Wings Over Scotland

There’s absolutely no news today – Scottish politics already seems to have packed up for Christmas – so why not watch a nice documentary instead?

Altered States has been available in episode form for a wee while now, but McMaster Media have kindly put together a full-length cut exclusively for Wings Over Scotland.

It’s a fascinating analysis with lots of insightful chat from – among others – the likes of Derek Bateman, Paul “Wee Ginger Dug” Kavanagh, James “Scot Goes Pop” Kelly and Christopher Silver, to whose pre-indyref “Scotland Yet” it’s basically a post-indyref counterpart, and it’s a perfect way to pass a slow, rainy Sunday.

Tonight we watched as the conclusion of a “debate” in the UK Parliament saw the “opposition”, almost unprecedentedly, sum up the same case as the government, to roof-raising cheers and applause (which is now apparently permitted again) from the Conservative benches for a Labour shadow minister.

We were rather put in mind of a famous Neil Kinnock speech from 1985.

Alex Salmond in the Syria debate with the non-pacifist case against bombing.

(Features brief cameo appearance from Alberto Costa MP, noted twat.)

To mark the day that we both appeared in the Herald’s “Power 100” list of “The leading Scots who shape our lives” – and she had another go at trolling us – we’d like to dedicate this wonderful tune sincerely to the popular children’s author JK Rowling:

We’ll try to understand her problems more sensitively in future.

We don’t often bring you footage of an Armed Forces Committee session in the US Senate, readers, but this spellbinding six minutes of questioning from a Republican senator on the subject of military action against ISIS doesn’t miss and hit the wall.

(We should note that Sen. Graham is a hawk who wants ISIS bombed back to the Stone Age. But even he can see the insane, irrational nature of the action currently being proposed, which would leave Syria a shattered mess but firmly in the hands of a murderous Russian-backed dictator conducting a ruinous, destabilising civil war.)

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Scottish Labour were unambiguous: VOW DELIVERED IN FULL!

And who could disagree?

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What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.

Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.

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The tiny number of people who watch the BBC Parliament channel is undoubtedly a blessing to the parties of the Union. We’ll be bringing you some eye-opening excerpts from today’s Scotland Bill debate later, but as a taster here’s one brief exchange.

Alberto Costa, the Scottish-born Conservative MP for South Leicestershire (of whom we’ll be seeing much more in a bit), is heard loudly expressing his satisfaction that not a single Scottish MP of any party (nor indeed any from Wales or Northern Ireland) has been permitted to sit on the Joint Committee discussing the government’s plan to scrap the Human Rights Act, although six unelected peers do get places.

When challenged, Costa explains that he’s happy about it because it’s a matter reserved to the “United Kingdom Parliament”. The fact that he apparently doesn’t consider any Scottish members elected to that parliament to have any business with its affairs is perhaps rather more revealing than Mr Costa intended it to be.

It’s been such an exciting, action-packed week for Scottish Labour since a dynamic and thrusting PPB launched the 2015 branch-office conference that we worried there might be a danger people had forgotten it already. So we’ve brought it back for a curtain call, in a version a bit more appropriate for what remains of their core vote.

Never mind the zeitgeist, feel the width.

The video clip below is from Russia Today, which is in no way an impartial news outlet. However, it’s dangerous and unwise to reflexively dismiss any message purely because of the medium. Heck, even the Daily Mail tells the truth sometimes.

That’s because the messenger in this case is Major General Patrick Cordingley DSO, a highly distinguished British Army veteran commander who led the invasion of Iraq in the first Gulf War in 1991, and who before the second one in 2003 (by which time he’d retired) had a very perceptive view of both the battle and the likely aftermath.

When we join the clip he’s discussing the USA.

His views are expert and worth listening to. (The full interview is here.) Readers can, as ever, decide for themselves whether to believe him or David Cameron.

Kezia Dugdale spoke for almost exactly 45 minutes to the Scottish Labour conference in Perth today. But we know you’re busy people who don’t want to sit through all of that, and that you trust us to endure it on your behalf so that we can sift through it and present you with only the important bits.

So we recorded the whole thing, then edited out all the bits that were just “SNP BAD” (that one’s a real time-saver), all the empty rhetoric, all the non-specific pledges to make everything be cuddly and fabulous, and all the uncosted, impractical, half-baked policy ideas that have no hope of ever being put into practice.

In the end we got it down to under 10 minutes.

No need to thank us. It’s what we do.