Wings Over Scotland

We read yesterday how Labour and the Tories have both, in rather different ways, been expressing their concern about the demographic timebomb that will affect Scotland unless it can attract a major increase in immigration.

“An independent Scotland would need almost one million immigrants by the middle of the century to boost the workforce and defuse its pensions time bomb, [Labour shadow pensions spokesman Gregg McClymont] has warned.”

And just a few months earlier:

“Economists believe the population needs to grow by 24,000 people a year just to keep pace with European economies. Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: ‘A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base. That is absolutely essential for the economy.”

So we’d imagine that’s always been the Labour and Tory policy, right?

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Earlier this week we mentioned a nasty bit of politics from Scottish Labour MP Gregg McClymont warning that Scotland would need “a million immigrants” to be able to fund old-age pensions in the future. We were too busy picking holes in Gordon Brown to look into the story in depth, but when it handily appeared again in today’s Daily Record (this time attributed to Yvette Cooper) we checked it a bit more closely.

The Record went with the same dramatic figure for its headline, but it’s not until several paragraphs down either article that you get to the rather less attention-grabbing reality.

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Remember how the No campaign was definitely going to be much more positive from now on, pushing a feelgood “sunshine strategy” to persuade Scots that the UK was the best of both worlds?

Let’s see how that’s going, shall we?

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Three years summed up in two tweets:

(We’re kidding, of course. Normally the media isn’t nearly that balanced.)

Tomorrow: “‘Eat that pie and you’ll get fat’, says Pickles”.

Earlier this week we did a little poking and prodding of the Scotsman’s last ICM poll, and now the full data tables are in for the latest one, so to while away an hour before tea we figured we may as well do a bit of comparing and see how things had changed.

Wait! Come back! There’ll be Miley Cyrus at the end!

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We’ve just endured Gordon Brown’s 45-minute “old man shouting out a series of random unconnected facts from Wikipedia” speech at Glasgow University. (You should be able to find it later on the iPlayer under the programme title “Briefings”, if you really want to.) It doesn’t bear a lot of analysis, being just the same old cobblers you’ve heard a thousand times before, but delivered in a more rambling manner.

There was one vaguely interesting thing about the event, though.

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Here’s the Scottish Labour finance spokesman Iain Gray on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, discussing Gordon Brown’s speech in Glasgow on pensions because Mr Brown himself refused to answer any questions about it.

As ever with Mr Gray, he packs a lot of entertainment into a short space of time.

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We’re still trying to make sense of some confusing arithmetic in Gordon Brown’s latest doomspeech about pensions, which was delivered this evening at Glasgow University and which we examined in some detail here.

One part in particular had us scratching our heads in bafflement, so we’ve pulled it out for some closer scrutiny by itself. Tell us if we get anything wrong.

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If you’ve ever found yourselves in a situation where you’re dating someone from the hardcore militant wing of vegetarianism, readers, you’ll know that their life – and by extension yours – quickly becomes defined by what’s missing.

Whether shopping or going out to a restaurant or a surprisingly large number of other things, hazards you’d never previously imagined loom menacingly everywhere. Veggie “beanburgers” often apparently contain unadvertised cheese, innocent-looking sweeties turn out to be glazed with beeswax, and so on.

But soon you familiarise yourself with the “everything-free” aisle in supermarkets, where much more expensive facsimiles of normal foodstuffs – now bereft of dairy, gluten, sugar and goodness knows what else – reside, leaving you to wonder over the mysteries of the sinister-sounding unheard-of substances they’ve replaced them with.

And increasingly, so it is with politics.

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… they think you are.

(UK edition on the left, Scottish edition on the right.)

Even the faithful Scottish media can scarcely rouse itself to hype up Gordon Brown’s latest lumbering “intervention” in the independence debate this morning. The Scotsman buries the story in a corner of page 5, below a big spread about the ongoing implosion of CBI Scotland, and it doesn’t make the Herald’s online front page at all.

(Indeed, even in the paper’s “Referendum News” section it’s only story #6, below the CBI, more attacks on Alistair Darling’s leadership of the No campaign and a vile piece of “FOREIGNERS!” dog-whistle politicking from Labour nonentity Gregg McClymont.)

It’s not too hard to work out why.

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