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The Decency Charter 374

Posted on April 23, 2017 by

This site has spoken a few times, usually in jest, about forming its own political party and contesting elections. But as the UK heads for the biggest democratic trainwreck in its history – a vote which, depending on where you live, is really either a proxy Brexit referendum, a proxy independence referendum, a judgement on the personal character of Jeremy Corbyn or any of half-a-dozen other things – we found ourselves thinking again about what, on the fundamental ideological level, we’d stand for.

It’s a question that existing parties find it remarkably hard to answer. Labour used to define it clearly in its key “Clause IV” – a clear statement of commitment to socialist principles like public ownership and wealth redistribution – before Tony Blair junked it in the 1990s for some woolly neoliberal rubbish from an aspirational Facebook meme.

For the SNP, clearly its primary defining goal is always the democratic pursuit of independence for Scotland. What you might call its day-to-day policies have, like most parties, varied and evolved over time, but it’s always had that one clear unifying and overriding aim. It may have won electoral success through decent governance, but its purpose was never merely competent administration for its own sake.

In the case of the Conservative Party, the turn-of-the-20th-century US economist John Kenneth Galbraith summed up their position pithily and accurately:

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

(And lest an offended Tory should seek to instantly dismiss him as some flavour of pinko tree-hugging bleeding-heart lefty, he also said: “Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”.)

The Liberal Democrats, of course, stand for being in the middle of Labour and the Conservatives, whatever that means on any given day. (They did briefly experiment in the 2000s with being to the left of Labour, partly because it was hard NOT to be, but the coalition scuppered that and now they’re basically Tory wets.)

But what about us?

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The selective calculator 126

Posted on April 21, 2017 by

Alert readers will be aware that we’ve been running a series of posts pointing out the gap between opposition rhetoric about the Scottish Government’s supposed failure to grow the economy, and their (total lack of) practical suggestions about what it should actually be doing, given that by design the Scottish Parliament controls almost none of the country’s economic levers.

And we thought a story fed to the press by Labour this week about job creation since the Tories came to power in 2010 was going to be just another case in point, until we spotted something else about it.

Now, we can’t claim to be exactly astonished that the Tories have mostly focused on creating work in London and the South-East of England at the expense of the rest of the UK. That’s pretty much their thing. But Scottish Labour’s noted rentahonk Jackie Baillie was hopping mad, and not only at the Tories.

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Rushing to the gallows 399

Posted on April 19, 2017 by

One of the most famous tales of the celebrated British hangman Albert Pierrepoint is that concerning James Inglis, a murderer who in 1951 sprinted the short distance from the condemned cell to the noose, enabling the entire execution to be concluded just seven seconds after Pierrepoint had first laid hands on him.

We can’t help thinking of it today.

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The end of sanity 751

Posted on April 18, 2017 by

Okay, so 2017 is turning out less dull than we expected.

Because the Prime Minister of the UK has lost her mind.

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Kezia Dugdale Fact Check, Part 680 252

Posted on April 17, 2017 by

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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The ersatz referendum 196

Posted on April 14, 2017 by

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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Anywhere but Scotland 326

Posted on April 13, 2017 by

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.

Murdo Fraser Wins A Vote 159

Posted on April 10, 2017 by

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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Tory council election manifesto launched 170

Posted on April 10, 2017 by

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

We mean the other thing.

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What they wish for 238

Posted on April 09, 2017 by

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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Unionist Manifesto Update 193

Posted on April 07, 2017 by

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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Being economical without the truth 275

Posted on April 06, 2017 by

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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