Wings Over Scotland

In the world of journalism, being second to a story carries certain advantages. The Sunday Herald scored a high-profile exclusive with its list of “Better Together” donators yesterday, but only told half the tale. Keen-eyed cyber-sleuths immediately started digging, and came up with some troubling information about by far the biggest contributor to the No camp’s fighting fund, excellently and concisely detailed here by Michael Gray of National Collective.

You’d imagine, then, that the likes of the Scotsman – with the advantage of an extra 24 hours to do some investigating and with all the leads already conveniently found and collected together for them – would have come up with some pretty interesting in-depth analysis on the subject, especially given how keen it usually is to look into anyone who financially backs the nationalist side.

(Not to mention the golden opportunity to get one over on its rival’s big exclusive by pointing out what they missed in their haste to be first.)

Oh well.

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Those wishing to read some more detailed background on today’s Scotland on Sunday stushie can find at this link a paper (full title: “Fortify the Cheviots! The Nazis and the Nats”) presented by Gavin Bowd – author of the SoS article in question – to the University of Edinburgh in June 2012. Here’s the opening paragraph for colour:

“In January 1939, Douglas Young, future leader of the SNP, wrote to his fellow poet, George Campbell Hay: ‘If Hitler could neatly remove our imperial breeks somehow and thus dissipate the mirage of Imperial partnership with England etc he would do a great service to Scottish Nationalism’.

Young thus showed the ambiguous, to say the least, attitude of Scottish nationalists towards Fascism. Hatred of the English led to the downplaying of the Fascist threat to freedom and peace, while more radical nationalists could be attracted to the authoritarian and xenophobic solutions offered by the Fuhrer and the Duce.”

Make your own judgements from the evidence.

So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?

After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.

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On the 12th May 1916, a man born 48 years previously in Edinburgh’s Cowgate was strapped to a chair in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin and – after receiving the last rites – was shot by a firing squad. He was too weak to stand.

In 2002 a BBC poll for its presentation of the “100 Greatest Britons” had him in 64th place. Yet he is hardly known in Scotland. Virtually the only time his name impinges on public consciousness is when those who wish to honour his name by public march in Edinburgh have to be given police protection from violent Unionist bigots.

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And we’ll give you a clue – the thing we’re in, we’re in it without a paddle.

The above is a graph released by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, invariably described as a “respected” economic research organisation of no particular political leaning. It’s an analysis of the likely impact of the coalition’s tax and welfare “reforms” on various demographic groups over the period of the current government.

It takes a moment’s study to make sense of (and it’s by far the most accessible thing they publish, though if you’re an economics whiz you can find all sorts of detailed cleverclogs stuff on their website), so we’ll quickly take you through a few bullet points.

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The Telegraph deserves some credit today. It runs a heartbreaking story about the reality of life on benefits, of the sort both the Conservative and Labour parties want to be “tough” on. It’s a piece of gripping, truthful and hard-hitting journalism, highly and properly critical of the party the paper steadfastly supports. Hats off to the author.

Then you read the comments.

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This site often reflects on the absence of real political choice available to the UK electorate, but it has rarely been more clearly illustrated than it was on this morning’s BBC breakfast news in an interview with Labour’s shadow chancellor Ed Balls.

Interviewed by presenter Charlie Stayt, Balls first clarified Labour’s position on the top-rate tax cut taking effect this week. Refusing to commit Labour to restoring the 50p rate if elected in 2015, Balls nevertheless made the meaningless pledge that if an election were to be held tomorrow it would be in Labour’s manifesto.

(An interesting distinction from “We would actually do it”, of course.)

We’re a bit puzzled by this. Either a 50p tax rate brings in more money or it doesn’t (and it does – even George Osborne’s own budget statement noted that it raised an extra £1bn for the Treasury compared to the 40p rate that preceded it), so what does it matter what the country’s general economic condition is? Shouldn’t Labour be committed as a matter of principle to wealth redistribution by taxing the rich?

Instead, Balls said that reducing the rate to 45p was “not my priority” (rather than, say, “I think it’s wrong”), suggesting that it was nevertheless something he’d want to do. But it was on welfare reform that he was most revealing.

