Wings Over Scotland

It’s probably time we had a series of these. So here’s #1.

scandal (noun) – a situation where no known crime has been committed and nobody has been interviewed by the police, yet which apparently contrasts in some way with other situations about which the exact same applies.

(Can often by identified by presence of Scottish Labour MPs/MSPs describing claims of entirely legal activity as “very serious allegations”.)

This is Labour’s shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, quoted in the Independent On Sunday on the 15th of November, just two and a half weeks ago.

That’s interesting, isn’t it?

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Tonight we watched as the conclusion of a “debate” in the UK Parliament saw the “opposition”, almost unprecedentedly, sum up the same case as the government, to roof-raising cheers and applause (which is now apparently permitted again) from the Conservative benches for a Labour shadow minister.

We were rather put in mind of a famous Neil Kinnock speech from 1985.

It’s never usually terribly difficult to get a Scottish Labour MSP to express a view on anything. It’s hard to open a newspaper without being forced to hear Jackie Baillie or James Kelly’s opinion on something or other.

(Admittedly it’s generally the SNP, and the opinion is invariably that they’re bad and whatever they do is wrong – but still, they’re not shy about coming forward with it.)

So when Neil Findlay attacked the SNP for all having the same view on bombing Syria last night (about which he was inexplicably furious, even though that view was exactly the same as his own opinion), we thought it’d be easy enough to find out how many of his MSP colleagues were on the respective sides of the debate.

It turned out that we were wrong.

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The meme of the week among the Unionist media and politicians is once again that the SNP is a sinister Borg-like organisation where independent thought is outlawed.

Bewilderingly, this evening Labour MSP Neil Findlay bitterly tweeted a complaint that all of the SNP’s elected members apparently agreed with his own position on bombing Syria, the vile swine that they are. (Presumably he’d prefer if some of them voted with the Tories just for the sake of it.) But he’s not alone.

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From tonight’s Evening Times:

We’re not aware of a single elected Scottish Labour official previously expressing unequivocal public support for independence. Is this a small, self-interested one-off, or just the first cracking of the dam? We can only wait and see.

We were considering having a day off today, readers. There’s absolutely nothing of any note happening in Scottish politics, and the papers have been reduced to scraping up all manner of barely-reheated leftover dregs to fill their pages.

But then someone drew our attention to something in Scotland On Sunday about the ongoing Women For Independence fiasco, and we were too annoyed to let it lie.

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For reasons which defy all known science, John McTernan remains the first number on the BBC’s speed-dial list when they need a commentator to represent Labour views. It’s a remarkable editorial decision, given that McTernan despises the party’s current leadership almost beyond words, and it doesn’t seem too fond of him either.

But on today’s Good Morning Scotland, McTernan really kicked it up a notch.

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Yesterday George Osborne treated us to an Autumn Statement in which he performed one of the most remarkable political U-turns in living memory.

The apparent need to cut £12bn from the welfare budget has long been sign-posted by the Tories as a requirement to getting us “back in the black” and on the road to a “higher wage, lower welfare, lower tax” society as part of their oft-cited “long-term economic plan”. (Or what academic economists prefer to call a “risky experiment with the economy in order to score political points“.)

Alert readers will recall David Cameron saying before the general election that child tax credits wouldn’t be cut in pursuit of that goal. But after the election, Osborne decided that they would. The Institute for Fiscal Studies determined that these cuts would have the worst effects on some of the poorest families in Britain.

Despite widespread opposition to the cuts, Labour infamously abstained on the critical vote in the Commons. Then, when the welfare bill reached the Lords, Labour once again abstained on a Lib Dem motion that would have completely killed the bill, in favour of a Labour one which phased in the cuts over three years, but meant Osborne would have to find another £4.5bn in his budget.

The passing of the Labour motion enraged Cameron so much that he went on an extraordinary rant about a “constitutional crisis” and announced a “rapid review”.

So we were somewhat surprised to hear Osborne say yesterday that the best thing to do was “not to phase these changes in, but to avoid them altogether”.

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At today’s First Minister’s Questions, the Scottish Labour leader Kezia Dugdale oddly chose to spend her entire allotted time not on any current issues affecting Scotland, but on attacking the SNP’s 2013 White Paper on independence, seemingly unaware that the referendum was held 14 months ago and resulted in a win for the No side.

Happily for Scotland, that decision resulted in a huge £200bn oil bonanza.

Hang on, let’s just double-check that to be sure.

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Here’s our old pal John McTernan, angrily condemning Labour’s shadow Chancellor John McDonnell quoting Chairman Mao to make a point in the Commons yesterday:

And for once he’s right. What sort of vile cretin would go around quoting Mao?

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The Daily Record has this on its front page today.

And that’s fine. The tale of a five-figure sum of money which might (or might not) have gone missing from the accounts of Women For Independence, who’ve promptly called the police to investigate an apparent discrepancy between their donated income and their expenditure, is entirely legitimate news.

But we couldn’t help wondering something.

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