A convention of the world’s finest satirists pulling a 24-hour shift on Red Bull couldn’t come up with anything to beat Labour’s position on renewing the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system. Following an overwhelming vote at the Scottish Labour conference this afternoon, these are the current cut-out-and-keep standings:
Kezia Dugdale spoke for almost exactly 45 minutes to the Scottish Labour conference in Perth today. But we know you’re busy people who don’t want to sit through all of that, and that you trust us to endure it on your behalf so that we can sift through it and present you with only the important bits.
We’re big fans of socialism ourselves, so when a number of delegates at the Scottish Labour conference today, including UK leader Jeremy Corbyn, revived an old Keir Hardie line we were quite excited.
Asking the question is the easy bit: “If the all-new, super-autonomous Scottish Labour decides to oppose the renewal of Trident, and UK Labour continues to support it, which way do Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster vote on it?”
The answer, unsurprisingly, was a lot more difficult to ascertain.
As we observed last night, the BBC’s Andrew Neil has reacted with rather poor grace to his chiding at the hands of respected statisticians Jim and Margaret Cuthbert. Neil embarked on a Twitter blocking spree and tried to rewrite history, claiming that he’d “simply offered” the blunt claim that there had been no cuts to the Scottish budget in the last five years “as one measure” of the money available to Holyrood.
The problem for Neil is that we recorded video of his Sunday interview with the SNP’s Angus Robertson, and anyone can see for themselves that Neil made an unequivocal assertion with no suggestion whatsoever that there were any alternative measures.
“In real terms there’s been – no – cut”, said Neil, spitting out the last three words with dramatic pauses between them for emphasis, in a statement whose stark absence of ambiguity unfortunately left him no wiggle room when the Cuthberts politely but firmly pointed out that it was “ridiculous” to argue that there hadn’t been any cuts, and that the budget “clearly has gone down”.
But Neil’s embarrassment is illustrative of a much wider delusion.
We were excited to find out what they were, because we’re sure this time they’ve definitely happened, not like all the times when they said they had but were joking.
We don’t follow many Unionists on social media, because you end up wasting your day arguing pointlessly with a lot of people who are never going to change their minds and getting in a bad mood. But we’re told they were all very excited about an article in yesterday’s Daily Record.
Penned by the paper’s political editor Davie Clegg, it’s a long diatribe about how the fall in oil revenues has created a black hole which now means Scotland is – stand by for a surprise! – too wee and too poor to be independent.
So far so meh – it’s not like it’s the first time we’ve heard that record played, after all. But as you can see from the image above, there’s also quite an interesting challenge printed in giant capitals at the foot of the page. We’re not in the Scottish Government, but it’s a rainy Saturday so we thought we might have a go.
We’ve been having a bit of a ponder over the effective passing into law of English Votes for English Laws, which has been remarkably little mentioned in Scotland’s media today. The BBC website has nothing about it at all on its Scotland front page, forcing readers to dig down into the politics section for some coverage.
The Daily Record, as far as we can tell, doesn’t have a word about it – nothing in the print edition and nothing online, even though as we write this it’s gone 3pm the next day, around 21 hours after the vote was passed in the Commons. The Scottish Daily Mail relegates it to a small feature taking up barely a third of page 12, even though the move supposedly ends the Union.
The Scotsman gives it a tiny corner of the front page and half of page 6, and only the Herald treats it as a lead story, although even there it only gets a couple of columns, less space than that devoted to a picture of David Cameron and the Chinese president Li Xinping having a pint in a pub.
All of which is remarkable, because it’s arguably the most radical change made to the UK constitution since the creation of the devolved Parliaments 16 years ago, and perhaps more significant even than that.
