Wings Over Scotland

We know the No campaign is dead set against entering any discussions before the independence referendum, but we were so moved by Willie Rennie’s concern today about Scotland not having enough time to “negotiate over 14,000 international treaties“ in the 16 months between a Yes vote and the first elections to an independent Holyrood that we thought we’d help him out a bit with some advance work.

We did enquire of Mr Rennie as to where these “14,000 international treaties” could be found, but he was too busy helping poor people by fining them £80 a month to answer. Luckily, alert reader Angus McLellan was hot on the case, and swiftly directed us to a handy Foreign Office website featuring the magic number.

We’ve now had a brief skim through some of the UK’s historic agreements with other countries, and to save some time after 2014 we’ve knocked a few off the list.

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Willie Rennie once called us “deplorable” and “warped”. This is the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader on yesterday’s Sunday Politics Scotland (around 52 mins), defending the Westminster coalition government’s despicable “Bedroom Tax”.

It turns out that contrary to what you might imagine, throwing thousands of the most vulnerable people in the country onto the streets is actually an act of kindness. If you’re struggling a little bit trying to figure out how that works, let Willie explain it:

“Actually it’s difficult for people who are trying to get into work if they’ve got the burden of having to pay for a house they can’t really afford, it makes it much more difficult – they’re going to have to earn more to make work pay. What we’re trying to do here is improve social mobility, so that people can get into work. This prevents them, and that’s why we need to take action.”

Did you get that, readers? People with disabled children who have enough bedrooms for all their kids to sleep in are actually suffering under a terrible burden, which Willie’s millionaire mates in the UK government are going to heroically relieve them of by, er, fining them £80 a month. This, you see, will somehow make it easier for them to find work and improve their social mobility.

How will their having much less money achieve that? Well, because… um… it… er… maybe their kids… uh… nope, it’s gone. We’ve got nothing, readers. If anyone can explain to us how having to keep your disabled child in a cupboard helps you get a job and become upwardly mobile, help us out, eh?

Poor old “Better Together”. We already knew they had some difficulty with basic counting, but today it seems their reading isn’t up to much either. Desperate to deflect attention from the hideous hole they’ve dug themselves into over Europe, they’ve seized on the latest Scottish Social Attitudes Survey showing (depending how you spin it) almost three-quarters of Scots in favour of devolution rather than independence.

There’s only one problem: the cited source for those figures doesn’t say that at all.

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We hope you’re just drunk, Ian. Honestly we do.

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On the one hand, there’s this, from Michael Kelly in the Scotsman on Thursday:

“Fatal errors made by Alex Salmond this year have ruined his chances of a 2014 referendum victory. The year of reversal for the cause of independence – that’s how 2012 will be recorded in footnotes to the political history of the United Kingdom.

The SNP tries to convince us that the new Scotland will be the same, only better – dependent independence. That is the fatal flaw, the fundamental inconsistency that has ensured the failure of the SNP’s only real policy. Fat ladies don’t sing in tragedies, but the chorus has begun to lament the fall of the hero. It’s all over bar the shouting.”

And on the other, there’s this, from PoliticalBetting.com in mid-February 2011:

“Unless all opinion polls are utterly wrong in Scotland, Labour will be comfortably the largest party in the Scottish Parliament post-May 5th. Labour should either win outright or come fairly close. Iain Gray will probably form a new Scottish Government. His decision is likely to be whether to go it alone or to invite the remaining Scottish Lib Dems to join him.”

Aside from comedy idiots like Kelly, though, a great many more sober commentators have also been proclaiming 2012 as a terrible year of catastrophe for the Yes campaign – by which they usually explicitly or implicitly mean its chief protagonists, the SNP. Yet for all the disasters which they allege have befallen the independence movement – the great patriotic celebrations of the Jubilee and Olympics, the supposed unravelling of SNP policy on Europe, the dogged personal smearing of Alex Salmond and his cabinet – what’s actually happened to the polling figures for independence?

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The office is the coldest room in my house. Facing north it doesn't get a lot of sunlight, and the radiator is directly underneath the window, so much of what heat it generates disappears outside immediately. So I have a little halogen heater to keep the place cosy in winter, which also gives off a bright and pleasant firesidey glow and saves you having to turn the light on then wait 45 minutes for the useless "energy-saving" piece of shit to actually reach some sort of vaguely worthwhile level of illumination.

