Wings Over Scotland

Last week we listened to a Radio Scotland phone-in debate on Trident, hosted very deftly by John Beattie, who managed to steer callers away from political points and keep the discussion on the merits or otherwise of the weapons system itself.

Sadly that didn’t dissuade the usual coterie of nutters/local councillors phoning in insisting that (a) North Korea would invade/blast Scotland off the face of the Earth the moment we let our guard down, and (b) Helensburgh would immediately revert to the Stone Age at the loss of jobs were the few hundred Trident sailors who spend about a week every year in the town to be reassigned to other posts in the navy.

We didn’t have time to ring in ourselves, but we did manage to think of a much better idea that solved both of those problems without lumbering Scotland with a gigantic nuclear white elephant, and one that would also free up an awful lot of valuable police time and resources that are currently spent arresting a bunch of hippies.

See if you can pick any holes in it, readers.

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We try to avoid openly editorialising on this site, readers. While unashamedly partisan in our leanings, as a rule we prefer to present the facts and let people come to their own conclusions from the evidence.

But we’re not sure we’ve ever seen anything more craven and pathetic than this.

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We’ve been quiet today because we’ve been wading through the 80-odd painfully-dry pages of the Labour 2015 election manifesto, folks. It’s a deeply tedious read – screeds and screeds of waffly text about how nice things are nice and good things are good but bad things are bad. A couple of things did jump out, though. Here’s one.

Alert readers will of course recall that the party’s solemn pledge in Scotland is to provide 1000 more nurses (hastily revised from the comical “1000 more than whatever the SNP say”) from the proceeds of the Mansion Tax, even though NHS Scotland is devolved and no Westminster government can in fact hire a single Scottish nurse.

But hang on. Something’s not right about those numbers.

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You’d have to say this seems pretty clear.

(From today’s Daily Politics, around 28m in.)

A super-alert reader pointed out something about today’s Sunday Politics that we hadn’t noticed. Before the galaxy-class trainwreck that was the Scottish leaders’ debate, the networked section of the show had a piece on Scottish polling, and our eagle-eyed viewer spotted that the chart of projected seats wasn’t in proportion.

So we measured, and this is what it should have looked like.

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With there only having been three hours of the Scottish political party leaders (and Jim Murphy) debating on TV so far this week, and four days to wait for another one, BBC Scotland thought they might need another 40 minutes on this afternoon’s Sunday Politics Scotland to discuss the issues around the forthcoming general election.

It went well, but for busy readers in a hurry we’ve edited the show down to a compact nine-minute cut, which still gets across everything the full version did.

A great example of adult discourse, expertly set. Well done, everyone.

There’s very little actual political news today, so the papers have largely been forced to either basically not have any at all (the Sunday Post and Scottish Sun On Sunday) or make up totally mad stuff for laughs to fill the space.

We’ve picked out some highlights for you below.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Scottish Liberal Democrat manifesto 2015:

I voted for this pathetic shower of useless snivellers for 23 years, folks. I’ve learned my lesson. Once again, I can only hang my head and beg forgiveness.

That slacker Chris Cairns is on holiday again, readers. But don’t worry, we’ve still got some chucklesome weekend funnies for you.

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With the “biggest party forms the government” lie now sunk and rusting slowly on the seabed (weighed down even further by polls suggesting that Labour actually will be the largest party even if they lose all of Scotland to the SNP), and four weeks of campaigning left to fill, Scottish Labour have had to grab a hammer, smash the glass on the “EMERGENCY – IN CASE OF DESPERATION” box and clutch desperately at whatever they found inside.

The abject answer is “Project Fear 2 – This Time It’s Full Fiscal Autonomy”.

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After this week’s STV and BBC debates, in which the Scottish Labour branch-office manager’s combative performances were favourably received by the Scottish media, Wings exclusively interviews armed-forces enthusiast Jim Murphy for a response to the latest numbers from YouGov, pausing first for the delivery of some refreshments.