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When we started this site we never imagined we’d find ourselves citing Aleister Crowley for anything, but it looks as though that strange and disturbing day has come.

We’ve had a theory for a while now that the expenses scandal of 2009 was a watershed moment in British politics, in the worst possible way. Practically the whole of the Westminster parliament was found to have perpetrated frauds against the taxpayer on a scale that would have seen benefit claimants given substantial prison terms, yet almost none were ever put in front of a court.

And despite the huge public outcry at duck houses and moat-cleaning and house-flipping and all the rest of it, when a General Election was called in 2010, the electorate trooped meekly into polling stations and re-elected almost every politician that had been caught with their greedy hands in the voters’ pockets.

Is it any wonder that those same politicians now think – probably correctly – that they can literally get away with just about anything? If we were them, we might be the same. After all, if sheep keep walking up to you when you’ve got shears in your hand, even if you keep gouging their eyes out with them, what else are you going to do?

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When we’ve reached the point where even the Daily Telegraph is calling the British Prime Minister a liar, it’s probably about time someone laid out the facts about the UK’s nuclear weapons, and in particular how they relate to Scotland.

Let’s see if we can keep it brief.

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The Prime Minister made a rare appearance in Scotland this afternoon, showing up at defence contractors Thales in Govan to answer questions from what the BBC described as “the public”, but looked in fact to have been exclusively employees of the company and who appeared to have been briefed not to ask anything difficult, instead serving up softballs like “What is the government doing to encourage business?” and other similar blandities that we’ve already forgotten five minutes later.

As you can see, he went down a storm.

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Much has been and will be written about David Cameron’s visit to Scotland today, during which he’s expected to vigorously advocate the continuation and renewal of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent”. Which didn’t deter Iraq from invading Kuwait, or Argentina from invading UK territory in the Falklands, but never mind.

(We’re also not clear on why North Korea or Iran would have any sort of beef with an independent Scotland anyway, as opposed to the UK. It seems to this website that the surest way for Scotland to avoid even the microscopically minuscule future prospect of an attack from either nation is to disentangle ourselves from Westminster’s much-hated foreign policy with all possible haste.)

But none of it will be as telling as a single line in the Telegraph today:

“Mr Cameron insists the Trident programme offers good value – at an annual cost of 1.5 per cent of Britain’s benefits bill.”

Could he have made it any clearer? The savage, failing austerity and welfare “reform” programme designed to annihilate the last remnants of civilised British society is explicitly contrasted with the “bargain” we’re getting by spending our money on a useless weapon system designed solely to murder millions in vengeance after we’re already dead. That’s what the United Kingdom stands for, Labour and Tory together.

The argument that Cameron is stealthily trying to sabotage the No campaign in order to shore up the Conservatives’ powerbase in England gets more convincing daily.

Iain Banks blew my mind. I read The Wasp Factory as a teenager when it came out in 1984, and I’d simply never encountered anything like it. I devoured it in an afternoon.

Until then my library had consisted pretty much solely of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books – brilliant and funny and quietly profound, but essentially lightweight stuff. The most “adult” literature I’d tackled was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an agonisingly painful experience that took nearly six months of teeth-gritted determination to plough through, one hideous chapter at a time, waiting for a promised epiphany of knowledge and understanding that never arrived. It single-handedly gave me a dislike of hippies that endures to this day.

The Wasp Factory was a revelation. Dark, disturbing, but funny and ultimately uplifting, it was at once both palpably Scottish and nationless. I hovered outside bookshops waiting for Banks’ subsequent releases – Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Espedair Street. Every one was utterly different from the last, united only by the warm, optimistic spirit of humanity underpinning them. I’m a natural misanthrope, but every time I read one of Iain Banks’ novels I’m turned away from despair towards hope again.

I made sure I took them with me when I left home, and they sit in my bookshelf still, growing more well-thumbed with the years. And when Banks moved into science-fiction, I came along for the ride. His undramatic, matter-of-fact depiction of an enlightened “post-scarcity” galactic Utopia – the Culture – was beautiful and politically thrilling, and as a young videogame obsessive the author’s clear connection with and understanding of the alternative worlds offered by games reached out to me in an incredibly direct and personal way that Douglas Adams’ work hadn’t.

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