Wings Over Scotland

The egos of the SNP’s tiny band of six Westminster MPs must be swelling by the day. For weeks we’ve been recording Labour’s standard, decades-old mantra of how Scots mustn’t vote SNP or the Tories will get in. In today’s Herald, meanwhile, no less a figure than the Prime Minister warns that if we vote SNP, Labour will get in.

And the Lib Dems? The Lib Dems have completely lost their minds.

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An intriguing extract from the weekend’s YouGov poll for The Sun:

It’s not the biggest vote of confidence, is it?

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One of our ever-alert agents uncovered this for us today. Published quietly last week by the House Of Commons Library and completely unremarked-upon by the Scottish media, it’s a document whose introductory text makes the relevant point concisely and eloquently without any need for elaboration or explanation on our part.

“The impact of removing Scottish MPs from the records of historic Commons divisions is also estimated. Of approximately 3,600 divisions to occur between 26th June 2001 and 26 September 2014, 22 (0.6%) would have concluded differently had the votes of Scottish MPs not been counted.

The note also compares, for each division since 2001, the lobby in which the majority of MPs per constituent country of the UK have voted to the lobby in which the majority of UK MPs voted.

In the current Parliament the lobby in which the majority of English MPs have voted has coincided with that of the majority of UK MPs for 99% of divisions. The majority of Scottish MPs has coincided with the majority of UK MPs for 24% of divisions; that of Welsh MPs for 26% of divisions.”

The emphasis is ours. England gets what England’s MPs vote for more than 99% of the time. Scotland gets what Scotland’s MPs vote for less than a quarter of the time. We’ll leave it at that.

Labour have already been widely derided for their feeble plan to increase the minimum wage to £8 by 2020 – a level likely to barely keep pace with inflation. But it turns out they’ve got a goal even more pathetic for people trying to survive on meagre incomes.

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Today’s media is dominated by reports on the release by the US government of a deeply horrifying dossier admitting and detailing the massive scale of torture carried out by the CIA on often-innocent detainees during the USA’s “war on terror”.

You can’t chuck a brick at the internet without hitting a hundred links on the subject, so we’re not going to pick any out in particular, but many reflect on the UK’s willing complicity in many of the abuses, with the Labour government of Tony Blair having allowed Prestwick Airport to be used as a stop-off for torture flights.

There’s also a rather telling article in the Scotsman.

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Alex Salmond as the Terminator. Any way you slice it it’s a remarkable mental image from the mind of a clearly distraught James Kirkup of the Telegraph.

Apparently death wouldn’t stop him anyway. We’ve actually cut this clip before the point where the woman from the Economist calls the former First Minister a “zombie who just keeps on powering through to the end of the horror movie”. Of course, if you think of the Union as the horror movie, it’s not the worst analogy we’ve ever heard.

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This is Tory activist Sarah Robb. She’s not a very nice person. (We don’t feel too bad about saying that, as she’s no fan of ours either.)

But, y’know, Tory activist, not a nice person – no news there, right?

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George Osborne’s autumn mini-Budget is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be read late at night. The programme of swingeing cuts to public services it outlined would chill the blood of anyone with an ounce of compassion in their souls.

Fortunately, this site concerns itself chiefly with Scottish politics, so we can leave the full horror to others, turn away in fear and focus on a couple of decisions that are particularly interesting in a constitutional context.

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“We are agreed that the Scottish Parliament is permanent”:

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As we’re talking about surveys, opinion polls and statistics today, it seemed worth mentioning another one that’s come to our attention. Conducted earlier in the year by YouGov but only released today, it’s a vast poll done on behalf of the Co-operative and canvassed over 180,000 people, most of them through the Co-op’s own website.

It’s relevant to us because the Co-operative also runs a political party, which has representatives at both Westminster (31 MPs) and Holyrood (4). They’re little-known because the Co-op never stands in its own right, but in conjunction with Labour, so to all intents and purposes it’s a branch of the Labour Party, funded by Co-op customers.

And it turns out most of them don’t know that, and don’t like it when they find out.

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We’ve long known that Labour’s attachment to the Union was founded on the belief – though a statistically erroneous one – that it couldn’t form a secure UK government without the block of MPs (currently 40) that it sends to Westminster from Scotland.

But a fascinating article from YouGov president Peter Kellner on the YG website today suggests that the party’s desperate and eventually successful efforts to secure a No vote could turn out to be the most Pyrrhic victory of all time.

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