Wings Over Scotland

Archive for the ‘uk politics’

The pooling and the sharing 171

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

Gordon Brown is expected to be up on his hind legs again in the Commons today – a second appearance in a week that’ll almost certainly be the mainly-absent opposition backbencher’s busiest period of activity in Parliament since the 2010 election.

He’ll be inexplicably getting time to lay out his views on devolution again, despite having absolutely no power to implement them, and it seems reasonable to imagine that he’ll spend a fair bit of time on the contents of the infamous “vow” he brokered days before the Scottish independence referendum.

One line of that vow ran “We agree that the UK exists to ensure opportunity and security for all by sharing our resources equitably across all four nations”. And as “pooling and sharing resources” was Mr Brown’s catchphrase during the campaign, we thought it might be worthwhile taking a look at what that means in practice.

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Category analysis, comment, investigation, scottish politics, uk politics

Another holiday needed 308

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

By the time we’d watched the Commons debate on devolution for four and a quarter hours, precisely ONE non-Unionist MP (the SNP’s Pete Wishart) had been allowed to speak, for just six minutes. On learning there were still two more hours scheduled, we could take no more and bailed out like the Bank of England.

Clearly we weren’t the only ones.

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Category comment, uk politics

In poker we call this a rubdown 147

Posted on October 14, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

The much-awaited and hastily-extended Westminster debate on Scottish devolution is just about to start in the House of Commons. We’ll be watching it on the Parliament website rather than the BBC, for the obvious reasons.

Category comment, media, scottish politics, uk politics

Club membership increases 1,173

Posted on October 11, 2014 by Chris Cairns

Tags: cartoons Chris Cairns
Category scottish politics, uk politics

The jumping-off point 375

Posted on October 10, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

A few days ago (and by criteria unknown), Wings Over Scotland was deemed the third most influential politics blog in the UK, which was nice. The #1 was LabourList, which today published a piece on last night’s two election results.

So let’s talk about UKIP.

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Category comment, uk politics

By way of example 698

Posted on October 08, 2014 by Rev. Stuart Campbell

With reference to our post from earlier today, we couldn’t help but notice Scottish Labour whining loudly this morning about the award of the ScotRail franchise to Dutch state-owned railway company Abellio. (On what sound like very good terms.)

We asked the party’s infrastructure spokesman James Kelly what Labour would have done instead had they been in power, and got no reply. So we went and had a look, and it turned out there was a clear and simple answer.

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Tags: hypocrisy
Category analysis, comment, scottish politics, uk politics