Wings Over Scotland

There’s an interesting article in today’s Guardian about the clown-shoed fiasco of a position the Labour Party has contorted itself into over Trident. It correctly identifies the conflict between a party representing its actual membership and being controlled by its Parliamentarians who insist they know better than the people they’re supposed to speak for, but then right at the end veers off to an irrational conclusion.

Because the obsessive insistence of the vast majority of commentators that political parties – and they’re nearly always talking about Labour – must at all times pander to the centre ground leads inescapably to one logical endpoint: that all political parties should disband themselves immediately and forever.

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As it happens, one of the things that we’ve been occupying ourselves with during the current news drought is pulling together a post called “The SNPBAD Files”, collecting all the desperate smear and innuendo of the Unionist press as it systematically tries to discredit every one of the 56 SNP MPs elected last May.

Until last night we hadn’t been sure which had been the most pathetically dismal. Was it the MP who still did a few haircuts in his barber shop on Saturday afternoons? The one who bought a derelict London house many years before he was an MP, renovated it with his own hands and now sometimes stays there when working at Westminster, rather than charging expenses to the public for accommodation? Or perhaps the one who tweeted that he was opposed to the concept of monarchy, the foul monster?

Now, though, we have a clear winner.

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In a cunning meta-twist which simultaneously proves and disproves its own claim, the headline above is itself a lie. It’s of course not true that every single headline you read in a newspaper is absolutely false.

It is, however, a pretty good rule of thumb.

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The groupthink of the Unionist commentariat is unfailingly a sight to behold. Barely a dozen weeks ago we drew attention to a seasonal crop of articles professing that the end of the SNP’s eight-year “honeymoon” was in sight, and that surely voters would surely tire at any moment of their supposed poor record in government.

But after the damage anticipated by the press from the Forth Bridge affair and another load of ham-fisted Labour attacks failed to materialise (defused in part by a set of excellent and significantly improved NHS waiting-time stats that must have had the BBC’s Eleanor Bradford weeping inconsolably into her clipboard), the pundit hive-mind has moved swiftly on to a new outlook: morose resignation.

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An archive of the opinion polls we’ve commissioned from Panelbase.

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Sometimes stuff breaks. Apparently this is news.

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So, it’s our birthday. It was exactly four years ago today, on the 7th of November 2011, that Wings Over Scotland published the first post of what was supposed to be a pretty insignificant spare-time blog picking out interesting politics stories in the day’s Scottish media and challenging any inaccuracies in them.

It got a bit out of control, frankly.

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Last week the BBC treated viewers to a Question Time hosted in Edinburgh, where a right-wing economics journalist from MoneyWeek magazine called Merryn Somerset Webb explained to a somewhat disgruntled Scottish audience why the government were right to bail out the bankers, but not steel workers.

It capped off an interesting week but to see why we’ll have to rewind a few days and revisit the work of an amateur Unionist blogger of our unwelcome acquaintance.

The amateur blogger in question has been garnering a fair amount of attention lately from straw-clutching Unionist hacks for his “analysis” of the Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland (GERS) figures, in which he purports to show a sizeable deficit in the economy of an independent or “full fiscal autonomy” Scotland.

In essence, the analysis amounts to dumping all the GERS summary tables into a Microsoft Excel graph, adding the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) forecast for oil revenue, and pointing to a resulting £9.1bn gap between Scotland’s public spending and its total revenue.

This, he asserts, is in addition to Scotland’s share of the hefty deficit the UK currently runs. His conclusion, shouted loudly and often by every angry Unionist on Twitter, is that the government of an independent Scotland – which tellingly they always assume to be an SNP one – would either have to drastically cut public services or raise taxes to fill this “black hole”.

It’s an interesting piece of analysis. Or it would be, if it wasn’t total nonsense.

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The call:

“BMA Scotland is calling on all political parties to stop using the NHS as a political tool and to make realistic and honest pledges to ensure the future of high-quality healthcare in Scotland.”

The response:

“Opposition parties used the publication of the manifesto to attack the SNP government’s record.

Labour’s public services spokesman Dr Richard Simpson said: ‘A crisis in family doctors has erupted on the SNP’s watch.’

Liberal Democrat health spokesman Jim Hume said: ‘Whether we are talking about cancer treatment times, A&E problems at flagship hospitals or the GP recruitment crisis, it is clear that our NHS is in need of intensive care after eight years of SNP government.'”

So that went well. Nice try, BMA.

The award goes to…

Edinburgh Pentlands Constituency Labour Party!

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We had an interesting conversation last night with someone who was prepared, quite legitimately, to credit Scottish Labour with a little more good faith over their proposed plan to mitigate Tory tax credit cuts than we were. But we had a lot of trouble coming to an agreement over the arithmetic, and we tend to think that backs up our cynicism.

Labour have presented their supposed funding for the policy in an incredibly dishonest and disingenuous way, and it seems to have confused the media to the point where nobody in the print or broadcast media has challenged what appears to be a huge and (to us at least) incredibly obvious gaping hole in the finances.

Let’s walk through it one more time.

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The reaction of the Scottish media and political opposition to Audit Scotland’s annual report on the NHS today has been nothing if not predictable. But we thought you might like an instructive and enlightening look at the two very different types of approach they’ve taken to trying to mislead the Scottish people about it.

First up is the non-specific Scottish Labour apparatchik (as far as we’re aware he has no official role in the party since Jim Murphy quit – indeed we don’t know what he does for a living at all any more) Blair McDougall:

This is what we in the writing trade call a “flat-out lie”.

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