Wings Over Scotland

We’re being somewhat generous with the numbering here, to be honest, but you’ve got to start the official count somewhere, right?

Alert readers will recall that current Scottish Labour policy is to enshrine in law the right to a free bus pass for all Scots over the age of 60:

This time last year, for example, their transport spokesman Colin Smyth specifically and indignantly condemned any possible suggestion by the dastardly SNP of perhaps increasing the qualifying age from 60 to state pension age (currently 65 and due to rise to 68 and beyond), saying:

“Sadly, the scheme is now under threat with SNP ministers refusing the rule out increasing the age citizens can qualify for a pass in a bid to try and save money. Ordinary people in their 60s should not be paying the price of Tory austerity because the SNP refuse to use the powers of the parliament to fund our services properly.”

A commendably unambiguous and righteous position. Indeed, the North British branch of Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist party announced at this year’s conference that if elected they’d not only keep the threshold at 60, but would extend free bus travel immediately to everyone in Scotland under 25, and then swiftly to everyone of any age.

So we can safely assume that in Wales, where Labour have been in power for all 20 years of the devolved Assembly, all those things will already be happening, because otherwise it’d just be embarrassing.

At the very least, we can be certain that there’s no chance of the qualifying age going up from 60 to state pension age, because we already know that Labour regard that as a scandalous and unthinkable moral outrage.

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Let the bells ring out and rejoice.

Still, at least the Record hasn’t been so completely lacking in self-awareness as to point a finger at others in Scotland and say something like “far too many people who should know better are complicit in the tragedy”.

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29 June 2016. Don’t say we don’t warn you, readers.

And this was February of the same year, when Barack Obama and David Cameron were still in charge of their respective nations:

You’ll always read it here first, folks. Even when you don’t want to.

Last night, grudgingly, we watched the whole of the final Tory leadership debate, for a contest in which pretty much everyone believes Boris Johnson has already gathered enough votes to comfortably win even though there are several days of voting to go.

The headline outcome the media appears to be focusing on is that both candidates proclaimed the Irish backstop “dead”, to which the EU’s response will without a doubt be “Is it, aye?”

So where does that leave us? Let’s have an update.

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Things were different in 2009.

Of course, they meant if they LOST the first one. But readers might feel that a certain degree of irony has perhaps manifested itself since then, particularly in terms of people knowing “what they would be in for” after June 2016.

So just to recap the UK government’s rules for the Yes movement:

 – If you win, you don’t really win and you have to go again in case things change.

 – If you lose once, that’s it forever, no matter how much things change.

Always remember what we’re dealing with, folks. The rules are always whatever they say they are, regardless of what they might have said a minute ago, and no matter what happens we’re swimming against the sea.

There’s quite an interesting piece in today’s Sunday National detailing the extremely unequal representation of various parties on the BBC’s network politics shows in the last month, in which readers will be astonished to learn that the SNP (and Scotland in general) come off very poorly.

(Five appearances compared to eight for the Lib Dems, 40 for Labour and a startling 143 for the Tories.)

As it happened, it coincided with our coming by a list of people who’ve appeared on the Corporation’s nightly newspaper-review show, so we wondered whether the brave members of the press whose job it is to scrutinise politics independently might have redressed the balance somewhat.

Let’s find out.

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We suspect that LBC’s Iain Dale might have been reading this morning’s Wings article before he interviewed Jo Swinson tonight.

We can only hope any subsequent Scottish interviewers do as diligent a job, and also pick her up on a few of the blatant lies she did manage to sneak past Dale.

Prospective new Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson was interviewed on Sky News this morning, where she made the usual honking mess of the admittedly-impossible task that is trying to justify her party’s naked hypocrisy over second referendums.

Swinson indignantly insisted that “the SNP do not have a mandate for [a second indyref]”, a statement which we of course already know is unambiguously false.

The SNP campaigned in 2016 on an explicit pledge to have a new vote if Scotland was dragged out of the EU despite voting to Remain, and they won the election and formed the government, having secured more MSPs than Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems put together (63-60).

They then put their manifesto pledge to the Parliament, which voted for it by a clear majority of 54% to 46% (almost exactly the reverse of the 2014 referendum, routinely described by Unionists as an “overwhelming” majority).

Finally they campaigned on the same pledge in the 2017 UK general election, where they again won more seats than the three Unionist parties combined (35-24).

So that’s a pretty clear triple democratic and political mandate in any parliamentary democracy: a majority of MSPs, a majority of Scottish MPs and a majority of the Scottish Parliament. But since Jo Swinson doesn’t seem to recognise it, we wondered if she maybe just didn’t know what the word meant.

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You’re going to need to before you watch today’s episode of The Jeremy Vine Show, featuring Paul Burrell (who used to be a royal butler about 20 years ago and somehow is now a political commentator), Nicola McLean (who used to get her surgically-altered breasts out for tabloid newspapers around the same time and then went on a reality show for halfwits with no actual talents), and Carole Malone, who we assume is some sort of live public-safety-information warning about the dangers of overdoing HRT.

Vine watches the unfolding horror with the expression of a man absolutely convinced he’s going to be murdered the next time he comes to Scotland. The most painful part is probably just after (Scottish) co-host and former weathergirl Storm Huntley (no, really) helpfully pipes up to suggest “shortbread, tartan… bagpipes” as Scotland’s economic foundations, at which point Jeremy turns in last-ditch desperation to the audience to save him from this slow-motion trainwreck and… well, you’ll see how that goes.

When the second indyref comes along, whenever the Yes campaign has a political broadcast slot on TV, we suggest just putting this on every time.