It’s 4.36am. I’m going to go to bed in a minute. I’m hoping that I get up in a few hours and laugh at this, delighted at my own unfounded pessimism.
Following our news report at the weekend that Kezia Dugdale had gone to the USA to help Hillary Clinton, a concerned reader etc etc with inevitable results etc.
Saturday 11.34am:
Saturday 8.02pm:
Wow, that’s fast. We can only assume she took John McTernan with her.
From a ridiculous piece by Hadley Freeman in today’s Guardian:
Actually, we’re pretty sure it isn’t and we can.
It’s long been a bone of contention for Scots – and not just nationalists – that the UK government, by common agreement, wasted the vast wealth windfall of the North Sea on funding Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s programme of deliberate de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, huge tax cuts for the wealthy and bribes to the working class in the form of Right To Buy.
It did so rather than investing the proceeds in a sovereign wealth fund, as demanded by the SNP (and some elements of Labour) and practiced in Norway, whose fund – only set up in 1990 – is now a literal embarrassment of riches.
But the reality is even worse than that. Because according to a 2015 report by the National Resource Governance Institute that’s just come to our attention, the truth is that if the UK had managed its North Sea treasure better, it could have done both.
The short version is “Everything Tony Blair said was a lie”. The full report can be read in 58 sections at the inquiry’s website here, but in the quite likely event that it gets swamped today we’ve uploaded the entire thing as a single convenient RAR file here.
[EDIT: individual sections now compiled into the print version’s 12 volumes.]
Today we’re a boxing site, and that’s all there is to it.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
