Wings Over Scotland

You can’t move for Michelle Mone in the media today, which is just the way she likes it. Almost every newspaper and broadcaster has been running lengthy stories and interviews about the publicity-craving ex-Labour supporter being commissioned by Iain Duncan Smith to produce a report on starting up businesses in disadvantaged areas.

(So excited was Mone – who now backs the Conservatives and is widely expected to be given a peerage in the next honours list by David Cameron for campaigning against Scottish independence – to be working for IDS that she just couldn’t keep the news in until the midnight embargo on the press release, tweeting it at 11pm last night.)

Nationalists have in the main reacted to Mone’s apparent imminent ennoblement as an unelected lawmaker in the manner you’d expect, but they’re not the only people to question her credentials as an expert business adviser and employment guru. So we thought we’d do a little digging and compiling.

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Social media is alight today with the latest extraordinary opinion poll for next May’s Holyrood election, which puts the SNP on a record-breaking 62% to Labour’s 20%.

(The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats trail in with miserable stats of 12% and 3% respectively, which means that within the standard margin of polling error it’s possible that NOBODY in Scotland is still planning on voting Lib Dem.)

Pollsters TNS report the findings under what might in the circumstances be seen as the slightly negative headline “SNP holds poll lead in spite of mixed views on record in government”, which relates to figures concerning the Nats’ performance in power.

But there’s an interesting quirk in those numbers.

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Alert social-media users will have noticed that it’s hard to avoid a constant low-level buzzing from a faction of the Yes movement, calling on the next Scottish Government (in the event, as currently seems likely, that it’s another SNP majority) to issue a Unilateral Declaration of Independence, or UDI for short.

And in the context of achieving Scottish independence UDI is indeed the answer, if we assume that the question is “What’s the stupidest thing the SNP could possibly do?”

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There’s a comment piece by Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson in today’s Sunday Times, comprising 846 words which could be condensed into two: “SNP BAD”.

As such it could have been easily turned into a speech by any Scottish Labour leader of the last five years with nothing more than a quick search-and-replace of the words “Conservative” and “Labour”. It puts forward nothing remotely resembling a policy, just paragraphs of boilerplate waffle and a call for a debate.

Davidson professes to offer “a practical and pro-UK alternative to the SNP”, a programme which she boils down to two key components. It seems to have entirely escaped her notice that they contradict each other on the most fundamental level.

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“In an independent Scotland, we’ll never have to worry about Tory governments again”, said the man on my doorstep, his YES badge gleaming in the sunshine.

“I am a Tory,” said I, watching with some amusement as the man’s jaw dropped.

“But I’ll still be voting Yes,” I added.

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Frank Cottrell Boyce in the Independent, 7 August 2015:

“Only 25 per cent of the population earns more than £30,000 a year. Most media commentators (including me) do. For people like me, the country basically works. Politics doesn’t affect me. Politics, for me, is about how other people are treated. It’s easy inside my echo-chamber to believe that I am the norm, or the middle. Easy to forget that there are voices outside.

To people in my position, austerity can be read as regrettable but pragmatic. But to my friends and family, who live outside the bubble, it’s not regrettable, it’s terrifying. It’s also not pragmatic. The crackpot, gimcrack ideological nature of austerity becomes more apparent the closer you get to the point of delivery.”

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Unalert readers will have been startled to read in much of the media this morning – including a front-page piece on the Daily Record – of the “shocking” £100,000 cost of renaming the new Southern General hospital in Glasgow after the Queen.

That, of course, is because all the alert ones read it on Wings two days ago.

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Yesterday, whatever the merits of the actual decision involved, we saw an admirable attitude to transparency and accountability from NHS Greater Glasgow And Clyde in their handling of our Freedom Of Information request about the renaming of the South Glasgow University Hospital. An extremely comprehensive response arrived promptly and without any attempts at evasion.

Today was different, because today we were dealing with the BBC.

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And they say it’s “lefties” who are more interested in slogans than useful policies.

We’ve received a reply to the Freedom Of Information request we submitted to NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde a few weeks ago with regard to the cost of renaming the new Southern General Hospital in Glasgow. The total cost of the renaming, the bulk of which was accounted for by the ceremony and three free-standing commemorative plaques, has been given as £100,486.

NHSGGC’s full statement can be read here.

There’s much noisy chat at the moment about Jeremy Corbyn being 20 points ahead of his Labour leadership rivals on first-preference votes. His rivals seem to agree; they’ve turned their main efforts to competing amongst themselves for second and third preference “stop Corbyn” votes.

But could any of them really close such a huge gap? And what if they don’t?

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