Wings Over Scotland

So, there was another vote in the House of Commons today on the bedroom tax. Labour brought forward a motion to abolish it, having abstained from the one the SNP and Plaid Cymru filed back in February according to the Bain Principle.

With many Lib Dems abstaining this time, the motion failed by just 26 votes. Dozens* of Labour MPs had failed to turn up to support the motion, including 10 (ie 25%) of the party’s Scottish MPs – Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy, Douglas Alexander, Pamela Nash and Ann McKechin among them.

Someone else didn’t make it either. Can you guess who, readers?

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When an alert reader pointed us to a story yesterday in the comments, we were too busy to get round to covering it and now all the mainstream media has picked it up and we’re behind the times. But having looked at the media’s reporting of it, we couldn’t help noticing something strange.

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This site has been warning for a few months now of what lies in store for Scotland should its people vote No to independence in 2014, and in particular if Labour should defy the odds and win the 2015 general election.

Quite openly and in public, safe in the knowledge that the mainstream media (and most importantly the ever-loyal Daily Record) will ignore it, senior Scottish figures in Labour have said repeatedly that Scotland will receive a lower share of UK public spending, with the money being diverted to poor parts of England instead.

It turns out that we could have saved ourselves a load of analysis.

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At 9am today, BBC newsreader Nicholas Owen read out the headlines with the words “The Queen will lead the Remembrance Sunday celebrations – commemorations – at the Cenotaph this morning”. He was right the first time, of course.

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The raison d’être of a government is to act in the interests of their populace, yet there’s a widespread perception that they instead now exist solely to serve the political and corporate elite, sometimes with not even lip service paid to the wishes of the public.

It’s a perception backed up by hard fact in the form of opinion polls, which demonstrate that the clearly-expressed desires of the electorate are regularly ignored by all parties in favour of blind ideology, cuts to services the public value, and tax breaks for those who don’t need them.

Whoever’s in power, the assets of the nation are sold off against the will of the people, in the name of a private-sector market ideology, for the short-term profit of wealthy City speculators, and for the benefit of other countries who ironically often end up running British industries as (foreign) state-owned public enterprises.

This happens because the votes of most of the electorate don’t count for anything.

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From the defence white paper “Defence Industrial Strategy”, published in 2005 by the Labour government of Tony Blair. “Onshore” in this context means “in the UK”.

“Shipbuilding and integration: there is no absolute requirement to build all warships and Royal Fleet Auxiliary vessels onshore, but a minimum ability to build and integrate complex ships in the UK must be retained.

B2.24 There is no requirement for fabrication of basic structures in the UK per se; however, mounting military operations from the UK base (including the fit of specific equipment for the operation in question), requires the relevant facilities and skills to be available onshore.”

Just out of curiosity, can anyone tell us when those policies changed?

Here’s Johann Lamont at FMQs yesterday:

“Let me repeat: the United Kingdom Government has made it clear that defence contracts will not be let outside the United Kingdom and therefore will not come to Scotland if Scotland were outside the United Kingdom.”

And here’s the UK’s Defence Secretary Philip Hammond speaking on Channel 4 News the previous night. See how clear you think he makes that.

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We were hoping to come up with a subtler headline than that, but trying to analyse today’s media in fine detail is a bit like trying to translate a complex scientific report from Mandarin into Latin, when it’s taped onto the front of a locomotive that’s hurtling directly towards you at 125mph and you’re standing on the track with a telescope.

There’s horror as far as the eye can see on this morning’s newsstands, but the most despicable and inexcusable is the atrocity of a front page disfiguring the Daily Record. The cover of “Scotland’s Champion” is crammed with falsehoods and idiocy from top to bottom, but that’s not the half of it.

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We’ve been scratching our heads a bit throughout the developing story of BAE’s job cuts in Portsmouth, Glasgow and Rosyth. Not least because it seems Scots are meant to be grateful that the Govan and Scotstoun yards have been “saved”, despite the reality being a huge slice of the workforce being made redundant.

(Curiously, not one story that we’ve been able to find mentions how many are actually employed at the two Clyde docks. We had to go back to 2010 to find out that it’s apparently 4000, meaning that the cuts will be slashing 20% of the yards’ manpower.)

But the strangest thing is something else.

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So I guess now we know why Ed Miliband isn’t too bothered about whether energy companies whack their prices up before and after his 16-month “price freeze” or not.

Because we’re paying his bill either way.

Ed Miliband’s parliamentary salary is approximately £140,000. Plus expenses.

This week it was claimed by Stuart Adam, senior economic researcher at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), that taxes would have to rise almost 14% in an independent Scotland, if they were the sole method used to fill the Scottish budget deficit.

It’s a dramatic headline, for sure. But is it an accurate reflection on the relative finances of an independent Scotland and one that remained part of the United Kingdom? As ever, you have to dig a little deeper to find out what’s really going on.

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We’re going to be in a frenzy of activity today writing posts for tomorrow, when we’ll be releasing the data from our second Scottish opinion poll. So things will be a little quiet until then – we suggest taking a few minutes to have a scroll down the page and catch up with anything you might have missed during the week.

First, though, if you didn’t catch The World At One on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, you might want to have a listen to this short interview it conducted with the First Minister.

Anyone tuned into the state broadcaster’s TV or radio current-affairs output couldn’t have failed to pick up the theme – programme after programme invited Mr Salmond on, and then demanded he credit the UK government for saving the Grangemouth petrochemical plant from closure, despite its involvement having been minimal.

(Curiously, non-BBC sources didn’t press the same angle.)

We were pleased to note that the FM adopted the more combative style he’s deployed with interviewers recently (also seen on last Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show), slapping down Edward Stourton in a polite but stinging manner we suspect might be getting increasing amounts of use over the next few months.