Wings Over Scotland

A play in three very short acts.

UNIONISTS:“We need information! We must have more information! We demand answers! Why aren’t voters being given the information they need? It must be given to them sooner, if not immediately! It’s an outrage!”

SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT: “We shall deliver this information.”

UNIONISTS:“Taxpayers’ money funding separatist propaganda! It’s an outrage!”

Hey ho. Just 18 more months of these idiots to go, readers.

Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer got a bit exasperated on last night’s edition of the show as he tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to get Scottish Labour’s ever-smirking Jackie Baillie to give him anything resembling a straight answer to a question about Labour’s (lack of) policy on the bedroom tax.

As the well-fed welfare spokeswoman embarked on another pre-scripted soundbite of SNP-bashing rather than commit Labour councils to a policy of not evicting tenants for arrears related to the penalty charge, Brewer sighed (at around 12m 52s) that “I was vainly trying to take into consideration the people who might be affected by this” before giving up and moving on to his other guest.

Baillie was demanding that the Scottish Government instead bring forward legislation to make such evictions illegal – just a few days after Scottish Labour’s press office had strenuously denied to this very website that the party was making any such demands. But it’s easy to see why she’d be having trouble keeping track of her position, because to Labour the bedroom tax is little short of a delight.

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We’re not sure we can untangle this.

Perhaps you can help us out.

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The media is in full-on spin mode today, reporting Ruth Davidson’s miraculous Damascene conversion to the principle of “more powers” for the Scottish Parliament, just 18 short months after her Churchill-esque declaration of devolutionary defiance to the effect that the petty tinkering of the Scotland Act was a “line in the sand”.

Most of the papers, of course, feign critical analysis by highlighting Davidson’s U-turn. But what we haven’t seen in a single one is any sort of actual examination of the content of Ms Davidson’s speech to a micro-audience of literally several people in what appeared to be the corridor of an Edinburgh hotel yesterday.

We suspect that’s because anyone who did would be very hard-pressed indeed to credibly describe the measures she proposes as representing “more powers” for anything. In fact, they’re the opposite.

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Running total (updated daily): £28,920 of £29,796 (97.1%).
Donations in last 24 hours: £886.

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We don’t know about you, viewers, but when we tune into a two-hour TV programme called “Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013”, we sort of expect the large bulk of that show to be, well, the Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013.

With the UK’s state broadcaster, though, that isn’t necessarily the case.

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The BBC’s coverage of the SNP spring conference has finally started. You can watch it on BBC2 Scotland or on this live web stream, and discuss developments below.

We suspect that for the vast majority of our readers, it’ll be quite hard to get to grips with the fact that the Scottish Daily Mail intends this headline as a criticism.

In 18 months’ time, Scots will have the chance to decide whether they’d rather spend their money on pay rises for public-sector workers or on tax cuts for the rich and bribes for them to buy second homes and inflate another housing bubble with. We must admit to being quite surprised that there’s a debate about it.

We already know that Labour, particularly in Scotland, have no policies on just about anything. But in the light of the past week’s glut of abstentions, we decided to see if we could find out if the party had any remaining principles either. The results were startling, by which we mean not startling in the slightest.

Below are just a few of the votes that Labour has abstained on, at both Westminster and Holyrood, in recent memory. What, we ponder rhetorically, is the point of having an Opposition that doesn’t ever actually oppose anything?

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We must admit that we didn’t see this one coming. Johann Lamont made a rather surprising admission 3m 16s into last night’s Newsnight Scotland special.

“There’ll be many people who voted SNP but don’t believe in independence who will breathe a sigh of relief, like me.”

Well, that goes some way to explaining the size of the SNP’s majority, at least.

We’re only just now getting round to watching last night’s special edition of Newsnight Scotland. It’s off to a cracking start. Great work there, BBC Scotland graphics team.