Wings Over Scotland

As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.

The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.

“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.

But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.

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We’ve had no answer from the BBC’s Andrew Neil to the question we asked him at the weekend. There has, however, been an interesting development in the debate over whether there have been severe real-terms cuts to the Scottish Government’s budget since the Conservatives came to power in 2010.

The extremely highly-respected economic analysts Jim and Margaret Cuthbert (the former of whom was Chief Statistician for the Scotland Office) have today written an article for Bella Caledonia seeking to establish the truth of the argument between Mr Neil and ourselves. Their conclusions are expert, detailed and very clear.

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Labour put out a press release yesterday a few hours before the tax credits fiasco. It concerned the much-ballyhooed new arrangements for Scottish Labour “autonomy”, of exactly the sort that the branch office has been telling us it already had ever since the election of Johann Lamont as leader in 2011.

We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.

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So tonight the Labour Party tweeted this:

It’s a lie.

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From today’s Daily Record:

“When the major new powers are transferred to Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament will be responsible for decisions about our schools, hospitals, transport, policing, justice and housing, as well as setting income tax rates and developing our own social security system.”

This one is, in fairness, mostly true. Technically. Sort of. Well, not really.

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Alert readers who follow our Twitter account, like all sensible people do, may have noticed we’ve had a few exchanges with the BBC presenter Andrew Neil since we published a couple of articles about his interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson on The Sunday Politics last week.

The debate centred around a claim Neil put to Robertson:

“You go on and on, your party, about ‘austerity, austerity’ – how much has the Scottish Government budget been cut in the past five or six years? […] In real terms there’s been no cut.“

It seems fair to say the matter’s been in some dispute since then.

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Kezia Dugdale in yesterday’s Scotsman:

“There’s three sort of tests being set for me, and that I’m setting myself.

I have to prove the Scottish Labour Party is autonomous. I have to show we have a belief, a vision of what the future of ­Scotland might look like. And then there’s the question of whether or not I am credible enough to hold the position I have.”

So how are those looking 24 hours on?

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Kezia Dugdale talking about her dad in today’s Scotsman:

“We are not one nation now. As much as we are all trying to come back together, the referendum kind of burns on. I see it as emotional, not rational. My dad will see something on Wings Over Scotland and post it. For him, it is as relevant a source as the ­Financial Times because it reinforces what he already believes.

And because I can see somebody in my family doing that, I understand that’s there’s 100,000 other people who feel exactly the same way.”

Just a couple of things.

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We don’t follow many Unionists on social media, because you end up wasting your day arguing pointlessly with a lot of people who are never going to change their minds and getting in a bad mood. But we’re told they were all very excited about an article in yesterday’s Daily Record.

Penned by the paper’s political editor Davie Clegg, it’s a long diatribe about how the fall in oil revenues has created a black hole which now means Scotland is – stand by for a surprise! – too wee and too poor to be independent.

So far so meh – it’s not like it’s the first time we’ve heard that record played, after all. But as you can see from the image above, there’s also quite an interesting challenge printed in giant capitals at the foot of the page. We’re not in the Scottish Government, but it’s a rainy Saturday so we thought we might have a go.

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We’ve been having a bit of a ponder over the effective passing into law of English Votes for English Laws, which has been remarkably little mentioned in Scotland’s media today. The BBC website has nothing about it at all on its Scotland front page, forcing readers to dig down into the politics section for some coverage.

The Daily Record, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have a word about it – nothing in the print edition and nothing online, even though as we write this it’s gone 3pm the next day, around 21 hours after the vote was passed in the Commons. The Scottish Daily Mail relegates it to a small feature taking up barely a third of page 12, even though the move supposedly ends the Union.

The Scotsman gives it a tiny corner of the front page and half of page 6, and only the Herald treats it as a lead story, although even there it only gets a couple of columns, less space than that devoted to a picture of David Cameron and the Chinese president Li Xinping having a pint in a pub.

All of which is remarkable, because it’s arguably the most radical change made to the UK constitution since the creation of the devolved Parliaments 16 years ago, and perhaps more significant even than that.

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