Wings Over Scotland

The Irish Times, 26 November 2012:

“The DUP will campaign against Scotland voting for independence in 2014, party deputy leader Nigel Dodds told his party’s annual conference on Saturday. The North Belfast MP said that Unionists watched with sadness the attempt by Scottish nationalists to “undo the bonds of union which bound us through history”.

“But just as we have advocated the Union here in Northern Ireland, so we will be the advocates for the union in the midst of a Scottish referendum. Just as we have been proved right here, so, I believe, the people of Scotland will see that we are better together, better when we are united as one,” said Mr Dodds.

“This party believes strongly that, together, the United Kingdom has significant influence in the world. The break-up of the Union would be financially, culturally and politically devastating for all of the British people. As Unionists we oppose any action that would erode the shared cohesion of the constituent parts which make up this kingdom,” he said.”

Yes. We saw you “advocating the Union” last week.

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The modern Scottish independence movement is 84 years old, dating back to the 1928 formation of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. It is a peaceful, inclusive, civic and democratic movement – to the best of our knowledge, and almost uniquely, not a single life has been lost in pursuit of Scottish independence.

Despite this, so-called “Unionists” (more properly described as British nationalists) still regularly try to portray independence campaigners as violent racists. As recently as a few days ago, one prominent Labour activist frequently employed as a commentator on BBC Scotland political shows attempted to perpetuate baseless (but oft-repeated by Unionists) 70-year-old smears that the former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was a Nazi sympathiser engaged in attempts to collaborate with the Germans during WW2, sabotage the British war effort and set up a Vichy-style government in Scotland. These claims were cited, astonishingly, as evidence of “the SNP’s fascist past”.

Such attacks are all the more bizarre given the constant reminders on the news that the only nationalists attempting to secure their goals by violence in the United Kingdom are those who do so in the name of Britishness, waving the Union Jack.

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If there’s one thing we all ought to grudgingly respect about the No campaign, it’s its ability to get all its ducks in a row and pump out an absolutely united and consistent lie. It’s a lot like a World War 1 artillery barrage – impressive in the sheer co-ordinated brute force of its display, even if it’s in fact completely useless in achieving its desired objective and ultimately leads only to a slaughter of its own troops.

Jose Manuel Barroso must be marvelling at it today. Time after time after time he’s quite unmistakeably said “I am NOT referring to Scotland, I’m talking in generalities”, only for the British media to report it, with a single unified voice, as the EC President making clear and specific proclamations directly about Scotland.

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Just one plucked from a fine crop of halfwits on Tory MP and former minister John Redwood’s blog. A warm welcome, readers, for Mr Bert Young. (We’ve tidied up some of his formatting for him a bit – no spaces before punctuation marks, Professor – but the comment is otherwise presented unedited and in its entirety.)

“A part solution to the SNP’s position is to bring the N Sea oil ashore in England! Extending the pipe work and off-loading the ships South of the Border is a simple matter and would bring home the message to the SNP that Scotland simply cannot afford to be “independent”. The N Sea Oil is owned by International organisations and not by Scotland; its source is in British and International waters. The SNP ‘s case is completely demolished unless they explain how they are going to pay off Scotland’s rightful share of the National Debt and maintain the sort of life style they have been able to enjoy under the UK umbrella. I cannot believe that any rational thinking Scot would want to support Scotland withdrawing from the UK.”

Better together!

Unionists are very excited this afternoon about the latest development in the EU membership debate. A BBC interview with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso repeated the assertion (or rather, the deduction from an implication) that an independent Scotland would have to apply for entry to the European Union as a new state. We’ll limit ourselves to a few factual observations.

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There’s a remarkable consistency from defence experts when it comes to the question of the relocation of the UK’s nuclear “deterrent” in the event of Scottish independence. Time and again, when anyone who isn’t a politician is asked the question, they give the same answer: it can’t be done.

The latest is Sir David Omand, a man described by the Scotsman today as “Tony Blair’s spymaster”. The former head of GCHQ offered the view that “I don’t see a feasible alternative site at reasonable cost. My fear is that it would precipitate the UK out of the nuclear business”, adding his weight to an opinion previously expressed by the former First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord West and other “senior military sources”.

That opinion is curiously at odds with that of most Unionist politicians – particularly Labour ones who insist that independence would merely move Trident “a couple of hundred miles down the M74” and therefore not make any significant contribution to global nuclear disarmament (and therefore be pointless). It’s easy to see why they would make that claim while trying to defend the Union. It’s rather harder to see why the various defence experts would have to gain from lying about it.

More remarkable still, though, is the second part of the Scotsman’s piece on Sir David, in which he’s quoted by the paper as saying “it should be made clear to Scots that before any referendum that the government of an independent Scotland would be forced to cover the cost of any removal of Trident.”

It’s a suggestion rather akin to if you’d let someone park their car on your driveway as a favour in return for them occasionally picking up some shopping for you in it. Then you decide you’d rather rip up the driveway and have a nice front garden (and get your own shopping in future), but your acquaintance demands that YOU pay to have the car towed away and to build them a new garage to keep it in.

We don’t think those negotiations would last long, do you?

Earlier today we reported on the latest misery-laden assessment from business leaders about how Scottish independence would damage the economy, cause milk to curdle in the bottle, spread plague in the rat-infested slums and see Craig Levein return as national team manager. Just for fun, we thought we’d dig out some of the other things that business leaders have told us would bring untold gloom and catastrophe crashing down on our heads over the last couple of decades.

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These are the leaders of the nation’s business community, as they present themselves to us when explaining that they’re the mighty “masters of the universe” and require to be paid ever-soaring salaries in order to generate wealth and jobs and growth, because without them society itself will crumble to dust and we’ll all be reduced to foraging for berries in the shattered ruins of our once-proud civilisation.

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We’re over the worst of the flu now, readers. You can blow out those prayer candles. Sadly, though, we’re still not quite at 100% fighting fitness, so it might be a wee bit too dangerous to wade recklessly into the pool of shrieking, panicked insanity that poor Brian Wilson is thrashing around in at the Scotsman today.

If you perhaps weren’t yet certain of the power of Nicola Sturgeon’s tremendous and widely-lauded keynote speech at Strathclyde University on Monday, Wilson’s furiously incoherent and plainly terrified response is the proof of the pudding. The No camp is losing the argument, and they don’t know what to do about it.

We’re not about to help them out with strategy tips as to the right way to make their case, but out of basic human decency we’ll give them one clue: this isn’t it.

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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