Wings Over Scotland

A play in three very short acts.

UNIONISTS:“We need information! We must have more information! We demand answers! Why aren’t voters being given the information they need? It must be given to them sooner, if not immediately! It’s an outrage!”

SCOTTISH GOVERNMENT: “We shall deliver this information.”

UNIONISTS:“Taxpayers’ money funding separatist propaganda! It’s an outrage!”

Hey ho. Just 18 more months of these idiots to go, readers.

Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer got a bit exasperated on last night’s edition of the show as he tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to get Scottish Labour’s ever-smirking Jackie Baillie to give him anything resembling a straight answer to a question about Labour’s (lack of) policy on the bedroom tax.

As the well-fed welfare spokeswoman embarked on another pre-scripted soundbite of SNP-bashing rather than commit Labour councils to a policy of not evicting tenants for arrears related to the penalty charge, Brewer sighed (at around 12m 52s) that “I was vainly trying to take into consideration the people who might be affected by this” before giving up and moving on to his other guest.

Baillie was demanding that the Scottish Government instead bring forward legislation to make such evictions illegal – just a few days after Scottish Labour’s press office had strenuously denied to this very website that the party was making any such demands. But it’s easy to see why she’d be having trouble keeping track of her position, because to Labour the bedroom tax is little short of a delight.

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We’re not sure we can untangle this.

Perhaps you can help us out.

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A keen-eyed viewer alerts us to the alarming fact that the Herald appears to have been letting Magnus Gardham write its leader column with his crayons again:

(Online version since fixed, print version preserved for posterity.)

The media is in full-on spin mode today, reporting Ruth Davidson’s miraculous Damascene conversion to the principle of “more powers” for the Scottish Parliament, just 18 short months after her Churchill-esque declaration of devolutionary defiance to the effect that the petty tinkering of the Scotland Act was a “line in the sand”.

Most of the papers, of course, feign critical analysis by highlighting Davidson’s U-turn. But what we haven’t seen in a single one is any sort of actual examination of the content of Ms Davidson’s speech to a micro-audience of literally several people in what appeared to be the corridor of an Edinburgh hotel yesterday.

We suspect that’s because anyone who did would be very hard-pressed indeed to credibly describe the measures she proposes as representing “more powers” for anything. In fact, they’re the opposite.

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Remember how Unionists endlessly cite World War 2 as the definitive example of great British “togetherness”? Turns out they might be over-egging that one a bit. From today’s Scottish Daily Express (print edition only):

Of course, that was a long time ago. Things are different now.

So. Wow. Where to start? Lead with the number, we suppose.

Did we say “Wow” yet?

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Something’s puzzled me for more than 15 years, viewers, and an article I read today brought it back to mind, so I’m going to raise it very briefly in the hopes that someone might even now be able to answer the question for me.

There’s something odd about the chart above, isn’t there?

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Running total (updated daily): £28,920 of £29,796 (97.1%).
Donations in last 24 hours: £886.

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We don’t know about you, viewers, but when we tune into a two-hour TV programme called “Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013”, we sort of expect the large bulk of that show to be, well, the Scottish National Party Spring Conference 2013.

With the UK’s state broadcaster, though, that isn’t necessarily the case.

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Apologies for the lack of posts today, readers – been working on a small practical project and getting into an argument with a No voter who might just be persuadable, among other things. But amid it all we stumbled across this on the BBC website.

It’s a 2011 interview with Noel Gallagher about the English riots. Gallagher was one of the cultural figureheads famously invited to Downing Street by Tony Blair during the short-lived “Cool Britannia” phase before the shine wore off the New Labour project.

“Running up to the last election I wasn’t going to vote, until my wife said ‘You’ve got to vote’, and I’ve got to say it’s the first time I’ve picked the most ludicrous thing on the list – some guy who was gonna dress as a pirate.

But the Labour Party have managed to prove themselves to be just as sleazy and horrible as we all know the  Conservatives are. There’s nothing left to vote for any more.“

We empathise. But there’s still one part of Britain where that’s not true.