Wings Over Scotland

We had a brief but enjoyable Twitter debate (Twebate? Twiscussion? Twargument?) with the Spectator’s excellent Alex Massie earlier today, on the question of whether it’s possible for a person to genuinely belong to two countries at once. Our view has long been that it isn’t, but Massie seemed incredulous, querying whether Sir Walter Scott and Donald Dewar really didn’t see Scotland as a “proper” country.

We’ve long pondered over the simplest analogy to explain our view, and for want of a better alternative (plus we still have the flu) reluctantly went down the war route.

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[FOOTBALL KLAXON.]

Okay, this has gone on long enough. We’ve been trying for quite a few months now to get anyone to explain something to us, and nobody ever has an answer. We’ve sat and watched with our heads in our hands as the SPL and SFL have competed to come up with the most bonkers, convoluted proposals for the reconstruction of Scottish football.

The SPL want two leagues of 12 splitting into three leagues of eight then merging back into two leagues of 12 again at the end, plus a league of 18 that just bumbles along feeling a bit left out of all the splitting fun. The SFL counters with a bizarre 16-10-16 (or possibly 16-10-18) system that has nowhere near enough fixtures in it, but proposes to fill the gaps with playoffs and by padding out the least popular competition in the Scottish game – the League Cup.

And all the while everyone pointedly ignores the most successful league system ever created in Scotland, which by coincidence was also the least embarrassingly stupid one, and which never ended with the team in 8th place in the final table having more points than the team in 5th place while all the other leagues laughed at us.

Please, for the love of God, someone tell us why.

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Perhaps the paper was confused after watching yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show, on which the host asked the question (at 37m) “Are you in favour of a squeeze on welfare?”, to which the allegedly-Labour politician Mr Balls replied “Of course!”

(Balls subsequently tried to waffle his way out of the response by claiming that he’d reduce the welfare bill by creating jobs, but Marr had expressly asked whether he backed the specific cuts to in-work benefits in the current welfare reform bill, and despite his repeating the question several times Balls refused to give an answer.)

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Despite slightly fewer posts last month than the preceding one, Wings Over Scotland still entered its second year by hitting another new all-time pageviews record in November, with an increase of nearly 25,000 to 429,114. The more telling statistic, though, was the number of unique users, which rocketed by a whopping 24% as almost 5000 new people came to visit, bringing total readership past 23,000.

(We were going to stop doing these every month, but with December’s figures likely to take a fall due to the Christmas break, we hope you’ll forgive us one more moment of self-congratulatory horn-tooting while we’re still on the upslope.)

It also seems a good time to remind you that we’re always on the lookout for features to draw even more readers in. In 2013 we’d like to broaden our contributor pool a bit and add some more names to the excellent talent we’ve already been proud to showcase. 2012 has seen a dozen people other than myself notching at least one WingsLand byline, and we want lots more voices next year. If you’ve got something to say and you want tens of thousands of people to hear it, you know where to reach us.

A few months ago, lots of people in the Glasgow area were wondering how the city’s Labour party was going to be able to fund some of the lavish promises in its council-election manifesto, such as free wi-fi covering the entire city. Thanks to the intrepid journalism of local freesheet The Glaswegian, the answers are beginning to emerge.

“Thousands of elderly people could be forced to give up safety alarms after the introduction of charges. Glasgow City Council will next month introduce a £3-a-week charge for the community alarm telecare service.

The council’s arms-length service provider Cordia say that around seven per cent of the 13,500 users – 945 – have indicated they no longer want the service due to cost. But opposition councillors say they have been told up to 3000 will give up the alarm.”

Here at Wings Over Scotland, we say good riddance to the despicable something-for-nothing scroungers demanding that ordinary taxpayers fund the emergency service that could be the difference between their life and death. We only hope that Labour will increase the charges as time goes on, because otherwise snatching £3 a week from 10,000 vulnerable old folk will still take over three years to produce the £5m that the council is contributing towards a “regeneration” project intended to restore the “lost grandeur” of the street directly outside its imposing city chambers.

But enough about Labour. UKIP also put in some strong performances in the three Westminster polls last night, scoring two second-place finishes and one third place on a night when the Lib Dems sank to an astonishing EIGHTH and the BNP outpolled the Tories in the same Rotherham seat. The truly disturbing thing, though – speaking as a current resident of England – was the total absence of a single viable party of the left.

The turnout in all three elections was dismal, with two of them barely scraping past the 25% mark and the most popular just managing to get a third of voters out. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least a significant part of the reason for that may be the near-total lack of meaningful choice available.

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Analysis later. If you simply want to read the two passages of the Leveson Inquiry’s report which concern the actions of the First Minister without wading through 2000 or so pages, you’ll find them below. Bored readers may wish to compare the contents with our own assessment/predictions from five months ago. (NOTE: Where it says “emphasis added”, the emphasis in question was added by Lord Leveson, not by us.)

