Wings Over Scotland

From the excellent Part 1 of STV’s new documentary “Road To Referendum” (based on the book by Iain Macwhirter, out this week), Labour PM Harold Wilson and Scottish Secretary Willie Ross punt a rather familiar line four decades before Ed Miliband.

We’re sure there’s nothing at all sinister in the fact that the show was unavailable to most viewers due to an unprecedented cross-media technical failure, which also wiped out the STV news at 6pm and this evening’s Scotland Tonight, incidentally.

Because we all of us do what we can, wherever we are.

This morning’s Daily Record carries a story about Ed Balls’ policy speech on welfare yesterday. Commendably, the Labour-supporting paper isn’t shy of pointing out the implications of Balls’ comments:

“Scots could get welfare benefits at lower rates than people in wealthy parts of England under plans being worked on by Labour. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls yesterday raised the idea of a regional cap on welfare, opening the door to variations in a range of social security benefits.

Balls said the welfare cap of £25,000 a year per household should be higher in London but could be lower in parts of the UK where housing is cheaper.”

We’d have been even more impressed, though, if Wings Over Scotland hadn’t revealed the reality of what Labour’s future plans meant for Scotland almost three weeks ago.

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Particularly alert readers may recall a shock-horror story from the Scottish media earlier this year relating to a sharp rise in the number of people waiting over four hours for treatment in hospital A&E departments, which came complete with some dramatic (and highly misleading) graphs.

Labour’s ironic Scottish health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie poured opprobrium on the Scottish Government both for the figures and for changing the treatment-within-four-hours target from 98% to 95%, with the Tories enthusiastically joining in as usual.

So we were naturally quite curious to see what the corresponding figures for the English NHS would be, and they were finally released today.

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We’re stuck with the old version, before “pledge” was officially redefined to mean “lie”.

But we’re sure the Eleventh Edition will be out any day now.

The Scotsman usually makes at least a token effort at concealing its bias a little bit better than this. We’re not sure what’s happened this morning.

What we mean is that normally when you want to find out one of the paper’s headlines is a massive misrepresentation of the truth, you might not have to dig far, but it’s usually slightly deeper than the story’s own strapline.

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So we read this earlier today from New Statesman journalist George Eaton:

We don’t mind telling you we were on tenterhooks waiting for the first concrete policy commitment of Ed Miliband’s three-year Labour leadership. Then it arrived.

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Wings Over Scotland undertook a research trip to London yesterday – mainly to check out the Propaganda: Power And Persuasion exhibition at the British Library, which we definitely recommend should you find yourself in the vicinity. Later in the day, though, we took a stroll down Oxford Street, and found ourselves horrified by the state of it.

The UK capital’s great retail showpiece looked like the aftermath of a Luftwaffe bombing raid on a run-down part of Burnley. Much of the south side of the street had been ripped to pieces by ongoing and seemingly endless work for the Crossrail project (sound familiar, Edinburgh residents?), but even where buildings were untouched by the builders there were boarded-up shops, tatty frontages and once-proud units now occupied by scores of scruffy tourist tat shifters.

And if even the great West End has now fallen into that sort of dilapidated, thoroughly depressing condition, despite three decades of all the country’s wealth being greedily sucked down to London, then what of the rest of the country?

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It’s been several months since we last did a major reader survey, so we’d quite like to poke our noses in again and get your views on a few issues that we didn’t ask about last time, as well as learning a little more about you personally. Some of the questions are directly relevant to the constitutional debate, some aren’t – we’re just curious. Feel free to skip any you’d rather not answer. As if you needed us to tell you that.

(NB All votes are anonymous, in case that’s important. We have no way of knowing how any individual reader voted on any question.)

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Readers may recall how back in January of this year we highlighted a truly horrible piece by tribal Labour dinosaur Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, where in reference to the current grotesque condition of the UK he wrote “No campaigners must publicise the fact that this is as good as it gets, and win votes by emphasising that reality”.

Ian Bell in the Herald today reports some figures from the latest research by Poverty and Social Exclusion, an organisation comprising analysts from six major universities in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s a sample:

“More than 30 million people “suffering some degree of financial insecurity”; close to 12 million “too poor to engage in common social activities”; around four million children and adults who are not properly fed; around 2.5 million children in damp homes; around 1.5 million children “in households that cannot afford to heat their home”.”

This, we’re told even by Labour in the No campaign, is the best the UK can ever hope to deliver. In their own words, the Union can offer us nothing better than that, and almost certainly worse still in the future. Is there anything else to say?

Littered with bank and school holidays, and often with the first glimpse of summer luring people out of doors away from their TVs, newspapers and monitor screens, May is usually a pretty slow month in politics. (Except in election years, of course.) We’re human too, and the last 30 days saw fewer posts on Wings Over Scotland than any this year – 83 compared to the Jan-Apr average of 101.

So we’re extra-chuffed about this:

That’s a whopping 15% increase on last month’s all-time record, and over 8,300 more unique readers. (Number of visits was also up slightly, with total pageviews marginally down as you’d expect from the decreased post count.)

As ever, thanks to everyone who makes the site worthwhile by coming here to read it. We’re taking a research day today, but no more slacking after that. There’s work to do.

This week’s papers had a story about ‘cybernats’ posting rude messages on social media about Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s opposition to Scottish independence.

For the uninitiated, ‘cybernat’ is the term used in Scottish politics to refer, ostensibly, to slightly mad old-school nationalists who post vile, personalised attacks on their political opponents. Some politicos in Scotland don’t seem to understand, though, that this attack doesn’t really work as a political device as it seeks to apply a pejorative to the SNP when everyone knows it can be applied to some supporters of all political parties. Take a look at the comment pages of any UK newspaper.

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