Just so we’re absolutely clear on what happened today:
There’s been a U-turn (The Sun):
Except that nothing has changed (the Scottish Lib Dems):
Let’s see if we can get a rhythm going.
1. No changes.
2. This article is over.
The Labour Party’s current state of euphoric hubris about losing another election is at least partly explicable. Jeremy Corbyn increased his party’s 2015 vote in England and Wales by a thumping 40%, took the highest vote share of any Labour leader since 2001 (beating Tony Blair’s 2005 victory by five points), the highest actual vote since Blair’s 1997 landslide, and deprived the Tories of their overall majority.
Those achievements are tempered by the fact that while Corbyn vastly overperformed expectations and certainly gave Theresa May a bloody nose (and might well end up depriving her of the Prime Ministership once her party gets a challenger together), the morning-after reality is that Tory rule has been extended to at least 2022 – by which time Corbyn will be 73 – with the nasty hangover of the empowerment of the DUP.
(With both Labour and Corbyn personally now leading in the polls it’s pretty much impossible to see the Tories losing a vote of confidence which would trigger another exemption to the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. Any new election would very likely lead not only to a Labour government but to a Jeremy Corbyn Labour government, a prospect to chill even the most rebellious Tory into meek and sober compliance.)
But it would be churlish to dispute that Corbyn has put Labour in its best position for nearly 20 years. The same is emphatically NOT true of Scottish Labour, which hasn’t stopped the Scottish media from desperately trying to pretend otherwise.
This was David Mundell on Sunday, guaranteeing that any extra money produced for Northern Ireland to secure DUP backing for the Tory government would be matched by more funding for Scotland (as much as £4.5bn under normal Barnett Formula rules, because Scotland has nearly three times the population of the province):
And here’s the truth 24 hours later:
Who could ever have etc?
We’re still on holiday, because five years of stuff like this ruins your soul:
Let’s look at the logic of that closely for just one minute, and then we’re going to go back to smashing our head off a brick wall to try to make the stupid go away.
The media is aflame today with some rather woolly “news” to the effect that Theresa May might possibly, in some unspecified manner, have conceded a veto over Brexit to the Scottish Parliament.
We can see no evidence suggesting such a thing has happened or will happen, and would instead direct readers to a report published yesterday by Unlock Democracy. We strongly advise taking five minutes out of your day to read pages 26-33 of it, but if you’re really in a rush this paragraph will give you the basic conclusion:
Remember your place, lesser nations of the UK.
Richard Murphy, political economy professor.
Brexit is already a shambles. Everyone south of Manchester is unhappy because it’s too suffocatingly hot to move, and everyone north of Manchester is unhappy because they’ve not got the sunshine. We could all, for various reasons, do with a chuckle.
So without further ado, readers, enjoy the “clueless metropolitan hacksplaining” hit of the summer: Kezia Dugdale, Comeback Queen.
Vote for the funniest line below.
This map probably correlates quite closely with one of the strength of Leave vote.
It seems somehow appropriate that on the day negotiations begin (with the UK having no government, no mandate and no idea what it actually wants), large parts of the country are essentially already on fire.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
