Wings Over Scotland

The Evening Standard, 16 October 2014:

“George Osborne was today named the most influential person in London as the Chancellor topped the Evening Standard’s The 1000 power list, with Mayor Boris Johnson in second place.

The Evening Standard panel decided Mr Osborne is London’s most influential person because of his willingness to invest in the capital despite pressure for the Treasury to spend the money in other parts of Britain.”

Nice to know he’s looking after your money, isn’t it?

We didn’t notice this piece in Scotland on Sunday three weekends ago, because we were on holiday and, well, it was in Scotland on Sunday. But it seems odd that nobody (including SoS) has picked up on its ramifications at the time or since, because if it’s true then it would officially and conclusively mark the complete abandonment of the “vow” all three Westminster party leaders made to Scottish voters prior to the referendum, just 10 days after Scots voted to believe that vow.

And you’d think that’d be bigger news.

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Gordon Brown is expected to be up on his hind legs again in the Commons today – a second appearance in a week that’ll almost certainly be the mainly-absent opposition backbencher’s busiest period of activity in Parliament since the 2010 election.

He’ll be inexplicably getting time to lay out his views on devolution again, despite having absolutely no power to implement them, and it seems reasonable to imagine that he’ll spend a fair bit of time on the contents of the infamous “vow” he brokered days before the Scottish independence referendum.

One line of that vow ran “We agree that the UK exists to ensure opportunity and security for all by sharing our resources equitably across all four nations”. And as “pooling and sharing resources” was Mr Brown’s catchphrase during the campaign, we thought it might be worthwhile taking a look at what that means in practice.

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On the BBC website today.

Just out of interest – does anyone know the last time Johann Lamont toured the country speaking to open audiences rather than invited and vetted Labour activists, or how many elections list MSP Alex Johnstone has won?

This morning’s Daily Record has a rather panicky-sounding editorial complaining that Yes supporters, from the First Minister down, are refusing to “move on” from the referendum result and are complaining about “betrayal”, especially in the light of yesterday’s joke of a Commons debate. The Record calls for unity and also talks, hilariously, of the “settled will of the Scottish people”.

(What is it, exactly, that the will of the Scottish people is meant to have settled on, given that they had and still have no idea which powers a No vote would bring?)

It rather smacks of the accused in a murder trial saying “Look, sure, I killed and butchered your wife and children, but that was MONTHS ago, let’s just forget about it and get back to normal”, but it’s not actually the point.

Because it’s not the referendum result that most people feel betrayed by. It’s not even the behaviour of the Unionist parties since the vote.

The entity in the dock here is the Daily Record itself – which still claims to be the most-read newspaper in Scotland, although the Scottish Sun sells more copies – and it’s charged with the serious crime of knowingly and deliberately lying to the people of Scotland, while proclaiming itself to be their “Champion”.

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By the time we’d watched the Commons debate on devolution for four and a quarter hours, precisely ONE non-Unionist MP (the SNP’s Pete Wishart) had been allowed to speak, for just six minutes. On learning there were still two more hours scheduled, we could take no more and bailed out like the Bank of England.

Clearly we weren’t the only ones.

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The much-awaited and hastily-extended Westminster debate on Scottish devolution is just about to start in the House of Commons. We’ll be watching it on the Parliament website rather than the BBC, for the obvious reasons.

The dust of the independence referendum is showing a distinct unwillingness to settle. Almost a month from the vote, alien observers would be hard pushed to identify Yes as the beaten side. SNP membership has more than tripled, and that of the Scottish Greens and SSP (much) more than doubled, in three weeks. The moribund Labour Party in Scotland has slumped in both Holyrood and Westminster polls. Newspaper sales figures continue to fall after not a single daily or national newspaper in the country backed the choice of almost half of the population.

Unionist politicians unnerved by the closeness of the result have advocated making independence actually illegal, and the Secretary of State for Portsmouth has issued a series of panicky warnings that the “nationalists” must not seek the best possible outcome from the figleaf Smith Commission (or, presumably, he’ll tell his mum).

Increasingly, the “once in a lifetime” referendum looks like only the opening skirmish.

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A few days ago (and by criteria unknown), Wings Over Scotland was deemed the third most influential politics blog in the UK, which was nice. The #1 was LabourList, which today published a piece on last night’s two election results.

So let’s talk about UKIP.

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With reference to our post from earlier today, we couldn’t help but notice Scottish Labour whining loudly this morning about the award of the ScotRail franchise to Dutch state-owned railway company Abellio. (On what sound like very good terms.)

We asked the party’s infrastructure spokesman James Kelly what Labour would have done instead had they been in power, and got no reply. So we went and had a look, and it turned out there was a clear and simple answer.

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We’re still on holiday until Tuesday, readers. But we wanted to ask you something.

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