Wings Over Scotland

Here we go, then. The debut Straight Debate is with Douglas "Edinburgh Liberal" McLellan, a Lib Dem member and activist, and in it we discuss the timing of the referendum, the meaning of the word "independence" and, appropriately enough, the tone of public discourse. (We had more stuff we wanted to cover too, but after we got to 2500 words from just two questions each it seemed a good time to take a break. So here's how we got on for starters.)

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The media and blogosphere is awash with anguished, hand-wringing pleas for the independence debate to be conducted in a mature, reasoned and intelligent way over the next couple of years, but which do very little to bring that situation about. Yet it's a vital goal, because the way we're going whoever wins the referendum will find themselves living in a bitterly divided Scotland torn apart by years of vicious fighting.

Looking to the mainstream media is hopeless, because it's simply not set up for adult discussion. Politicians are crammed into tiny amounts of airtime which encourage nothing but vacant point-scoring soundbites – prepared in advance, often repeated robotically, and on no account to be deflected by anything the interviewer might have actually asked. (Though in fairness, on his night the BBC's Gordon Brewer can be as tenacious an inquisitor as these islands have seen.)

The online arena is no better, overwhelmingly inhabited by partisan sites – including this one – many of which also censor large swathes of dissenting opinion behind cowardly moderation policies. (Which we don't – only a contributor's first comment is moderated, as an anti-spam measure.) It's almost unheard of for opposing sides to undertake any sort of above-the-line dialogue.

So we're going to have a go.

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We greatly enjoyed the intervention of former First Minister and now Lord of Glenscorrodale, Jack McConnell, in the referendum debate last night. Appearing on both Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland, he graced the nation's airwaves to present a statesman-like call for "compromise" on the planning of the vote on Scotland's constitutional question, and generously offering his assistance to the Prime Minister and First Minister in untangling the situation. Our favourite was his explanation of how to compromise on the timing of the poll.

"There are those who are pressing for the referendum to be held this year as quickly as possible, the SNP want it to be held in nearly three years' time – I'm suggesting we compromise on that, let's have an agreement that we hold the referendum in about 18 months' time, maybe 15 months' time."

Now, we're not quite sure who the people allegedly "pressing for the referendum to be held this year" are. We don't know of anyone even remotely sane who's seriously proposed that it could or should be held in 2012 – the UK government's own suggested timetable is for an "early" vote in September 2013. The SNP, meanwhile, want "Autumn 2014", which is widely held to mean October of that year. The SNP have never confirmed that claim, but let's use it for the sake of argument.

What that means is that Lord McConnell's proposal for a "compromise" date between September 2013 and October 2014 is, um… September 2013. (Or alternatively June 2013, ie three months earlier than even the UK government's preferred date, never mind the Scottish Government's.) No wonder he repeatedly struggled to conceal an embarrassed smirk during the Scotland Tonight interview.

Lord McConnell's other envisaged compromises follow surprisingly similar lines.

NUMBER OF QUESTIONS:
Unionists: one question
SNP: open to second question
Compromise: one question

FRANCHISE:
Unionists: no vote for 16/17-year-olds
SNP: vote for 16/17-year-olds
Compromise: no vote for 16/17-year-olds.

LEGALITY:
Unionists: UK Government must give permission to hold the referendum
SNP: Scottish Government has the right to hold the referendum
Compromise: UK Government must give permission to hold the referendum

And so on and so forth. Amusingly, the noble Lord also still hasn't even conceded that independence gets to be the "Yes" answer in the referendum, putting forward the hilarious "compromise" notion that BOTH sides should get a "Yes" option, astonishingly concluding that this would be an aid to clarity and decisiveness. (Though he subsequently went on to talk of "the Yes and No campaigns" anyway.)

We await the logical outcome of Lord McConnell's thought process – that we should compromise between the SNP's position of having a referendum and the Unionist side's ingrained opposition to the whole idea, by simply not having a referendum at all.

We have a paid subscription to the Herald, but it's not working at the moment, locking us out from access. In case it's a widespread problem, we feel compelled to reprint this amazing story – which curiously didn't make the website front page today and was buried in the politics section – just to make absolutely sure that nobody misses it.

