Wings Over Scotland

Among supporters of a Yes vote this site has often been an outspoken defender of Newsnight Scotland’s Gordon Brewer. Sometimes prone to lapsing into a poor impersonation of Jeremy Paxman, all hectoring and interrupting and not listening, on top form the BBC man is in our book the finest inquisitor of politicians in the UK, with only Bernand Ponsonby of STV capable of giving him a run for his money.

After last night, we’ve rarely felt more vindicated.

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We just had to put this up before packing in for the evening.

“Labour has also rejected proposals to devolve air passenger duty (APD), alcohol, fuel and tobacco duties, corporation tax and capital gains tax, to avoid tax competition with the rest of the UK and to avoid appealing to business interests.

Senior sources said the decision to reject devolving APD was also influenced by the loud applause from BA boss Willie Walsh and Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary for Salmond’s policy of phasing out APD after independence.”

Read that over to yourselves a few times, folks. Let it seep right in. Labour refused to devolve APD, a policy their own Devo Commission’s interim report had recommended, because it was an SNP policy that some major Scottish employers approved of.

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Nothing to do with Devo Nano, just something spotted by an alert reader that we don’t recall being picked up anywhere in the press. And it seems, you know, interesting.

“The ‘Yes’ side sought to turn the table on their opponents over Europe by arguing that the potential 2017 [EU] referendum, which Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged  to hold if he can’t negotiate better terms for the UK, creates more uncertainty than a Yes vote.

But in one of the most eye-catching statements of the evening, [Alistair] Carmichael said, to gasps of surprise among the audience:

‘There is no question of there being a referendum. There is no mechanism for the Conservatives to deliver a referendum 2017. That is the hard political fact.’“

Shouldn’t that really be “ear-catching”? But we can’t help wondering whether Mr Carmichael has explained this rather pertinent fact to his cabinet colleagues or not. With the EU elections coming up, it might be something they’d want to know.

[NOTE: The content of this article will be added to Part 1 after today for easy future reference. This one will be left here so that comments will be preserved. Comment on either this post or the earlier one as you see fit.]

Let’s proactively synergise some more inter-operational solutions!

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So, the wait is over. Two full years after announcing the setup of its “Devolution Commission” (comprising three MPs, three MSPs, one MEP, a pair of general-purpose office wonks and one increasingly-unhinged councillor), this morning Scottish Labour unveiled its final report, strikingly clad in the flag of, er, Shetland.

As we write, only the executive summary has been made available – a slim 14 pages including the preamble, reasoning and recommendations. These are our observations.

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We’ve finally got hold of a copy of the long-awaited report (or at least, the executive summary) from Labour’s “Devolution Commission”. While we wade through the fine detail, we thought we’d quickly let you see the list of things Labour has decided that Scotland absolutely cannot, under any circumstances, be allowed to handle for itself.

Analysis to come.

While we wait for the full detail of what look like being even more watered-down and insipid “Devo Lite” proposals from Labour than we were expecting, we suppose we might as well spend a minute on last night’s big “Better Together” announcement that Eddie Izzard was going to hold a benefit gig for the No campaign, putting the Union on a par with starving Ethiopians and earthquake victims.

Einstein is claimed to have said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results (and readers hopefully already know our views on Quote Nazis), so we found a line attributed to Izzard in the press release particularly striking.

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Here’s the footage of Alistair Darling’s interview in Glasgow with James Naughtie a few days ago. If you want to spend 35 minutes of your life watching a man totally dodge every question asked of him, it’s your lucky day.

Naughtie does ask a few decent ones, particularly on the currency and EU, but Darling just waffles his way past all of them (a particular trick we’ve noticed among Labour politicians lately is saying “Let me just say this and then I’ll answer your question”, whereupon they trot out some boilerplate and then don’t answer the question), and Naughtie doesn’t ever press him any further.

So, y’know, saving the £20 was probably the smart call.

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Well, this is the month of the Mad March Hare, we suppose.

First we had Bernard Ponsonby telling us that the referendum was a choice between independence and a completely imaginary “more powers” option. Next up was Hamish Macdonell in the Spectator, oddly hallucinating that David Cameron had announced “devo max” when in fact he’d announced devo nothing at all.

At the weekend (and, we suspect, all this week) there were journalists insisting that Johann Lamont was offering Scots major advances devolution when in fact she was essentially offering the 2009 Calman Commission with a new ribbon tied on it.

But the winner is surely David Torrance in today’s Herald.

“This was the first Scottish Conservative gathering I can remember in quite a while where there were visible signs of political life. Ms Davidson made the best conference speech of her leadership, actually connecting with her audience, while usefully the venue, Edinburgh’s shiny EICC, didn’t conform to type by being dusty and half-empty.”

Our emphasis. But, um…

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At the weekend we examined the likely outcome of Scottish Labour’s long-awaited “Devolution Commission”, and the media’s extraordinary spin on it. Hyped breathlessly as a “game-changer” by more than one Scottish journalist, the plan is in fact an empty piece of window-dressing, a charade as fake as the shop-fronts which line so many High Streets as the UK government’s “recovery” bypasses most normal people’s lives.

And while Johann Lamont might have fooled the media – always willing to be suckered by any passing devolution conman – she clearly doesn’t fancy her chances of pulling the (painting of) wool over the Scottish public’s eyes, because a piece in yesterday’s Sunday Mail reveals just how low Labour are trying to manage Scotland’s hopes.

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The top five most-read stories on Wings Over Scotland in the last seven days.

1. We less, we happy less
Awful grammar and the same old scaremongering from “Better Together”.

2. Sympathy for the devil
The No camp tries not to rejoice at bad news for Scotland.

3. Please stop lying to us
Reporting the news from Things That Didn’t Actually Happen World.

4. The countdown starts tomorrow
We got the date wrong on this – just two days to go.

5. An apology to Gordon Brown
Instantly gazumped in the “old man gibberish” stakes.

This week’s theme: devo schmevo.

Scotland on Sunday deputy editor Kenny Farquharson was sticking with all the doggedness of the Inverness Caley Thistle defence to his paper’s bizarre story about Johann Lamont’s “Devo 2.0” plans when we chatted briefly to him on Twitter this afternoon. (Although let’s at least give SoS credit for what as far as we know is a whole new “devo something” suffix.)

The concept is so strange it merits breaking down further.

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