Wings Over Scotland

The tiny number of people who watch the BBC Parliament channel is undoubtedly a blessing to the parties of the Union. We’ll be bringing you some eye-opening excerpts from today’s Scotland Bill debate later, but as a taster here’s one brief exchange.

Alberto Costa, the Scottish-born Conservative MP for South Leicestershire (of whom we’ll be seeing much more in a bit), is heard loudly expressing his satisfaction that not a single Scottish MP of any party (nor indeed any from Wales or Northern Ireland) has been permitted to sit on the Joint Committee discussing the government’s plan to scrap the Human Rights Act, although six unelected peers do get places.

When challenged, Costa explains that he’s happy about it because it’s a matter reserved to the “United Kingdom Parliament”. The fact that he apparently doesn’t consider any Scottish members elected to that parliament to have any business with its affairs is perhaps rather more revealing than Mr Costa intended it to be.

Last Friday’s article on the limitations of GERS caused quite a stir among the stout defenders of the Union, as social-media users may have noticed over the weekend.

Amidst the wildly-flailing fury-storm of shouty, abusive responses which pathologically evaded addressing the article’s point, the one vaguely factual argument raised was the notion that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be able to make significant savings on its current (notional) £3bn defence budget because NATO supposedly requires all member states to spend 2% of their GDP on defence.

So we thought we’d see if it was true.

Read the rest of this entry →

We saw this tweet from Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson yesterday:

And we were quite confused.

Read the rest of this entry →

When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.

Read the rest of this entry →

So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

Read the rest of this entry →

Order “Welcome To Cairnstoon”, Chris’ compilation of Wings cartoons and more, here.

It’s been such an exciting, action-packed week for Scottish Labour since a dynamic and thrusting PPB launched the 2015 branch-office conference that we worried there might be a danger people had forgotten it already. So we’ve brought it back for a curtain call, in a version a bit more appropriate for what remains of their core vote.

Never mind the zeitgeist, feel the width.

This is amazing, readers. It’s an extract from this afternoon’s The Big Debate on Radio Scotland, in which a journalist – the BBC’s Gordon Brewer – finally gets round to asking someone from Scottish Labour how they can make the extra £500m they need to fund their tax-credits “policy” while keeping all taxes the same.

The answer… well, the answer is quite something.

(The Big Debate, BBC Radio Scotland, 6 November 2015)
.

You might have to listen through a few times to get your head round it, because that really is what a grown woman actually tried to get away with in front of a live audience.

Read the rest of this entry →

Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

Read the rest of this entry →

We noticed this on Twitter earlier this evening:

And we thought, “Well, that sounds bad”.

Read the rest of this entry →

Alert readers will probably already be familiar with the philosophical proposition of Schrödinger’s cat. (The less alert can click the link for a short and easy primer.) The hypothetical experiment posited by 20th-century Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has entered into popular culture. But increasingly and disturbingly, it’s also becoming the guiding principle of mainstream media journalism.

Certain viewers should steel themselves at this point, because we’re about to briefly talk about football before moving on to other things later in the article. You can consider that your trigger warning. We’ll let you know when it’s over.

The lines above were issued to the press yesterday by The Rangers International Football Club plc, a football club (the clue’s in the name) formed in 2012, yet which lays claim to the history and achievements of a previous club of a similar name which was liquidated for bankruptcy the same year, having been formed in 1872.

And eagle-eyed logic fans may have spotted something of a contradiction.

Read the rest of this entry →

The call:

“BMA Scotland is calling on all political parties to stop using the NHS as a political tool and to make realistic and honest pledges to ensure the future of high-quality healthcare in Scotland.”

The response:

“Opposition parties used the publication of the manifesto to attack the SNP government’s record.

Labour’s public services spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said: ‘A crisis in family doctors has erupted on the SNP’s watch.’

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Jim Hume said: ‘Whether we are talking about cancer treatment times, A&E problems at flagship hospitals or the GP recruitment crisis, it is clear that our NHS is in need of intensive care after eight years of SNP government.'”

So that went well. Nice try, BMA.