Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will be aware that we’ve been running a series of posts pointing out the gap between opposition rhetoric about the Scottish Government’s supposed failure to grow the economy, and their (total lack of) practical suggestions about what it should actually be doing, given that by design the Scottish Parliament controls almost none of the country’s economic levers.

And we thought a story fed to the press by Labour this week about job creation since the Tories came to power in 2010 was going to be just another case in point, until we spotted something else about it.

Now, we can’t claim to be exactly astonished that the Tories have mostly focused on creating work in London and the South-East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK. That’s pretty much their thing. But Scottish Labour’s noted rentahonk Jackie Baillie was hopping mad, and not only at the Tories.

Read the rest of this entry →

An alert reader got in touch with us this evening to tell us that they’d been clearing out an old hard drive and found an interesting web page they’d saved from several years ago. They asked if we’d like to see it.

“Sure”, we said. “Let’s have a look.”

It turned out that they’d had an exchange several years ago with Kezia Dugdale on her old (now deleted) blog, where she tended to be a bit more candid than she is now, and were so startled by an answer she’d given them that they’d felt the need to keep it.

Read the rest of this entry →

We don’t often wholeheartedly agree with anything “Rape Clause Ruth” Davidson says at First Minister’s Questions, but we can’t fault this observation from earlier today.

One of the most famous tales of the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint is that concerning James Inglis, a murderer who in 1951 sprinted the short distance from the condemned cell to the noose, enabling the entire execution to be concluded just seven seconds after Pierrepoint had first laid hands on him.

We can’t help thinking of it today.

Read the rest of this entry →

Okay, so 2017 is turning out less dull than we expected.

Because the Prime Minister of the UK has lost her mind.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s the holidays, so the papers are desperate to fill space and the political parties are all trying to help out by sending them helpful press releases which can be slotted directly onto pages, titled “PARTY X CONTINUES TO SUPPORT POLICY Z WHICH IT HAS ALWAYS SUPPORTED. ALSO, THE OTHER PARTIES ARE BAD”.

Scottish Labour’s contribution is a piece in most papers today reiterating their demand for the Scottish Government to hike the top rate of income tax – a policy on which Labour stood at the last Westminster and Holyrood elections and which was quite stupendously comprehensively rejected by voters, but which Labour inexplicably feel the SNP should implement anyway.

And that’s all very well and good, because Kezia Dugdale gets paid the best part of £80,000 a year by taxpayers and she’s got to say something all day to justify it. The trouble, as we’ve noted at great length on this site, is that so many of the things she says aren’t actually true.

Read the rest of this entry →

For a party which insists the last thing it wants is a second independence referendum, it’s rather odd that the Tories are doing everything in their power to turn next month’s council elections into exactly that.

Still, let’s do our bit to help them out.

Read the rest of this entry →

It’s now more than a year since we said this:

And it’s probably time to start keeping track.

Read the rest of this entry →

So far as we can tell, the primary occupation of chunky former “Better Together” head honcho, Scottish Labour apparatchik and tuba enthusiast Blair McDougall these days – he appears to be otherwise unemployed – is posting endlessly on Twitter about how the UK would rob Scottish pensioners who’ve paid National Insurance to the UK for their whole lives in the event of Scotland voting for independence.

We’ve never been quite sure why that’s supposed to be a great selling point for how fabulous the UK is – “Don’t leave us or we’ll starve you to death” – but in any event it was dealt something of a blow yesterday by McDougall’s own party.

The image referred to a brand-new “pledge card” issued by Labour yesterday, which promised not only to maintain payment of the UK pension to pensioners living abroad anywhere in the world but to uprate it in line with inflation, avoiding situations like that of eldsters who’ve retired to countries which don’t have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK and therefore face a continual slide in the real value of their pension.

It certainly didn’t say anything about “with the sole exception of if they happen to live in Scotland”, but maybe there just wasn’t enough room.

The John Beattie Show on BBC Radio Scotland today hosted a 20-minute-long debate between Professor Richard Murphy and an amateur Unionist blogger who for the last several years has used the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures to prove that an independent Scotland would be economically unviable.

Below is a very short extract from it. (The full debate is here.)

(The John Beattie Show, BBC Radio Scotland, 12 April 2017)
.

We’re glad that’s finally settled. Though we have to admit, given that all parties to the discussion now absolutely concur on those facts, we’re a bit confused about what the amateur blogger’s been doing for the last five years.

Read the rest of this entry →

Most of the Scottish media today reports the latest Lord Ashcroft poll, which found Nicola Sturgeon to be by a distance the most popular political leader in Scotland.

“Scots feel quite positive about Sturgeon”, said the Daily Record, while the Scotsman headline was “Poll shows Scots approve of Sturgeon’s performance” and the Herald went with “Poll reveals strong support for Sturgeon”.

All three opened with almost identical paragraphs observing that the First Minister was the only UK politician to record a net positive approval rating in Scotland, putting her a thumping 32 points ahead of her nearest domestic rival.

The Scottish Daily Mail, though, had a slightly different take.

Read the rest of this entry →