It’s Monday morning, so rather than have an “And finally…” tonight we thought we’d cheer you up ahead of the grimmest day of the week with a couple of completely genuine unPhotoshopped images from this morning’s BBC Breakfast.
We’d love to imagine this was a satirical “accident”.
Scotland on Sunday, 14th April 2013 (our emphasis):
“[A Labour] MP pointed out that any further devolution would need support from the Labour Party in England: ‘Johann can’t just say to Ed [Miliband, the Labour leader] this is what I want. These decisions and policies have consequences for the whole of the UK. There are Labour MPs in England now who are getting fed up with it, not just Tories.'”
We hate to harp on. But it may be that there are still some people stuck in a cave somewhere in the Hebrides who think Johann Lamont is the “leader” of a political party called “Scottish Labour” rather than a regional branch manager of one based in London, and who imagine that the findings of her commission on devolution – should there actually be any before the referendum – will become official Labour policy.
And for those people, we have four words.
The Labour Party’s clinging to the pretence of a commitment to multilateral nuclear disarmament is perhaps the most cynical of all the lies it still tells the electorate, on either side of the border. This weekend, as thousands of protesters congregate in Glasgow, Labour activists are mounting a frantic rearguard action pretending that independence and Trident are unconnected issues.
But the feeble smokescreen with which the party attempts to conceal the truth could be blown away by an asthmatic bee. It shouldn’t take too long to run through the logic.
We haven’t heard any more from Ian Taylor’s lawyers yet. But in a surprising development never previously observed on the internet, his attempt to silence various pro-independence voices appears to have resulted in people digging deeper into the affairs of Vitol, the oil-trading company of which he’s been Chief Executive since 1995.
One particularly interesting revelation that we don’t think was covered in any of the earlier articles relates to the company’s conduct in the Republic of the Congo, where they got up to shenanigans a little shadier than simply drinking all the Um Bongo.
There’s an old maxim that serves all writers well: “Perfection is when there’s nothing left to take away”. With that in mind, let’s see how few words we can render the complex issue of the future of welfare in the UK in.
But in case those aren’t enough, we’ll expand just a little.
The Daily Record, 5th May 2010:
“Before Margaret Thatcher, Scotland made steel, ships, cars and trucks and produced coal. By the time she had finished with our country, all those industries were devastated – and tens of thousands of proud men and their families were living in ravaged communities with no jobs and no hope.
Scotland could wake up tomorrow to the grim reality of a new Tory government, led by Thatcher disciple David Cameron. And for all his talk of “compassion”, few doubt that we will suffer again if he wins power. We spoke to five men who lost their livelihoods under the Tories, and they all had the same message for the voters: “Don’t let them loose on Scotland again.”“
Well, voting Labour didn’t work. What else could we try?
This is from last weekend’s Sunday Herald:
And then there’s this, from the Herald back in January:
(All emphases ours.) Mr Taylor lives in London – not located in Scotland the last time we checked – and is Chief Executive of an oil-trading company called Vitol, whose extremely colourful history includes the fact that “Last year, it was revealed that for a decade the company had been using Employee Benefit Trusts which avoided tax on incomes of its UK staff and was in discussion with HMRC about a deal to pay this off.”
(The next-biggest donator, author CJ Sansom, sent their £161,000 cheque from their home in Sussex, which we’re fairly sure also isn’t in Scotland.)
We’ve dropped Mr Sheridan a line asking if he finds non-Scottish-resident, tax-avoiding Ian Taylor’s huge donation to the No campaign “nauseating”. We’ll let you know his answer the minute it arrives, which surely won’t be long.
We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.
Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.
We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:
Attentive readers will of course recall the shocking revelations from the No campaign earlier this year about the terrifying cost of independence to Scots – £1 a head. But what’s the latest info on the price of staying in the UK?
£1 for independence or £891 for the Union? Tough call.
And we’re not going to hypocritically pretend that we are.
Glorying in the death of an individual is unseemly, especially one long past the time when they did their damage. Owen Jones put it well here. Today, though, with no shame whatsoever, we celebrate the death of an icon. Not the human being, but the values they stood for and their appalling toxic legacy of what was once a country one could be proud of being a part of.
That country died in 1979, and its corpse was dug up and desecrated in 1997. Nothing we could say, no matter how awful, would be a tenth as despicable as the changes wrought in Britain over those last 34 years. So we’re going to say nothing, and play a song with words that are impossible to make out. You might prefer some others.
In the world of journalism, being second to a story carries certain advantages. The Sunday Herald scored a high-profile exclusive with its list of “Better Together” donators yesterday, but only told half the tale. Keen-eyed cyber-sleuths immediately started digging, and came up with some troubling information about by far the biggest contributor to the No camp’s fighting fund, excellently and concisely detailed here by Michael Gray of National Collective.
You’d imagine, then, that the likes of the Scotsman – with the advantage of an extra 24 hours to do some investigating and with all the leads already conveniently found and collected together for them – would have come up with some pretty interesting in-depth analysis on the subject, especially given how keen it usually is to look into anyone who financially backs the nationalist side.
(Not to mention the golden opportunity to get one over on its rival’s big exclusive by pointing out what they missed in their haste to be first.)
Oh well.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
