Wings Over Scotland

Quite a few remarkable things were said on last night’s STV debate between the two prospective leaders of the Labour Party branch office in Scotland. This one, though, was especially striking.

That’s Anas Sarwar denying three times that he was a part of the “Better Together” campaign with the Tories. A startled Colin Mackay claims to have seen photographs of Sarwar campaigning with BT, at which point Sarwar insists no, he merely appeared on TV debates which happened to also have Tory guests.

It seemed like it’d be an easy thing to check.

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Readers will doubtless be startled to hear that today’s Scottish newspapers have taken a somewhat misleading approach to the facts on one of the day’s big stories.

Several of them report the findings of a commission looking into the idea of a Citizen’s (or Universal) Basic Income, a scheme which pays every adult in the country a fixed sum every year regardless of their own income, almost completely replacing the current benefits system.

(We’ll use Universal/UBI, to avoid confusion with the greedy-businessman trade body.)

The idea is that as well as reducing poverty, the administrative costs of social security are massively reduced, as is the problem of vulnerable people not taking up benefits because of the stigma often attached to them by the press.

The downside is that it’s generally more expensive. But have the Scottish press accurately reported the scale of that cost, or have they massively exaggerated it for shock value and to serve a right-wing agenda? Read on for a surprise!

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Investigative site The Ferret this afternoon published a report into the Scottish Futures Trust, the SNP’s replacement for Labour’s cripplingly costly PFI projects.

The report was undertaken by Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, a pair of economists well regarded in nationalist circles, and makes some interesting if vague comments about downsides that MIGHT, in theory, exist in the SFT now or in the future.

The headline claims are all full of highly-qualified language (“may not deliver value for money”; “profits may be unduly high”; “could restrict growth”; “potentially has adverse implications”; “impossible to tell whether“), and it’s a long way down the page until you get to anything approaching a hard fact, or indeed the revelation that the report seems to have been paid for by Scottish Labour.

And that’s when things get a little weird.

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We long ago gave up expecting any sort of principled consistency from the Scottish Tories. Whether it was Ruth “line in the sand, no more powers” Davidson magically morphing into a champion of extended devolution, or suddenly reversing her position on free prescriptions, the party is now almost as fluid on policy as Scottish Labour.

The underlings, of course, dutifully follow their leader’s example. Readers familiar with Adam Tomkins’ remarkably rapid journey from fiery pro-independence republican to an ultra-Unionist ultra-Conservative monarchist will, we suspect, barely have batted an eyelid this morning as he unblinkingly performed a full 180-degree turn on the concept of universal basic income.

Even though as recently as this January he was full of admiration for it:

And he’s not alone.

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The Guardian today on Ruth Davidson’s legendary commitment to the day job:

And an action shot of those packed-in crowds two weeks ago:

We hope nobody was injured in the crush.

A story on the BBC website last night:

The same story this morning:

The first version is entirely accurate. Readers can decide for themselves why someone at the BBC felt it needed to be changed from neutral terms to pejorative ones.

The Conservative Home website ran this yesterday.

Alert readers, of course, will be able to explain at least one Scottish teaching vacancy.

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We thought, since it’s Friday, you might like a really good laugh.

If you’re wondering if the “anti-establishment” Anas Sarwar is the same one who was privately educated at a £10,000-a-year grammar school, a hereditary millionaire who has also made his children millionaires while one of them is still in nappies, is privately educating the others, who had a Westminster seat handed down to him by his father but then lost it at the first opportunity, and who is now a Holyrood MSP without a single person in Scotland actually voting for him (having previously derided the Parliament as “undemocratic”), we can confirm that yes, it is.

It’s no easy task picking the dimmest of the new intake of Unionist M/SPs. Competition is stiff, what with the likes of Jamie Greene (Con), Dean Lockhart (Con), Jamie Greene (Con), Christine Jardine (Lib), Jamie Greene (Con) and Paul Sweeney (Lab) all putting up a strong showing on a regular basis.

But we have a new(ish) contender for the crown.

The above story is feeble enough as it stands, even allowing for it being a desperately slow news week for Scottish politics. Maureen Watt is 66 years old and has asthma, and making a pensioner with breathing difficulties sprint a mile to get to a speech on time probably isn’t the most cost-effective way for the Parliament to save four and a half quid, once you’ve factored in the cost of the ambulance and everything.

But it gets worse.

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This was Jamie Ross of Buzzfeed at the SNP conference yesterday.

But not everyone was having the same experience.

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Sometimes it’s hard for Yes supporters in Scotland not to be a bit jealous of Catalonia.

Despite their would-be nation being only a little bit bigger than Scotland, and despite being faced with very real physical and legal intimidation, the Catalan independence movement regularly manages to put hundreds of thousands of people on the streets.

Yes marches and rallies in Scotland, by comparison, often struggle to get attendances numbered in the hundreds, largely because squabbling factions refuse to get along with each other and by far the biggest entity in the Yes movement – the SNP – wants nothing to do with them.

Marches don’t win independence, of course. But what does?

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