Michael Laing on Things happen slowly: “I’m seeing a lot of criticism of the new comment set-up, and I don’t agree with the critics at all.…” Oct 7, 01:15
sarah on Things happen slowly: “Perhaps the competition is “How many different interpretations can be made?”. I like your take i.e. that the police probe…” Oct 6, 23:51
aLurker on Things happen slowly: “Well Spotted sarah. They are plainly telling us the ‘probe’ into ‘the firm’ is a fake! 😉” Oct 6, 23:42
Dan on Things happen slowly: “No, it’s currently a total inefficient time-wasting difficult to follow crock of shit nested comment system like Arsebook uses, with…” Oct 6, 23:33
sarah on Things happen slowly: “Are the Mail’s sub-editors running a competition amongst themselves for the most double-entendre headline? “Fake firm probe”. ??? 🙂” Oct 6, 23:03
Willie on Things happen slowly: “The decision to charge three indiviuals was without doubt made some time back. Timing of launch is what’s being played…” Oct 6, 22:47
Mac on Things happen slowly: “Unless you are willing to crawl through every reply looking for the most recent reply date for every BTL comment…” Oct 6, 22:27
Geri on Things happen slowly: “Hmm.. when I go to the main article & scroll down, as I would the old fashioned way, ppls comments…” Oct 6, 22:19
Neil Singleton on Things happen slowly: “Does anyone believe that the Ferguson Marine/ferries fiasco is not a classic money laundering exercise? Ever increasing costs (to obscene…” Oct 6, 21:56
Mac on Things happen slowly: “So people are replying to comments up and down the thread but there is no easy / quick way to…” Oct 6, 21:55
Geri on Things happen slowly: “Wait until you get a load of what they did to China.. PS, ignore the village idiot. He posts OTT…” Oct 6, 21:47
Geri on Things happen slowly: “And,… if they’ve already presented their findings then that would suggest their investigation is complete for one of them at…” Oct 6, 21:44
Mac on Things happen slowly: “So scrolling to the end here it seems like no comments since 2 hours plus… Not sure the new comments…” Oct 6, 21:33
Andy Ellis on The whole caboodle: “Nobody will take any notice unless the majority of MPs or MSPs represents a majority of the electorate. Everyone remembers…” Oct 6, 20:31
James Gardner on Things happen slowly: “Aberdeen council employee embezzled over £1 million pounds which were refunds to council householders over a period of 17 years,…” Oct 6, 20:09
Fiona on Things happen slowly: “yeah, you are right it was OTT I was, to be fair, on a rant… I’m still reading a book…” Oct 6, 19:28
Andrew Lees on The whole caboodle: ““communist/masonic” is a new one, and I don’t get many of those these days.” I don’t suppose you do….but some…” Oct 6, 18:46
Young Lochinvar on Things happen slowly: “As for Leask, I still reckon Greg Moodie must have used him as a model for his press corp hack…” Oct 6, 18:45
Young Lochinvar on Things happen slowly: “Looks like classic Churnalism. You should accuse them of plagiarism.” Oct 6, 18:40
Alf Baird on Things happen slowly: “Re ‘the crocodile’; special ‘branch’ has ‘form’.” Oct 6, 18:22
Garrion on Things happen slowly: ““But Scotland’s mighty press sat on its hands and said nothing.” Needs to carved in 20 ft letters on the…” Oct 6, 18:17
sam on Things happen slowly: “From Sky “A Police Scotland spokeswoman said: “On 9 August 2024, we presented the findings of the investigation so far to COPFS…” Oct 6, 17:44
jock mctavish on Things happen slowly: “Is it time for Murrell to transition, in order to share a cell with St Nic?” Oct 6, 17:44
McHaggis69 on Things happen slowly: “Financial crime is notoriously difficult to investigate and prosecute. Each thread of finances can burst exponentially into different paths, each…” Oct 6, 17:35
Anton Decadent on Things happen slowly: “Scottish born journalist John Swinton speaking at a media celebration of the independent press in New York in 1883. “There…” Oct 6, 17:32
Aidan on The whole caboodle: “@Alf – your definition of colonialism is so absurd it would apply to any people (or perhaps a person) who…” Oct 6, 17:26
Alf Baird on The whole caboodle: “You must be quite young. A majority of nationalist MPs = independence was always the party’s raison detre – until…” Oct 6, 17:21
James Gardner on Things happen slowly: “On the subject of the missing £600K plus, how many Yessers asked for and got their donations refunded from “THE…” Oct 6, 15:41