Kezia Dugdale gave an interview to Good Morning Scotland earlier today that viewed from above would probably look rather like the runway at Baghdad Airport in 1991.
If we tried to pick out all the individual bomb craters in one post, readers’ eyes would glaze over long before the end. So we’re going to have to do it in bits.
We had a little Twitter run-in last night with former Scottish Labour deputy leader and current unemployed halfwit Anas Sarwar, when he reported us to Police Scotland for making a joke about bank holiday mail deliveries, “people in England” and “especially” Scottish ones – which of course includes this site’s own editor, that being the gag.
We’d almost forgotten he existed. But the incident brought something back to mind.
To be fair to Mr Sarwar, he was at least partly right.
We hadn’t heard of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust until today. It turns out that it’s a sister organisation to the highly admirable Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which does great work highlighting and fighting issues around poverty and social injustice.
Barring some sort of unforseeable apocalypse, Scottish Labour aren’t going to win the Holyrood election in May, so it doesn’t really matter what their policy proposals are – they’re never going to happen.
Nevertheless, it’s pretty much our job to examine stuff like their plan to “scrap council tax”, and it’s more fun than watching the news today, so let’s give it a go.
From Kezia Dugdale’s speech to the Scottish Labour conference yesterday:
So hang on – only people born in Scotland are “Scottish”? Bit controversial. But then again, given Scottish Labour’s constant pejorative use of the word “foreigner” in recent years, we probably shouldn’t be shocked.
We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.
But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:
Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.
[EDIT 24 August 2016: This article has now been updated here.]
It’s Sunday, so there is of course one last convulsive orgy of “BLACK HOLE!” articles in all the papers, as every Unionist hack and pundit in the land falls over themselves to portray their own country as a useless scrounging subsidy junkie without actually using the exact words “too wee, too poor, too stupid”.
Everywhere you look there’s a “Proud Scot” screaming about how Scottish revenue this year being 1% lower than it was last year has comprehensively demolished a case for independence that those same people have spent most of the last four years stridently insisting never existed in the first place.
So before everyone moves on to a new “SCOTLAND BAD” next week, we thought it was worth a short recap of what we’ve learned about a devolved Scotland’s financial books this week.
We don’t normally ask you to watch videos as long as this, readers. (Although at 4m 22s it’s still not War And Peace.) As a rule the key part of any TV discussion can be boiled down to a few seconds, but this one needs to be taken in at a bit more length.
It happened on last night’s Question Time from Dundee, and was already 10 minutes into a discussion about whether there might be a second independence referendum and what might trigger it, in particular the prospect of Scotland voting to remain in the EU in June but the rest of the UK voting to leave, dragging Scotland out forcibly.
At that point, host David Dimbleby made an inexplicable intervention, abandoning his position as supposedly neutral moderator to pluck a “fact” out of thin air with which to attack the SNP’s John Swinney. Here’s what unfolded.