Wings Over Scotland

As a newspaper, The Scotsman is under absolutely no obligation to report the news impartially (a fact frequently misunderstood by a great many people). But it's becoming less and less subtle in its distortions of the truth the further we get into the SNP majority administration. One of its big politics stories today is a case in point. As a reader of Wings over Scotland you are by definition a normal, well-adjusted person, so how would you interpret the following headline?

"Swinney demands £20bn to secure the economy"

Since John Swinney is an MSP with a remit which covers only the devolved Scottish Government, naturally you'd assume he was demanding this £20bn for Scotland, right? Particularly as the story opens with this sentence:

"Finance secretary John Swinney has demanded billions of pounds from the UK government for major building projects in Scotland"

Even for the most ardent nationalist it sounds an outrageous demand, even in less austere times than these. £20bn is around two-thirds of the Scottish Government's entire annual block grant, and would pay for every conceivable major infrastructure project in Scotland – finishing the Edinburgh trams and the Edinburgh and Glasgow airport rail links, dualling the entire A9, building the new Forth road crossing, completing the Borders railway, implementing the Beauly-Denny power line and opening the carbon-capture plant at Longannet – with a good £10bn still left over.

But with readers duly inflamed, the next paragraph quietly reveals the truth. Swinney wants the Chancellor to spend £20bn on capital investment projects in the whole of the UK, with just a tenth of that money coming to Scotland. He's asking for £2bn, not £20bn, and – we find out another nine paragraphs later – that £2bn would be spread over three years, amounting to a somewhat more modest £0.67bn a year for Scotland, set against the UK government's total annual Scottish spending of £53bn.

The arguments for extra capital investment to drive growth, create employment in the construction sector and avoid a double-dip recession are economically sound, but that's another debate entirely. The Finance Secretary has in fact asked for approximately one-thirtieth of what the Scotsman's highly-misleading headline implies. It's hard to see that misrepresentation as an accidental one.

An alert viewer draws attention to an interesting historical curio in the Scotsman today. It's a letter to the paper from Labour MSP Hugh Henry, dating from a few days after the 2011 Holyrood election, in which he rejects the idea of an early independence referendum in the most unambiguous of terms:

"Mr Salmond and the SNP clearly stated that any referendum would be held later in the life of this parliament. That's what many Scots voted for, that's what gave Mr Salmond his majority and that's the mandate which the SNP has."

Henry isn't exactly a radical dissident in Scottish Labour – he was Education Minister and Deputy Justice Minister in the second Lab-Lib coalition administration, and was mainstream enough to be the party's nomination for Presiding Officer earlier this year. In the light of Labour's recent threats to back the Westminster government in forcing an earlier UK-controlled referendum over the Scottish Parliament's head, it would be interesting to find out if his position is the same now as it was six months ago.

In case you hadn't noticed it already, in response to several requests Wings over Scotland now has an RSS feed. It's over in the right-hand sidebar, or you should be able to click these words right here to subscribe.

Scottish Viceroy Michael Moore is banging away on the same old drum in the Herald today, demanding that the SNP detail every last conceivable detail of policy in an independent Scotland before the referendum, continuing to rather clumsily miss the entire point of what referenda are for. But as we wearily ploughed through the rhetoric one more time, a thought dawned on us.

The only way Moore's complaints would make any kind of sense would be if a vote for independence was also a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity. Only if the SNP are going to rule an independent Scotland forever would it be incumbent on them to lay out every last line of what they stood for before the referendum, because then (and only then) the electorate would have no opportunity to reject at the ballot box a government implementing policies that voters objected to.

Could it be that Moore believes no other party could ever rise to power in an independent Scotland, and that the nation would in effect become a one-party dictatorship, lost to democracy forever under the iron thistle of the First McReich? (He's at least two-thirds right, after all – the Tories and Lib Dems aren't going to be providing a First Minister any time soon.) If so, we think he should come out and say so instead of beating around the bush. The people deserve to be warned. 

The growing rift between Labour and the trade union movement in Scotland was highlighted yesterday by a statement from the STUC flatly contradicting the narrative spun by all three opposition parties this week, namely that that uncertainty over the date of the independence referendum was damaging the prospects of business investment in Scotland.

In a statement striking for its lack of ambiguity, an unnamed spokesman for the congress was reported by the Scotsman as saying that the unions "had come across no evidence that the forthcoming poll was deterring investment in the country", and that as a result it "did not believe it was necessary to hold a referendum as soon as possible, as is being urged by both the UK government and opposition parties", adding that "There are far more immediate problems that need to be looked at."

