We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.
It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.
At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.
Today’s Herald reveals that the new Labour leader of Glasgow City Council, Frank McAveety (who was last seen in the headlines leering at a 15-year-old girl visiting the Scottish Parliament), has hired Bob Wylie as a special adviser.
Wylie was communications director of the scandal-riddled Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT), which readers may recall from last year’s banning of an advertising campaign for this site on the city’s Underground after receiving one complaint about it.
But he’s somewhat more famous for his part in an expenses junket which saw several of the quango’s senior management bill taxpayers for a 2008 “fact-finding” mission to Manchester whose timing just happened to coincide with the UEFA Cup final between Rangers and Zenit St Petersburg being played in the same city.
Wylie’s appointment follows the controversy which arose when Labour gave convicted drunken arsonist Mike Watson a job as education spokesman in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. And the two hirings threw some light on a thought we’d been thinking since reading a Kevin McKenna column in last weekend’s Observer.
The article in question, which we posted last night regarding the former Parliamentary Assistant to Scottish Labour deputy leader hopeful Richard Baker who’s just defected to the Tories, was entirely comprised of some of Stephen Anderson’s own tweets.
It carried no editorial commentary on them whatsoever, and none of the tweets had (of course) been doctored in any way, so the only way the piece could have been “filled with inaccuracies” would have been if the tweets themselves were drivel.
We wish Ruth Davidson the best of luck with her new recruit.
This is a tough time to be writing analytically about Scottish politics, and for once we have a degree of empathy with our fellow journalists in the mainstream press. Very little worthy of discussion is actually happening, yet there are still pages to fill. Perhaps we should have taken a month off rather than two weeks.
That’s not to say that nothing NOTABLE is happening. The SNP more than tripling its membership in a month to the point where it may well be four times that of the three Unionist parties put together, for example, is a remarkable event, but there’s very little worthwhile to be said about it other than observing the simple fact. Nobody knows who these new members are, why they joined or what they want, and anyone speculating about it is just filling space with the sound of their own voice for the sake of it.
Similarly, discussing the Smith Commission report is mostly a pointless exercise. Its conclusions will be based on the submissions of the three Westminster parties – we can all, surely, discount the idea that any significant amount of the SNP’s contribution will be included – and those have been known since March.
And in any event, as we noted at the weekend, the Commission’s report will be an irrelevance. It’ll be followed in short order by a general election, and whichever party takes the keys to 10 Downing Street will not be bound by its conclusions. If the eventual devo package reflects the Commission’s findings it’ll be by pure electoral coincidence – if the Tories get in they’ll implement the Strathclyde Commission, and if it’s Labour it’ll be “devo nano”. (Why would either of them, having just won an election, voluntarily and needlessly compromise on their own preferred plan?)
We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.
We nearly killed ourselves this week compiling twelve “quotes of the year” articles for December 30 and 31, which required ploughing through over a THOUSAND posts (1,170 to be precise) looking for interesting or amusing word-nuggets. Unfortunately, everyone was on holiday or out having a good time, so hardly anybody read them.
So we’ve put them all together in a single ridiculously huge mega-post to give everyone who only reads the most recent article a chance to catch up. We’re nice that way.
And then on Monday, when we’ve all finally got back to having some sort of vague idea what day of the week it is again, 2014 starts in earnest.
79%. That’s how far into the referendum campaign we are, assuming we take the start date as 6 May 2011, when the SNP secured the historic majority that ensured the people of Scotland would be given their first-ever vote in over 300 years on whether their ancient nation should be incorporated into another.
We don’t know about you, readers, but for all the woeful bleating from the parties of the Union about the length of the debate as they woke up to the full reality of their defeat, for us it’s flown by. We can scarcely believe that nearly four-fifths of the allotted time have already passed, and as 2014 looms just a few dozen hours away we’re about to enter the final 20%.
2013, though, was the year Wings Over Scotland became our full-time job, and it would be remiss of us not to use this last bit of quiet time to take a wee glance backwards over the momentous 12 months that are just ending.
Labour MPs have been largely conspicuous by their absence on social media today, just as they were at this Tuesday’s bedroom tax vote. With even the Scottish press belatedly picking up on their no-show, most have been keeping their heads down rather than trying to explain their (in)actions.
So kudos to the party’s culture-loving Airdrie & Shotts MP Pamela Nash, who bravely stood up, despite already having one massive bullet-hole in her foot, to take careful aim and have a blast with the other barrel.
For those of you who – inexplicably and frankly rather hurtfully – STILL don’t follow us on Twitter and may therefore not have heard the news yet on your gramophones, this evening’s Scotland Tonight promises to be a real treat.
Not so much for the fact that they’ll be referencing our poll, but because they’ll be doing so as the jumping-off point for a discussion between Dennis Canavan (chairman of Yes Scotland) and Ian Davidson MP, on the subject “Are undecided voters in the independence referendum more socialist, more republican, & more green?”, which should be like watching Rab C Nesbitt give David Bowie fashion tips.
In our previous poll, we discovered that the public overwhelmingly thought its politicians were a bunch of liars. Not a single one of them scored a net positive trust rating for truthfulness, although Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon had the small consolation of being well out in front of the competition as the least distrusted.
We felt a little bit sorry for the nation’s elected representatives, so we thought we’d give them a better chance this time around.
Alert readers will be aware that we like to occasionally have a bit of light-hearted satirical fun pointing out the gulf in numbers between grassroots campaigners on the Yes side of the independence debate and their counterparts in the No camp.
But we’ve been gathering evidence of a much more sinister side to the phenomenon.
A few days ago, our mole in Scottish Labour HQ sent us the first draft of Johann Lamont’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference. Oddly, a few lines seem to have gone missing from the version delivered to the hall yesterday afternoon.
Here’s the full original text, so you can see what Johann was really trying to say.
