Wings Over Scotland

We saw this exchange on Twitter this morning, involving left-wing Labour activist Eoin Clarke, a reader, and Scottish Labour list MSP Elaine Smith.

Smith professed to find it “unbelievable” and “scary” that the reader thought he’d had Tory governments for most of his lifetime. (We asked him how old he was and he said 34, which means he’s had Tory governments for 62% of his life, so that checks out.)

But it’s a standard Scottish Labour line that there’s no real difference between Scottish and English voters in terms of favouring left-wing politics, so we thought we’d just quickly check the arithmetic on that. The results are unlikely to shock you.

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…on Good Morning Scotland yesterday, then we suspect you’re going to love the Lib Dems’ heroically glaikit MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton on the same show today.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 March 2017)
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Our favourite line is probably “the SNP didn’t win an election”, although it’s run quite close by “If you listen to Christine Jardine”.

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We joke, of course. The Spanish government has made this position abundantly plain several times over a number of years, and it still doesn’t stop idiot Yoons (and media pundits who should know better) from spouting it.

But this time, in the flesh, it’s really quite hard to spin a way out of.

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We don’t want to fall into the trap of portraying the Liberal Democrats as a party of any political relevance or consequence in Scotland, but for the sheer comedy value alone Willie Rennie’s interview with Gary Robertson on today’s Good Morning Scotland is worth a couple of minutes of your time.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 10 March 2017)
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So, are we all clear?

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No.7: Erin, 15, from Gullane.

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First Minister’s Questions today (featuring stand-in FM John Swinney in a theatrical mood) was one long howl of “TOO WEE AND TOO POOR!”, with both Ruth Davidson and Kezia Dugdale using all of their questions to hark back to oil revenue forecasts from 2013 and insist that an independent Scotland would face economic apocalypse.

It was a dispiriting spectacle, and we found ourselves experiencing (not for the first time) pangs of sympathy for the remaining tiny rump of Scottish Labour voters, who must surely watch in broken despair at the antics of the hapless pack of squawking diddies representing their views in the Parliament.

But on the day that a new Ipsos MORI poll for STV found support for independence leaping to fractionally over 50%, we wondered how big a deal the economy really was for voters. And fortunately, we already knew the answer.

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Today the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens all teamed up to pass a meaningless Holyrood motion declaring that the minority SNP government was a load of rubbish and smelled of toilets and its mum was fat and ugly.

(As an alert reader wryly noted: “Well, that’s a first. A one party state raises a motion against its own policy and defeats itself.”)

And we thought you’d like to be reminded that the Scottish Parliament was expressly designed from the beginning so that it would always work like that.

They must be pretty chuffed with how it’s turned out.

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We haven’t said much about the huge furore whipped up by the Guardian in recent days around spurious allegations of racism/online abuse by supporters of Scottish independence, made first by Sadiq Khan and then by a deranged “Better Together” activist who also thinks all vegans are racist (or something).

Partly that’s because we covered the initial speech by Khan and the fallout from it pretty extensively, and partly because we didn’t want to feed the Guardian’s clickbait.

However, when the activist who was allegedly “hounded off Twitter” in fear for her life – fear caused by supposed comments that nobody has actually seen – miraculously recovered her bravery less than a week later (coincidentally just in time for the launch of her book), we thought it was probably time someone started keeping some records.

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No.6: Christopher, from Stirling, biker.

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Last year, as we’ve done a number of times in the past, we wrote about the dangers of handcuffing the independence movement to a particular narrow political agenda. Conflating a Yes vote with a number of hardline ideological positions which are more or less unquestioned within the liberal commentariat and the radical left, but actually highly unpopular with the general public, is self-evidently a huge strategic mistake.

Many of those positions are ones which this site supports in their own right, such as abolition of the monarchy and the abandonment of nuclear weapons, but our stance has always been that those arguments – like membership of the EU and NATO – are ones which ought properly to be conducted among the people and elected politicians of an independent Scotland in their own good time, not imposed without debate as part of the package of independence.

This weekend the notionally pro-independence Sunday Herald newspaper – as well as taking part in a media-wide Unionist smear campaign against this site and defending a “Better Together” activist who’d written a deeply offensive clickbait Guardian article claiming that Scottish nationalism was racist – carried a front cover and inside spread on the heated topic of mandatory gender quotas, which the paper supports.

As it happened we’d asked about the subject in our Panelbase poll last month.

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