Wings Over Scotland

(Order Chris’ latest splendid volume of cartoons, The Road To Nowhere, here.)
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Sitrep: we’ve given up any hope of turning on the television and seeing a politician – any politician – telling the truth.

Boris Johnson is lying about negotiating a new deal with the EU. Jeremy Corbyn is lying about pretty much everything (in so far as he even knows what he wants the truth to be, let alone what it actually is). Jo Swinson is lying about wanting to meaningfully work with other parties to stop Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon is lying about wanting to stop a no-deal Brexit – she just wants to stop Brexit full stop.

(Unfortunately, this also means she’s lying about having any real intention of holding a second independence referendum before 2021. If she did, she wouldn’t have all her MPs and MSPs frantically running around parliaments and courtrooms trying to destroy her own democratic mandate for it, which would leave her needing to secure a fresh one 20 months from now. And assuming she’d have any more idea how to put it into practice than she has with the ones she’s already got.)

The government is lying about the fact that it doesn’t have confidence in itself, and the opposition is lying about the fact that it does. Everyone now says they want an election, but somehow it isn’t happening because nobody wants it yet, and nobody can agree when they DO want it, and they’re all lying about why.

And absolutely everyone is lying about the fact that whatever they’re trying to do right now has any chance of solving the present shambles. Johnson is just stalling to run the clock down until no-deal, although he swears blind that he isn’t, and the opposition just wants to drag the whole agony out for several more months with not the slightest clue what they’d actually do then.

Grimly, the closest thing that British voters currently have to an honest man is Nigel Farage, who is at least clear about what he wants and what he’s prepared to do to get it. Which is ironic, as he’s only anywhere near getting it because he’s spent his entire political career lying through his teeth about it.

We don’t mind telling you, folks, it’s been pretty hard to get up in the mornings.

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So, British politics, eh? We’re basically on strike until things make at least an iota of sense, because there’s no point in attempting political analysis right now when events can overtake you before you’ve finished typing a sentence.

But let’s just have a quick recap on what we know.

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Today, a collection of UK politicians who were to all intents and purposes attempting to arrange a coup have been complaining that the government has beaten them to it by organising a coup against their coup. The fox has ambushed the chickens.

Boris Johnson’s move to prorogue Parliament for most of September and a chunk of October actually only represents a couple of weeks of extra holiday time for MPs – Westminster would be shut for most of the time in question anyway for party conference season.

The Commons would open for business again on 14 October, in time to debate the outcome of a crucial European Council summit on 17-18 October. If that meeting doesn’t provide any new deal – and it’s vanishingly unlikely that it will – then there’ll be no time for anything other than a no-deal Brexit.

But there wasn’t anyway.

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It seems mad that this even needs to be said.

Luckily, as always, Wings is way ahead of the zeitgeist.

We really can’t be bothered with having the GERS “debate” again, in which all the same people make all the same exactly opposite spins on the exact same data. Minor annual fluctuations aside, the core reality is the same as the one we repeat every 12 months, and serious economists on both sides of the political divide still treat the figures with the disdain they properly merit.

One such person is Richard Murphy, and in an excellent piece today he posted a version of this graph which did catch our jaded eye. It purports to show the share of UK debt supposedly accounted for by Scotland – which has, let’s remember, just 8% of the UK’s population – in each of the last 16 years, and which immediately prior to the SNP’s 2011 majority stood at almost exactly that of our population share.

(Which is itself a gross calumny against reality, but let’s stay focused.)

How very remarkable, some readers may feel, that the extent of Scotland’s supposed responsibility for the UK’s debt should have rocketed so very dramatically at the exact point when independence became a live political question.

It does rather make you wonder why the UK government, scraping as it is for every penny of possible savings, seems more and more desperate to hang onto Scotland as the terrible economic burden we become on the rest of the country grows ever heavier.

Truly, our partners in this great equal and bountiful union must be the most generous and forgiving people on Earth. We don’t deserve them.

Oh dear God in Heaven, not THIS again.

Helen Thompson is apparently the “Professor of Political Economy” at Cambridge University. No wonder the country is being run by imbeciles.

Let’s speak really slowly and see if the idiots can get it into their thick heads this time.

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This poll from Opinium came out a few days ago, but didn’t get as much attention as people might normally have expected, possibly because it was presented in a very difficult-to-follow graphical form. So we’ve sorted it out, and also added in the missing Lib Dem voters.

The takeaway is that a clear majority of voters both in Scotland and the UK now believe that the UK government should accept the Scottish Government’s request for a second independence referendum.

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In case you missed it, there was an interesting phone-in on the subject of Scottish independence on James O’Brien’s LBC radio show from 10am this morning. I chipped my tuppence-worth in at the start (I’m the second caller, from about 6m 25s), but it’s fascinating listening to O’Brien’s tone evolve as the hour-long segment goes on.

(James O’Brien, LBC, 7 August 2019)
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We don’t doubt for a moment the sincerity and good intent with which he states his position. But when he talks in the intro about the special feelings he has when he’s in Scotland, which he also gets in Greece, the whole argument collapses.

Because O’Brien doesn’t appear to need to feel that he “owns” Greece, or that he’s a Greek citizen, to have that warmth towards it. He doesn’t need the people of England to elect Greece’s governments for it – he’s happy to have those feelings towards a completely independent country. So why not about an independent Scotland?

(Sadly I was cut off before I got a chance to respond to his point about Germany and its federal regions, which would have been to point out that no one German region is six times bigger than all the others put together and can – and does – impose its will on them whenever it wants.)

And much to his credit he appears to realise that as the show goes on. Whether he still thinks deep down that the Scottish independence movement is in significant part driven by anti-Englishness, only he can say. But his callers today at least appear to have made him think about it, and it’s a process worth listening to.