Wings Over Scotland

Remember the scary old days, readers?

Thankfully, Scotland voted No and pensions were saved forever.

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The Labour Party has today published Margaret Beckett’s report into why it lost the 2015 general election. We were rather struck by this line:

Let’s just go over that one again to be sure: Labour believed that an SNP victory in Scotland would make it “impossible” for the Tories to form the government.

Which is weird, because that’s not quite what we remember them saying.

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Thanks to the Scottish Daily Mail, we’ve just spotted a piece by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin for City AM a few days ago. We had an inordinate amount of trouble getting the full article to display past the site’s incredibly over-zealous advert enforcer, so we’ve preserved it for posterity here.

There’s a gem in every paragraph. You’re going to like this one.

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I know he’s a figure of comedy and pity, but this is something else.

Someone glue the cork in the bottle, eh? For his own good.

What a day it’s been to be a proud Scot.

Knights and Lords and Ladies, all ours to cherish. Truly, we’re better together.

Comrades! Be upstanding and bow your heads to your superior, The Right Honourable The Lord Darling of Ruilanish, revolutionary socialist of Her Majesty:

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Alert readers may recall a very recent incident where the Daily Record made baseless insinuations about a trip by former SNP MP Natalie McGarry to Syria, and whether its funding had been declared on the Parliamentary Register Of Members’ Interests.

(It had been, and the Record still hasn’t clarified its article to that effect.)

So here’s a thing.

Nil? Zero? Nothing at all? That seems… wrong.

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We’ve been having some trouble trying to explain the Alistair Carmichael verdict to some English chums who hadn’t been following the case previously and have now just heard about it on the news.

Lord Matthews and Lady Paton in their great wisdom concluded that Carmichael had lied about the “Frenchgate” memo, and that he had also lied to them in the courtroom, and that the first of those lies was intended to help Carmichael achieve re-election, but that somehow his own re-election was not a “personal” matter.

Our friends couldn’t follow the logic of that, and to be honest we weren’t able to help them much. Nevertheless, the judgement has been handed down and the case is closed. It seems unlikely the petitioners could fund an appeal even if one was to be allowed, particularly given that according to press reports Carmichael will be pursuing them for his £150,000 costs as well as their own.

However, in the process of wriggling out of his lie on an obscure legal and semantic technicality, Carmichael appears, so far as we can tell, to have explicitly implicated himself in a far more serious crime.

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So now Scotland knows where it stands. Alistair Carmichael is innocent.

There’s officially nothing wrong with a minister of the UK government deliberately lying in an attempt to undermine the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland before a general election, smearing foreign ambassadors in the process, then openly admitting his wrongdoing but refusing to stand down, flicking two fingers at his own constituents and the whole country.

Right you are, then. Duly noted. On we go.

Earlier this year, a Secretary of State in Her Majesty’s Government leaked an untrue memo to the press, with the intention of undermining the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland and damaging her party in an imminent general election. He then went on national TV and lied about doing so, in order to protect his own reputation.

The newspaper he leaked the smear to printed it without making the slightest attempt to ascertain its veracity, for which it was nominated for an award (even after having been strongly censured by the press complaints watchdog). The “journalist” involved has never retracted or apologised for the story. Others have defended it.

The minister’s colleagues and other opposition politicians gleefully leapt on the smear and propagated it, mostly failing to retract their accusations after they were shown to have been false. Others shrugged that it was normal and fine for politicians to tell “brazen” lies and that complaining about it was “bullying”.

These facts are not in dispute. Tomorrow morning we’ll find out what they mean.

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This morning’s Daily Record, and also some newspapers, report that booze-ruined internet troll and convicted violent criminal George Foulkes – who’s spent several decades of his political career campaigning to abolish the House Of Lords, and all of the last one sitting in it as Baron Foulkes of Cumnock – has dreamt up a wizard new wheeze to enhance the Scottish Parliament by giving it its own chamber of peers.

The thirsty noble aims to avoid the undemocratic nature of the UK Lords by making the new “senate” an elected chamber. But in an uncharacteristic development that will shock innocent readers to their cores, he doesn’t seem to have thought it through.

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