Wings Over Scotland

You can see the full unedited Kezia Dugdale interview with Gordon Brewer on today’s Sunday Politics Scotland at this link, so you can verify that the shortened edit below isn’t misrepresenting anything. But if you don’t have time or attention span for the full 20 minutes, this’ll give you the gist without all the desperate waffling.

We think readers will agree that there can no longer be so much as a scintilla of doubt over whether Kezia believes Jeremy Corbyn can lead Labour to victory.

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The press and social media today are frothing with excitement about a new Ipsos Mori poll for STV which shows (for the second poll in succession) Ruth Davidson scoring marginally higher approval ratings than Nicola Sturgeon.

But the problem is that that wasn’t what people were actually asked.

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As several alert readers have already spotted, our Twitter account was suspended at some point in the early hours of this morning. We’ve had no email from Twitter offering any sort of explanation, but it seems most likely to have been at the behest of a Daily Express hack called Siobhan McFadyen who’s been huffily bleating to the company’s executives over the weekend about this tweet:

The reason we tweeted that comment is detailed here and here. But apparently it’s an opinion that you’re no longer allowed to have.

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More or less since the morning of 19 September 2014, the Unionist parties in Scotland have kept up an unceasing chorus of “You lost! Accept it!” directed at the entire Yes movement, but primarily the SNP (despite the SNP having never to date disputed the result or called for a re-run of the referendum).

Readers may not be entirely astonished to discover this morning that at least as far as Scottish Labour are concerned, that principle only applies to other people.

Because we’re pretty sure there’s already a name for when political parties set out an “alternative programme of government”.

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This is the demented, McCarthyite state of madness the Labour Party has reached:

This is a party now openly rejecting anyone as a member who has ever supported any other party. We’d take a minute to try to explain to them how the arithmetic of that one works out, but they’re a long, long way beyond the grasp of reason now.

The Scottish media has worked itself into an indignant froth over the last few days about the appearance of Sputnik News – an Edinburgh-based arm of a publicly-owned, state-run Russian news agency, fronted by (among others) former Dateline Scotland and NewsShaft stars Jack Foster and Carolyn Scott.

(Any resemblance to publicly-owned, state-run national news agencies of questionable impartiality in other countries is of course entirely coincidental and totally different.)

The Sunday Herald ran a bizarre smear piece yesterday on the pair’s past fundraising initiatives for their two previous projects (which were obviously completely unrelated to Sputnik), and today’s Times has an even weirder column by Melanie Reid in which Foster and Scott are directly and startlingly compared to the Cuban Missile Crisis:

We tried, for the purposes of satire, to think of another country that played host to nuclear missiles that were controversially imposed on it by an external government, but unfortunately we couldn’t come up with anything. Sorry about that.

Annie Wells and Brian Whittle are two new Conservative MSPs. Look how happy and excited they are today at Labour winning a council by-election from the SNP.

The SNP candidate actually won comfortably on first-preference votes, but was edged out at the sixth count under the Single Transferable Vote system when 78% of Tory voters gave their second preference to Labour (whose own vote fell 7%).

We’re trying to think of a good reason why they’re still two separate parties, but to be honest with you, readers, we’re coming up short.

Posted without comment.

This is prospective Labour leader Owen Smith on the Andrew Marr show this morning, explaining why he’ll be one of the 65% of Labour MPs voting in favour of the renewal of Trident next week:

Let’s just see if we can get this straight once and for all.

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The UK is currently a non-functioning democracy. The Prime Minister has handed in his notice and has no nominated successor. The leader of the Opposition has just been served with a vote of no confidence by 80% of his own MPs. Parliamentarians are openly discussing overturning the result of a democratic referendum. People are pretending that Angela Eagle is a credible future Prime Minister.

The country, in short, has lost its mind.

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The people (of England) have spoken, and their elected representatives are freaking out all over the shop.

Several senior Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs have openly called for the result of a democratic referendum to be overturned by Parliament against the wishes of voters. The Prime Minister has quit, the Chancellor is expected to follow on Monday, and half of the Labour shadow cabinet is apparently doing it as we speak, after Jeremy Corbyn fired Hilary Benn for planning a coup.

(Apparently including Ian Murray, the shadow Scottish Secretary who’s also the only Scottish Labour MP at Westminster, putting the party in the farcical position of having to find itself a spokesman on Scottish affairs who either sits in an English or Welsh seat or is an unelected lord.)

Labour MPs are also demanding Corbyn’s head, in essence for the crime of his being hugely popular with the party’s membership for reflecting the old-fashioned left-wing ideology and views that they actually believe in, rather than the “moderate” neo-Tory position of Blairite parliamentarians. Corbyn shows no sign of going.

Two opinion polls, meanwhile, suggest that support for independence has taken the lead in Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon is quietly and calmly making arrangements with senior European officials to hold discussions about ways to keep Scotland in the EU – with the backing of Willie Rennie just in case any of the talks take place on a bouncy castle or a slide.

(The Daily Telegraph, which we must assume has been chatting to Alistair Carmichael again, is reporting that Sturgeon has joined the Tories and turned gay.)

It’s been suggested that the Scottish Parliament could in fact block any attempt by the UK to leave (though it seems unlikely). Britain faces a future without Milky Way Magic Stars. UK politics, to put it mildly, is in chaos.  So what the hell’s going on?

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So, just to recap this week’s events so far:

It’s now offensive to call gay people human beings, a Leave vote will destroy Western civilisation, a Remain vote will bring about an Orlando-style mass killing by Islamic terrorists, Ed Balls – whose party isn’t in government and who isn’t even an MP – has promised to cut immigration if we vote Remain, Alistair Darling has teamed up with George Osborne to deliver a Punishment Budget if we vote Leave (except that it won’t pass because 57 Tory MPs will vote against it), Jeremy Corbyn led the last Prime Minister’s Questions before the EU referendum by asking about the Leveson Inquiry, and Bob Geldof is conducting a naval battle on the Thames with Nigel Farage.

Did we miss anything?