Wings Over Scotland

Here’s a little weekend brainteaser for you, folks. On the BBC’s This Week show on Saturday, veteran presenter Andrew Neil interviewed two former senior government ministers about the UK’s nuclear deterrent – one was a Conservative former Defence Secretary, the other a Labour former Culture Secretary. For now we’ll call them Politician A and Politician B.

See if you can match the following quotes to the person who said them.

ANDREW NEIL: What is your view – should [Trident] be renewed?

POLITICIAN A: No, I think it’s all nonsense.

NEIL: Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?

POLITICIAN A: No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent, because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent, because now largely we are facing the sorts of enemies – the Taliban, Al Qaeda – who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. It’s a tremendous waste of money, it’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige, it’s wasteful, and at the margins it is proliferatory.

NEIL: Okay. But the government – or at least the Conservative part of the coalition – looks like they’re going to proceed with it. What will [your party’s] position be on it [, Politician B]?

POLITICIAN B: Actually, the position that Phillip Hammond has taken is very close to the position that we agreed some time ago when [Politician C] was Defence Secretary. The decision about whether to proceed […] won’t be taken until 2016…

NEIL: …but you’re happy that Mr Hammond’s going ahead with the spending, the seed money, which allows the decision if you want to?

POLITICIAN B: Yeah, completely, yes, yeah.

We’re going to assume that you’re ahead of us here, readers. The former Tory Defence Secretary (Michael Portillo) is, of course Politician A, the one who thinks that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is a pointless, ineffectual waste of time and money aimed solely at letting the UK grandstand on the world stage, while the former Labour Cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) is Politician B, who wants to spend billions of pounds just on the preparatory research for upgrading it – let alone the £84bn cost of actually doing so – at a time when her party is telling us that we can’t afford to educate our young people or look after the elderly.

You can watch this remarkable development for as long as it’s still available on the iPlayer (from 31 minutes), or listen to a permanent audio clip here. The politics of the Union are now truly through the looking glass.

A front-page piece in today’s Scotland On Sunday expands on Gordon Brown’s attempted intervention in the independence debate yesterday with an extraordinary headline which appears to be based on an actual quote from the former Prime Minister: “SNP plan makes Scotland a colony, claims Gordon Brown”.

Sure enough, Brown is reported as saying that an independence for Scotland would be “a form of self-imposed colonialism more reminiscent of the old empire than of the modern world”. Which raises an obvious question: given that an independent Scotland would by any definition have vastly more control of its own affairs than it does now, doesn’t that mean it must currently be something far less than a colony?

The only status we can think of for a nation that’s arguably lower than a “colony” is that of a vassal state. Wikipedia’s definition of that term certainly seems to apply to Scotland: we pay “tribute” to the UK (by contributing a greater share of its revenues than we get back in spending), and we also “provide military power to the dominant state”, both directly in the form of troops and by giving a home to the UK’s nuclear weapons, an important political tool which it wouldn’t be able to retain otherwise.

Wiki goes on to add that a more common modern term for a vassal state is “puppet state”. If you’ve got a minute, Gordon, can you just confirm for us that you and the rest of the Unionist alliance currently see Scotland as a puppet state of England? Cheers.

Gordon Brown doesn’t turn up in the House Of Commons very much. He’s represented his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituents at just 14% of votes since stepping down as Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, not bothering to voice an opinion on their behalf at 545 out of 635 divisions. But at least we’ve now found out why.

Brown has barely signed in to earn his £200,000-a-year salary for the last 30 months because he’s been busy working on a list of 22 questions to ask the SNP. We can tell he’s devoted his time to it single-handedly, because the list – unveiled at a speech in his constituency yesterday – has clearly never been anywhere near a sub-editor. It’s a clunking, bloated lump of leaden prose, almost entirely bereft of punch, coherence and even basic readability – any primary-school English teacher worth their salt would hold the former Prime Minister back for some extra lessons on first glance.

Nevertheless, because we’re professionals we’ve ploughed through the double negatives, split infinitives and stultifying repetition to make some sort of sense of it, and in the interests of opening up debate we’ve come up with answers to all of Gordon’s queries, even though we’re not actually in the SNP. Read on below.

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After ten days, we have an answer, of sorts.

“Dear Rev Campbell

Reference CAS-1714825-RP7R5W

Thank you for your e-mail. Your comments were passed to the Editor of Newsnight Scotland, who has asked that I forward his response as follows:

“Thank you for getting in touch with us about the Newsnight Scotland interview with Nicola Sturgeon on 23rd October.

We have received a number of complaints about this item, most of them concerning the sound quality of the interview and a number alleging politically-motived bias.

