Wings Over Scotland

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.

Crivvens. We were rooting around in Google Analytics (the thing that records website traffic) today. It’s a service we only signed up to at the start of March, which among other things means our cumulative lifetime pageviews statistic is probably understated by around 100,000. But the startling thing we discovered was something else.

Since we started tracking “unique visitors” in March (statspeak for the number of different identifiable people who’ve come to the site at least once), Wings Over Scotland has been read by just over 125,000 people. That’s… wow. That’s a lot.

Obviously many just pass through after following a link from somewhere and never come back, and a typical single month will only see about a fifth of that number, but around 80% of our readers each month are return visitors – increasingly, people who come here once come back again. (So once more, we’ll be making no apologies for publishing the occasional story about Rangers when merited…)

That’s not just down to the editorial contributors – we’re proud to have some of the most informed commenters in the blogosphere too, who not only tip us off to stories worth covering but also provide new angles and ways of thinking about stuff that hadn’t occurred to us. So if you’re one of the 99% who read but don’t comment, speak up. We, and an increasingly large number of other people, want to hear from you.

Most newspapers today are reporting concerns over the future of the UK’s three remaining naval shipyards, located in Portsmouth on the south coast of England, and at Govan and Scotstoun on the Clyde. Owners BAE Systems have strongly hinted that at least one is likely to close, with a decision expected by the end of 2012, and the two Glasgow yards (which more or less face each other across the river) tend to be treated as a single unit.

The relevance of the outcome to the independence debate is obvious. Shipbuilding on the Clyde has long been a totemic feature of the argument for the Union, with Labour and Conservatives alike long having insisted that there would be no chance of the rUK commissioning warships from an independent Scotland – Labour MP Ian Davidson is quoted today saying that very thing:

“Obviously if Scotland were to separate from the United Kingdom, then the terms of business would preclude any orders for the Type 26 being placed on the Clyde.”

So the problem for the Westminster government is clear: shut the Clyde yards, handing the SNP and the Yes campaign huge propaganda victories, or shut Portsmouth, costing thousands of jobs in an almost entirely Tory area where only one of the seats currently held by the party (Gosport, a majority of 15,000) could be classed as “safe”.

It’s difficult to picture a world in which the Conservatives would sacrifice 5000 jobs in their own heartland in order to save 3000 in Glasgow, but to not do so would be to torpedo the “Better Together” campaign to devastating effect – an option which the party may find more tolerable if only because the explosion would also damage Labour in its biggest remaining Scottish stronghold.

Of course, the independence movement gets a big stick to beat the Union with in either case – were Portsmouth to be closed, the rUK would be left with no facilities for warship construction at all, making the threats of the likes of Ian Davidson sound even more hollow. Non-combat vessels are one thing, but would the rUK really commission its battleships, frigates and aircraft carriers from the other side of the world rather than a tried-and-trusted contractor a few miles across the border – particularly if it was seeking co-operation from its neighbour over the location of Trident submarines while London found somewhere in its own waters to base them?

Not only shipyard workers will be awaiting the decision with trepidation.

There’s a very good piece in the Scottish Sun today by Andrew Nicoll – entitled “Why promise more devolution when it will never happen?” – on the consequences of a “No” vote in the 2014 referendum. It’s well worth reading in full, but if you’re in a rush we’ll just quote the last line of it to give you the flavour:

“Independence has been a gun at Westminster’s head for decades. What do you think will happen when they find out there are no bullets in it?”

We are, as ever, pleased to see the mainstream Scottish media catching up with the stuff we’ve been saying for months, although the reality is in fact even worse than Nicoll suggests. Nonetheless, it’s good to see the analysis disseminated in Scotland’s biggest-selling paper, and by a proper senior staff journalist rather than the cop-out option of an opinion columnist. The Scottish Sun has almost ten times the circulation of the Scotsman, the country’s supposed “quality” broadsheet, and it’s worth remembering that pieces like this will therefore reach far more people than the likes of Michael Kelly, Brian Wilson or Magnus Gardham could ever dream of. Slowly but surely, the independence campaign is winning the argument, and the opposition’s panicked response tells the story. Stay out of the mud, folks.