The Scotland Office is unexpectedly no more.
It’s had an unannounced rebranding as “The UK Government For Scotland”.
We wonder how many papers we’ll see this in tomorrow.
We hate to be picky, but aren’t these the wrong way round?
November 2014: “The Vow has been delivered, ahead of schedule.”
That’s past tense, right?
Earlier today we made an observation about the overblown way the media has been covering the Scottish Government’s underspend of 1.3% of its budget (a figure about which the David Hume Institute today cooed approvingly “Even Mr Micawber could not budget more accurately”).
To nobody’s great amazement, Scottish Labour rentahonk Jackie Baillie – fresh from making a complete idiot of herself over the Michelle Thomson case – couldn’t resist jumping on the bandwagon.
Quite aside from the fact that it means no such thing – there’s no less money, it’s just that some of it will now be carried over and spent this year instead – we suppose the tweet does at least mean that Scottish Labour’s policy position is clear: the Scottish Government should always spend every penny of its budget. Right?
The editor of the New Statesman just tweeted this image, trailing an interview with Jim Murphy, who alert readers may recall led Scottish Labour for a few months this year before its apocalyptic disaster of a general election campaign which saw it lose 40 of the 41 Scottish seats it won in 2010:
Oh, wait – maybe he’s trying to claim the credit for it.
A story in the Scotsman tonight reports how the Scottish Parliament’s independent research body SPICE has found – contrary to long-running claims from Labour – that the Scottish Government has OVER-funded the eight-year Council Tax freeze.
And that’s all very well, but not exactly stop-the-presses stuff – nobody reading this site is going to be terribly surprised at Scottish Labour being caught out in a lie. But the party’s house newspaper the Daily Record went for a subtly different angle on the story that did manage to provoke us to raise an eyebrow.
You’d put this down as a slip of the tongue, but when it came in the middle of an extended bout of bodyswerving John Mackay’s straightforward question about a referendum on Trident, maybe Kezia Dugdale really was just saying what she meant.
Earlier today Gordon Brown gave a speech in London, on a subject and for reasons which are unclear. It was widely trailed in the press, however, as an intervention in the Labour leadership campaign, with the particular goal of stopping Jeremy Corbyn from winning. It was – naturally – broadcast live and in full by the BBC News channel.
Corbyn wasn’t mentioned by name so far as we noticed, but to tell the truth we drifted in and out of the rambling, 49-minute, 30-page monologue full of celebrity namedrops and unconnected anecdotes, hypnotised as we were by Brown’s relentless pacing up and down the room like a caged animal.
Nobody who isn’t getting paid should have to endure the entire grimness of it, so using the magic of technology we’ve compressed it all down to a mere fraction of its length (just 20%) for you, but without losing any of the tone, content or intellectual nuance.
We offer it to you as an elegy. It marks the day that Labour reanimated the walking corpse of the only person left in the party that it considers to have any gravitas – not to win an election, but to try to crush the first man in living memory to enthuse tens of thousands of new members to join a political party in the hope of restoring the values it was created to uphold.
It is the day the soul of the Labour Party finally died.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
