Wings Over Scotland

Pointing out the spectacular levels of imbecility among Scotland’s elected Tories has threatened to become a full-time job for this website in recent months. We wish we could say that today’s example was even a particularly noteworthy one, but tragically it’s about par for the course.

Today’s Scottish Daily Mail leads with a rather limp piece about some fairly minor and unavoidable loopholes in the new legislation for minimum alcohol pricing. It notes, for example, that if people order alcohol online and it’s despatched by the supplier from outside Scotland, the Scottish Government will have no jurisdiction over the price.

(Because the UK has no internal border controls and there’s no law against someone buying cheaper booze in England and bringing it home to Scotland.)

Retailers, of course, can easily block this loophole if they choose to, by refusing to deliver cheap alcohol purchases to Scottish addresses, so it’s not much of a problem.

And the other “loopholes” aren’t actually loopholes at all – one*, according to the Mail, is that “loyalty reward vouchers can also continue to be offered to cut the cost of alcohol”, which is a bit like saying it’s a “loophole” that employers could give people pay rises that they might use to buy more beer.

But if you thought THAT was stupid, Annie Wells MSP is here to raise the bar.

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From here:

(NB These rules do not apply to Andrew Neil, Nick Robinson, etc etc. Like, duh. In a properly democratic country we’d be able to use FOI to actually see the blacklist, but this is the BBC we’re talking about.)

Because we have no words.

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Last night – at the insistence of the SNP – the House Of Commons held a six-hour emergency debate in the wake of the UK’s unquestionably illegal bombing of Syria at the weekend, under the supposed justification of a chemical attack that may well not have happened at all, far less have been the responsibility of the unfortunate country’s murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad.

(Loony left-wing conspiracy theorists casting doubt on Assad’s responsibility for what happened – or didn’t happen – in Douma include, er, Major General Jonathan Shaw, the former head of the UK’s special forces, and Admiral Lord West, the former First Sea Lord under Tony Blair and Minister For Security And Counter-Terrorism in Gordon Brown’s government.)

The debate concluded with a token vote, not on whether the bombing was right or wrong but which merely asserted whether Parliament had “considered” the subject. (ie voting that it had NOT done so would have made a statement that the Prime Minister acted improperly by committing UK forces to a conflict without obtaining MPs’ assent.)

Faced with the opportunity to issue a symbolic public rebuke to the government for bypassing Parliament on a matter of war and breaking international law, the radical socialist opposition Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn… abstained.

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Scotland’s political opposition and media, today:

There can surely be no country on Earth cursed and plagued with a more pathetic shower of petty, whining, gossiping harpies in those roles than Scotland. And while we knew that already, barely a day seems to go by without them reaching a new nadir.

If you’ve got the stomach to hear about the latest low point, grit your teeth, lower your expectations of humanity considerably and read on.

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Yes, we know the Express announces a “killer blow” to independence every couple of weeks. But otherwise we can think of nothing to add to this story, so just click the pic to read and enjoy.

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In one way or another, a lot of politics is being played out in courts at the moment. Whether it’s Spain trying to crush the Catalonian independence movement, America frantically trying to impeach its President before he does something REALLY crazy or the UK trying to redefine the most basic of human freedoms out of existence without ever putting an act before Parliament, judges are having as much say as ministers in deciding the future shape of Western civilisation.

Of the most direct interest to Scotland, of course, are the UK government’s attempts to trample all over the 20-year-old devolution settlement.

The urgency of the situation, with Brexit now less than a year away, has driven the Yes movement into one of its occasional paroxysms of dispute about when a second independence referendum should be attempted, with SNP MP Pete Wishart attracting some overheated opprobrium by warning against acting in haste, and in the process serving up a juicy gift-wrapped opportunity for Unionists and a news-starved media.

But the furore masks a key issue that the Yes movement – and more crucially, the Scottish Government – has failed to address for the last three years, and which it’s really going to have to deal with at some point.

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The accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers – last seen charging the taxpayer an eye-watering £20.4m for just eight weeks’ work during the collapse of Carillion – today published a report into the declining number of high-street retail outlets in the UK.

BBC Scotland was keen to put a regional slant on it.

According to the article, Scotland had put in the worst performance in the country. But that didn’t appear to be what the report said at all.

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The front page of today’s Scottish Daily Mail:

The problem: it’s completely and utterly made up.

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This was the front page of yesterday’s Scotsman:

As is often the case with Scottish newspapers these days, the story was based entirely on a fantasy – IF a certain number of people did a certain thing (flee to England to escape a 1p income tax rise), which the story doesn’t provide a shred of evidence to suggest they’re going to do, then a bad thing would happen.

But that wasn’t the weird bit.

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So, yeah, this happened:

The new crowdfunding platform we used this year is a curious and arcane beast, and as a result the honest truth is that we’re still not quite 100% certain what the precise final total (including “offsite” donations and a few that squeezed in after the technical deadline) is. But as best as we can make out, including everything, it’s this:

£153,215

And, y’know, good heavens.

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