Wings Over Scotland

(Link and link.)

Some people in Britain can’t afford to eat and are having to go to foodbanks to survive.

So open your heart (and wallet) for this hungry little ginger fella. There’s only so far an expense account will stretch when you’re on a tightly-controlled public sector salary.

Wings Over Scotland went to London last weekend, for no particular reason other than a change of scenery. After a trip to the faux-bohemian Camden Market – in which about six different stalls are now repeated over and over in a sad, gentrified mockery of its previous more anarchic life, yet while still maintaining much of the vibrant feel – we set off in no particular direction and found ourselves in Trafalgar Square.

Despite having been to the capital dozens of times, I’d never visited the home of Nelson’s Column, which is far bigger in real life than it looks in pictures, managing to dominate what is a very large plaza with no shortage of other imposing monuments and decorations. (Including the vast National Gallery and, at the moment, an incongruous enormous bright blue cockerel.)

Suitably inspired, we elected to take a stroll to the Embankment, past the London Eye, and from there on a walking tour of the heart of the British establishment. Searching for exploitable weaknesses, obviously.

Read the rest of this entry →

Our old pal Tom Harris fits awfully comfortably into the pages of the Daily Telegraph for a Labour MP representing a poverty-blighted Glasgow seat. But there’s something a bit odd about the ugly little piece on immigration he penned for the paper this week.

See if you can spot it.

Read the rest of this entry →

We linked you yesterday to a quite startling display of cognitive dissonance, as a dedicated Labour activist struggled to reconcile his party’s position on Trident with his own belief in disarmament, reaching some quite extraordinary contortions of logic in an attempt to convince himself that staying in the Union represented the best way of ridding the United Kingdom of weapons which are enthusiastically supported by every major UK political party and the Lib Dems.

But it’s not just mad bloggers who are frantically trying to whip up a sandstorm of spin to obscure Labour’s final abject surrender to the nuclear weapons lobby.

Read the rest of this entry →

In Alan Moore’s legendary graphic novel “V For Vendetta”, the central character tells co-protagonist Evey: “Silence is a fragile thing. One loud noise, and it’s gone”.

Yesterday we ran a guest post from the Scrap Trident Coalition calling for an end to the Johann Lamont and the Scottish branch of the Labour Party to end its silence on the subject of nuclear weapons.

But though Lamont remains “on holiday” and unavailable for comment on a range of issues (or even completely excluded from discussing them at all), her party has ended her silence for her, with a succession of loud noises nobody could possibly miss.

Read the rest of this entry →

ComRes for ITV News, 20 July 2013:

“After a fortnight which included high-profile debates around Labour and Ed Miliband’s relations with the trade unions, Britons are saying they do not believe that the Labour leader will be the next Prime Minister. Fewer than one in four (22%) expect Ed Miliband to be the Prime Minister in 2015.

Read the rest of this entry →

Careful readers will be aware that this site primarily concerns itself with the activities of politicians and the media. Doing so can of course leave the way open to accusations of paranoia and conspiracy theorising. So we thought it might be interesting to share with you the findings of Transparency International’s 2013 survey into the public perception of corruption in the United Kingdom. (Part of a global poll.)

The only three bodies thought to be corrupt or extremely corrupt by a majority of the UK population were political parties, Parliament and the media, with the media coming off worst out of the three. (Next up, incidentally, were “business” with 49% and “public officials/civil servants” with 45%.)

Perception isn’t necessarily fact, of course. But at the very least, it’s not just us.

Here’s a nice wee feelgood story to end the week, found by one of our covert field agents this afternoon. (Codename “Maw”.) Despite the extreme financial pressures on the British economy, the UK government has managed to stumble across a significant cash windfall – over half a billion pounds, in fact.

We’ll pass you over to the Fife edition of the Courier for the details.

Read the rest of this entry →

Apologies if the headline falls fouls of anyone’s work filter (although it shouldn’t, as it’s officially legally not a swear word), but we can’t think of a more concise and accurate way of describing the phenomenon illustrated by the comically absurd story that’s being blared all over the Scottish media this morning like news of the Apocalypse.

The price of oil, as the No campaign never tires of telling us, is volatile. Nobody knows what it’ll be in 27 weeks’ time, or even 27 days’ time. Predicting what level it’ll be at 27 hours from now is pushing your luck a bit, and City traders regularly make and lose fortunes betting on that timescale and getting it right or wrong.

So the idea that anyone, let alone the Office for Budget Responsibility, can have even the slightest, vaguest hint of a clue where North Sea oil prices and production will be 27 YEARS from now is – well, see the headline.

Read the rest of this entry →

Watchful readers will know that one of the recurring themes on this site is the impossibility of finding any real ideological differences between the three main Westminster-based parties. But to be scrupulously fair, we think we might finally have uncovered one now, in the light of this week’s bizarre Lib Dem policy paper on Trident.

(This is turning into the worst day off ever.)

Read the rest of this entry →