Wings Over Scotland

You do sometimes have to admire the sheer barefaced chutzpah of Scotland’s Labour MPs and MSPs. Take this solid-gold passage from Douglas Alexander’s speech to the Labour conference today, which he apparently delivered with a straight face:

“Just two years into Government and that’s David Cameron in a nutshell: out of touch at home; out of his depth abroad.

But what’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the EU? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the G20? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the WTO? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for NATO? Nothing, it’s a blank page.”

No, you’re not imagining that, folks, it really happened – a senior figure from Scottish Labour genuinely just criticised someone else for having no policies on something, less than a week after his own supposed leader had announced that we’ve got at least two more years to wait before their party will deign let the people of Scotland know what they stand for on any subject at all.

We take our hat off to Wee Dougie. Maybe he can hide his bright red face behind it.

So we’re told that Scottish Labour are to launch yet another devolution commission, which will report on which new governmental powers Labour has suddenly realised the Scottish Parliament needs since the Calman Commission closed down in 2009.

(We like to imagine that as they proudly published their last report, someone at the press conference casually asked what they’d concluded about fiscal autonomy, and the Commission board all slapped their foreheads and wailed “Doh! We knew there was something we’d forgotten to talk about!”)

We’ve already examined the commission’s yawning credibility gap ourselves, but over the weekend we digested a couple of articles from more impartial sources that make it even clearer just how hollow and meaningless any Labour promises of greater devolution to come after a No vote in 2014 will be.

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We apologise for running two horn-tooting stories in one week, but we’re blown away, we really are. Back at the start of August we predicted, in all sincerity, a big drop-off in pageviews for this site, because the June and July figures had been inflated by a hefty sprinkling of Rangers stories as that particular circus ricocheted between slapstick and farce on an hourly basis. We were linked from many dozens of different football sites and forums as far apart as Inverness and Portsmouth, and thousands of readers with little to no interest in Scottish politics arrived for a brief visit.

There was indeed a fall in August as we stopped covering the Great Govan Debacle, but a much tinier one than we’d anticipated – just 4% (and more on that in a moment). And this month, to our considerable amazement, we’ve not only recovered the losses but hit another record high: up over 15,000 to 265,203. We only broke the million-views barrier in August, and in September (albeit the 29th) we passed 1.5 million. Wow.

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Scrapping universal free prescriptions would, after the administrative costs of means-testing and suchlike, save Scotland somewhere in the region of £50m a year. By our calculations, it’d take just 254 years before the policy recouped this gigantic Labour waste of NHS money. But every little helps, right, Johann?

Hilariously, the Scottish Labour Party has just announced the personnel for its latest commission on devolution. We’re not quite sure which dramatic events have occurred since its last one, the Calman Commission, concluded that all Scotland needed was a few extra powers over speed limits and airguns. Oh, wait – yes we are.

It seems that a mere 18 months after it happened, Scottish Labour has finally come to terms with the electorate’s contemptuous rejection of its pathetically feeble vision of enhanced devolution. In just a year and a half, it appears to have finally dawned on the slow-witted dinosaurs at John Smith House that the Scottish people are no longer prepared to accept the status quo with a couple of trivial tweaks at the outer edges.

And in a panic, Labour are flailing desperately in all directions at once.

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Sadly these pieces all arrived too late to be included in yesterday’s round-up and poll. But all of them are still pretty unmissable reading. (And didn’t we tell you weeks ago that Kevin McKenna was starting to see the light? Oh ye of little faith.)

LABOUR STILL LOST IN THE WILDERNESS
(Herald View in the Herald)

“Denied power at Holyrood for a second term, Labour appear so warped by their tribal hatred of the Nationalists that they would rather align with the Coalition than the SNP. Instead of recognising a fellow progressive force, they would rather collude in dismantling the welfare state. It is a pitiful sight.”

LABOUR’S WRETCHED SILENCE ON CHILD POVERTY
(Kevin McKenna for the Observer)

“Ms Lamont’s use of the phrase “something for nothing”, as well as coming straight from the grimoire of Margaret Thatcher is, at best, misleading, at worst, downright false… It’s difficult to assess which body of Labour supporters will be most insulted and alienated.”

HOW DID THE PARTY OF SMITH AND DEWAR COME TO THIS?
(Iain Macwhirter for the Herald)

“As a presentational disaster this ranks alongside John Major’s back to basics speech which helped seal the fate of the UK Conservatives in the 1990s. There has been a whiff of decay around Scottish Labour for some years, but I’m beginning to think it has finally popped its clogs.”

LABOUR THROWN INTO A CRISIS
(Socialist Party Scotland for socialistworld.net)

“Labour’s leader has signalled her support for a vicious extension of the cuts agenda and the tearing up of those modest but important advances that still survive in Scotland. In doing so she could also sound the death of Labour in Scotland.”

It’s been hard to keep up with the avalanche of opprobrium that’s been poured onto Johann Lamont’s head since Tuesday, as nationalists, commentators and Labour loyalists alike have all reacted with shock and horror to her craven, mendacious abandonment of the last shreds of the once-great party’s ideology.

