Wings Over Scotland

We greatly enjoyed Any Questions on Radio 4 this week. Well chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby, it was a mostly grown-up and adult discussion of issues around nationalism and independence, perhaps assisted by the fact that – we gather – Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale was unable to take part and was replaced as a Labour representative by Lord Falconer, who offered some considered and intelligent views.

The only slight wasp in the ointment was Tory list MSP Adam Tomkins, who delivered his usual boorish, patrician and arrogant debating style, which was frequently met with boos, jeers and catcalls from a feisty Blantyre audience. But he did come out with one rather unexpected and off-message policy position.

(Any Questions, BBC Radio 4, 29 April 2017)
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Wait, did we hear that last bit right?

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This appears to be a genuine question from a YouGov poll going out to selected areas of the country today. We’ve had a couple of people confirm it to us who we have no reason to disbelieve. (It also asked this.)

The particular political arrangement it’s testing the waters of public opinion on there is fascist dictatorship. God help us all.

Chris Cairns is on holiday. Yes, again.

Following on from Ian Murray’s last night, we received another election leaflet from an alert reader today, this time one delivered to them by the Scottish Conservatives.

Let’s just look at that highlighted section again.

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We had a little fun last night at the expense of Ian Murray, the sole surviving Scottish Labour MP, who’d sent his constituents a list of his achievements in office that was actually a blank sheet of paper. And in fairness, he was extremely quick off the mark in response, producing a video tweet within four hours.

And it seems that he’s actually been keeping VERY busy.

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An alert reader received a letter today about the forthcoming general election, from Scottish Labour’s only current MP, Ian Murray. (Although you’d have to know that in advance, as he doesn’t mention the Labour Party in it once.)

Here’s a close-up of part of it:

And below, we swear, is what’s on the other side of the page.

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There’s no particular reason to post this today, other than that it’s only come to light this week and today happens to be the 20th anniversary of the article below.

While it’s often said (mainly by nationalist types) that the Scottish Parliament and its electoral system were specifically designed to prevent the SNP from coming to power and holding an independence referendum, there’s been very little in the way of explicit evidence to back that statement up.

The 27 April 1997 issue of the Scottish Sun, though, had it in spades.

So we thought we should save it from Twitter’s fleeting attention span for posterity.

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We’re still struggling a bit with this one, to be honest.

So… now the Tories are upset because the SNP aren’t obsessed with independence?

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We’ve never tried to put a precise breakdown on how much of the falsehood pumped out daily by the Scottish political media is due to deliberately misleading spin and how much of it is simply due to journalists who are really, really terrible at their jobs.

But there’s plenty of both in today’s Times.

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This is the Conservative MSP group at Holyrood today, at the end of an unusually powerful speech from Kezia Dugdale during the rape clause “debate”. Click the picture to enlarge it if you want to find out what people gazing into the hideous abyss of their own souls and not liking what they see looks like.

We put the word “debate” in quotemarks because every single Tory MSP who spoke was too cowardly to allow any interventions from the other parties. We can’t say we’re surprised. We’d find it hard to look anyone in the eye if we were them too.

Leopards don’t change their spots, folks.

Especially when they’re in the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

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This site has spoken a few times, usually in jest, about forming its own political party and contesting elections. But as the UK heads for the biggest democratic trainwreck in its history – a vote which, depending on where you live, is really either a proxy Brexit referendum, a proxy independence referendum, a judgement on the personal character of Jeremy Corbyn or any of half-a-dozen other things – we found ourselves thinking again about what, on the fundamental ideological level, we’d stand for.

It’s a question that existing parties find it remarkably hard to answer. Labour used to define it clearly in its key “Clause IV” – a clear statement of commitment to socialist principles like public ownership and wealth redistribution – before Tony Blair junked it in the 1990s for some woolly neoliberal rubbish from an aspirational Facebook meme.

For the SNP, clearly its primary defining goal is always the democratic pursuit of independence for Scotland. What you might call its day-to-day policies have, like most parties, varied and evolved over time, but it’s always had that one clear unifying and overriding aim. It may have won electoral success through decent governance, but its purpose was never merely competent administration for its own sake.

In the case of the Conservative Party, the turn-of-the-20th-century US economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up their position pithily and accurately:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

(And lest an offended Tory should seek to instantly dismiss him as some flavour of pinko tree-hugging bleeding-heart lefty, he also said: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”.)

The Liberal Democrats, of course, stand for being in the middle of Labour and the Conservatives, whatever that means on any given day. (They did briefly experiment in the 2000s with being to the left of Labour, partly because it was hard NOT to be, but the coalition scuppered that and now they’re basically Tory wets.)

But what about us?

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