Wings Over Scotland

We hadn’t been planning to talk any more about the curious case of Claire Austin, the suddenly publicity-shy Edinburgh nurse who – how can we put this? – seemed a rather ill-chosen figurehead for the good cause of getting more pay for a group of people who are rightly well-regarded by the public.

But yesterday, the release of a letter from Scottish Labour branch manager Kezia Dugdale re-opened political hostilities after last week’s hiatus for the Manchester terror attack by shoving the now-reticent Ms Austin right back into the spotlight.

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We’re not going to join in the attacks on a nurse who criticised Nicola Sturgeon during last night’s BBC election debate. While her lifestyle seems at a glance to be wildly at odds with her claim that she relied on foodbanks to survive, there are – genuinely – possible explanations for at least most of it.

Her daughter could have won a free scholarship to the £11,000-a-year George Heriot’s school. Family and friends could have paid for her five-star holidays to New York and frequent dinners in expensive restaurants. She lives in Stockbridge, which is a quite expensive area of Edinburgh – in itself the most expensive city in Scotland – where wages might not stretch as far as elsewhere.

Owning a convertible car isn’t proof that someone’s wealthy – I have one myself that’s worth less than £1000, and I also have a relative who has very little money but who nevertheless owns a horse just like Claire Austin’s daughter seemingly does. (It’s also possible to be quite poor but still own things you bought when you were less poor.)

It ill befits Yes supporters – who are happy to deploy the existence and growing use of foodbanks to justifiably attack the UK government – to complain if someone who calls the First Minister “wee Jimmy Krankie” adopts the same tactic. More to the point, we entirely agree with Ms Austin’s core view that nurses should be paid more in general, as we suspect most people do.

(And in Scotland, of course, they ARE paid more than in the rest of the UK, and under the SNP have always been given the full pay rises recommended by the independent pay board, which hasn’t been the case in England.)

But that still leaves some things hanging disquietingly in the air.

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Kezia Dugdale tells voters in the Borders, Highlands and a number of other areas that voting Tory is a better way to stop the SNP than voting for her own party’s candidates.

We assume she’ll be suspending herself shortly.

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I went to the dentist this morning, and boy was I ever in for a shock when I got back.

So I guess we’d better talk about this for a minute.

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From today’s interview on Good Morning Scotland:

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 17 May 2017)
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That needs transcribing for the record.

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Because in the 124-page Labour manifesto released yesterday, these 115 words are the entire amount of text devoted to Scotland:

(That’s not a fake screenshot, btw. The giant Union Jack is really there.)

So let’s take a very quick stroll through them.

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We were intrigued to hear Labour activist Duncan Hothersall tell radio listeners this morning that his party’s opposition to independence was rooted in “Labour values”, and most specifically by his assertion that “nationalism and socialism are opposites”.

So we thought we’d take a look back at our last Panelbase opinion poll, which we conducted in February, and see what the values of Unionists were.

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The Labour general election manifesto is officially launched today, as if it mattered. It will reportedly say that the party will block a second independence referendum if it’s in power at Westminster, which of course it won’t be.

And while Labour’s position on anything – particularly anything involving Scotland – is a complete irrelevance, it’s still quite fun to listen to them tying themselves in knots.

So with no further ado, ladies and gentlemen, we bring you Duncan Hothersall.

(Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 16 May 2017)
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Something really quite strange happened yesterday. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was caught red-handed in the act of telling a bare-faced, unarguable lie in the middle of a general election campaign, and nobody cared.

Reacting to the Crown Prosecution Service decision not to prosecute dozens of Tory MPs who’d broken the law in getting elected in 2015, the PM offered up a quote, which was reported in most of the newspapers:

“If we look at the expenses issue, we have seen all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists, being fined for mistakes having been made on national expenses. We’ve paid our fines, and I sincerely hope that the other parties are paying theirs.”

Nice wee bit of snark on “all the major parties, and the Scottish nationalists” there. But there’s a slight problem with the statement, which is that it’s an absolute lie.

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Most of the papers today are full of stories screaming hysterically about a (real, but somewhat exaggerated) decline in Scottish educational standards. But if the contents of those papers are anything to go by, Scotland’s schools have been disgorging idiots into the general population for a lot longer than the last 10 years.

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This one definitely looks dodgy.

We, um… we don’t think they DID show that, Kez.

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Don’t say we didn’t warn you about this.

Because we’ve been telling you it was coming for half a decade.

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