Wings Over Scotland

This is how today’s BBC News summed up (fairly accurately) the two main themes of last night’s Question Time special with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn:

May managed to largely get away with her party’s abysmal track record of brutal cuts and austerity, while Corbyn was made very uncomfortable by a howling mob of angry, terrifyingly bloodthirsty old white men over Labour’s policy on Trident.

And while Corbyn’s position on the nuclear deterrent is idiotic and makes him an easy target for opponents, the main reason for the differing outcomes is language.

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We’re being told that this Tory leaflet, where Stephanie Smith is described as “Ruth Davidson’s candidate” for Edinburgh South, is standard across the whole country.

Which is unfortunate timing.

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…for one idiot and an occasional cartoonist talking to a country of only 4m adults.

And one of us DOESN’T EVEN LIVE THERE!!!!!

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…that will satisfy the Unionist parties. Last night Ruth Davidson told STV viewers that even getting more than 50% of the vote in a general election wouldn’t give the SNP a mandate to pursue their manifesto policies.

She was echoing the words of Kezia Dugdale just over a year ago:

So that’s clear. Davidson has reversed her previous view. There is now no peaceful democratic avenue by which the people of Scotland could express the wish for a second referendum which the two main Unionist parties would accept. They have EXPLICITLY said, in full public view, that they would reject any democratic mandate.

And that’s frightening.

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“It couldn’t be clearer than that” was Kezia Dugdale’s assertion tonight on the subject of whether a Labour UK government would block a second independence referendum, during her “Ask The Leader” interview with the BBC’s Glenn Campbell.

She’d insisted explicitly several times that a Jeremy Corbyn administration WOULD block a new indyref, even after being shown a video clip of Corbyn from earlier in the day saying he wouldn’t, and she repeatedly urged readers not to listen to the party’s leader and to instead go and look at the Labour manifesto.

So we did.

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Today’s Daily Record has a swipe at Jeremy Corbyn for, well, let’s call them “mixed messages” over a second independence referendum. It suggests his Scottish branch manager Kezia Dugdale would have “her head in her hands” over his latest comments, which is a bit rich considering Dugdale’s own history on the subject.

And since her headline boast when she took over as leader of the North British office was that people would know exactly what Labour stood for (and indeed she spent all of the weekend’s keynote Sunday Politics interview listing all the things she’d been very very clear about), we thought we’d have a recap and see how that was going.

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Apologies in advance about this, folks, but it’s driving us mad. We got into a Twitter argument with some Tory balloon last night and this morning, and to cut a long story short it got us looking at the 1951 UK general election result.

History records it as a Tory majority, securing just over half of the Parliamentary seats (321 of 625) and forming the government under Winston Churchill despite narrowly losing the popular vote to Labour (48% to 48.8%).

But if you examine the result in the House Of Commons Library the numbers don’t add up, and we can’t figure out why.

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From the Victoria Derbyshire show today in Dunstable.

“This election is life or death for us.”

The Oxford University research she’s talking about, and the Napier and Heriot-Watt Universities research into the mental health impact of Work Capability Assessments.

Tremendous news for the rest of Scotland’s football clubs as Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers promises never to win the treble unbeaten again, even if his side score more goals than the other team in all their matches.

That’s how it works, right?

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No.13: James, Aberdeenshire.

Please help make more of these brilliant films.

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…is roughly how often Aberdeen get to the final of the Scottish Cup these days. The last time was 17 years ago – a tournament which started in the last century and ended the year Rangers started paying their players with EBTs – when SFA rules meant that they had to play almost the entire game without a recognised goalkeeper.

(A tackle in the third minute broke veteran custodian Jim Leighton’s jaw, and because you were only allowed three players on the subs bench the Dons had no backup No.1 and had to put striker Robbie Winters between the sticks, with a predictable outcome. Leighton never played professional football again.)

In politics, Labour were only one year into the first ever administration of the modern Scottish Parliament, and still in the first term of Tony Blair’s rule at Westminster. The idea of the SNP winning an election, let alone holding an independence referendum, was the preserve of mad fantasists.

And the last time the Pittodrie side actually won the trophy was 27 years back, which is so long ago that most of Hampden was still open to the elements.

Still, it would be weird if we got to the final again next year and some of the Aberdeen support refused to go on the grounds that the matter of who was the best cup football team in Scotland had been settled forever today.

Or if Celtic won but had fielded an ineligible player and the SFA ordered a replay, but the Dons declined to take part because they’d played too many finals recently.

Just saying.

#COYR