It’s embarrassing to even have to point it out, to be honest.
Yet just six months later, with nothing having changed, everything had changed:
But when it comes to Unionist politics in Scotland, embarrassment is the default state.
We stuck this short clip up on YouTube yesterday as a throwaway while watching the Labour conference in slack-jawed astonishment (a visitor from an alien planet would have concluded it was the gathering of a party that had just won a landslide victory, not lost its third general election in a row), but on reflection it deserves a proper post.
If you know anything at all about the story of how female Glasgow City Council employees have fought for equal pay, you’ll probably be as outraged as we are at Baxter’s bulletproof brass neck. But the video actually demonstrates what appears to be Scottish Labour’s master strategy for winning back Scotland.
In today’s Herald, for no apparent particular reason, this drivel again:
And who might this latest impartial “expert” be, we wonder?
Labour will start their autumn conference in Brighton properly today, but the comrades have already been at the seaside over the weekend. We thought we’d see how the UK’s official alternative to the Tories was getting along.
We’re sure it’s a well-oiled machine.
This weekend’s Scottish Mail On Sunday carries a column from UK Cabinet Office minister Damian Green which, if anyone was still in any doubt, rings just about every warning bell imaginable in terms of the Tories’ plan to use Brexit to cripple devolution both in principle and in practice.
It’s tucked away on page 27 and doesn’t appear on the Mail’s website, but you can read the whole thing by clicking the pic above. And below, we’ve pulled out the key sentences that should have the blood of devolution-loving No voters running cold.
(Buy Chris Cairns’ second great book of cartoons here. Plus cuddly Hamish!)
We’re not saying it’s been a slow news week in Scottish politics, but this is what the Scotsman’s going with today:
We might go for a walk.
It was nice to see an old friend back in the Scottish media today.
How times change.
Be a shame if anything happened to it.
For anyone who thinks it’s safe to wait until after 2021 for another indyref.
We struggled to summon up much more than a weary sigh about a story in a couple of the minor papers today (the Herald and Express), about a micro-scuffle at Saturday’s pro-indy rally in Glasgow. The most interesting thing about it appeared to be that the Express had written its article several hours before the event took place.
But we weren’t quite right.
Three years ago today, Scotland bottled it. Almost uniquely in world history, its people turned down the chance to take control of their own affairs forever without a drop of blood being shed. They did so on the back of a package of vague promises, not least one of “extensive new powers”, almost all of which have subsequently been broken.
The Secretary of State for Scotland has chosen the anniversary of the referendum to let it be known that on top of that, the most fundamental building block of devolution – the premise that any power not explicitly reserved to Westminster in the Scotland Act 1998 would belong to Holyrood – will now be torn up, in the light of the exit from the EU that Scots were promised a No vote would protect them from.
In poker we call that a rubdown.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