Oddly, this fairly dramatic divergence of opinion was afforded just 126 words by the paper, compared to the 2,348 devoted to Douglas Alexander's rather less newsworthy speech to a Labour youth conference.

Not for the first time, the Scotsman is today apparently guest-edited by Douglas Alexander. The paper offers blanket coverage – including a secondary article, analysis, leader column and a personal profile, as well as the front-page lead story itself – to the shadow foreign secretary's latest speech to a Labour audience, in which he urges the Scottish party to back greater devolution rather than campaign alongside the Tories and Lib Dems for the status quo. (The Herald doesn't mention the speech at all.)

The story barely justifies such excitable trumpeting. Alexander has already made public his concerns about how Labour should approach its policy on the constitution, in a speech which was heavily-featured across the Scottish media just a month ago. The latest one puts no meat on the bones of his earlier effort – Alexander makes no specific proposals as to what further devolution the party should support, and maintains Labour's position of opposing a devo-max question on the referendum paper.

Alexander is not an MSP, and therefore has no control over the Scottish party's decisions. (If, that is, Scottish Labour is an entity as autonomous as its supporters frequently insist.) So basically what we have is an outsider with no official influence suggesting that Scottish Labour should slightly change its pronouncements about devolution, but not its actual policies or actions. In other words there is, in essence, no actual news to report here at all.

The Scottish electorate still overwhelmingly supports greatly-extended powers for the Scottish Parliament, albeit with roughly half of the backers of devo-max also supporting independence. Scottish Labour is desperate to tap into this support and create clear Saltire-blue water between itself and the UK coalition, but has painted itself into a difficult corner by  opposing a devo-max option in the referendum.

It's a circle that the party is going to find very difficult (perhaps impossible) to square – it would, in effect, be campaigning on a position of "Vote No to independence and we might give Scotland some (unspecified) extra powers, at some unspecified point in the future, probably after yet another Calman Commission, if we win a Westminster majority under Ed Miliband, and if we keep our promises (unlike with electoral reform and tuition fees), and if we haven't changed our minds again by then".

At present, all Alexander is really achieving is drawing attention to that fact.

All the papers today report on the latest developments over the increasingly doomed-looking Scotland Bill. Perhaps the most telling comment in all of them, though, wanders in unassumingly towards the end of the Herald's piece.

Mr Mundell, the country’s only Tory MSP, said: “I do not believe the Scottish election result earlier this year was a mandate to strengthen this Bill.”

One does tend to get the impression that the Tories still don't see the connection between those two things, and we're going to be so bold as to assert that their electoral prospects are unlikely to improve until they do. Earlier on in the article the Herald's Robbie Dinwoodie notes that "the Westminster Ministers’ repeated riposte was to point to the result of the previous May when the pro-Calman parties won their mandate", which is an underestimation of the Scottish electorate so grave that it all but explains the SNP's landslide in May by itself.

Scottish voters know full well that there's next to no point in electing SNP MPs to Westminster. Even if every single Scottish seat went to the nationalists, they would have almost no chance of achieving or influencing anything, since only twice in the last 50 years (and briefly on both occasions) has the entire block of Scottish MPs held the balance of majority at Westminster. Sending SNP members south serves only to dilute the party's talent base, and while the SNP can never admit this in public and have to put forward a candidate in every seat (because to do otherwise would appear defeatist), it's largely a gesture – the difference in the amount of money and effort the party devotes to Westminster and Holyrood campaigning is huge.

The electorate therefore tends to use its vote tactically against the Tories, and as they can't trust Labour and the SNP to work together against a common enemy – witness Labour's venomous, contemptuous response when the Scottish and Welsh nationalists offered their support for a centre-left coalition in 2010 – Scottish voters in Westminster elections therefore quite reasonably back the biggest of the opposition parties. (It speaks volumes for the degree to which Labour has exhausted the patience of its core vote that even despite this, the SNP have now moved well ahead in the polls for voting intentions at the next UK general election.)

