Yesterday we listed some of the nastier items from George Osborne’s horrifying 2015 budget that Labour had said they wouldn’t be opposing, including the public-sector payrise freeze, the reduction in the benefit cap and the slashing of child tax credit for families with more than two children.
On a BBC hustings debate today, Yvette Cooper extended the list.
The first five words of “The Vow” – the solemn pledge made by all three UK party leaders on the eve of the independence referendum – are “The Scottish Parliament is permanent”. This is what happened in the House of Commons this evening when the UK government was asked to make good on that pledge.
Is what we’re all about. Here’s David Mundell speaking during a fascinating Scotland Bill debate in the House of Commons this evening:
We should probably fact-check that, shouldn’t we? That’s what we do.
For the last month or so, the Unionist parties have briefly enjoyed the opportunity to taunt the SNP in the Commons over Full Fiscal Autonomy, challenging the party to bring forward proposals and accusing it of being afraid of the policy it campaigned and won on in the election. The Nats called the bluff, and today got the unsurprising result.
The reason given by Secretary of State David Mundell – who declined to appear on today’s edition of “Good Morning Scotland” to defend or explain the decision – was that FFA “would cost every family in Scotland £5,000”.
And we thought that figure had a rather familiar ring to it.
We’ve already brought you the First Minister’s appearance on last night’s The Daily Show in the US, but in addition to the seven minutes that were shown on TV there were a further seven minutes of interview which didn’t go out on air, but were shown on the Comedy Central website, region-blocked so only US residents could see them.
When the FM goes abroad to represent Scotland in the outside world, though, we think it’s only fair that Scots get to see what she’s saying and doing on their behalf, so we didn’t let such trifling obstacles get in our way.
The likely next Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale on today’s Sunday Politics:
We’ll try to keep this brief, because we want to go to the seaside.
The current Scottish Secretary, David Mundell, on Politics Scotland earlier today:
“I was not convicted”, of course, isn’t quite the same thing as “I didn’t do it”.
Many of you won’t have seen this quite extraordinary performance from the Guardian’s assistant editor Michael White on last night’s Scotland Tonight, and you really should.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