To take each in turn:

I accept that the sound quality of this item fell short of the standards we would expect and apologise if this detracted from your enjoyment of the interview. However, I do not believe that the editorial sense of that interview was compromised by the technical problems. I have investigated what went wrong in this instance and have taken appropriate steps to ensure that something similar does not occur in future.

Some have suggested that the BBC in some way deliberately ‘doctored’ the interview for reasons of political bias; others suggested that it was not a technical fault but a deliberate attempt to suppress the words of the Deputy First Minister. Either suggestion implies that we were happy to be grossly unprofessional and, thereby, seriously to breach all of the journalistic standards which the BBC has striven for so many years to achieve and which are encapsulated in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. I can only repeat – this was an unfortunate technical matter for which I again apologise.

Thank you again for taking the time and the trouble to be in touch about the programme.”

Details of the BBC complaints process are available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

Kind Regards

Patrick McManus
BBC Complaints”

As often tends to be the case with BBC responses, it produces more questions than answers. The nature of the “technical fault” is not clarified, there’s nothing on how it managed to get past the producer without the failure being noticed and be broadcast, and nor – more tellingly – is there any explanation of why there was no apology broadcast on either that night’s show or the following evening’s. Even if we take the reply at face value with regard to the incident itself, we all pay a significant (and mandatory) fee for the BBC and we deserve more respect than that.

But most curiously of all, if you read it closely the reply doesn’t in fact deny the suggestions of bias. It merely says, if we might paraphrase, “If you believe we’d do such a thing, then you must be prepared to believe that we’re biased.” It rather conspicuously doesn’t go on to add “But we’re not”, instead merely leaving the reader to infer it without it actually being said.

We feel compelled to note once again that in the event of a vote for independence, everyone at BBC Scotland would be out of a job. We’re not sure how conducive to impartiality that is, and we suspect it could certainly stretch to turning a blind eye to an initially non-deliberate gremlin in the works. We will, as ever, continue to monitor.

Watching FMQs yesterday, a thought suddenly occurred to us. Is it possible that a lot of Scottish people’s reluctance to support independence isn’t because they think the south-east of England knows what’s best for Scotland, but because they’re simply terrified of the possibility of someone other than the SNP winning an election to an independent Scottish Parliament, and thereby risking putting the entire nation in the hands of the likes of Johann Lamont, Jackie Baillie and Richard Baker?

Have we been making a terrible tactical error all this time? Should we, in fact, spend the next two years bigging up Scottish Labour and the rest of the Holyrood opposition instead of mercilessly exposing their hapless ineptitude at every turn? Should we do our best to reassure a frightened electorate that should the SNP split after independence (which some people think it will, though we don’t), there’s nothing to fear from a government that might include Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and James Kelly and have control of ALL of Scotland’s finances, welfare and defence?

Because if so we’ll give it a shot. But frankly, that’s going to be a tough sell.

It’s got flowers on it and everything.

Gemma Fox is a rather strange lady who makes Lego dioramas of Royal Marine Commandos and who we had a childish but enlightening recreational argument with on Twitter last night. (Funnily enough after a long and tiring day visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.) James Mackenzie is a Green activist and one of the editors of the once-popular and increasingly-ironically-named Better Nation blog.

(Mackenzie threw an impressive hissy fit earlier this week when we very politely challenged him to support a seemingly-baseless allegation about another blogger, even going so far as to claim “harassment” on the basis of someone responding civilly to comments made in an open public forum. Presumably, as a Better Nation editor he’s just not used to people answering him back without being able to censor them.)

Ms Fox generously warned us last night that we had until “2000 hrs” this evening to delete unspecified tweets from our account, and that we should also “warn yer pals”. (We’re not quite sure who that means, but it might be you, so we thought we’d better let you know.) If we vanish suddenly at 8.01pm under legal action – the threat of which we’re sure is real and serious, and definitely not just the mad rantings of a delusional internet lunatic – speak kindly of us when we’re gone. We had a good run.

Crikey, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun? Wings Over Scotland is a year old today. The site was created on the 1st of November 2011 with the import of a clutch of Scottish-politics posts from my personal blog, though it didn’t go properly officially public with an original post of its own until a week later. And jings, readers, what a birthday present it is you’ve given us:

Click on the image for an enlarged version showing all the stats. The site’s pageviews increased by a staggering 53% last month, and the number of unique readers by 54%. October 2012 was also the first time we’ve attracted more than 100,000 views in a single seven-day period. We’re gobsmacked.

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The Yes campaign wins the referendum in October 2014.

Labour wins the May 2015 UK General Election, securing a majority of 21 with the help of 35 Scottish MPs, who have to be elected because Scotland still needs representation at Westminster until the independence arrangements are completed.

