Wings Over Scotland

We suspect that for the vast majority of our readers, it’ll be quite hard to get to grips with the fact that the Scottish Daily Mail intends this headline as a criticism.

In 18 months’ time, Scots will have the chance to decide whether they’d rather spend their money on pay rises for public-sector workers or on tax cuts for the rich and bribes for them to buy second homes and inflate another housing bubble with. We must admit to being quite surprised that there’s a debate about it.

We already know that Labour, particularly in Scotland, have no policies on just about anything. But in the light of the past week’s glut of abstentions, we decided to see if we could find out if the party had any remaining principles either. The results were startling, by which we mean not startling in the slightest.

Below are just a few of the votes that Labour has abstained on, at both Westminster and Holyrood, in recent memory. What, we ponder rhetorically, is the point of having an Opposition that doesn’t ever actually oppose anything?

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We must admit that we didn’t see this one coming. Johann Lamont made a rather surprising admission 3m 16s into last night’s Newsnight Scotland special.

“There’ll be many people who voted SNP but don’t believe in independence who will breathe a sigh of relief, like me.”

Well, that goes some way to explaining the size of the SNP’s majority, at least.

We’re only just now getting round to watching last night’s special edition of Newsnight Scotland. It’s off to a cracking start. Great work there, BBC Scotland graphics team.

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Had yesterday’s podcast been going out today instead, I’d probably have chosen this as the play-out music. But it’ll do just fine right now too.

Just for fun, then, let’s have our guesses. I’d love to see Alex Salmond stand up in Holyrood this afternoon and announce that the historic first chance for Scots to choose their own destiny will take place on Saturday 25th October 2014, because that means the result would arrive on my birthday the following Monday. But I don’t think he will.

The official Wings Over Scotland prediction is Thursday 2nd October 2014.

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And, um, also another person, can now be heard on episode 20 of the Scottish Independence Podcast, featuring regular host Michael Greenwell and your humble correspondent rambling on about the this and the that (and occasionally the other) of Scottish politics. It’s a right riveting listen, and if you don’t like it you can always skip straight to the end for a nice tune.

The 36-minute podcast can be downloaded, played live or subscribed to on iTunes.

Well, what a curious day this is shaping up as. As we scoured our Twitter feed in vain after the bewildering media blackout on the workfare vote, we also discovered that “Better Together” has been running around half the internet trying to censor a satirical video. To cut a long story short, you can download a copy of the video by right-clicking on the image below and choosing “Save As…” or “Save Link As…”.

(NB: Don’t left-click, as it will attempt to stream it and fail.)

We invite the No campaign to see if they can have it pulled from this site.

But that wasn’t the end. As people started to read our story on the workfare motion, we began to get tweets and comments questioning the quote we’d used, as it didn’t seem to appear anywhere in the article on the website. Confused, we went and had a look, and sure enough the original version had vanished, replaced by something much shorter and far more innocuous.

Luckily this isn’t our first time with internet censorship. At the time of writing there’s still a cached version of the original, and when that disappears you can read it here.

We’re not quite sure what’s happening today, but we don’t like it.

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This article* puts our feelings about the actions of the three London parties in the House Of Commons today better (or at the very least, more concisely and with considerably more restraint) than we could ourselves.

The SNP, Plaid Cymru, the sole Green and about 40 of 258 Labour MPs opposed the motion, which was only able to be rushed through because of Labour’s co-operation with the government. Everyone else either voted for it or abstained. The rule of law means nothing any more, and neither does democracy. Better together, right?

*The link now points to a saved version. The original has been mysteriously replaced.