With David Mundell and Ian Murray both having appeared on today’s “Good Morning Scotland” singing the praises of the wonderful Scotland Bill and how it would deliver all a nation could ever dream of, it seems a good time to publish the results of our recent Panelbase poll on the subject.
The nation, it seems, has rather more ambitious dreams.
Alert readers may recall a few weeks ago, when this was a thing:
The SNP standing for seats in England, of course, is an idea that’s been put forward before by some of the nation’s sharper and more insightful political commentators, but the party has for obvious and understandable reasons shown no inclination thus far to undertake the experiment.
But as we realised after chatting to a left-wing English chum this week (a successful creative and businessman), such a party actually already exists, and has dozens of MPs. It’s just that it’s currently trapped inside a corpse.
These pages from the 14 March 1998 issue of NME (just 10 months after the election of Tony Blair’s first Labour government) are a fascinating historical document.
They needed saving. So we found them and we saved them.
Alert readers may have noticed something of a glut of articles in the press recently by right-wing commentators angrily challenging the SNP to prove its left-wing credentials if and when the new Scotland Bill ever becomes law and grants Holyrood more powers over taxation, some minor aspects of welfare and – of course – road signs.
The zenith of the phenomenon must surely be today’s eye-rubbingly bizarre Scotsman story in which the Scottish Tories urge the SNP to increase tax in order to reverse, er, Tory cuts. But there’s method behind the seeming madness.
From a bizarre, rambling Torcuil Crichton column in today’s Daily Record:
It’s Torcuil Crichton, so we’d better check that, eh?
The battle-cry of right-wing Labour apologists all this week has been “realism”. It’s all very well people like Jeremy Corbyn having crazy old principles about what Labour is supposed to stand for, runs the argument, but you can’t argue with public opinion and public opinion is desperate for Labour to become Tories with a slightly softer edge.
“Mental John” McTernan, for example, told the readers of the Telegraph yesterday that Labour’s disastrous, shambolic abstention on the welfare reform bill was the right thing to do because the party “had to show the public it got the message over welfare”.
But what actually IS the public’s message on welfare?
From “Record View” in today’s Daily Record:
If only there’d been some way of ensuring Scotland was never “skewered by political decisions made on the basis of English priorities”, etc etc.
We’re sorry to keep going on about this, readers, but we’ve been going over and over it in our heads and we just can’t get it to make sense.
Below is the failed Labour amendment to the Welfare Reform And Work Bill:
As you can see, its sole intended purpose was to refuse a second reading to the Bill. Labour voted for their own amendment (an achievement, we suppose), which means they didn’t want to see the bill get a second reading.
You’re with us so far, right?
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