That happens in early 2016, just in time for an independent Scotland’s first elections.

The rUK now has over 50 foreign MPs in its Parliament, who if removed would reverse the balance of power, turning a Labour government into a Conservative one overnight, with chaotic ramifications. To the best of our knowledge, no country on Earth permits citizens of another country to elect members to its Parliament. So what now?

Did anyone else notice that in last night’s Scotland Tonight interview (in which he noted that Labour’s tribal hatred of the SNP was blinding and damaging it), former First Minister Henry McLeish referred to Johann Lamont as “leader of the Labour Party in Scotland”, rather than as the leader of anything called “Scottish Labour”? As a current member and ex-head of the party’s Scottish division, you’d think Mr McLeish would know the proper name and internal structure of it. What aren’t we being told?

Poor old The Herald. The paper’s political editor Magnus Gardham must have felt today was a safe day to keep piling attacks on the SNP about an independent Scotland’s status within the EU. So he went ahead and penned “Further Blow For Salmond Over Europe”, a front-page lead concocted out of comments from an obscure European politician about Catalonia, which observant readers may be aware is not Scotland.

Yet even as Gardham (and colleague David Leask) thundered about how a mandarin from Luxembourg’s personal opinion about a situation almost entirely incomparable with that of the United Kingdom could nevertheless be extrapolated to dire consequences for Scotland (with a Yes vote in the referendum leading to Scots being ejected from the EU and forced to apply for membership as a new nation), a document published by the UK’s own Parliament came to light offering exactly the opposite view.

The document, dated 24th September and 17th October this year, is a submission to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee by Graham Avery, who is identified as a “Senior Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Senior Adviser at the European Policy Centre, Brussels, and Honorary Director-General of the European Commission”, and whose CV notes that he spent “40 years as a senior official in Whitehall and Brussels, and took part in successive negotiations for EU enlargement”. Sounds like a chap who might know what he was talking about in this field.

You can read the whole thing here. But a few passages leap out. (Our emphasis.)

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This film doesn’t need commentary.

Johann Lamont thinks these people want something for nothing. Ruth Davidson thinks they’re a burden on society. Willie Rennie is prepared to sacrifice them for a couple of token tax hikes on rich people. All three think nuclear weapons are a better use of Scotland’s money than looking after our people. Make your own decision.

Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland both ran fairly decent shows last night leading with the issue of Trident and its replacement, but the most telling contribution to the debate came from the long-standing Labour columnist Polly Toynbee. In a frank and direct piece for the Guardian, Toynbee analysed the politics rather than the economic or defence arguments, and concurred with something this site and others have been saying for almost a year:

“We know where everyone stands – except Labour.”

But it’s just after that line where Toynbee drops the real bomb:

“Some in Labour are nuclear-heads because they occupy seats such as John Woodcock’s Barrow, a one-industry town dependent on defence. Others are nuclear out of strong conviction a unilateralist Labour would be dead at the polls. Probably no one in Labour actually believes we need a Trident replacement for national defence – only for political defence of Labour.“

It’s become fashionable in recent months to put forward the argument that the Scottish electorate isn’t as different to the English one as we often like to portray. There’s certainly a core sliver of truth to that, with the Scottish political spectrum slightly distorted by votes for the left-of-centre SNP that may be at least partly more to do with their competence – compared to an embarrassingly useless opposition – than with Scots being ragingly socialist.

But there are still specific issues where Scots consistently poll to the left of England and the rest of the UK. Welfare is one, and Trident is another. Whether that’s based on a deep moral opposition to the concept of nuclear weapons or merely the fact that it’s our backyard they’re parked in is a matter for conjecture. But the SNP can’t be accused of populist opportunism on the issue, because they’ve been solidly committed to an anti-nuclear platform since the day the first Polaris submarine sailed up the Clyde over 50 years ago.

Labour, on the other hand, are so dizzy from trying to face in every direction at once on the issue that their Scottish “leader” refuses to even say what her personal position is, let alone what she’d do were she to somehow, God forbid, find herself the First Minister of an independent Scotland.

Toynbee’s explosive column openly acknowledges the truth: the £83bn cost of Trident (and the reality, demonstrated over decades, is that it will in fact be several times that) is, as far as Labour are concerned, an expenditure primarily aimed at getting themselves elected. Not that they’ll pay for it – you and I, the gullible taxpayer – will pick up the tab, and the sick and the poor and the vulnerable will be the ones to suffer from the huge hole it’ll leave in the budget.

Labour don’t want Trident because they think it protects the people of the UK, because even Tony Blair admitted it was worthless for that. They want it to protect themselves.