Wings Over Scotland

It’s the holidays, so the papers are desperate to fill space and the political parties are all trying to help out by sending them helpful press releases which can be slotted directly onto pages, titled “PARTY X CONTINUES TO SUPPORT POLICY Z WHICH IT HAS ALWAYS SUPPORTED. ALSO, THE OTHER PARTIES ARE BAD”.

Scottish Labour’s contribution is a piece in most papers today reiterating their demand for the Scottish Government to hike the top rate of income tax – a policy on which Labour stood at the last Westminster and Holyrood elections and which was quite stupendously comprehensively rejected by voters, but which Labour inexplicably feel the SNP should implement anyway.

And that’s all very well and good, because Kezia Dugdale gets paid the best part of £80,000 a year by taxpayers and she’s got to say something all day to justify it. The trouble, as we’ve noted at great length on this site, is that so many of the things she says aren’t actually true.

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For a party which insists the last thing it wants is a second independence referendum, it’s rather odd that the Tories are doing everything in their power to turn next month’s council elections into exactly that.

Still, let’s do our bit to help them out.

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So far as we can tell, the primary occupation of chunky former “Better Together” head honcho, Scottish Labour apparatchik and tuba enthusiast Blair McDougall these days – he appears to be otherwise unemployed – is posting endlessly on Twitter about how the UK would rob Scottish pensioners who’ve paid National Insurance to the UK for their whole lives in the event of Scotland voting for independence.

We’ve never been quite sure why that’s supposed to be a great selling point for how fabulous the UK is – “Don’t leave us or we’ll starve you to death” – but in any event it was dealt something of a blow yesterday by McDougall’s own party.

The image referred to a brand-new “pledge card” issued by Labour yesterday, which promised not only to maintain payment of the UK pension to pensioners living abroad anywhere in the world but to uprate it in line with inflation, avoiding situations like that of eldsters who’ve retired to countries which don’t have a reciprocal arrangement with the UK and therefore face a continual slide in the real value of their pension.

It certainly didn’t say anything about “with the sole exception of if they happen to live in Scotland”, but maybe there just wasn’t enough room.

Conservative list MSP Murdo Fraser is Scottish politics’ undisputed king of rejects. He’s had a 16-year career in the Scottish Parliament without once winning any sort of election, trousering close to a million pounds of taxpayers’ money in the process, and there’s pretty much nothing anyone can do to get him out of it.

First of all he was firmly rejected by the electorate of East Lothian in 1997, picking up under 20% of the vote. Then when the Scottish Parliament came into being in 1999 he tried his luck at winning its North Tayside seat and was rejected again. He had a go at the Westminster version of the seat in 2001, and was rejected there too.

He hadn’t managed to come in the top three of the Tory regional list either, but when one of the list MSPs who HAD been elected resigned later that year after a bout of pneumonia, Fraser got to walk into his vacant seat unopposed, elected by no-one.

He tried to win North Tayside again in 2003 and 2007, and was rejected both times. (In the four attempts he made at the seat, his vote share decreased every time. The more people saw of him serving as an MSP, the less they liked him.)

By 2011 North Tayside had been abolished and replaced by Perthshire North, which Fraser contested in that year and in 2016, but was rejected twice more. In between he stood for leader of the Scottish Conservatives, but was rejected by Tory members.

After eight humiliating failures out of eight, though, today Murdo finally won one.

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It’s a comprehensive policy document focused on local issues wait no.

We mean the other thing.

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There’s an interesting article in today’s Sunday Times, about a cunning plan by which the Scottish Government could bypass the veto of Presiding Officer Ken Macintosh and legislate for a second independence referendum – forcing a direct showdown in which the UK government would have to openly trample the Scottish Parliament and its electoral mandate.

If pursued, it would reopen the current absurd argument in which the Unionist parties claim that the Scottish Government has no “mandate” to pursue a second referendum, despite mandates arising solely from the ability to win votes in Parliament.

(If an absolute majority for one party was required to pass legislation, Holyrood would of course have done absolutely nothing for most of its life.)

And that reminded us that our last Panelbase opinion poll was so vast we still hadn’t finished releasing the results of it, including one rather surprising finding.

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Yesterday we noted that while Scotland’s opposition parties and Unionist media were united in the staunch belief that the Scottish Government should do something to improve the poorly-performing economy over which it has almost no control, none of them seemed able to offer so much as a single actual policy they wanted changed or implemented to this end.

Today the Daily Mail continued the attack at length:

So we thought we’d see if anyone had come up with anything yet.

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We’ve been trying to take advantage of the current lull in politics, with Holyrood in recess for Easter, to have a bit of a semi-break. Having to watch all the Unionist party conferences in March is always toxic to the soul, and with the gargantuan torrent of insane lies emanating from the indyref2 and Article 50 developments to deal with as well, this year’s was even grimmer than usual.

So when all the papers went heavy on this morning’s news that the Scottish economy had a slight retraction in the last quarter of 2016 and filled their pages with rentaquote drivel from the opposition parties about how it was all the SNP’s fault, our first instinct was to simply direct readers back to this piece from last October, detailing how the Scottish Government – by design – controls almost none of Scotland’s meaningful economic levers, and go to the movies again.

But then a headline in the Scotsman’s article changed our minds. Because we thought we should see which policies they actually wanted changed.

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Unionists were barely able to hide their excitement last month at the thought of some dead pensioners. This was former Labour MSP Dr Richard Simpson, for example:

(Simpson later went on to embellish the claim by saying that it had in fact reversed.)

The story was serious enough to be the Sunday Times Scotland front page lead.

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Martin Kettle in the Guardian today:

That sounds like the sort of thing we like to fact-check.

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Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

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The figure below is my own, but it’s also remarkably typical:

Click the pic to get yours.

(It actually feels like a lot more than that – quite possibly because I have, in fact, not for one minute of my entire life been represented by a government at Westminster – or anywhere else, come to that – that I voted for, unless you count the token presence of the Lib Dems in the 2010-15 coalition. Which I don’t, because they immediately betrayed every policy and principle for which I’d voted for them in the first place.)

For Scotland, democracy in the UK simply doesn’t work.

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