ENGLISH 'WOULD BOMB OUR AIRPORTS'

Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, in an independent Scotland, could be bombed by an English government if it was threatened by an unfriendly country, a former deputy leader of the UK Conservative Party has warned.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie also warned that SNP policies removing nuclear forces from Scottish bases and reducing Scotland's navy "essentially" to fishery protection vessels could make Scotland a war zone. He said a country with a few fishery protection vessels was "asking to be invaded".

The former Lord Advocate and Solicitor General said he did not see who might have "evil intentions" against England but he had missed "the import of the Balkan crisis and the ramifications of 9/11" and would hesitate "to predict the crises even in the rest of the century".

He foresaw the possibility of an enemy commander ordering the runways at Scottish airports to be cleared because his planes would be landing and "if that were to happen what alternative would England have but to come and bomb the hell out of Glasgow airport and Edinburgh airport".

He suggested one solution would be to base the nuclear fleet, currently based on the Clyde, to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Ponder for a moment, readers, the media coverage if a significant SNP figure had suggested the reverse scenario. Wouldn't that be fun?

Okay, so it's not the most shocking headline we've ever run. But it's dismaying to see how openly Scottish Labour recoils from the very idea. Over on LabourHame today, Tom Harris runs yet another another one-eyed piece we won't dignify with a link, about how SNP supporters are nasty and arrogant while Labour's are paragons of humble virtue to a man. It only took him a few minutes to delete our comment in response:

"The fact is the nationalists might win. I hope they don’t, but they might. We might win. We might not, but we might." [Tom Harris]

Speaking as an evil cybernat, I agree completely with this statement. But when moaning on about how SNP supporters apparently have a monopoly on certainty, as usual you ignore the beam in your own eye. You don't have to look very far to see that attitude on the Labour side – in fact, only as far as your nearest rival for LabourHame's most prolific contributer, Mr Ian Smart, who asserts at every opportunity that (a) there won't be a referendum at all, and (b) if there is, the Yes vote will be 28%.

You're a pretty clever guy, Tom. Imagine what a force you could be in the campaign if you abandoned the puerile, transparently-hypocritical sniping that makes you so easy to mock and dismiss as a troll, and actually tried engaging in a vaguely mature debate.

Sadly, despite our (actually entirely genuine) plea, Tom has very much nailed his colours – we're not really sure which ones those are – to the "puerile, transparently hypocritical sniping" mast. We think that's a terrible shame, for reasons we've covered previously in some detail, but on Labour's head be it.

If you’re a bit naive, it can be hard to understand why the parties of the Union are so bitterly opposed to a second question on the referendum ballot. All three of them, after all, claim to want more powers for Scotland (though not yet, and they don’t want to tell us which ones), and after all the fuss they’ve made before it seems odd that they don’t feel the need to get any democratic mandate for them.

It’s also odd because it’s pretty much agreed by everyone on all sides that a second question for, let’s call it Devo-X, would all but completely sink the SNP’s chances of winning a Yes to full independence, whereas in a straight two-way face-off it’s already very close and the numbers (as well as the arguments) are slowly but steadily moving in the Nats’ direction. That appears an awfully big gamble for the No parties to take purely in order to deny the SNP something (more powers, but short of independence) that all the Unionists are supposedly in favour of.

So what’s the real reason? Well, it’s not too hard to figure out.

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The Unionist parties aren’t completely stupid. While we all know that one of their core arguments against independence is that Scotland is too wee, too poor and too stupid to survive without the rest of the UK, they’re not quite daft enough to be caught coming out and bluntly saying it in those terms.

So they were faced with a tricky dilemma with the release of the latest GERS figures last week, which showed that Scotland contributed over £2bn more to the UK economy in the 2009/10 fiscal year than it got back in UK Government spending. (And that figure itself neglects a number of large discrepancies in the figures, where money considered as “Scottish spending” isn’t actually spent in Scotland at all, such as almost a billion pounds on defence alone.)

One approach is to get friendly journalists to print unchallenged quotes and then use them in your headlines. The other, not-unrelated strategy is to spin the figures in such a way that Scotland subsidising the rest of the UK somehow sounds like the exact opposite – or as the Herald’s story put it, “Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians claimed the report proved Scotland was better off within the UK.”

