Wings Over Scotland

We suppose we shouldn’t technically be surprised that today’s newspapers carry no analysis whatsoever of Kezia Dugdale’s big speech yesterday detailing Scottish Labour’s first big election pledge – a £6000 handout to first-time home buyers.

After all, current polling suggests Scottish Labour have about as much chance of exerting any influence in the next Scottish Parliament as Lemmy has of posthumously winning the Eurovision Song Contest, so it doesn’t really matter if Kezia Dugdale promises every voter a free unicorn made of diamonds and glitter.

Still, if only for the mental exercise, it’s worth taking a look in detail.

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As politics wakes up from the holidays, any readers still bothering to gaze at the pages of the Scottish media could be forgiven for a crushing sense of deja vu.

In more senses than one.

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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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The National today has a story we’ve been sitting on for several days while we tried to get some verifiable evidence in the form of links or screenshots to back it up.

But Labour aren’t the only people having trouble scaring up a candidate roster.

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It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.

(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)

So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.

It turned out that we were wrong.

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This is the lead Politics story in morning’s Herald:

And, y’know, we’re fairly confident that’s true.

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For reasons which defy all known science, John McTernan remains the first number on the BBC’s speed-dial list when they need a commentator to represent Labour views. It’s a remarkable editorial decision, given that McTernan despises the party’s current leadership almost beyond words, and it doesn’t seem too fond of him either.

But on today’s Good Morning Scotland, McTernan really kicked it up a notch.

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Yesterday George Osborne treated us to an Autumn Statement in which he performed one of the most remarkable political U-turns in living memory.

The apparent need to cut £12bn from the welfare budget has long been sign-posted by the Tories as a requirement to getting us “back in the black” and on the road to a “higher wage, lower welfare, lower tax” society as part of their oft-cited “long-term economic plan”. (Or what academic economists prefer to call a “risky experiment with the economy in order to score political points“.)

Alert readers will recall David Cameron saying before the general election that child tax credits wouldn’t be cut in pursuit of that goal. But after the election, Osborne decided that they would. The Institute for Fiscal Studies determined that these cuts would have the worst effects on some of the poorest families in Britain.

Despite widespread opposition to the cuts, Labour infamously abstained on the critical vote in the Commons. Then, when the welfare bill reached the Lords, Labour once again abstained on a Lib Dem motion that would have completely killed the bill, in favour of a Labour one which phased in the cuts over three years, but meant Osborne would have to find another £4.5bn in his budget.

The passing of the Labour motion enraged Cameron so much that he went on an extraordinary rant about a “constitutional crisis” and announced a “rapid review”.

So we were somewhat surprised to hear Osborne say yesterday that the best thing to do was “not to phase these changes in, but to avoid them altogether”.

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At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale oddly chose to spend her entire allotted time not on any current issues affecting Scotland, but on attacking the SNP’s 2013 White Paper on independence, seemingly unaware that the referendum was held 14 months ago and resulted in a win for the No side.

Happily for Scotland, that decision resulted in a huge £200bn oil bonanza.

Hang on, let’s just double-check that to be sure.

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The Daily Record has this on its front page today.

And that’s fine. The tale of a five-figure sum of money which might (or might not) have gone missing from the accounts of Women For Independence, who’ve promptly called the police to investigate an apparent discrepancy between their donated income and their expenditure, is entirely legitimate news.

But we couldn’t help wondering something.

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We’ve been pondering this week whether or not to hold a quick fundraiser to pay the £750 fine levied on us recently by the Electoral Commission for being a bit late with some indyref paperwork, readers.

(Our feeling is that there’s still plenty money left in the Wings War Chest from this year’s big crowdfunder, but lots of people have specifically asked for one for the fine, mainly to make a point to both the Commission and the little army of Unionist trolls who almost exploded with glee when the news came out late last month.)

But we’re not sure we can compete with this.

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The Additional Member System by which the Scottish Parliament elects its MSPs is a fascinating construct. One of its functions, at least in theory, is to ensure that every party gets its best and brightest talents into the Holyrood chamber, by providing them with a “second chance” in the form of the regional lists.

The Conservatives, for example, would be hard pushed to ever get their leader elected if they could only contest constituency seats. Ruth Davidson got a pitiful 1,845 votes in Glasgow Kelvin in 2011, and whatever you think of the Tories it’s hard to dispute that she’s one of their more able operators. (Faint praise though that may be.)

One weakness of the system is that regional MSPs are sometimes seen as “second class” members, having been personally (and in Davidson’s case, comprehensively) rejected by the electorate but still snuck in against the voters’ wishes under cover of the list. But in the current era of remarkable domination by the SNP, for the opposition it’s increasingly being chosen to fight for a constituency that’s the booby prize.

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