Bottom story from today’s Financial Times, less than four months after the top one:
A forecast turned out wrong? Must be the SNP’s fault somehow.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.
It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.
At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.
Wait, what?
Depending on which parts of the media you were reading yesterday and this morning, the economic case for independence was either “shattered” (the Herald), “demolished” (the Spectator), “shredded” (Daily Record), “smashed to smithereens” (Willie Rennie, bless) or any number of other apocalyptic metaphors for total destruction, by a 1% fall in Scottish revenues resulting from a steep drop in oil prices which led to a notional Scottish budget deficit that by some measures was as high as 10% of GDP.
We must assume, then, that the economic case for the UK being an independent nation was rendered unto ruins in 2009-10, when its deficit exceeded 11% of GDP.
An alert reader just found this. It’s quite something.
We especially liked this bit:
“The growing practice of the socialist government is to take decisions vitally affecting Scotland in Whitehall… this is a process which we have every intention of setting in direct reverse.”
(1m 46s)
Weirdly, right after seeing this earlier this afternoon, we sat down to watch an episode of The Professionals on ITV4, which contained what seemed a rather apt segment.
We don’t think it’s a younger Iain Martin of the Telegraph (accompanied by colleagues Alan Cochrane and Tom Gallagher), but don’t make us swear to it.
Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.
It’s quite incredible that someone with Jim Sillars’ political experience should be so naive about the tactics surrounding the EU referendum. Regardless of your feelings on the EU itself, there’s absolutely no point in any supporter of Scottish independence voting Leave this June, and here’s why.
Alert readers can’t have failed to notice a desperate Scottish Labour dusting off the old “Tartan Tories” attack on the SNP recently, over the Nats’ unwillingness to join in with Kezia Dugdale’s kerrazy kaper of hiking up income tax.
So after today we can only assume they’ll be looking for some similarly pithy zingers for their colleagues in Wales. They can have this one for free.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