(Never mind about the Iraq war – I'd put Tony fucking Blair in prison for the rest of his life just for robbing us of proper lightbulbs, the wanker.)

The heater has three replaceable halogen elements. This is the process for replacing one of them (click to see the whole thing):

I have two questions for the manufacturers.

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Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

We don’t know if there’s ever been an official competition for “Most British Place In Scotland”, but if there was it’s a pretty safe bet that Ibrox Stadium would win it at a canter. So we don’t suppose we ought to be surprised that this is what happened there just before the kick-off of yesterday’s SFL3 match against Peterhead:

The display was only one part of a touching and solemn commemoration of the fallen of two world wars which also included the firing of an artillery gun on the pitch (“Hey, survivors of enemy barrages, here’s a fun trip down memory lane for you!”), Broxi Bear standing with his big comedy foam head bowed in the centre circle for the minute’s silence and – we promise we’re not making any of this up – a bunch of Royal Marines abseiling down from the Govan Stand roof with the match ball.

Now, we’re sure this whole grotesque circus was conducted with the best of intentions. But anyone juxtaposing the poppy with a national flag – with any national flag – has misunderstood what it is that the poppy is supposed to stand for in the most complete and catastrophic way imaginable. This was the poppy as symbol not of remembrance and sacrifice and tragedy, but of victory.

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"Ooh, I fancy a game of Bombshells: Hell's Belles on my iPad today."

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We don’t like to write articles that are 70% adjectives, so let’s start with a disclaimer: it’s nigh-on impossible to exaggerate the naked, open contempt with which the Scottish football authorities are now treating their paying customers, so let’s just take it as read that any opinions we might offer in the following piece are understatements by a factor of around 1000 and get on with it.

Direct quotes from those who attended today’s meeting of the Scottish Football League are thin on the ground, with the main participants reluctant to be interviewed, so we’re going to have to rely on second-hand accounts from reporters outside Hampden. Seemingly, SFA chief executive Stewart Regan revealed that Charles Green’s new football company Sevco Scotland (which he intends to rename Rangers, but has not yet legally done) will not be admitted to the SPL no matter how the Premier League’s members vote at their own meeting tomorrow.

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We think our brains may have been completely fused by a story in today’s Daily Record, which is based around comments by Rutherglen Labour MSP James Kelly, pictured below in a scene from the particularly bad acid headache he’s just given us.

Here’s the bit that’s been making our minds spin round and round and round in circles this morning until we’re dizzy trying to make sense of it:

“ALEX Salmond was accused of “double standards” yesterday over his efforts to woo Rupert Murdoch. Labour raised further questions about the First Minister’s links with Murdoch following claims the media mogul lobbied Tony Blair to wage war in Iraq.

Former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said in the latest volume of his memoirs that Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us, etc”.

Salmond won plaudits across Scotland for his outspoken opposition to the war which he described as “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of recent times”. But it did not stop him from trying to get closer to Murdoch to win The Sun newspaper’s backing for the SNP.

Labour MSP and chief whip James Kelly said: “This could make the conversation a little uncomfortable the next time Alex Salmond has Rupert Murdoch round to Bute House for tea and biscuits. Alex Salmond was against the Iraq war but that didn’t stop him cosying up to Rupert Murdoch. This is classic double standards from Alex Salmond who is prepared to put his party’s interests ahead of any issue.””

Let’s try to talk our way through this slowly: LABOUR is attacking the SNP for not being sufficiently critical of RUPERT MURDOCH when he backed LABOUR Prime Minister TONY BLAIR over going to war in IRAQ in 2003? What, seriously?

That can’t really be it, can it? Labour, who instigated the illegal war that left hundreds of thousands dead, attacking an opposition party who voted against that war (and which actually tried to impeach Blair for it) for not being critical enough of a newspaper proprietor whose papers enthusiastically backed Labour at the time and who made Tony Blair godfather to one of his children, because when subsequently in government it had a couple of meetings with that newspaper proprietor (also one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers) the best part of a decade later?

Are we dreaming this stuff? Please tell us we’re dreaming it.