Wings Over Scotland

We can hardly contain our joy, gentle readers, that Scottish Labour have brought this magnificent graphic from January back again, tweeting it several times yesterday with all the mindbogglingly fat-headed flaws from two months ago still present.

But we couldn’t help being struck by this new comment about it, by the branch office’s notoriously truth-averse finance spokesclown:

Let’s walk through that one really quickly. People can’t afford to save for a deposit, because rents are so high. So rather than do anything about rents, Labour will double the zero they HAVE managed to save, boosting it all the way up to, er, zero.

(Which is lucky, as they’re going to do it with money that doesn’t exist.)

They want to run the economy, folks. And there are still hundreds of thousands of people in Scotland prepared to vote for them. We live in zany times.

The first quote below is from Magnus Gardham in the Herald, the second one is from Kenny Farquharson in the Times, both today.

So just to clear that up: four times £12 million is £200 million. The mystery of why people are increasingly reluctant to believe what they read in newspapers continues.

And has no more luck this week with hapless Scottish Labour list MSP Claire Baker than he did with her habitually mendacious colleague Jackie Baillie last week:

(The Big Debate, BBC Radio Scotland, 13 November 2015)
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Brewer’s weary sigh at 2m 14s speaks volumes.

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When it comes to Scottish Labour’s great brainwave about “restoring” Tory tax-credit cuts, the madness just won’t stop. Here’s Magnus Gardham, formerly political editor of Scotland’s staunchest Labour paper the Daily Record, in the Herald today:

Read that one over a few times.

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When we watched Kezia Dugdale’s toe-curling moment on this week’s Question Time, we were immediately reminded of a mesmerising passage in Jon Savage’s masterful 1991 history of punk rock “England’s Dreaming”, in which he gives an account of the last ever Sex Pistols concert, at Winterland in San Francisco in 1978.

And like the show, Dugdale’s week just kept getting worse.

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The media and Unionist politicians (we really need to come up with a word to describe that single entity), when not concocting hysterical frothing diatribes against Michelle Thomson or complaining about the Scottish Government giving money to T In The Park – a position we must confess we find ourselves in some sympathy with – have recently been loudly protesting about last year’s “underspend” in the Holyrood budget.

There’s an extremely good article here by Dr Craig Dalzell of the Scottish Greens dealing with the broader issue of why such complaints are idiotic, so rather than go over the ground again we thought we’d look at another angle.

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Kezia Dugdale talking to Gordon Brewer on BBC Scotland today:

“I’m astonished that you’ve spent 10 minutes in this interview talking about independence and Trident when almost 50% of the poorest kids in the country can’t read […] I’m sure you’d be shocked to know that 50% of the poorest kids leave our schools unable to read.”

We suspect he would too. Because it’s total cobblers.

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There’s been a veritable flurry of polls commissioned to mark the impending one-year anniversary of the independence referendum. In the last 48 hours alone we’ve seen ones from Survation, YouGov and Panelbase, making a variety of interesting findings. As ever, though, the trick is in the interpretation.

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Comedy buffoon Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph:

Actual donations received: No campaign £4.3 million, Yes campaign £2.8 million.

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We’re sure we’re not the only people for whom the hours are dragging and we wish the election would just hurry up and get here, but all the same we’re pretty sure that if there were 11 days left to save the UK on Sunday morning, then by Tuesday morning there should be fewer than 10 still to go.

So, let’s just get this one straight, this morning’s English edition of The Sun – two parties with 316 seats are “stealing” an election from two parties with 309 seats?

Want us to walk you through that whole “counting” thing again?

Because almost nobody in Westminster, whether they’re politicians or the media, ever pays any attention to anything outside SW1A, Alex Salmond’s comment in London yesterday that the SNP would vote against any Tory government in the event of a hung Parliament – which to any Scottish person was news as surprising as a weather forecast for rain – has been greeted with seemingly-genuine shock and horror.

Reporter after reporter has treated the non-revelations (which have been official SNP policy for as long as we can remember, and were stated explicitly by Nicola Sturgeon in November) as a stunning bolt from the blue, and Tory politicians and the right-wing media alike have burst into frothing, spluttering rage, based on the fact that apparently none of them grasps how either the UK electoral system or basic arithmetic work.

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