Wings Over Scotland

(Real) email correspondence forwarded by an alert reader:

From: HARTY, Sam
Sent: 21 October 2014 16:58
To: MILIBAND, Ed
Subject: Official Copy of Vow

Dear Ed

Mr Clarke has a constituent who would like a formal copy of the Vow that was made prior to the Scottish Referendum.

Is it possible for your office to provide Tom with a copy for his constituent?

Thanking you in anticipation of your co-operation.

Regards

Sam

On behalf of

TOM CLARKE MP

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Owen Jones in the Guardian today:

“If Scottish Labour does indeed die, historians will ponder just how the party of Keir Hardie allowed itself to be outflanked on the left by a Scottish National Party committed to George Osborne-style cuts to corporation tax.”

You know where we’re going with this one, right?

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From the Twitter account of the Aberdeen Conservative and Unionist Association last night, during the First Minister’s appearance on Question Time from Liverpool:

Just a couple of things.

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Today’s Herald carries a report from the initial meeting of the Smith Commission on “enhanced devolution” for the Scottish Parliament. The paper quotes from what seems to be a press release issued by the Commission, in which it explains that it thinks the people of Scotland are idiotic, drooling simpletons who’ll swallow anything.

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The Labour-friendly elements of the press made much play yesterday of an Ipsos MORI poll which showed an unusually high level of support in the UK for remaining in the EU (while ignoring one by YouGov that showed a majority in favour of leaving).

But a piece in today’s Times throws the reality into sharp relief, and illustrates why the Yes movement hasn’t simply lain down and died after losing the referendum.

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Here’s Nick Clegg in many of today’s papers:

“Alex Salmond reminds me of a Japanese soldier found in the jungle 20 years after the war had finished, still ducking at every shadow, thinking the war was still on. At some point, you have to call it a day and accept that the people have spoken.

After a ferociously contested referendum that has dominated debate north of the border for years, not just months, there was a pretty emphatic result.

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This is a tough time to be writing analytically about Scottish politics, and for once we have a degree of empathy with our fellow journalists in the mainstream press. Very little worthy of discussion is actually happening, yet there are still pages to fill. Perhaps we should have taken a month off rather than two weeks.

That’s not to say that nothing NOTABLE is happening. The SNP more than tripling its membership in a month to the point where it may well be four times that of the three Unionist parties put together, for example, is a remarkable event, but there’s very little worthwhile to be said about it other than observing the simple fact. Nobody knows who these new members are, why they joined or what they want, and anyone speculating about it is just filling space with the sound of their own voice for the sake of it.

Similarly, discussing the Smith Commission report is mostly a pointless exercise. Its conclusions will be based on the submissions of the three Westminster parties – we can all, surely, discount the idea that any significant amount of the SNP’s contribution will be included – and those have been known since March.

And in any event, as we noted at the weekend, the Commission’s report will be an irrelevance. It’ll be followed in short order by a general election, and whichever party takes the keys to 10 Downing Street will not be bound by its conclusions. If the eventual devo package reflects the Commission’s findings it’ll be by pure electoral coincidence – if the Tories get in they’ll implement the Strathclyde Commission, and if it’s Labour it’ll be “devo nano”. (Why would either of them, having just won an election, voluntarily and needlessly compromise on their own preferred plan?)

So what to talk about?

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Preserved for posterity in case of sudden vanishing, but also because we just couldn’t face writing another post about “The Vow” today.

This is a real thing that you can buy on Amazon and iTunes. If you chose to be British last month, this is what “British” means in 2014. Enjoy it.

From a blog post by Hopi Sen, former head of campaigns at the Labour Party.

Scotland is one of the more dramatic areas of Labour decline (it’s now the party’s second-worst “region”), but it’s far from alone. Fewer than 80% of Labour’s 2010 general election supporters now say they’ll vote Labour in 2015. The party is shedding votes everywhere and in every demographic group, as the post notes in detail.

With barely six months to the election, Labour’s average poll lead down to around 1%, UKIP continuing to grow and the expected traditional incumbency effect, it’d be a brave voter indeed who’d put a fiver on the increasingly hapless Ed Miliband taking the keys to 10 Downing Street next year.

There’s a rather curious piece in today’s Sunday Times by the UK’s only known living psephologist, the estimable Prof. John Curtice of Strathclyde University. In it he rather blows his cover of impartiality by framing his comments as an anti-SNP warning, but nevertheless raises an interesting point, while adding to the enormous pressure on the unfortunate Smith Commission.

It’s worth taking a moment to ponder the impossibility of its task.

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The Guardian today carries an article by Gordon Brown, which echoes the content of his speech to the House Of Commons on Thursday. We’ve read it over and over again trying to make any sort of coherent sense out of it, but we’ve drawn a blank. The mighty architect of “The Vow” appears to have not the slightest idea what he actually proposes as a constitutional settlement for the UK and Scotland.

But perhaps we’ve missed something.

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The Evening Standard, 16 October 2014:

“George Osborne was today named the most influential person in London as the Chancellor topped the Evening Standard’s The 1000 power list, with Mayor Boris Johnson in second place.

The Evening Standard panel decided Mr Osborne is London’s most influential person because of his willingness to invest in the capital despite pressure for the Treasury to spend the money in other parts of Britain.”

Nice to know he’s looking after your money, isn’t it?