(Even the most foaming of Labour’s ultra-staunch comment-thread attack dogs, such as Left Foot Forward’s absurd “Newsbot9”, called it “political suicide”.)

We can’t help but note the irony in the fact that Scottish Labour’s first ever full-blown, supposedly-independent leader is the one who has eliminated the final vestiges of difference between the more traditional Scottish party and its neoliberal London parent.

So to save you scouring the internet haphazardly, we’ve gathered together our top 10 picks of the bunch for some leisurely weekend reading. And just for fun, you can vote for your favourite in the poll in the central column. It’s no easy task. Enjoy.

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The last seven days have been the biggest week in the history of Wings Over Scotland, eclipsing even any of the ones at the height of the Rangers fiasco. The site saw a total of 86,522 page views over the period – 15% up on the previous best – in a historic week which also saw us break the 500-posts and 10,000-comments barriers.

So thanks to all of you for reading and sharing, thanks to everyone who marched for independence in Edinburgh last Saturday, and most of all, our very special thanks to Johann Lamont. We couldn’t have done it without you.

This week, Johann Lamont called for an end to the “something for nothing culture” with regard to the provision of universal benefits in Scotland. We found the phrase oddly familiar. But where had we heard it before, and from whom?

“This is our contract with the British people – to bring an end to the something for nothing culture”
– Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative minister, October 2011

“We are repairing the damage of an age of irresponsibility. Ending the something for nothing society that flourished during it”
– George Osborne, Conservative Chancellor Of The Exchequer, October 2011

“The hard working people of Britain want their government to bring an end to Labour’s something for nothing culture”
– Baroness Warsi, Conservative peer and former chairman, December 2011

“[The welfare state] has sent out some incredibly damaging signals. That it pays not to work. That you are owed something for nothing”
– David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, June 2012

“There are some who really are sitting at home and putting little effort into moving on in life… A something for nothing culture does no one any favours”
– Chris Grayling, Conservative minister, August 2012

“Jobless young adults will soon be forced to do three months’ full-time work or have their benefits cut under a scheme being piloted in Croydon to tackle its “something for nothing culture””
– Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London, September 2012

Oh yeah. Now we remember.

Ever since May 2007, one of the strangest aspects of Scottish politics has been the poisonous hostility of the Scottish Liberal Democrats to the SNP. The parties sit very close to each other on the political spectrum, and the SNP are sympathetic to some key Lib Dem policies – most obviously a local income tax – which the Lib Dems stood no chance of implementing in coalition with anyone but the nationalists.

(The Lib Dems are also still officially a party of federalism, committed to far stronger devolution than Labour or the Tories.)

Yet a succession of leaders have treated the SNP as little short of pure evil. Nicol Stephen, Tavish Scott (especially) and now Willie Rennie appear to regard Alex Salmond’s party with undisguised hatred, for no immediately obvious reason, and the idea of any sort of co-operation on any issue about as unthinkable as Barack Obama announcing a treaty of friendship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In this site’s view, that approach was at least as responsible for the Scottish Lib Dems’ humiliation in 2011 as the UK party’s Westminster coalition with the Conservatives. Most people had expected the Lib Dems to form a coalition with the SNP in 2007, and when they refused we suspect that middle-ground Scottish voters no longer saw the party as serving any sort of practical purpose.

But the reduction of the Scottish Lib Dems to a tiny, embarrassing rump of just five MSPs, without a single constituency on the entire Scottish mainland, has given them a useful role in the service of the anti-independence campaign: that of cannon fodder.

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…is unfortunate, twice is careless, and three times in quick succession starts to look like a trend. Sober viewers may recall a post from a few days ago, in which we noted the latest example of the Herald’s increasingly-frequent habit of telling outright lies. It turns out that the formerly-respectable publication was being even more economical with the truth than we knew, as a tiny piece in a corner of today’s edition reveals*:

Still, it was nothing too serious. The original piece only exaggerated the number of turbines by around 400%, and the potential area to be covered by the new development by a trifling 3,300%. (In addition to suggesting that the land was to be sold off to private industry whereas in fact it was remaining in public ownership.) Apart from those few minor issues, the story was almost entirely accurate.

The Herald is currently circling the drain. We can’t imagine why.

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*We’re indebted to keen-eyed reader “McHaggis” for pointing out the correction to us.

Scottish Labour mouthpiece the Daily Record is currently running a long series of horror stories about Atos “Healthcare” and their appalling persecution of the sick and disabled. We heartily and sincerely commend the Record for doing so, even if it usually fails to note that Atos were unleashed on the poor and vulnerable by a Labour government, and occasionally just outright lies about it.

You might expect, then, that the valid concerns of the Record and its readers would be earnestly reflected by the nation’s Labour MSPs when the Scottish Parliament debated the issue of Atos’ conduct of Work Capability Assessments yesterday.

You’d be wrong, of course.

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