Wings Over Scotland

Thanks to the Scottish Daily Mail, we’ve just spotted a piece by the Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin for City AM a few days ago. We had an inordinate amount of trouble getting the full article to display past the site’s incredibly over-zealous advert enforcer, so we’ve preserved it for posterity here.

There’s a gem in every paragraph. You’re going to like this one.

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Okay, we’ll make this quick.

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This tweet mysteriously vanished from Blair McDougall’s Twitter timeline last night:

We’re not sure why, as we know that Scottish Labour love nothing more than to attack the Scottish Government (no matter how ham-fistedly) over education.

And we’re pretty sure it’s not because McDougall felt guilty about picking out only the negative aspects of what Scotland’s biggest teaching union called a “largely positive picture” of the state of Scottish education – and which the OECD itself said contained “much to be positive about” – because if there’s one thing we know for sure about Blair it’s that his conscience isn’t troubled by misleading people.

Our best guess was that even he was just too embarrassed at having made an attack line out of the fact that 20% of the country’s schools were “only” rated “satisfactory”, thereby implying that “satisfactory” status was actually in some way unsatisfactory.

In doing so, of course, he was echoing the words of his hapless leader Kezia Dugdale, who in September told the Holyrood chamber that “no parent wants a satisfactory education for their child”. Maybe McDougall just realised belatedly that he was reading from the wrong month’s script.

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A strange phenomenon we’ve remarked upon a few times since the independence referendum is the inexplicable undying rage of a certain subset of Unionist voters.

Having won the vote, a casual observer might expect them to be happy, but instead they appear to exist in a constant state of fury.

(Our own best guess is that they were expecting to triumph by a crushing margin of two or three to one – some fretted that it might only be a 20-point victory – and then suffered the double blow of a much closer result that kept the Yes movement very much alive coupled with a massive surge in SNP membership and support.)

A demented anti-SNP tactical-voting campaign for this year’s general election – led by, among others, a frothing ultra-Loyalist-nutter-type by the name of Andrew Skinner – recorded one of the most spectacular failures in history as the Nats captured 56 out of 59 Scottish seats, only narrowly missing the other three, and the party’s poll ratings have continued to rise since then.

So this week, Mr Skinner decided to try for a more manageable target.

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This one rather speaks for itself.

(Data below from our latest Panelbase poll.)

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When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.

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This is amazing, readers. It’s an extract from this afternoon’s The Big Debate on Radio Scotland, in which a journalist – the BBC’s Gordon Brewer – finally gets round to asking someone from Scottish Labour how they can make the extra £500m they need to fund their tax-credits “policy” while keeping all taxes the same.

The answer… well, the answer is quite something.

(The Big Debate, BBC Radio Scotland, 6 November 2015)
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You might have to listen through a few times to get your head round it, because that really is what a grown woman actually tried to get away with in front of a live audience.

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Some of you may not have seen this from last night, and it needs to be seen.

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…from today’s Daily Record.

Honestly, they’re really in there.

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A convention of the world’s finest satirists pulling a 24-hour shift on Red Bull couldn’t come up with anything to beat Labour’s position on renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. Following an overwhelming vote at the Scottish Labour conference this afternoon, these are the current cut-out-and-keep standings:

But it’s even better than that.

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Was feeling a bit left out as the only person involved in the independence debate who hadn’t been accused of being in the pay of MI5. But no more!

Thank goodness for thirsty old Ian.

Even the alertest readers will probably already be confused by the baffling tale of Douglas and Jacqueline Wright, who sold their home to Edinburgh West MP Michelle Thomson. We certainly were last night, but on delving a little more into the media coverage of their story, things got a whole lot worse.

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