We already knew what David Mundell’s guarantees were worth, of course. So it’s not like we can exactly feign surprise at this.
The best we can say is that at least this time it took four months for the Secretary Of State’s promise to completely and utterly collapse, not 48 hours.
We’re not often genuinely shocked, readers.
But then we switched on BBC1 Northern Ireland today.
It’s a sleepy Wednesday in July, so let’s celebrate some proud British culture!
The next five years of UK politics:
This was David Mundell on Sunday, guaranteeing that any extra money produced for Northern Ireland to secure DUP backing for the Tory government would be matched by more funding for Scotland (as much as £4.5bn under normal Barnett Formula rules, because Scotland has nearly three times the population of the province):
And here’s the truth 24 hours later:
Who could ever have etc?
The media is aflame today with some rather woolly “news” to the effect that Theresa May might possibly, in some unspecified manner, have conceded a veto over Brexit to the Scottish Parliament.
We can see no evidence suggesting such a thing has happened or will happen, and would instead direct readers to a report published yesterday by Unlock Democracy. We strongly advise taking five minutes out of your day to read pages 26-33 of it, but if you’re really in a rush this paragraph will give you the basic conclusion:
Remember your place, lesser nations of the UK.
This map probably correlates quite closely with one of the strength of Leave vote.
It seems somehow appropriate that on the day negotiations begin (with the UK having no government, no mandate and no idea what it actually wants), large parts of the country are essentially already on fire.
We know that people like to chat generally about issues of the day (and more) in the comments, so while we’re taking a break we’ll probably put up stuff like this now and again just so that we don’t end up with a single post with thousands of comments in it. (And so you know we haven’t been killed by bears.)
They probably won’t all be about politics. Call them conversation starters.
This was the revealing reaction of the Question Time audience and panel last night when right-wing Daily Mail/Times journalist Isabel Oakeshott and Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti debated who’d “won” the election:
On Thursday Jeremy Corbyn got 40% of the vote, 40% of the seats and lost by 2%.
In Scotland, Ruth Davidson got 28% of the vote, 22% of the seats and lost by 9%.
(Corbyn was also a thumping 33 points clear of the 3rd-place party in terms of vote share. Davidson’s margin over the party below was just 1.5 points.)
Yet the entire media, across both Scotland and the UK, has presented Davidson as the undisputed and triumphant victor, and nobody laughs.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
