Wings Over Scotland

Despite the launch of the rainbow-coalition Yes campaign on Friday, we’re still fighting the assertion that Scottish nationalism is both racist and bigoted – one typified by a recent article by George Galloway in the Daily Record.

I have to admit to a guilty soft spot for the MP for Bradford West. I know he’s ridiculous in many ways, but I like him. Watching George on Question Time recently, I knew he’d be entertaining and sometimes disrespectful. It’s a nice change from the grey men of politics we usually see. I like the idea that some politicians have the bottle to say and do pretty much what they want and sod everyone else. Not always pleasant and often enough to make your toes curl with embarrassment, George is, at least, a character and we could do with a few more like him in politics.

But as I read the article he wrote for the Record, in which he talked about seeing people who have “what can only be described as a virulent hatred of English people and a belief they are the source of Scotland’s troubles”, I began to wonder what country George was looking at.

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There’s a famous scene in the first Indiana Jones film where our hero, faced with a swordsman performing an elaborate duelling ritual prior to an anticipated bout of formal combat, simply pulls out a gun and wearily shoots him. (Inspired, no doubt, by the legend of the Gordian Knot.) We’re feeling a bit like that this morning as we peer into the bewildering, constantly-shifting looking-glass that is the affairs of Rangers FC.

Either of yesterday’s events would have been enough to try to untangle by itself, but the two smashed head-on into each other and created a grisly heap of tortured, twisted, smoking metal that’d take half a Scottish fire brigade all day to separate into identifiable components, and with about the same chance of anyone walking away intact. But we’re so stupid we’re going to have a go by ourselves. Read on, if you dare.

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Well, it’s safe to say it’s all kicked off big-time today, with not one but two massive developments in the Neverending (Rangers) Story. Firstly, you can read the entire CVA document for yourself here. But these are the bullet points:

1. The £8.5m Charles Green and his consortium (“Sevco”) intend to fund their purchase of Rangers with is in fact a loan, to be paid back (with interest) by 2020 [Section 4.20], despite Green’s previous pledge to run the club “debt-free”.

2. According to the BBC, Duff & Phelps’ fees during the period of administration to date are £5.5m, leaving just £3m in the pot for the creditors.

3. Highly unusually, the proposal doesn’t actually specify a percentage creditors will be paid. But Rangers’ current debts are in the region of £55m, meaning the maximum payout to unsecured creditors will be slightly over 5p in the £. The actual figure is impossible to gauge, as the CVA proposal document is full of unknown sums marked “TBC”, such as the amount owed to Craig Whyte. [Schedule 8]

4. Should Rangers lose the Big Tax Case the debt will at least double, but is widely thought likely to increase by even more, taking the total to around £150m. This would reduce the maximum payout to unsecured creditors to 2p in the £.

5. Should the CVA be rejected by creditors, Green has a contractual obligation to purchase the club’s assets for £5.5m (presumably again in the form of a loan, though this isn’t explicitly specified) and liquidate it, saving himself £3m. [Section 4.23] By coincidence the purchase price is exactly the sum quoted by the BBC for Duff & Phelps’ fees, leaving precisely £0 in the pot for creditors.

6. The creditors therefore have a choice between accepting a maximum of 5p in the £ (but likely much less than that), or getting nothing at all.

More coming as we unravel it. All we can say is that in a world where Robert Mugabe is about to be made a UN tourism ambassador and the head of the IMF doesn’t pay any tax, the notion of a bankrupt football club with £50m of unpayable debt and up to £100m more hanging over it BORROWING the money to pay off its creditors – by offering them an unspecified amount somewhere between almost zero and actually zero and expecting them to willingly agree to the deal even when one of them is the nation’s taxman – suddenly doesn’t seem all that insane by comparison.

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The media has been strangely silent today about the apparent missing of yet another deadline in the Rangers saga – yesterday was supposed to be the day Duff & Phelps actually sent out the mythical CVA proposal, but as yet there’s no public sign of it. Bizarrely, STV News reports that the document sent out to creditors doesn’t actually specify the percentage being offered, so we can’t see how it even counts as one.

