Wings Over Scotland

Mainstream and social media alike are now well into their second day of an absolutely epic meltdown at the news that Alex Salmond is to broadcast a chat show on RT, the Russian equivalent of the BBC.

It really is almost impossible to overstate the magnitude of the shrieking fit the decision has produced. Addled old Lords with criminal convictions for violently and drunkenly assaulting Her Majesty’s police have with an audacious lack of self-awareness decried the immorality of one of HM’s advisors going on TV to talk about stuff, and one Lib Dem MSP has even gone so far as to raise a Holyrood motion demanding that the state interferes with the lawful employment choices of a private citizen.

We imagine that RT will be beside itself with joy at the avalanche of publicity the UK press and political sphere is giving it. We’d be amazed if the hysterical brouhaha didn’t double or treble the audience figures that Salmond could otherwise have expected.

It’s just that it’s all a little, well, sudden.

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The bit we’ve highlighted reveals and explains a lot.

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Investigative site The Ferret this afternoon published a report into the Scottish Futures Trust, the SNP’s replacement for Labour’s cripplingly costly PFI projects.

The report was undertaken by Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, a pair of economists well regarded in nationalist circles, and makes some interesting if vague comments about downsides that MIGHT, in theory, exist in the SFT now or in the future.

The headline claims are all full of highly-qualified language (“may not deliver value for money”; “profits may be unduly high”; “could restrict growth”; “potentially has adverse implications”; “impossible to tell whether“), and it’s a long way down the page until you get to anything approaching a hard fact, or indeed the revelation that the report seems to have been paid for by Scottish Labour.

And that’s when things get a little weird.

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It’s embarrassing to even have to point it out, to be honest.

Yet just six months later, with nothing having changed, everything had changed:

But when it comes to Unionist politics in Scotland, embarrassment is the default state.

We stuck this short clip up on YouTube yesterday as a throwaway while watching the Labour conference in slack-jawed astonishment (a visitor from an alien planet would have concluded it was the gathering of a party that had just won a landslide victory, not lost its third general election in a row), but on reflection it deserves a proper post.

If you know anything at all about the story of how female Glasgow City Council employees have fought for equal pay, you’ll probably be as outraged as we are at Baxter’s bulletproof brass neck. But the video actually demonstrates what appears to be Scottish Labour’s master strategy for winning back Scotland.

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And no, we’re not talking about Ruth Davidson living it up at Fingers Piano Bar. Kezia Dugdale tweeted this today:

Which would be a little bit like us gloating that Andy Murray was rubbish at tennis on the grounds that he was knocked out of Wimbledon this week.

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If you weren’t listening to the Kaye Adams show earlier, and you probably weren’t, this was my call to Scottish Lib Dem leader Willie Rennie.

(The Kaye Adams Programme, BBC Radio Scotland, 18 May 2017)
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(Alert readers may have noticed that I had to adopt a wee bit of subterfuge to get on by saying – truthfully – that I was from Bathgate, because BBC Scotland don’t tend to take my calls when I say where I am.)

As you’ll hear, Rennie had no answer to the question (even when put to him again by Adams), trying to deflect the issue onto SNP BAD instead.

His position was that the British people should have the right to another vote in case they’ve changed their mind about Brexit, even though there’s been no material change of circumstances, but that the Scottish people SHOULDN’T have the right to another vote on independence even though there HAS been a huge material change.

All I can say is that I tried.

We’re still struggling a bit with this one, to be honest.

So… now the Tories are upset because the SNP aren’t obsessed with independence?

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The Tories yesterday:

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We weren’t going to dignify the utterly absurd media stushie over a tweet by Glasgow MSP John Mason yesterday with any coverage because it was too cretinous to even bear thinking about, but this from today’s Daily Record was just too good.

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St Andrew is of course the patron saint of ALL of Scotland. He doesn’t belong to the SNP, or to nationalists, but to everyone in the country.

So it hardly even seems worth pointing this out, really.

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Even seasoned and cynical observers of the Scottish opposition and press such as ourselves, readers, have been rubbing our eyes in startled disbelief this week at the spectacular about-face performed by the aforementioned parties with regard to the Scottish Government’s £10bn Chinese investment “deal” that was never an actual deal, and which may or may not have collapsed.

But today’s Times just about boggled our minds completely.

Well, who could disagree with that? Who would suggest otherwise?

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