The job of explaining this remarkable distortion of the truth fell to the unfortunate Ken Macintosh, finance spokesman for Scottish Labour, who was shoved onto Newsnight Scotland on March 7th to explain why Scotland having more money on the plus side of its books would be a bad thing. It was a tough line to push, and poor Ken was forced to begin by trying to convince viewers that he didn’t understand the basic concept of how arithmetic works. Let’s break down his comments and see how he did, and what it tells us about the Unionist vision of Scotland, starting with his opening gambit.

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Tom Harris MP on Twitter, 10th March 2012:

"To the homeless, the unemployed, the hungry, the vulnerable, I say this: the SNP will give you a Scottish passport!"

Oof! That's some biting satire from the Scottish Labour man there, suggesting the SNP will do nothing for these unfortunate people other than change their nationality! That's going to sting those pesky "Tartan Tory" Nats! Hurrah for the good comrades of the Red Flag who stand up for the poor and the dispossessed!

But wait a minute – who's this vile, compassionless Tory slimebag sort, being quoted approvingly in the Telegraph by arch-Tory columnist Alan Cochrane barely three months earlier for telling those same unemployed, homeless and vulnerable to go and get stuffed, because his party has nothing to offer them?

"We were set up as the party to represent the values of working people, working being the key word. We weren't set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society – the long-term unemployed, the benefit dependent, the drug addicted, the homeless."

What? It's Tom Harris of the Scottish Labour Party, you say? We're confused again.

An alert viewer points us to a story in today's Times (paywall link).

"Supporters of the United Kingdom have swamped the Scottish government with hundreds of demands for an early referendum, SNP sources said. Scottish ministers were stunned when they received a flood of e-mails from unionists late last week, each one calling for a change in their approach to the referendum.

But when they examined the demands they realised that each e-mail was exactly the same and every one had been copied from a single standard e-mail.

[…]

[Michael] Moore was keen to distance himself from the e-mail deluge yesterday. A source close to the Scottish Secretary insisted that neither Mr Moore nor his team were responsible for the e-mails.

A Conservative spokesman was more direct, however. He said: “Given the way the cyber-Nats operate with the tacit approval of the SNP leadership, maybe the SNP should just calm down and look closer to home if they want to find conspiracy theories.”"

We'll be watching closely to see if any of the "Scottish" media investigates this dramatic story further over the weekend. But we won't be holding our breath.

We're a bit confused, readers. We live in the online age, where almost everything that happens is recorded for posterity – whether by a full TV crew or someone with a mobile phone. There can be almost no concerted misrepresentation of events, because no matter how hard spin doctors or biased media sources might try to push a dishonest line, someone somewhere will have what really happened on video.

So we're somewhat bemused as to how there can be such a polarised difference of opinion on whether the SNP wants one or two questions on the ballot paper for its proposed referendum on Scottish independence in 2014. The facts, as presented by the SNP in front of a watching nation and preserved forever on tape and digital memory by a hundred news channels of every and no political colour, seem extremely clear.

"On a historic day in Edinburgh, as the Scottish Government published its detailed proposals for a referendum to determine the country’s future, the First Minister announced his intention to put a simple question to voters in the autumn of 2014: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country? Mr Salmond’s single question on independence was supported by constitutional experts last night. The UK government also welcomed the clarity of the question he proposes." (Eddie Barnes, The Scotsman)

"Alex Salmond has revealed plans for a single-question independence referendum in 2014, offering voters a straight 'yes' or 'no' choice."
(Andrew Nicoll, The Sun)

"Selkirk’s Tory MSP John Lamont has welcomed Alex Salmond’s preference for a single question in Scotland’s independence referendum"
(Selkirk Weekend Advertiser)

"Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond has unveiled the question he wants to ask Scots in a referendum on independence. He said it should be: "Do you agree Scotland should be an independent country?" In a statement to the Scottish Parliament to launch his party's public consultation on the referendum, he told MSP's Scots will be given a "straightforward" and "clear" choice." (James Matthews, Sky News)

"The document will also see Salmond confirm his preference for a single yes-no question on independence in a 2014 referendum."
(Tom Gordon, The Herald)

