Wings Over Scotland

We were going to do something on the disgraceful line-up of tonight’s edition of Question Time, broadcasting from Edinburgh with an audience of 16/17-year-olds, but frankly we couldn’t put it any better than the Scottish Green Party’s official complaint to the Corporation has. You can read it in full here.

UKIP have no Westminster MPs, no Holyrood MSPs and no Welsh AMs, and attract a microscopic proportion of the vote in Scottish elections, yet their leader Nigel Farage has made more appearances on Question Time (14) than any other politician since 2009. The Greens have representation in both Westminster and Holyrood, but the Scottish party has been invited onto QT just once in the same period.

The show’s guest list tonight will uphold the BBC’s standard debate policy of four anti-independence politicians (Farage plus George Galloway, Anas Sarwar and Ruth Davidson) against a single pro-independence one (the SNP’s Angus Robertson) with a token neutral (Scotsman journalist Lesley Riddoch). Enjoy. We’ll be playing poker.

With apologies to both The Jungle Book and Animal Farm.

But seriously – how DOES one tell Tories and Labour apart nowadays? Policies?

(JOKE.)

Yesterday we passingly mentioned how Home Secretary Theresa May this week claimed that Scots could lose their British passports and be denied dual nationality following a ‘Yes’ vote for independence in next year’s referendum.

Mystifyingly none of the newspapers reporting the story bothered to research the facts behind her claim, so we had to get our investigating hats on.

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Keen followers of the Scottish media may have noticed that since the start of the year there’s been little sight of the phrase “the positive case for the Union”. Perhaps buoyed by opinion polls showing little movement, the No camp has more or less abandoned even the pretence of positivity and concentrated on the tactic it’s most familiar and comfortable with – carpeting Scotland with fearbombs.

The last couple of days have been no exception. At the Scottish Tory conference David Cameron repeated the curiously vague threat that an independent Scotland might not be allowed to keep the pound, and yesterday in Westminster the Home Secretary dropped (implausible) hints that Scots might not be allowed to keep UK passports.

But wait a minute. Why so shy?

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It’s taken 306 years for the people of Scotland to be allowed a democratic voice on the constitution of their country. It’s a thing that was never supposed to happen. The Scottish Parliament’s electoral system was constructed deliberately and explicitly to prevent any party achieving a majority – in theory ensuring that the SNP could never pass a referendum bill – even though the two main UK parties still resolutely defend the First Past The Post system that produces them at Westminster.

But that’s all sorted out now, right?

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In a post earlier this morning we made passing reference to the Scottish “cringe” – a sociological phenomenon by which Scots develop a subservient inferiority complex about their culture and abilities, predominantly compared to England. It’s not something we’ve ever suffered from personally, but every once and a while its malevolent force can still be felt nagging at the corner of even the strongest psyche.

An illustrative example was provided by an interview that Liam Byrne, the Labour spokesman for work and pensions, gave to Radio 4’s “Today” programme yesterday on the subject of the party’s proposed reforms to social security should it somehow win the 2015 UK general election.

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ANDREW NEIL, 5-6-2013: Would you keep child benefit for better-off taxpayers?

MARGARET CURRAN: Well, what we are saying, and Ed will make his own speech tomorrow, and I don’t have foresight of that… What we are saying is when you get into government, and when we come in in 2015, we won’t be able to do all that we wanted to do… Will child benefit for the wealthiest people be our top priority? I’m not sure about that.

ED MILIBAND, 6-6-2013: When it comes to the decisions of the next Labour government it won’t be our biggest priority to overturn the decisions this government has made on taking child benefit away from families earning over £50,000 a year.

We must admit, for someone who hasn’t seen the speech it’s a heck of a guess. Does anyone want to ask Ms Curran if she’s got a score forecast for Croatia vs Scotland?

Below is attached the full text of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s speech in London today.

We’ve translated a few of the trickier passages for you.

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It seems worth updating this piece from last September, for the 40,000 of you who weren’t around then. Today, Labour leader Ed Miliband gave a speech on his party’s welfare plans should it win the 2015 UK general election. It contained the following line:

“People’s faith in the system has been shaken by a system that appears to give a minority of people something for nothing.”

If you think you’ve heard those words before, let us refresh your memory.

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One of the odder quirks about the BBC iPlayer is that it’ll let you rewind live TV broadcasts for up to two hours, but not radio, despite radio using vastly less bandwidth. So at the moment we can’t bring you a verified quote that Liam Byrne really just told Radio 4’s Today programme that the idea of rent controls as a solution to the UK’s housing benefit bill was “going a bit too far”.

But there’s another new Labour welfare policy that’s missing a fairly vital chunk of information this morning, which is even more worrying than the shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions having less intelligence, insight, principle and moral courage than a starving weasel.

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Heaven’s sent us an angel, folks. Alert reader Jack Deeth is stranded far from home shores (really very far indeed) and stuck for something to do in the long winter nights, he very generously offered us his transcribing services.

We leapt on the offer with undignified haste, and you can read the first results below, in the shape of today’s interview between Margaret Curran and Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics, in which the shadow Scottish Secretary clearly and unambiguously laid out a future Labour government’s spending and welfare plans.

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