By Wee Hamish

The SNP have made a humiliating U-turn. Who says so? Scottish Labour and the Scottish media, so it must be right then, mustn’t it? They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

But hang on, what is this humiliating and embarrassing U-turn? It’s to do with Tax Credit cuts. The SNP said they had no power to reverse the cuts which (shock! Horror!) was actually true because the proposed Scotland Bill gave them no authority to do anything with the reserved areas of Welfare. It would have been the Bedroom Tax all over again, with the Scottish Government having to beg Westminster for the right to offset the cuts.

Then Viceroy Fluffy, David Mundell, announced proposed changes to the Scotland Bill and these included the right for the Scottish Government to set up new social security payments. That’s when the SNP said they could do something after all.

It’s not really a U-turn, is it? A u-turn is when you change your mind simply because you realise you were wrong once people start protesting. A U-turn isn’t changing your mind when you learn that the facts on which you based your original decision have been altered.

Not that this will prevent the media from banging on about the embarrassment and humiliation of a U-turn because that’s what the Scottish media do. What they’re not saying is that the power to make additional payments is not quite the same as having the power to reverse the Tax Credit cuts. It’s not the same at all, because there are rumours that any additional payments the Scottish Government makes could be regarded as extra income by those lovely people at the DWP and so will mean a further reduction in Tax credit payments.

On top of all that, the Scottish Government has no administration system in place which would let it make the payments in the first place.

And where is it supposed to find the money? Labour and their media pets keep asking if the SNP will reverse the cuts in full which is stupid because we don’t yet know the full extent of the cuts.

But the worst thing about this whole media circus is that Scottish Labour are playing politics simply so they can bash the SNP. The media, naturally, are joining in because they see it as their job to run down the SNP at every opportunity.

What they are missing is the biggest point of the whole thing. It’s that these problems were created by the Tories in Westminster and allowed to pass by the spineless refusal of UK Labour to oppose them. Now, both Tories and Labour in Holyrood are whining and pointing fingers at the SNP and claiming it is all their fault. Maybe that’s what they meant when they said they were Better Together. Better at joining forces to keep Scotland under Westminster’s thumb, better at ganging up on the Party a majority of Scots support, better at behaving like spoilt kids in a playground rammy.

The sad thing is, I’ve heard a lot of people who believe this guff. The media are pushing it for all it is worth because it’s a great chance to put the SNP on the spot over an issue they did not cause. It’s a bit like blaming the paramedics when someone dies after a terrorist attack because they ran out of bandages because of the sheer number of casualties. That’s the way Scottish Labour think and how the newspapers and the BBC misrepresent the truth in order to attack the SNP. I, for one, hope that the Scottish voters see through this pathetic stunt for what it is and hurt both Labour and the Tories next year by kicking them where it hurts the most – in the ballot boxes.