Wings Over Scotland

Chris Cairns is on holiday. Yes, again.

This is the Conservative MSP group at Holyrood today, at the end of an unusually powerful speech from Kezia Dugdale during the rape clause “debate”. Click the picture to enlarge it if you want to find out what people gazing into the hideous abyss of their own souls and not liking what they see looks like.

We put the word “debate” in quotemarks because every single Tory MSP who spoke was too cowardly to allow any interventions from the other parties. We can’t say we’re surprised. We’d find it hard to look anyone in the eye if we were them too.

Leopards don’t change their spots, folks.

Especially when they’re in the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

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This site has spoken a few times, usually in jest, about forming its own political party and contesting elections. But as the UK heads for the biggest democratic trainwreck in its history – a vote which, depending on where you live, is really either a proxy Brexit referendum, a proxy independence referendum, a judgement on the personal character of Jeremy Corbyn or any of half-a-dozen other things – we found ourselves thinking again about what, on the fundamental ideological level, we’d stand for.

It’s a question that existing parties find it remarkably hard to answer. Labour used to define it clearly in its key “Clause IV” – a clear statement of commitment to socialist principles like public ownership and wealth redistribution – before Tony Blair junked it in the 1990s for some woolly neoliberal rubbish from an aspirational Facebook meme.

For the SNP, clearly its primary defining goal is always the democratic pursuit of independence for Scotland. What you might call its day-to-day policies have, like most parties, varied and evolved over time, but it’s always had that one clear unifying and overriding aim. It may have won electoral success through decent governance, but its purpose was never merely competent administration for its own sake.

In the case of the Conservative Party, the turn-of-the-20th-century US economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up their position pithily and accurately:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

(And lest an offended Tory should seek to instantly dismiss him as some flavour of pinko tree-hugging bleeding-heart lefty, he also said: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”.)

The Liberal Democrats, of course, stand for being in the middle of Labour and the Conservatives, whatever that means on any given day. (They did briefly experiment in the 2000s with being to the left of Labour, partly because it was hard NOT to be, but the coalition scuppered that and now they’re basically Tory wets.)

But what about us?

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Alert readers will be aware that we’ve been running a series of posts pointing out the gap between opposition rhetoric about the Scottish Government’s supposed failure to grow the economy, and their (total lack of) practical suggestions about what it should actually be doing, given that by design the Scottish Parliament controls almost none of the country’s economic levers.

And we thought a story fed to the press by Labour this week about job creation since the Tories came to power in 2010 was going to be just another case in point, until we spotted something else about it.

Now, we can’t claim to be exactly astonished that the Tories have mostly focused on creating work in London and the South-East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK. That’s pretty much their thing. But Scottish Labour’s noted rentahonk Jackie Baillie was hopping mad, and not only at the Tories.

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We don’t often wholeheartedly agree with anything “Rape Clause Ruth” Davidson says at First Minister’s Questions, but we can’t fault this observation from earlier today.

One of the most famous tales of the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint is that concerning James Inglis, a murderer who in 1951 sprinted the short distance from the condemned cell to the noose, enabling the entire execution to be concluded just seven seconds after Pierrepoint had first laid hands on him.

We can’t help thinking of it today.

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Okay, so 2017 is turning out less dull than we expected.

Because the Prime Minister of the UK has lost her mind.

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So far as we can tell, the primary occupation of chunky former “Better Together” head honcho, Scottish Labour apparatchik and tuba enthusiast Blair McDougall these days – he appears to be otherwise unemployed – is posting endlessly on Twitter about how the UK would rob Scottish pensioners who’ve paid National Insurance to the UK for their whole lives in the event of Scotland voting for independence.

We’ve never been quite sure why that’s supposed to be a great selling point for how fabulous the UK is – “Don’t leave us or we’ll starve you to death” – but in any event it was dealt something of a blow yesterday by McDougall’s own party.

The image referred to a brand-new “pledge card” issued by Labour yesterday, which promised not only to maintain payment of the UK pension to pensioners living abroad anywhere in the world but to uprate it in line with inflation, avoiding situations like that of eldsters who’ve retired to countries which don’t have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK and therefore face a continual slide in the real value of their pension.

It certainly didn’t say anything about “with the sole exception of if they happen to live in Scotland”, but maybe there just wasn’t enough room.