As the winter Scottish political news drought enters its 17th week, mainstream and alternative media commentators alike are scratching around desperately for anything to write about, which tends to end up in overlong reflective and/or hectoring essays about how to secure independence, invariably concluding that what we need is for everyone in Scotland to start thinking and acting exactly like the author of the article.
We’re going to aim for something a bit shorter and more practical, at least.
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analysis, europe, scottish politics, uk politics
A timely reminder about how much 85% of British people (or to put that another way, English people) really value the rest of the UK.
“Lead us, Scotland, don’t leave us!” is going to be a pretty hard sell next time.
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comment, disturbing, europe, scottish politics, uk politics
We still have no reliable internet, just occasional five-minute bursts or a shonky 4G phone connection, but there’s a BT Openreach man in the garden and as soon as he gets hold of a different kind of all-terrain BT Openreach man we’re hopeful that the problem will finally be fixed by the end of today, after two weeks.
In the meantime, we couldn’t help but be struck in passing by the collapse of talks on reopening the Northern Ireland’s devolved Assembly, which has now been closed for over a year following the failure of an election to deliver a workable administration.
If there’s a better illustration of just how limited the powers of devolution in the UK are than the fact that the region seems to have muddled along just fine for 13 months without the parliament, we’re having a hard time thinking of what it might be. The old saying that “power devolved is power retained” has never been more visibly true.
If Scotland wants to thrive, it can only do so with all the meaningful powers of a nation under its own control, and at the end of the day there’s only one way to get those.
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comment, scottish politics, uk politics
…with the Secretary of State for Scotland.
Boo! But wait!
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comment, europe, idiots, scottish politics, uk politics
This is an interesting one. Almost 40 years on from the event, Scottish politics is still plagued by micro-brained Labour types insisting that the SNP “ushered in” Margaret Thatcher after the devolution referendum of 1979 was sabotaged by a Labour MP.
SNP supporters counter that this is complete bollocks, largely because it’s complete bollocks. James Callaghan, the Labour PM at the time, blamed 34 of his own MPs for bringing his government down, by supporting an amendment from Islington South and Finsbury Labour MP George Cunningham which blocked the creation of a Scottish Assembly even though it won the referendum by a narrow margin.
(Cunningham resigned from Labour two years later and subsequently joined the SDP, but in 2012 the Daily Express dragged him out to demand that the same “40% rule” be applied to the indyref.)
History, though, has forgotten someone else who was apparently the true architect of the fix, to the extent that we’d never heard about it until now.
Let’s find out more, shall we?
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Tags: from the archives
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history, scottish politics, uk politics
The gigantic-clown-shoed bunglemuppet that is Scottish Tory MP Ross Thomson was galumphing around social media yesterday, quoting a notoriously dim-witted Yoon troll to the effect that the Scottish Government could (and therefore presumably should) use its own money to compensate the “WASPI women” – a group who’ve been robbed of years of rightful pension payments by the UK government changing the rules after they’d already qualified for their pensions.
Which throws up a whole series of questions.
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Tags: hypocrisypoll
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analysis, scottish politics, uk politics
This is the well-known hardcore Corbynite commentator John McTernan on the radio yesterday, detailing how outrageous it would be for politicians to attempt to block a second referendum on a divisive but important issue.
(Talkback, BBC Radio Ulster, 4 January 2018)
.
No, not THAT kind of second referendum, silly!
Tags: hypocrisy
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audio, comment, europe, media, scottish politics, uk politics
