Wings Over Scotland

As this site is somewhat on the left of the political spectrum, it’d be all too easy to attack yesterday’s Budget based on its interpretation by what still passes for the UK’s left-wing media. So instead let’s look at it through the eyes of the Daily Mail, which is putting, shall we say, quite a positive spin on it.

Fair-minded readers will concur, we trust, that the Mail’s English and Scottish editions are both portraying George Osborne’s first all-Tory budget in almost 20 years as being a good thing for the nation. But let’s take a look inside. Because when it’s finished with the spin, even the Mail can’t disguise that what happened yesterday was the biggest robbery of the British people in a lifetime.

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85.1% of the Scottish electorate voted against the Conservatives in May. Scotland has a Tory government anyway, because of how England voted, because Scotland is part of the UK and so doesn’t get to choose its own governments. The people who ensured that could happen don’t get to whine about what that Tory government does.

So do everyone a favour and shut your mouths today, No voters. We warned you until we were blue in the face. This is what you wanted. This is what you got. Suck it up.

There’s a very strange feature in today’s Daily Record, and it’s not even one of their regular pieces of pioneering and hard-hitting investigative journalism about who’s the hottest guest ever to appear on the Jeremy Kyle show.

The headline screams unequivocally that according to a new Survation poll, fear of the SNP influencing a Labour government was the reason that English voters swung back to the Conservatives, defying polls that said the Tories would be the largest party but be short of an overall majority.

(Weirdly it says that their goal in doing so was to “keep Salmond out of power”, even though (a) Alex Salmond is a humble backbench MP who doesn’t even lead the SNP group at Westminster, let alone the party, and (b) he won his seat anyway.)

The article then produces a flurry of graphs and figures showing that various numbers of supporters of the four UK parties switched their votes to various other parties after being polled (as always happens).

But then there’s something quite important missing.

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We reported last night on the mealy-mouthed semi-correction the Daily Telegraph has finally been forced to grudgingly publish with regards to its incompetent and inaccurate creation of the “Memogate” scandal. The paper – we’re loath to prefix it with the word “news” – has now suffered the full weight, such as it is, of the press regulator IPSO, and will not have to answer any further for its actions.

And that just leaves us with the source.

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In our latest Panelbase opinion poll, conducted last week in association with the Sunday Times, we wanted to complete the work we started previously in analysing the public’s reaction to Labour’s election strategies.

What we found last time was that almost every decision the party had taken in Scotland under the regional managership of Jim Murphy had been massively at odds with the Scottish electorate.

Whether it was booze at football, full fiscal autonomy or the Named Person initiative for child welfare, the voters were full-square behind the SNP, and every new policy Scottish Labour unveiled doomed them further. Anything that could be got wrong was.

This time we were curious about the effects in the whole UK, and with regard to one landmark moment in particular.

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The Sunday Post’s lobby reporter James Millar noticed today that all the parties have submitted their nominations to sit on the Scottish Affairs Committee at Westminster.

As has already been noted, the majority of the committee – seven from 11 – are MPs for English seats (list below). But one name in particular caught our attention.

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How the UK’s constitution now works, in brief:

– English votes for English laws

– English votes for Scottish laws

– No Scottish votes for English laws

Any questions?

In today’s Scotsman, Peter Jones makes the case for why an independent Scotland would have been plunged into the same crisis currently affecting Greece (and making the case along the way for why George Osborne’s austerity is inevitable and we should just shut up and accept it).

He insists strenuously throughout the article that he’s doing no such thing and is simply highlighting the flaws in the idea of a currency union between Scotland and the rUK, but to anybody who actually reads the article, it’s patently obvious that that’s exactly what he’s doing.

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I was on my way to work in London the other morning when I heard someone talking on his mobile phone. He was a white English man in his thirties, wearing builder’s gear, presumably on his way to work too. We were heading in the same direction, so I listened to his end of the conversation as we walked along.

He was in mid-rant when I first clocked him, complaining about drug addicts and alcoholics living on benefits, while he had to get up and go to work. “I’m on my way to work too,” I thought, and the only thing that bothers me about the thought of drug addicts and alcoholics lying around at home or still asleep on the streets is the utter waste of human lives it involves.

But of course, I was on my way to a job I love, and even though I would happily write comedy whether or not I was paid for it, I’m guessing that my job probably pays a lot more than his does. And from the tone of his voice, I don’t think he was looking forward to his day’s work nearly as much as I was looking forward to mine.

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On Wednesday we highlighted a curious outbreak of mass hysteria in the Scottish press, when a whole clutch of its newspapers suddenly and inexplicably jumped on a six-month-old story that had been comprehensively debunked at the time and hadn’t become any more true.

The story was swiftly proven to be complete rubbish all over again, and some of the papers printed grudging and much less prominent pieces admitting it was nonsense (all gallantly blaming their source, some Buckingham Palace flunky gone rogue, rather than their own failure to check the facts).

And then things got weird.

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