Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

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Actually, we hear this one was meant for internal use only.

We don’t normally set a lot of store by them, but this one’s a peach:

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Oh dear lord. The No campaign really does seem hell-bent on making life hard for those of us who occasionally enjoy mocking it by (slightly) exaggerating the depths of its “Project Fear” scaremongering strategy. They’ve attempted to terrify Scots with uncertainty over the price of stamps, mobile-phone roaming charges and having to buy in Strictly Come Dancing, but none of it’s worked.

So now they’re pulling out the big guns: baked beans.

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There’s quite an embarrassing subbing howler in a story in the Sunday Times today in which the word “No” is replaced by the word “Yes”, which you’d have to put down as a non-trivial error. Fortunately the meaning is clear from context, as it’s part of a piece called “No campaign is branded as ‘amateur'” and containing the following fairly indisputable quote in respect of “Better Together” and its director Blair McDougall:

“There is no one regarded as a grown up in that campaign team.”

The entire article – which is accompanied by another in the same paper entitled “Unionists’ front man is nobody’s Darling” – is well worth a read. You can find it below.

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We must confess ourselves perplexed by the Messianic awe in which much of the Scottish media appears to hold Douglas Alexander. The epitome of the modern career politician (as far as we’re aware he’s never had any sort of job outside politics), Alexander has risen without trace through the Labour ranks, and his Wikipedia profile is unable to attribute one noteworthy achievement to the former minister despite his having held some of the most senior offices of state.

We’re unable to recall a single instance of Alexander ever expressing a view on any subject that was anything other than 100% in line with the official orthodox party position, and in Scotland his name is perhaps most associated with the shambolic conduct of the 2007 Holyrood election.

Nevertheless, for some reason Scottish newspapers appear to regard him as some sort of intellectual powerhouse within Scottish Labour, and the fact that his speeches don’t consist exclusively of tangibly bitter, hate-filled attacks on the SNP also seems to have him marked down as the party’s great thinker.

Which means that roughly every two months we have to endure a vacuous torrent of middle-management duckspeak such as the one Scotland on Sunday has inexplicably chosen to make its front-page lead this morning.

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And that’s something we can’t say every day.

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The Herald, 5 December 2013:

“A group of academics whose views on green energy underpinned a central plank of the Better Together campaign has published a shock U-turn report arguing that independence now offers the best way to meet Scotland’s renewables targets.

Last night’s edition of Scotland Tonight saw a clearly nervous, rambling and seemingly well-refreshed ex-Labour spin doctor Simon Pia called upon to defend “Better Together” chairman Alistair Darling (“as good a frontman as I can imagine to save Britain”, said the Spectator’s Fraser Nelson in that extraordinary accent of his) from a series of attacks by his own side over his stewardship of the No campaign.

Pia played the usual cards that Labour types do when called upon to defend a man who is now distrusted by a majority of Labour voters. Darling was “substance not style”, a serious man with “cross-party appeal” (if you exclude Labour, the SNP and now seemingly a lot of Tories) who had “filleted” the White Paper (without reading it or understanding the one page he did look at) and saved the nation in 2008 “when we looked into the void”.

But not everyone shares Pia’s view of Darling’s integrity and competence.

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When it comes to oil and gas, Scots are used to being treated like backwoods yokels by Westminster, deemed incapable of looking after this valuable resource and lied to about its value. Oil and gas is a priceless treasure to the UK, and Westminster is terrified of losing control of it.

That’s because not only are the billions of pounds in oil and gas tax receipts valuable in and of themselves, but they also halve the balance of payments deficit, thereby protecting the value of the pound.

But how exactly does Scotland turn oil and gas into money?

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About 1,000 more and LFI will be bigger than Scottish Labour’s actual membership.