The huffy intransigence of the coalition in the face of the Scottish Parliament's attempts to improve the Scotland Bill – with a cleverly-chosen package of suggestions backed not only by the SNP but variously by all three Holyrood opposition parties – shows how little they've grasped about the reasons for the rise of the nationalists. This stubborn resistance already looks like costing them the Scotland Bill (which in its current form is a sneaky attempt to weaken the Scottish Government by quietly reducing its funding while shifting the blame to Holyrood). If they continue with the see-no-evil-hear-no-evil approach, it may cost them Scotland itself.

Labour's former Lord Provost of Glasgow and celebrity Celtic fan Michael Kelly would have an entry in the "Zany Comedy Relief" section of our blogroll if there was a central link hub for his outpourings. His latest rant in the Scotsman, though, is demented even by his standards. Under the bizarre title "Alex Salmond’s anti-sectarian purge has gone too far" (is it possible to go too far against sectarianism? Are we saying there's an acceptable level above zero?), he attempts to make an extraordinary case which twists and turns on itself with every line.

Firstly, he expresses his outrage that the police reported Celtic to UEFA for alleged sectarian singing during their Europa League match against Rennes, rather than arresting the perpetrators. Yet in the very next paragraph he relates a tale of them doing just that to a fan accused of singing a pro-IRA ditty during a Celtic-Hibs game, and claims that the arrest "seems excessive".

Kelly then launches into a more general diatribe against the anti-sectarianism legislation currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament, culminating in the astonishing claim that the IRA "was not a sectarian organisation". Because we all remember all its many prominent Protestant members, of course. But Kelly isn't quite done yet. His penultimate paragraph contains the following mind-boggling passage:

"But further, both Celtic and Rangers fans argue there is a significant difference between celebrating the actions of current terrorist groups and remembering with nostalgia the exploits of the freedom fighters of a century ago. Thus the Boys of the Old Brigade and Here Lies a Soldier should be classified as folk songs like the Massacre of Glencoe and the grossly offensive but condoned Flower of Scotland."

This blog doesn't know about you, readers, but we've never heard "The Massacre Of Glencoe" being lustily bellowed from the Fir Park stands when Motherwell take on Kilmarnock – indeed, we've never heard it spontaneously sung anywhere ever, let alone at a football match. Perhaps for the strikingly obvious reason that, just like Michael Kelly's beloved ballads of a century-old war in a foreign country, it's got absolutely sod-all to do with Scottish football. But the notion that "Flower Of Scotland" – Scotland's national anthem – is "grossly offensive" leads us to wonder why in the world Michael Kelly still lives in such a hateful nation.

"Flower Of Scotland" could at a stretch be deemed to contain some anti-English lyrics, but the song is a tale told from a purely defensive perspective. It's about repelling a foreign invader ("and sent him homeward to think again"), not invading others (compare and contrast with the infamous verse in "God Save The Queen" about crushing the Scots in Scotland), and in that deeply moral theme it stands with some of the world's finest anthems, such as "La Marseillaise". Even then "Flower Of Scotland" sounds a pacifistic note, pointing out that:

"Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain."

To call it "grossly offensive", then, is fairly unarguably deranged. (Not to mention irrelevant, since this blog is unaware of any group of supporters having ever sung FoS at league games, which are what the sectarianism bill is designed to tackle.) The Scotsman no longer allows comments on Michael Kelly's posts. Perhaps it should take the logical next step and no longer employ him to write them at all.

Some frightening numbers and home truths from Iain Macwhirter in the Herald today. The piece reaches the only conclusion it's possible to draw from the evidence, namely:

"There will have to be redistribution to claw back the 40% or so of wealth hoarded by the top 1%."

But which party  – particularly in the UK – does one vote for to achieve this? Who stands on a platform of serious wealth redistribution, calling the "But we'll leave!" bluff of the obscenely rich? (Who avoid as much of their tax burden as they can anyway.) The imminent Second Great Depression is a lot like the First World War – everyone can see it coming, nobody actually wants it, but we've hitched ourselves to an ideological bandwagon that's hurtling towards a terrible abyss and nobody's prepared to shoot the horse that's pulling it.

Professor John Curtice, a psephologist at Strathclyde University and the Scottish media's go-to guy for all political analysis, is often attacked by "cybernats" for alleged partiality in favour of Labour. This blog sighs in despair whenever online nationalists automatically scream "Biased!" at anyone who doesn't come onscreen in a kilt and Jimmy hat singing "Flower Of Scotland", but it has to be said that Prof. Curtice has done himself no favours at all this week.

