Wings Over Scotland

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Diligent readers will know that this site is engaged in a lonely and difficult quest to find out what Labour’s actual policy on the Bedroom Tax is. And in attempting to establish the facts of the matter, it’s important to differentiate a policy from an opinion.

The latter are in plentiful supply – Labour, we’re told repeatedly, is “against” the tax. Check out, for example, this intriguing exchange on Twitter. (Click for full version.)

Jamie Glackin is a member of Labour’s Scottish Executive Committee, so you think he’d have a fairly firm grasp of the party’s policies, but he’s oddly evasive regarding the Bedroom Tax. Asked by SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter if Labour would scrap the tax, Glackin dodges by saying “Don’t think it will get that far. It’s a dead duck.”

But he’s far from alone in not wanting to answer that question.

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Only the special ineptitude of the Scotsman could make the task of downloading a simple PDF into a near-impossible trial suitable for the Krypton Factor. We don’t advise you bother trying to get yourself a copy of “Scotland Decides” (the paper’s compilation of its eight-week series of pro- and anti-independence essays) from its own website unless you have a fetish for frustration, but thanks to the sterling efforts of Peter Bell we have a local copy here for you without all the dicking around.

The contents of the document, when all taken together, are revealing.

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Brigadoon is the story of a Scottish village which only appears for one day every hundred years. GERSland, on the other hand, is a country – similar to Scotland in many ways – which has appeared, albeit fleetingly, every year since 1999.

GERSland too suffers from Caledonian Antisyzygy – it is simultaneously like Scotland and unlike it. It is not Scotland as we know it and it’s not a glimpse of an independent Scotland either, despite the dogged insistence of countless journalists, analysts and commentators less insightful than Wings Over Scotland’s on presenting it as such.

It is, as the lawyers say, sui generis, or a special case.

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Over time, and particularly since the turn of 2013, this site’s attitude to the Unionist media in Scotland (which is to say, ALL of the media in Scotland) has undergone something of a shift. Previously we held its partisan spin and naked dishonesty in professional contempt, but more recently it’s become increasingly hard not to simply feel sorry for the poor beleaguered hacks on dying publications as they wrestle uncomprehendingly with their bleak future.

To exercise something as poisonous and destructive as hatred or even anger over today’s lead in Scotland on Sunday by Tom Peterkin (cache link), for example, would be about as productive as entering into a debate on a Saturday night with a drunk who was urinating into a skip and simultaneously ranting about immigrants round the back of a Lidl car park. All we can really do is sigh, call social services and walk sadly on.

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We haven’t studied the McCluskey report in detail, and we’re awfully tempted – after 16 months of scrutinising the many abysmal failings of Scotland’s media – to cynically assume that if it’s got them so uniformly up in arms it must be a good thing. But we’ll try to resist the kneejerk reaction.

For now we’ll merely pass comment on a very odd piece against the proposals by Iain Macwhirter in the Herald, ostensibly listing reasons “Why Scotland should be afraid”.

“George Galloway called Tony Blair a murderer – but he won’t be able to say that in print or online. Some of the descriptions of Brian Souter, during the ‘Keep the Clause’ campaign against the promotion of homosexuality in schools, would be actionable, as would many of the remarks made by his supporters. Feminists who say silly things like ‘all men are rapists’ could be in the dock , as would loud-mouths like Ray Winstone who said he was ‘raped by taxes’.”

Um, and these are supposed to be BAD things, are they? If those are really the potential consequences of the report’s implementation, if such counter-productive and divisive and idiotic debasement of intelligent discourse would suddenly become a punishable act, then sign us up right now. Because given that we currently live in a country where this can happen, we’re not sure we’ve got anything to lose.

Recent claims made by Jackie Baillie (Labour’s shadow health spokeswoman and Better Together campaign director) suggested that Scots would be unable to gain access post-independence to medical treatment in England, because a Yes vote would lead to cross-border reciprocal healthcare becoming bogged down by red tape, complexity and costs, leading to treatment being delayed or withheld.

As we’ve explained before, given that reciprocal agreements already exist between the UK and other countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) – in the form of the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) – Baillie’s claim is at its most generous interpretation an absurdly ill-informed misunderstanding, and in a more depressingly plausible scenario, an outright lie.

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A couple of paragraphs in a Vince Cable story (to over-dignify the piece in question) from today’s Scotsman are quite amusing if you swap the order they come in.

“The first day I took up my job as the chief economist at Shell I was given a plaque which had an Arabic saying and when I pressed for a translation, they said ‘All those who claim to predict the future are lying, even if they are later proved right’.”

Righto.

“Business Secretary Vince Cable last night warned that an independent Scotland’s reliance on revenue from oil would result in savage public spending cuts or tax rises, as he addressed the Liberal Democrat Scottish conference.”

Oops!

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

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Sharp-minded readers will recall a piece from earlier this week, in which we crossed swords with a Scottish Labour press officer angrily denying that the party wanted the Scottish Government to introduce a no-evictions law for Bedroom Tax arrears:

“You wrote that SLab has a specific policy proposal relating to evictions. Don’t assert – prove. Show me where you get it from.”

Will this do, Alan? (Our emphasis, as if it were needed.)

“Labour today called on the Scottish Government to intervene to protect those worst hit by the “bedroom tax” […] Labour claimed the Scottish Government could ease the plight of those due to be hit by the bedroom tax by introducing a ‘no evictions’ policy – pledging no-one would be kicked out of their home simply because of the new rules.”

If there are any other Scottish Labour policies that the Scottish Labour press office needs us to clarify for it, it’s welcome to ask any time.

…about the full extent of the modern Labour Party’s complete and utter betrayal of the poor and vulnerable and its wholesale capitulation to Tory ideology, read this.

We have to go out this afternoon so we’ll make this quick. Blah blah too poor blah blah no jobs blah blah individual smear blah blah fascist state blah blah invaded by Belgium or something blah blah. Frankly we wouldn’t even bother clicking the links if we were you. If you miss them today, the same stories – or very slight variations on them – will be back in the Scottish media tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, and the day after that, and all the days after that all the way to autumn 2014.