I know he’s a figure of comedy and pity, but this is something else.
Someone glue the cork in the bottle, eh? For his own good.
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.
The ever-delightful Taxpayers’ Alliance, speaking at the Conservative conference:
We’re not sure about that last line, chaps.
Alert readers may recall an incident last year in which the Scottish media got itself very worked up about some independence supporters threatening to boycott holiday company Barrhead Travel after its owner sent a barking-mad letter to staff about how the company would go out of business if Scotland voted Yes.
The Telegraph, Express, Times, Daily Mail and Scotsman were among those covering the story at length – with the latter going so far as an extraordinary comparison to the Nazi atrocity of Kristallnacht – and someone called Jim Murphy opined that it was “a new low” and “the worst type of negative politics”, despite the SNP having discouraged and disassociated itself from any boycott.
So we’re sure that you won’t be able to move later today and tomorrow for newspaper articles about something similar, but significantly worse, that happened this weekend.
The government’s brutal, monstrous welfare reform bill passed its second reading in the Commons tonight by 308 votes to 124, meaning that somewhere in the region of 80% of Labour MPs abstained on it.
Half an hour earlier the party tweeted this:
Presumably as a joke.
The Daily Mail, having unaccountably failed to notice the slew of Unionists who tried to blame the SNP for Charles Kennedy’s death before the body was cold on Tuesday, suddenly remembered to look at its Twitter timeline again today.
There, it conveniently found that vile cybernat hate mobs had hounded the former Lib Dem leader into an early grave (rather than the alcoholism-induced haemorrhage that the post-mortem concluded was responsible).
We suppose they’d know all about that sort of thing, right enough.
I had no time for the way that Charles Kennedy conducted himself in the referendum campaign and it would be hypocritical to pretend that I did.
But before that he was one of the main reasons I voted Lib Dem for over 20 years – a compassionate, principled man who took some difficult stands and left his party in a far healthier place, both politically and morally, than it occupies now.
He deserves better than this.
From a piece on Labour’s welfare shadow Rachel Reeves in today’s Guardian.
So… who DOES represent those people, then?
Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves on Sunday Politics.
Did you spot what she got wrong, readers?
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
