Wings Over Scotland

The Herald, 1 June 2014:

“[A] YouGov poll compiled by Better Together suggests most Scots want to share pensions and benefits across the UK. Labour released the findings ahead of the launch of its referendum campaign, due to take place at a rally in Glasgow on Tuesday.

Scottish leader Johann Lamont will be joined by former prime minister Gordon Brown at the event. 

Ms Lamont said: ‘According to this Better Together polling, most Scots understand that our pensions and benefits are better being backed across the United Kingdom, spread across 60 million people rather than six million.'”

We’ll let Johann’s rather shaky grasp of the UK and Scottish population sizes slide on this occasion – she taught English, not maths or geography. The important thing is that the No vote in the referendum assured that benefits would remain a central, shared and uniform facet of British life. Right?

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There was a very disturbing opinion poll published by YouGov earlier this year and recently highlighted by the pollster, which took 16 policy propositions across a variety of subjects and set them against each other in a sort of Politics World Cup to find out the British public’s priorities. The result was predictable but no less depressing for it.

By some chillingly large margins, the policy the people of the UK want implemented more than any other is the spiteful removal of the right to benefits for new immigrants. (We suspect that if the question had offered the option of withdrawing benefits from immigrants full stop it wouldn’t have changed the figures much.)

And we couldn’t help wondering how big a deal that really was.

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Labour shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves on Sunday Politics.

Did you spot what she got wrong, readers?

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Earlier today we published an email from Daily Record editor Murray Foote about “The Vow”. In it he referred to an editorial published in the paper on 8 September, attacking the “confused” and “shambolic” position of the three Unionist parties on further devolution to Scotland in the event of a No vote.

The infamous “Vow” was their response. When publishing it on 16 September, two days before the referendum, the Record announced on its front page that “NOW VOTERS CAN MAKE AN INFORMED CHOICE”, thereby implying that “The Vow” had delivered what the 8 September editorial had demanded.

Readers can judge for themselves.

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To his credit, Ed Miliband seems to have noticed that his party is crumbling beneath his feet. The rot is spreading down from Scotland, and Labour’s vote in Rochester & Strood – a seat it held, with slightly different boundaries, as recently as 2010 – has plummeted to just 16% despite voters in the constituency naming the NHS (usually Labour’s strongest field) as their top priority.

And when modern-day Labour panics, it reaches for a little hammer and smashes the glass on a box marked “IN CASE OF ABSOLUTE EMERGENCY TRY SOCIALISM”, in which it keeps a very old, moth-eaten piece of paper titled “House of Lords reform”.

So today Miliband suddenly pulled what seems to be a brand-new box-fresh policy out of – well, let’s be polite and say “the ether”.

The Lords is to be abolished, we’re told, and replaced with a new elected “Senate”, which will conveniently also serve as some  form of regional devolution, though its specific responsibilities and powers have – readers will doubtless be quite astonished to hear – not been laid out.

Mr Miliband’s only problem will be getting anyone to believe it.

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We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.

And you’d think that’d be bigger news.

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This morning’s Daily Record has a rather panicky-sounding editorial complaining that Yes supporters, from the First Minister down, are refusing to “move on” from the referendum result and are complaining about “betrayal”, especially in the light of yesterday’s joke of a Commons debate. The Record calls for unity and also talks, hilariously, of the “settled will of the Scottish people”.

(What is it, exactly, that the will of the Scottish people is meant to have settled on, given that they had and still have no idea which powers a No vote would bring?)

It rather smacks of the accused in a murder trial saying “Look, sure, I killed and butchered your wife and children, but that was MONTHS ago, let’s just forget about it and get back to normal”, but it’s not actually the point.

Because it’s not the referendum result that most people feel betrayed by. It’s not even the behaviour of the Unionist parties since the vote.

The entity in the dock here is the Daily Record itself – which still claims to be the most-read newspaper in Scotland, although the Scottish Sun sells more copies – and it’s charged with the serious crime of knowingly and deliberately lying to the people of Scotland, while proclaiming itself to be their “Champion”.

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Scottish Labour and “Better Together” have clearly decided to go out all guns blazing with their pitiable last-ditch desperation slogan “If you don’t know, vote No”.

Blair McDougall faithfully recited it on “Good Morning Scotland”, and the leaflet on the left-hand side of the image below was being shoved through people’s doors last night. (Complete with the English, not Scottish, NHS logo. Classy touch.)

That the once-proud party of the people (and its Tory funders) have reached such a low point as to be telling voters to vote in ignorance rather than finding out the facts speaks for itself. We have a different view.

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Yeah, again.

Do we even need to bother?

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The below appears to be Magnus Gardham’s column in today’s Herald.

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We couldn’t help but notice Labour peer, Stalin-moustache enthusiast and celebrity Bobby Ball lookalike Lord/Baron Robert Winston standing at the front of the party’s boorish stag-party gathering of MPs and MSPs in Glasgow yesterday, as Ed Miliband railed against the dastardly SNP and insisted that the NHS wasn’t under threat.

(We didn’t see Andy Burnham among the MPs in the footage, so we assume he was still down in London telling anyone who’ll listen that the NHS is under threat.)

And we couldn’t help wondering whether the peer’s presence was a tacit endorsement by Miliband of his proposal to charge people £120 a year to visit their GP.

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Yesterday the three UK party leaders all came to Scotland to “campaign”. None of them would appear in public or be interviewed on TV, speaking only to small crowds of invited supporters before scurrying south again. Nevertheless, their fleeting presence north of the border meant that the weekly Prime Minister’s Questions was conducted by substitutes. Standing in for David Cameron was William Hague.

So that’s all a bit clearer now.

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