It’s relevant because the CVA represents the only chance of Rangers automatically playing in the SPL next season, without having to beg the other 11 clubs to admit them directly as a newco – something that most commentators agree will happen anyway, on the grounds of self-interest. But just how well-founded is that belief?

As the fiasco drags on (and on and on and on), we’re constantly warned that the loss of the travelling Rangers support, among other things, will cripple the SPL’s smaller clubs. Many of the less-considered assertions of this claim centre on an inexplicable belief that should Rangers go out of business or be demoted to the SFL Division Three nobody would replace them, and that what would have been home fixtures for other SPL clubs against Rangers will be replaced by vacant Saturdays in a succession of empty, tumbleweed-strewn stadia.

But a reader comment on one story sent us scurrying off to our Big Book Of Scottish Football Stats again, and produced a surprising result.

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Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

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I’ve been a nationalist pretty much all my life, or at least since I was old enough to grasp the basic concept of politics (probably from about the age of 10 or so). Leaving aside any precocious notions of specific policies, I’ve never been able to grasp the basic concept of a people who consider themselves to be a nation being afraid to actually stand up and take responsibility for running that nation themselves.

If you think you’re a country, you shouldn’t be having foreigners pick your government for you. And if you don’t, you need to accept that you’re just a region with ideas above its station, and act accordingly – no more “national” football teams, no rugby teams, no flags, no anthems, no different laws or any of the rest of it.

To me, the idea goes far beyond anything so base as cowardice, and belongs instead in the realm of “simply too mad to understand”. It’s like not believing in gravity or evolution or the Earth being round and orbiting the Sun – that is, once someone’s pointed it out to you, it’s just a bit mental to keep disputing it.

Nobody can have two countries, or at least not simultaneously. You can be a citizen of somewhere, carry a passport for it, live there for as long as you like, or whatever else, but countries are like wives and livers – you can only have one at a time. You can change your nationality, if that’s what’s in your heart, but not have two at once. I’ve only agreed with Norman Tebbit about one thing in my entire life, and it’s that.

I’m Scottish. I’m British too, just like I’m from West Lothian and from Europe and from the Northern Hemisphere and plenty more things, but only one of them is my country. As such, I believe that it’s a self-evident truth that the government of Scotland should be chosen by the people of Scotland, and the people of Scotland alone.

But occasionally, just very occasionally, I have the misfortune to witness something like BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last night, and I’m not so sure we can be trusted.

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The Scottish media’s response to Friday’s launch of the Yes Scotland campaign in an Edinburgh cinema has been, as you might expect, extensive and varied.

Some of the coverage was dismayingly predictable, some of it rather more surprising.

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If you're a reasonably frequent reader of WoSland, this is kinda important. Just to the right you'll see a poll. (We apologise for the fact that it's a bit ugly, and in the sidebar rather than in the body of this post – failings which are a result of the absolutely startling shitness of every single WordPress polling plugin.)

Please take five seconds to respond to it. Thanks.

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you could be forgiven for thinking that the “positive case for the Union” was some sort of mythical beast, akin to the fabled unicorn. But that’s not quite the case. It did once exist, many moons ago, but has since become extinct – a victim of an ever-changing world where it was unable to compete and it couldn’t adapt to its new environment, thereby spelling its doom.

So just what was the positive case when it existed? Let’s find out.

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It was very pleasant to see Lou Hickey and Dougie MacLean performing “Caledonia” at the Yes Scotland launch – it’s a nice enough tune, if a bit mopey, and “Flower Of Scotland” has been somewhat ruined for us as a national song by years of appallingly murdered, out-of-time renditions at Murrayfield and, especially, Hampden.

