Wings Over Scotland

This is getting spooky now.

Scottish Labour quasi-leader Johann Lamont at FMQs last month.

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On the rare occasions when we can briefly drag ourselves away from the Wings Over Scotland coalface and the brutal, unforgiving lash of our slavedriver readers, we enjoy a social game of poker. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from poker, it’s that shuffling a terrible hand doesn’t magically transform it into a good one. We’ve tried.

So we suspect the SNP will be rather less than quaking in their boots at today’s news that Labour have decided to reunite the dream team of Johann Lamont and Iain Gray that was such a resounding success when they were the party’s leader and deputy leader (not in that order) in 2011.

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Particularly alert readers may recall a shock-horror story from the Scottish media earlier this year relating to a sharp rise in the number of people waiting over four hours for treatment in hospital A&E departments, which came complete with some dramatic (and highly misleading) graphs.

Labour’s ironic Scottish health spokeswoman Jackie Baillie poured opprobrium on the Scottish Government both for the figures and for changing the treatment-within-four-hours target from 98% to 95%, with the Tories enthusiastically joining in as usual.

So we were naturally quite curious to see what the corresponding figures for the English NHS would be, and they were finally released today.

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Sorry this post is a bit late, folks. We’ve been pretty stymied all morning trying to get a handle on the extraordinary, unmockable mendacity that’s being fed to the people of Scotland as we speak, which keeps crashing our powers of rational comprehension.

We quite often highlight the utterances of The Labour Party in Scotland (henceforth TLPiS) as examples of “blackwhite”, the Orwellian term for presenting the truth as the exact opposite of reality. But today must surely have set some sort of world record.

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We had to be out most of yesterday, so we didn’t have time to cover a story which broke in the morning in several UK papers. 24 hours later, though, we can still find no mention of it in the Scottish media, which remains fully occupied in filling its pages with recycled wittering drivel about the pound.

This is a worrying state of affairs, because yesterday’s story is of direct concern to an awful lot more Scots than a hypothetical scaremongering fantasy about currency.

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We must admit we’re quite jealous of National Collective’s media management. We told Ian Taylor’s lawyers to sod off over a week ago and nobody put US all over the news. But in amongst all the brouhaha around the site’s welcome return, one aspect of the coverage stood out rather startlingly.

“Better Together campaign director Jackie Baillie MSP said she did not have a problem accepting Mr Taylor’s money. […] Ms Baillie also pointed out that Mr Taylor had made important investments in the Harris tweed industry on the Western Isles.

‘Is the first minister equally suggesting that Mr Taylor should disinvest from Harris tweed?’ she said. ‘I don’t think he’s said that today.'”

After a week of stonewall silence, it seems the No camp has finally come up with its defence line (the Tories, Lib Dems and various tame columnists have also been faithfully parroting it all day): there’s no difference between Ian Taylor investing his doubtless-legally-obtained wealth in Harris Tweed and investing it in “Better Together”.

Except there rather obviously is, isn’t there?

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After six years in kneejerk opposition, extending even so far as to abstain on or vote against budgets with their own amendments in them, Scottish Labour have apparently suddenly discovered the merits of mature, constructive consensus politics. This week has seen the party calling for unity in opposing the bedroom tax, and demanding that the Scottish Government should mitigate the effect on social-housing tenants by providing tens of millions of pounds from its own budget to bridge the gap.

There are numerous reasons why this isn’t a practical long-term solution, some of which we explore in the comments on this Labour activist’s blog post. But if anyone should be wondering why it might also seem politically unattractive to the SNP, perhaps it might be instructive to note what Labour’s reaction was when the Nats did that very thing a year ago, when finance secretary John Swinney found £40m to lessen the effects of UK government cuts forcing the poorest to contribute more Council Tax.

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Newsnight Scotland presenter Gordon Brewer got a bit exasperated on last night’s edition of the show as he tried, repeatedly but unsuccessfully, to get Scottish Labour’s ever-smirking Jackie Baillie to give him anything resembling a straight answer to a question about Labour’s (lack of) policy on the bedroom tax.

As the well-fed welfare spokeswoman embarked on another pre-scripted soundbite of SNP-bashing rather than commit Labour councils to a policy of not evicting tenants for arrears related to the penalty charge, Brewer sighed (at around 12m 52s) that “I was vainly trying to take into consideration the people who might be affected by this” before giving up and moving on to his other guest.

Baillie was demanding that the Scottish Government instead bring forward legislation to make such evictions illegal – just a few days after Scottish Labour’s press office had strenuously denied to this very website that the party was making any such demands. But it’s easy to see why she’d be having trouble keeping track of her position, because to Labour the bedroom tax is little short of a delight.

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Diligent readers will know that this site is engaged in a lonely and difficult quest to find out what Labour’s actual policy on the Bedroom Tax is. And in attempting to establish the facts of the matter, it’s important to differentiate a policy from an opinion.

The latter are in plentiful supply – Labour, we’re told repeatedly, is “against” the tax. Check out, for example, this intriguing exchange on Twitter. (Click for full version.)

Jamie Glackin is a member of Labour’s Scottish Executive Committee, so you think he’d have a fairly firm grasp of the party’s policies, but he’s oddly evasive regarding the Bedroom Tax. Asked by SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter if Labour would scrap the tax, Glackin dodges by saying “Don’t think it will get that far. It’s a dead duck.”

But he’s far from alone in not wanting to answer that question.

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Recent claims made by Jackie Baillie (Labour’s shadow health spokeswoman and Better Together campaign director) suggested that Scots would be unable to gain access post-independence to medical treatment in England, because a Yes vote would lead to cross-border reciprocal healthcare becoming bogged down by red tape, complexity and costs, leading to treatment being delayed or withheld.

As we’ve explained before, given that reciprocal agreements already exist between the UK and other countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) – in the form of the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) – Baillie’s claim is at its most generous interpretation an absurdly ill-informed misunderstanding, and in a more depressingly plausible scenario, an outright lie.

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The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

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