Wings Over Scotland

From this morning’s Daily Record:

– Number of Scottish Lib Dems MPs who didn’t vote for an opposition motion: 11
– Number of Scottish Labour MPs who didn’t vote for their own motion: 10

– Number of UK Lib Dem MPs who didn’t vote for an opposition motion: 55
– Number of UK Labour MPs who didn’t vote for their own motion: 47

Where should we drop this delivery of stones for Torcuil Crichton’s glass house?

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So, there was another vote in the House of Commons today on the bedroom tax. Labour brought forward a motion to abolish it, having abstained from the one the SNP and Plaid Cymru filed back in February according to the Bain Principle.

With many Lib Dems abstaining this time, the motion failed by just 26 votes. Dozens* of Labour MPs had failed to turn up to support the motion, including 10 (ie 25%) of the party’s Scottish MPs – Gordon Brown, Jim Murphy, Douglas Alexander, Pamela Nash and Ann McKechin among them.

Someone else didn’t make it either. Can you guess who, readers?

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With the sickening developments at Grangemouth understandably dominating the news, readers perhaps won’t have fallen quite so far off their seats with surprise at the Scottish media’s total failure to so far breathe a single word about “Better Together” apparently running an illegal fundraising lottery.

(After all, you can’t have two stories in one newspaper – that would be madness.)

And besides, the revelation – which merely, after all, involves several prominent MPs and MSPs on the board of the No campaign in what would be criminal activity, and not for the first time – is so trivial that it’s the kind of thing no self-respecting newspaper would bother running even on a slow day anyway, right?

It’s around this point that we usually like to cue an alert reader.

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There’s an interesting piece in today’s Scotsman, entitled “Why isn’t Scotland making more popular films?” and bemoaning the poor condition of the Scottish film industry.

At the end it contains the following paragraphs.

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Part 1: Scottish Labour – yes, Scottish Labour – have a go at another party for (get this) an insufficiently prominent leader. No, we’re not making that up. The party led by Johann Lamont just slagged someone off for not being seen in public enough. It’s possibly the first time they’ve ever accused Alex Salmond of underpromoting himself.

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Sometimes there isn’t much happening in the world of politics, but it’d be a bit of a stretch to describe this week as one of those times. So we’re not sure in what context this article on the BBC website today counts as “news”.

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Having spent the best part of two years shining an unforgivingly critical spotlight on the Scottish and UK media, we can have no complaints when we come under the same sort of scrutiny. So we didn’t mind a bit when the right-wing Spectator columnist (is there any other kind?) Alex Massie had something of a swing at us yesterday in a no-punches-pulled column entitled “The Closing of the Nationalist Mind”.

The theme of the piece was the beastly manner in which awful cybernats, typified by ourselves, refuse to even countenance the other side of the argument. Ooft!

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We were forwarded this email today from a reader who’d contacted “Better Together” to express their concern about the deeply troubling recent events where UK Border Agency police have been harassing non-white people at tube stations and elsewhere, and wanted to know their view on it.

This was the reply they got.

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Credit where it’s due to the Scotsman today, which has been impeccably even-handed in its coverage of the furore around the issue of men-only membership at the Muirfield golf club, current host to the sport’s flagship event, the Open.

Here’s this morning’s edition discussing Alex Salmond’s stance, for example:

“The way he has performed this summer, I can’t be the only person relieved that Alex Salmond has decided against going to the Open at Muirfield.

Or is his bungled boycott of arguably the most treasured sporting event in Scotland’s calendar actually his clumsiest attempt yet to muscle his way into the spotlight?”

And showing scrupulous fairness, they’ve also reported on David Cameron’s view.

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Hang on – didn’t our “Project Fear” pals spend half of last year sobbing and wailing and raging that a certain tri-morpheme prefix was leading and unfair and beastly and a clear attempt at rigging the referendum by the dastardly, unprincipled Nats?

Maybe our memory’s playing tricks on us. We’re pretty old.

There’s an intriguing interview in today’s Sunday Herald with ‘Better Together’ campaign director Blair McDougall (described by the paper as a “Labour apparatchik”), to mark the anniversary of the campaign’s launch. We recommend buying the paper – our digital copy costs just 69p from PressReader – and reading the whole thing, but if you’re pressed for time the last few paragraphs sum up the content pretty accurately.

And if you’re really in a rush, the last two sentences will do.

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That’s what Google Translate renders in Latin from the phrase “who questions the questioners?”, which is good enough for us. After weeks of silence, Labour’s irony-free “2014 Truth Team” Twitter account sprang back into life yesterday. As part of its mission to “find out the facts and expose the myths”, it made this dramatic assertion:

The link points to a Herald piece in which, sure enough, the Scottish Government does indeed refuse to guarantee something. But it’s not the “UK pension rate”.

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