(We liked the brief period when The Three McTenors or something did a speeded-up rendition at the football, which was nicely modern and left less room for the crowd to balls it up in – for some reason football fans can’t grasp the concept of a pause – but the SFA with their trademark ineptitude soon abandoned it in favour of Ronnie Corrie barking it out in his Hielan’-wedding get-up again. We also approve of the SRU’s practice of making the band stop for verse two and leaving it to the crowd alone, but why not just count them in and then let them sing unaccompanied from the start?)

We can’t help feeling, though, that music is a bit of a weak spot generally for the Scottish nationalist movement – still basically mired in the misty-blue-hills-of-Tiree era, where Runrig are seen as modernist hep-cats and the SNP’s official song is a 1962 blues tune best known by the staggeringly inappropriate title of “Let’s Stick Together”.

Had it been up to us, the Yes launch would have seen Glasgow’s own Primal Scream stood in front of a giant backdrop of Gordon “British jobs for British workers“ Brown and pummelling out an apocalyptic rendition of “Swastika Eyes“, but we get that that might not have mainstream appeal. Anyway, the point is, it’s time to think positive.

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We need to clone ourselves – there’s so much going on today we can’t possibly cover it all. The official launch of the Yes Scotland campaign was better than we expected, with particularly good contributions from Tommy Brennan, Dennis Canavan and a showstopping closing speech from Brian Cox all highlighting the broad base of support for independence – Alex Salmond was the only SNP politician on show, taking up just a couple of minutes of the hour-long presentation.

Online Labour activists were particularly keen to vilify Cox, unleashing a deluge of bitter attacks which succeeded only in drawing attention to how desperately the party wants to silence the 20% or so of Labour voters who actually back independence.

In an attempt to spoil the media coverage, the nascent No campaign chose the eve of the launch to release a YouGov poll they’d commissioned, with a headline figure of 33% in favour of independence and 57% against. Curiously, though – and little reported by the media – the poll didn’t ask the actual question that’s likely to be on the ballot paper, choosing instead the comparatively tortuous “Do you agree Scotland should become a country independent of the rest of the UK?”

Creating such an obvious hostage to fortune is a clumsy and guileless piece of work – especially given the enormous public fuss the Unionists have made about the precise wording and the possibility of bias therein – but the anti-independence parties presumably knew the media could largely be relied on to focus solely on the numbers and not mention what the actual question was.

Our favourite thing today, though, was an extraordinary outburst from Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale, who apparently wants the word “Yes” itself to be outlawed in the years running up to the referendum. On first reading of the piece we thought it was just a complaint that a democratically-elected government was daring to actively pursue the policies it had been elected on, but in fact it’s even nuttier than that – the leaflet and website Dugdale is objecting to isn’t actually anything to do with independence at all, but merely promoting a positive, “can-do” approach to Scottish enterprise.

To Labour, of course, promoting jobs and the Scottish economy is simply despicable populist cheating on the part of the Scottish Government – worse still when, in the immortal words of George Foulkes, the SNP are doing it deliberately. As Labour cling ever more tightly to negativity, as Ms Dugdale herself says: expect more of this.

We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange this week with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green leader (sorry, “co-convenor”) Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the he-said-we-said in too much depth (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation took in the comradely and left-wing-solidarity-building, if somewhat distant from reality, assertion that “the Green Party make Salmond look like Thatcher“ before culminating in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, the obvious thing that might strike a passer-by would be that the Greens appear to be massively overplaying their hand from the off. They might claim their complaints are about a “democratic” process, but they speak for just 4% of the Scottish electorate, and even among those backing independence they’re a tiny (9%) minority. Democracy has spoken already, and it wasn’t for the policies of the Greens.

(Nor those of the Scottish Socialist Party, who have also offered the media a chance to portray division in the Yes camp over their policies that an independent Scotland must be a republic rather than a monarchy, and be outside of NATO – although the latter in fact remains SNP policy too anyway.)

Clearly, none of that means that they need to shut up and just go along with what the SNP says – the whole point of independence is to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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