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The Scottish media is winding itself up for another sustained assault on the Scottish Government. Kerry Gill of the Scottish Daily Express has been pushing the story hard since last night along with some journalists from other English papers, and the BBC’s Scotland correspondent James Cook set the scene in a tweet this morning:

Sure enough, the Scotsman carried it as a front-page lead below only the Leveson Inquiry report – while inflating the figure by over £31,000 for effect – and the Herald also carries a prominent piece, although at least only rounding the amount up by £1,420.

The reports reveal that 36 people spent around a week in the US, taking part in various business events in addition to attending the golf tournament, which the Scottish Government was contractually obliged to send a delegation to as part of the agreement to host it at Gleneagles in 2014, and which is predicted to be worth £100 million to the Scottish economy. But as the papers line up to hand the Holyrood opposition a club to hit the First Minister with over the spending, there’s a very significant part of the equation missing from the coverage.

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Keen-witted viewers may have spotted a couple of additions to the central links column, which will help to support the site without costing you anything. If you want to buy anything through Amazon, visiting their site via the button on the right will divert a few pennies from your purchase to Wings Over Scotland, which isn’t quite as good as them paying proper amounts of tax but at least it’s something.

GiffGaff, meanwhile, is a top-notch pay-as-you-go mobile-phone network we’ve been using for a couple of years now and highly recommend for its excellent-value packages (especially if you use the internet on your phone) and terrific customer service.

Commercial message ends. As you were.

The Guardian carries a rather provocative piece today, suggesting that the SNP and the other nationalist parties at Westminster might do a deal with the Tories to push through their controversial proposals on changing (or gerrymandering, as some would have it) the UK’s constituency boundaries, in return for a radical overhaul of the Scottish constitution which would hand an unprecedented package of powers just short of full independence to the Holyrood parliament.

The plans are generally presumed to be electorally advantageous to the Conservatives, who currently have to secure considerably more votes to form a majority than Labour do, and the Lib Dems have vowed not to back their coalition partners on the issue after House Of Lords reform was shelved, leaving the Tories in need of votes from the smaller opposition parties to have any chance of getting the legislation through.

We’ll put aside for a moment the unworthy notion that if the Lib Dems are vowing to oppose the changes then that almost certainly means they’ll end up voting for them, and concentrate instead on the broader plausibility of the story, which appears to be sourced solely from a single former Tory MEP. Would the SNP really enter such a Faustian pact with the Tories for the sake of devo max? Let’s delve into the detail.

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Good piece about Parliamentary standards today by Iain Macwhirter over on his personal blog. It covers a lot of ground, and we’re not 100% sure we go along with the comments on Nadine Dorries, but this passage (our emphasis) leapt out:

“And by the way, the PO should ban the practice of applauding at question time. Holyrood has turned into a bear-pit. It isn’t anyone’s fault in particular – though Labour’s conduct has been pretty inexcusable. You can’t win any argument by ranting – except in a pub. The Nats have been behaving in a heavy handed manner since they won their landslide majority and their packing of parliamentary committees hasn’t helped.

Labour’s frustration is partly down to their being locked out of all influence. But it was their fault they lost the election by such a crushing majority, and they aren’t helping their chances of re-election by restoring to the politics of closing time.”

We’ve said several times before that applause should be banned from all forms of televised political debate except at the start and end. It swallows up precious time and serves no purpose – all sides of any given debate will (or at least should) be represented in the audience, and will obediently clap their own man or woman, telling us nothing. It wasn’t permitted in the 2010 UK general election leaders’ debates, and so far as we can tell it wasn’t missed. Holyrood should be no different.

But it’s the second paragraph quoted above that’s even more on-the-nose. In much the same way that they didn’t ever seem to genuinely accept the fact that they lost the 2007 election – seeing it instead as a blip, a grudgingly-permitted technicality, that the SNP got more seats than them – Labour in Scotland have absolutely refused to acknowledge the much bigger hiding they took four years later.

Johann Lamont constantly demands an input that her party simply didn’t earn – the electorate chose, entirely democratically and after looking at the conduct of the previous administration and opposition, to give the SNP the power to run the country without any petty, obstructionist interference this time round. Labour are going to have to suck that up for another three-and-a-half years at least, and if they don’t get a grip on themselves pretty soon they’re going to burst a blood vessel.

Crybaby Nation is a land without borders. But a couple of recent news items from it do have a particularly Scottish flavour. One of them, also reported in the Daily Record, concerned an expat Scot and Motherwell supporter in the US banned from having “MWELLFC” on his car licence plate, on the barely-believable grounds that someone might interpret it as “ME WELL F**KED” and be offended. The other one, though, shames us more, because it happened on our own patch.

According to STV News, two new Grampian Fire & Rescue Service vehicles have had to be taken in and repainted after two people complained that the Saltire on their front grilles was a “political symbol”, connected to the SNP and independence movement.

We’re not even going to insult you by pointing out what pathetic, cringing, snivelling creatures those making a complaint against their own country’s flag must be, or how irrational the argument is. We’re just going to slump face-down onto our desk and sob for a couple of minutes about the gutless “corporate team” who allegedly decided to back down over it. We’ll be with you again shortly.