ruth Davidson got a pitiful 1,845 votes in Glasgow Kelvin in 2011, and whatever you think of the Tories it’s hard to dispute that she’s one of their more able operators. (Faint praise though that may be.)
One weakness of the system is that regional MSPs are sometimes seen as “second class” members, having been personally (and in Davidson’s case, comprehensively) rejected by the electorate but still snuck in against the voters’ wishes under cover of the list. But in the current era of remarkable domination by the SNP, for the opposition it’s increasingly being chosen to fight for a constituency that’s the booby prize.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
