Wings Over Scotland

This one rather speaks for itself.

(Data below from our latest Panelbase poll.)

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What Unionists insisted was the biggest and most important parliamentary transfer of powers to a devolved government anywhere in the world was squeezed into five and a half hours of debate time in the House Of Commons tonight, approximately two hours of which were taken up by Westminster’s farcical voting system.

Of the remaining three and a bit hours, a third of the time was taken up by the three MPs you can see video of at the bottom of this post. We know it’s a lot to ask to watch an hour of politicians deliberately trolling Scotland, but if you didn’t see the debate live it’s about the minimum you need to get an accurate sense of the tone.

At the end of it all, a small number of things had been decided.

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So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

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Alert readers will probably already be familiar with the philosophical proposition of Schrödinger’s cat. (The less alert can click the link for a short and easy primer.) The hypothetical experiment posited by 20th-century Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has entered into popular culture. But increasingly and disturbingly, it’s also becoming the guiding principle of mainstream media journalism.

Certain viewers should steel themselves at this point, because we’re about to briefly talk about football before moving on to other things later in the article. You can consider that your trigger warning. We’ll let you know when it’s over.

The lines above were issued to the press yesterday by The Rangers International Football Club plc, a football club (the clue’s in the name) formed in 2012, yet which lays claim to the history and achievements of a previous club of a similar name which was liquidated for bankruptcy the same year, having been formed in 1872.

And eagle-eyed logic fans may have spotted something of a contradiction.

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We had an interesting conversation last night with someone who was prepared, quite legitimately, to credit Scottish Labour with a little more good faith over their proposed plan to mitigate Tory tax credit cuts than we were. But we had a lot of trouble coming to an agreement over the arithmetic, and we tend to think that backs up our cynicism.

Labour have presented their supposed funding for the policy in an incredibly dishonest and disingenuous way, and it seems to have confused the media to the point where nobody in the print or broadcast media has challenged what appears to be a huge and (to us at least) incredibly obvious gaping hole in the finances.

Let’s walk through it one more time.

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Here’s Kezia Dugdale back in August:

“Too many people in Scotland tell us that they just don’t know what Labour stands for anymore. Under my leadership there will be no doubt what we stand for and who we stand with.”

So thank goodness that’s all been cleared up.

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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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Kezia Dugdale spoke for almost exactly 45 minutes to the Scottish Labour conference in Perth today. But we know you’re busy people who don’t want to sit through all of that, and that you trust us to endure it on your behalf so that we can sift through it and present you with only the important bits.

So we recorded the whole thing, then edited out all the bits that were just “SNP BAD” (that one’s a real time-saver), all the empty rhetoric, all the non-specific pledges to make everything be cuddly and fabulous, and all the uncosted, impractical, half-baked policy ideas that have no hope of ever being put into practice.

In the end we got it down to under 10 minutes.

No need to thank us. It’s what we do.

When we watched Kezia Dugdale’s toe-curling moment on this week’s Question Time, we were immediately reminded of a mesmerising passage in Jon Savage’s masterful 1991 history of punk rock “England’s Dreaming”, in which he gives an account of the last ever Sex Pistols concert, at Winterland in San Francisco in 1978.

And like the show, Dugdale’s week just kept getting worse.

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Asking the question is the easy bit: “If the all-new, super-autonomous Scottish Labour decides to oppose the renewal of Trident, and UK Labour continues to support it, which way do Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster vote on it?”

The answer, unsurprisingly, was a lot more difficult to ascertain.

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Kezia Dugdale in the Scottish Daily Mail this morning:

“We’re not like the SNP. This isn’t a party of robots that are given a chip and told what to think.”

Twitter’s response is below.

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Labour put out a press release yesterday a few hours before the tax credits fiasco. It concerned the much-ballyhooed new arrangements for Scottish Labour “autonomy”, of exactly the sort that the branch office has been telling us it already had ever since the election of Johann Lamont as leader in 2011.

We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.

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