Wings Over Scotland

There’s a remarkable piece in today’s Times about Stefan Cross, the lawyer working for the women in the Glasgow City Council equal-pay dispute. (For example it’s over 1500 words long but the word “Labour” doesn’t appear a single time, despite the party having controlled the council for the entire 20 years or so the dispute covers.)

The most interesting passage, though, is this one.

Because the story reveals that the GMB, an ultra-loyalist Labour and Unionist trade union, did absolutely everything in its power to obstruct and hamper the women’s claims until the spring of 2017, at which point the union experienced a Damascene conversion and threw their weight fully behind the women and against the council.

If only there’d been some fundamental alteration in the nature of the council around a year and a half ago which could explain such a “complete cultural change” in the GMB’s attitude and enthusiasm for equality, eh readers?

Apologies for the shortage of content in the last couple of days, folks. The 10-year-old Wings PC has been wheezing and groaning and emitting smoke for a few weeks, but it’s now reached a point where we can barely keep it from crashing for five minutes at a time, and we’ve run out of sticking plasters (and stuff to delete on its tiny C drive to give it a bit of cache space and stop it falling over clutching theatrically at its throat).

(Don’t even get us started on a rant about all the idiot software that insists on stealthily clogging it up with mysterious useless bloat but won’t work anywhere but the C drive. Who knew it was even possible to hate iTunes any more than we already did?)

We ordered a new one a while back, but until it gets here we might be a bit light on anything that involves a lot of typing, linking or formatting. Please bear with us.

And we do mean rank. It’s been quite a week already for super-hapless Labour MP Hugh Gaffney, but he excelled himself today when joining in with Scottish Labour’s campaign to resist building a new hospital in Gartcosh (which is the recommendation of an independent NHS panel), rather than on the site of the current one in Monklands.

(And yes, that is the same one Labour wanted to shut down in 2007.)

Because it wasn’t terribly long ago that he took a rather different view.

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In many ways the Glasgow equal-pay dispute feels like the impotent final fury of the dinosaurs after the dust cloud of a prehistoric asteroid impact blacked out the sun and condemned them all to death.

What we’re seeing now is a futile howl of rage against irrelevance by the shady cabal of Labour politicians and senior trade union officials who used to treat the city as their personal fiefdom, as they sink into inglorious extinction.

We highly recommend clicking that link to read the whole series of tweets from Labour member and solicitor Ian Smart, who readers won’t need reminding is no sort of friend of the SNP or inclined to their defence. Because the story goes much deeper than the common-or-garden hypocrisy we saw yesterday.

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We don’t know whether Sky News’ senior Scotland correspondent James Matthews recognised double-jobbing Labour MP and councillor Hugh Gaffney on today’s strike march in Glasgow or not. (We suspect he did, but as Gaffney’s only been an MP for a year and a half we can’t be sure.)

What’s certain is that he gave him plenty of time, opportunity and cues to disclose who he was, and Gaffney didn’t take any of them, leading to this extraordinary clip.

Which is, y’know, pretty bold.

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On the face of it, this stuff is like shooting fish in a barrel.

But let’s treat it with more dignity than it deserves and hear her out.

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The indyref sometimes caused feelings to run rather high, and people on both sides made themselves very unpopular with those on the other side. But four years of water has flowed under the bridge since then, and not everyone is still in the same trenches.

Some high-profile names have switched to from No to Yes (often but not exclusively as a result of Brexit), and the reception afforded to floor-crossers like Murray Foote, Eric Joyce, Jackie Kemp, Mike Dailly, Tom Morton and Simon Pia hasn’t always been an entirely warm one, with some unable to keep a lid on their old grudges.

And in a similar vein, some of the remarks in recent days on the reported switch to Yes of Billy Connolly – a few from people I thought better of – are deeply offensive and potentially deeply damaging.

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Today:

But that’s only fair, because after all – oh:

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Well well, look who suddenly believes in second referendums.

It’s fascinating to note how you can completely reverse Kezia Dugdale’s position on the subject simply by substituting the word “Scotland” for the words “the UK” in that second tweet, and imagine she was talking about the independence march in heavily-Remain-voting Edinburgh earlier this month instead of the (proportionately smaller) one in London yesterday.

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The BBC’s Scottish politics website today prominently carries this story:

Our famously alert readers may recall as far back as five-and-a-half months ago, which was the last time the Scottish media tried to whip up demented scare stories about baby boxes, which have been given to every new mother in Finland for approximately 70 years and caused absolutely no documented problems.

So what’s fresh about the story to justify this significant new coverage? Let’s see.

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