As co-author of a report published yesterday by the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, the good professor has launched what the Scotsman today calls a "strongly worded attack" on Holyrood's proportional electoral system, under which the SNP won a majority of seats (53%) on 45% of the vote. As we noted yesterday, it's odd that the ERSS has chosen now to demand changes to the system, given that when Labour/Lib Dem coalitions had Holyrood majorities in 1999 and 2003, they also commanded less than 50% of the vote (45.5% between them in 2003, 49.5% in 1999), and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.

Now, to be fair to Prof. Curtice, the Scotsman does put words in his mouth, in their characteristic manner. The headline of the piece claims that the report brands the Holyrood system "a failure" (a description which we can't find anywhere in it) and also asserts that the report demands the system "should be changed to prevent one party winning an overall majority", which is something of an exaggeration – Curtice only actually says that the objective of the proposed changes is to make a majority "more difficult", not impossible.

But by fronting such a suspiciously-timed report, the Professor and the ERSS have allowed their credibility to be undermined by exactly the sort of distortion the Unionist media specialises in, and in doing so have left themselves dreadfully open to allegations of political colour. The society claims their motivation is honourable, and aimed only at promoting a fuller range of political views:

"We are convinced our democracy would work better with more parties in the system, so that more voices are represented and heard and that power is shared, checked and balanced."

…but the current method of electing the Scottish Parliament is perfectly capable of delivering that – in 2003, for example, the Greens got 7 seats, the Scottish Socialists won 6 seats and two independents also secured seats, those three groups between them providing almost 12% of the Parliament's MSPs. (For comparison, imagine the UK Parliament having 78 MPs from outwith the three main parties – the actual number is 28, with only one of those representing an English constituency.)

The simple fact is, the electorate could have elected a wider range of MSPs if they'd wanted to, as they have done in the past. Instead, they overwhelmingly chose the SNP. That's democracy, because in practice almost no democracy on Earth is perfectly proportional. This blog has no objections to bringing the Scottish Parliament closer to that ideal, but it's decidedly odd that supposedly neutral organisations like the ERSS didn't feel the need to suddenly press for it until the SNP won a majority.

We're absolutely confident, however, that the author of the above quote – the society's director Willie Sullivan – also being a Labour councillor in his day job (a fact the Scotsman inexplicably neglects to mention) is entirely coincidental.

PS The replacement PR method proposed by the ERSS report is one devised by the French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë. His most famous work is the calculation that it was scientifically impossible for bumblebees to be able to fly.

Scottish Labour embarrassed themselves horribly today when they jumped on comments from SNP MSP Stewart Maxwell in which he noted that the Scottish Government was only legally empowered to hold an advisory referendum on independence rather than a binding one. Not withstanding the fact that ALL referenda in the UK are only advisory, whether conducted by Holyrood or Westminster or anyone else, Labour’s humiliating blunder was in triumphantly asserting there was something new about this position, when in fact the very first sentence of the SNP’s National Conversation website – dating back over two years – says the exact same thing:

“The First Minister has outlined plans for a public consultation on a draft Referendum Bill which sets out proposals for an advisory referendum on extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament.”

But there’s another aspect to the nature of referenda that everyone seems to be inexplicably overlooking of late. The Unionist parties have recently ramped up a campaign in which they demand the SNP “clarify” every last item of policy in an independent Scotland, from currency and EU membership to renewable energy transmission costs, pension provision, and all the way down to what colour the First Minister’s going to paint Bute House’s front door. What nobody seems to have grasped is the fairly crucial point that that’s not what a referendum is for.

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The Scottish Liberal Democrats (remember them?) are rather excited today. With their finger on the pulse of the nation as usual, they invite citizens of Scotland and the UK to rejoice in our low, low petrol prices. No, that's not a typo – they mean low compared to Norway, Scotland's oil-rich neighbour whose people apparently pay up to 20p a litre more than us at the pumps. This concerns all five of Scotland's remaining Lib Dems greatly, as they fret that "hard-pressed families" in an independent Scotland might be forced to pay similar sums for their fuel.

Of course, those same families might be prepared to bear that burden if in return they were to enjoy Norwegian levels of salary. The average Norwegian worker takes home an impressive £46,700 or so a year, in one of the most economically equal countries on the planet, compared to the UK average of £25,500. As a driver, I'd personally like to take this opportunity to announce that I will happily pay a 20p-a-litre premium in exchange for an extra £21,000 a year, should any party wish to propose such a policy. How about you, readers?