"As Mr Salmond launched the Scottish Government’s consultation paper on the independence referendum, the document’s centrepiece was the question Scots will be asked in 2014: “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” The document, launched on Burns Night, even contains a mock-up of how a single-question ballot paper would appear, with two boxes, marked Yes or No." (Paul Kilbride, the Daily Express)

"Salmond reiterated his Scottish National Party's formal preference for a single question." (Keith Albert, Public Finance)

"Mr. Salmond wants only one question on the ballot paper: Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?"
(Neal Ascherson, the New York Times)

"It is interesting, when you look at the public utterances of people like the Deputy First Minister and the Finance Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney, that they have said, clearly, that they prefer a single question themselves. Indeed, the Scottish Government’s own consultation makes that their preference." (Michael Moore, Secretary of State for Scotland)

"The Government has made it clear, as it always has done, that its preference is for a single question on independence."
(John Swinney, Finance Secretary)

"Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson said she was glad that Mr Salmond had set out his preference for a single question on independence."
(Sanya Khetani, Business Insider)

"Our preference is to have a single question."
(Alex Salmond, quoted in Holyrood magazine)

So that all seems pretty straightforward and unambiguous. The First Minister and the SNP have made it clear that their preference is for a single-question referendum with a straight Yes/No answer, and while they're willing to listen to other opinions and consider any alternative, a single question is what they prefer and that's what they're proposing. Right? But wait – what's this?

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To be honest, I thought I was bound to have missed the boat. When you hear about fire-sale bargains on the internet, you tend to find that they're long gone by the time you actually get to the shops, cleared out by swarms of discount locusts. But when I took a wander into Bath city centre today after reading of GAME and Gamestation's last-throw-of-the-dice stock clearance, I didn't exactly have to fight through crowds.

That didn't, by any stretch, mean that they were out of the good stuff, though.

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The desperate attempts of the Unionist parties to portray Scotland as a country too poor to survive on its own are nothing if not inventive. One might think that the publication of the latest GERS report, showing that Scotland contributes more to the UK Treasury than it receives back in public spending, would be pretty hard to turn into a plus point for the Union. But while Michael Moore’s strategy on behalf of the Con/Dem coalition has been simply to put his fingers in his ears and insist that Scotland would be poorer outside the United Kingdom in flat-out contradiction of the official facts, the Labour “opposition” are trying a rather different spin.

Scottish Labour’s finance spokesman and failed leadership contender Ken Macintosh issued a press release today in which he made the bizarre claim that the GERS figures somehow constituted a positive case for the Union:

“The GERS report published this morning demonstrates the significant benefit to Scotland of being part of the UK. The report shows that public expenditure in Scotland was last year between £11bn and £19bn higher than all the taxes generated in Scotland, including North Sea oil.”

But let’s look at that for a second, and generously gloss over the fact that Macintosh’s figures apparently have an 73% margin of error. (Is it £11bn or £19bn, Ken? That’d be a fairly important difference.) What Macintosh is actually saying is that Scotland, taken as part of the UK as a whole, ran a budget deficit in 2009/10.

Now, in itself (and leaving aside the comically wide range of Macintosh’s “figures”) that’s true. But then, almost every Western economy currently runs a budget deficit. The UK as a whole ran a vast budget deficit over the same period – just under £152bn – and has been doing so for many years, which is why we’re currently experiencing massive cuts, imposed by the Tories and Lib Dems but backed (and largely caused) by Labour. And since the Scottish Government has no borrowing powers and has to balance its own block grant, every penny of that £11bn (or £19bn) “Scottish” deficit in 2009/10 was actually run up by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems at Westminster.

What McIntosh is in fact saying, then, is that Scotland can’t afford to stay in the UK. The logic of his position is that he’s calling for a further £11bn (or £19bn) of public-spending cuts in Scotland – to be imposed by Westminster, as Holyrood’s budget is fixed and wasn’t responsible for the deficit – so that we’ll be living within our means.

The SNP, on the other hand, would prefer Scotland to control its own finances, make huge savings by cutting things that the Scottish people don’t want (like Trident and PFI), and take full advantage of the likely increase in oil prices over the coming years to pay down our debts and fund investment in renewable resources for the future.

We don’t think it’s hard to spot which of those is the “positive” option.