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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Today’s Herald reveals that the new Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Frank McAveety (who was last seen in the headlines leering at a 15-year-old girl visiting the Scottish Parliament), has hired Bob Wylie as a special adviser.
Wylie was communications director of the scandal-riddled Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), which readers may recall from last year’s banning of an advertising campaign for this site on the city’s Underground after receiving one complaint about it.
But he’s somewhat more famous for his part in an expenses junket which saw several of the quango’s senior management bill taxpayers for a 2008 “fact-finding” mission to Manchester whose timing just happened to coincide with the UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg being played in the same city.
Wylie’s appointment follows the controversy which arose when Labour gave convicted drunken arsonist Mike Watson a job as education spokesman in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. And the two hirings threw some light on a thought we’d been thinking since reading a Kevin McKenna column in last weekend’s Observer.