Wings Over Scotland

Unionists got very excited last week when the Office for Budget Responsibility once again downgraded its long-term North Sea oil revenue forecasts (which in 2011 it was predicting at £131bn) to just £2.1bn over 20 years. The new figure was as usual treated as a gospel fact and deployed to attack both independence and full fiscal autonomy by proving that Scotland couldn’t afford to run its own affairs.

We and others pointed out the numerous flaws in that argument, but of course those are just points of view. We could all debate it all day and all night and never achieve a consensus. There is, however, an easy way to settle the matter, by which supporters and opponents of independence and FFA alike can both put their money where their mouths are and everyone will be happy.

It really couldn’t be simpler.

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The first five words of “The Vow” – the solemn pledge made by all three UK party leaders on the eve of the independence referendum – are “The Scottish Parliament is permanent”. This is what happened in the House of Commons this evening when the UK government was asked to make good on that pledge.

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Is what we’re all about. Here’s David Mundell speaking during a fascinating Scotland Bill debate in the House of Commons this evening:

We should probably fact-check that, shouldn’t we? That’s what we do.

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For the last month or so, the Unionist parties have briefly enjoyed the opportunity to taunt the SNP in the Commons over Full Fiscal Autonomy, challenging the party to bring forward proposals and accusing it of being afraid of the policy it campaigned and won on in the election. The Nats called the bluff, and today got the unsurprising result.

The reason given by Secretary of State David Mundell – who declined to appear on today’s edition of “Good Morning Scotland” to defend or explain the decision – was that FFA “would cost every family in Scotland £5,000”.

And we thought that figure had a rather familiar ring to it.

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With scarcely a moment’s pause for breath or reflection, the Unionist polity and media has seamlessly switched its focus to the elusive beast that is “Full Fiscal Autonomy”.

(The SNP thankfully seems to have swiftly dumped the silly and short-lived attempt to rebrand it “Full Fiscal Responsibility”.)

Having deemed the anti-independence “Project Fear” strategy a success because it won the referendum – seemingly oblivious to the fact that what it actually achieved was to turn a 30-point lead into a 10-point victory, at the cost of the annihilation of Unionist MPs in Scotland – the exact same tactics have been deployed against FFA.

And the main problem with that is that there are in fact two FFAs. And the Unionist side is fighting against the wrong one.

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On the day Jim Murphy stands down as leader of the Labour Party North Britain branch office, we’d like to take this opportunity to offer our humble, heartfelt tribute to both him and the insightful political commentariat of Scotland.

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Let’s start with a nice simple flat-out lie, from the Daily Record:

The imaginary figures for future UK oil revenues released yesterday by the Office for Budget Responsibility (which is amusingly pretending it has some sort of idea what the proceeds from the world’s most infamously volatile industry will be 25 years from now when it can’t get anywhere close to accurate three-MONTH predictions) saw the OBR downgrade its OWN previous figure of £37bn – not the SNP’s – to just £2bn.

Let’s just say that again – despite the lie in the Record’s headline that the SNP had been predicting a figure of £37bn, that number was actually a projection by the OBR.

(In fairness to the UK government-funded organisation, at least the report does include a disclaimer saying basically “Look, nobody can actually predict oil revenues, we’re essentially just pulling figures out of our arse here”.)

A reasonable person might at this point wonder why anyone would still bother listening to a body that had just slashed its own previous guess by an eye-watering 94% in the space of a year, when you could simply buy a dartboard and a blindfold, get drunk and produce your own “projections” that were every bit as likely to be accurate, but that’s not even the half of it.

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24 hours in news:

Oil is good again! Yay!

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We’ve already noted that today is a confusing news day. But when we were listening to the radio this morning we thought we maybe hadn’t woken up properly.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 11 June 2015)
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The segment concerned a report by the Tory-leaning think tank Reform Scotland, and saw both the organisation and Labour MSP Hugh Henry trying doggedly to find a bad spin on the news in the fact that crime in Scotland is at a 40-year low. So desperate were they to do so that they ended up denying the existence of arithmetic.

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So first of all there’s this (click pic for full story):

…in which the figures appear to show that Iceland’s policy of imposing justice and imprisoning the greedy bankers who caused the world financial crash – rather than just shovelling money at them and letting them carry on robbing everyone – actually saw its economy recover at least as well as anywhere else’s.

But then things get more complicated.

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