Wings Over Scotland

A reader comment earlier today sent us off to do a little research. Specifically, we were interested in the results of opinion polling before the last referendum concerning the Scottish constitution – the 1997 vote on devolution. The results were fascinating.

In the days leading up to the referendum, two polls with standard sample sizes were conducted by System 3 for the Herald. They showed very similar results, averaging 61% of respondents in favour of a Scottish Parliament (with 23% opposed and 16% don’t-knows), and 46% in favour of that Parliament having tax-raising powers (31% against, 23% don’t-knows).

The second poll was conducted the day before the referendum. The actual vote, just 24 hours later, was 74-26 for the Parliament and 64-36 for tax-raising powers – overnight swings of 7% and 9% respectively in favour of the two propositions.

(Of the 16% of Don’t Knows on the first question, when it came to the crunch 13% had plumped for Yes compared to just 3% for No. On the tax-raising question, meanwhile, the 23% previously answering as Don’t Knows had divided 17% for Yes, 6% for No.)

This site welcomes both the continued determination of the Unionist parties to bully the Scottish electorate into making a stark choice between hope and fear once again, and also their complacency about the outcome.

The Scottish media is predictably excited about Gordon Brown’s latest intervention in the independence debate. Giving a speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Kirkcaldy MP who’s barely turned up in Parliament to represent his constituents in the two-and-a-quarter years since being deposed as Prime Minister abandoned any pretence at a positive case for the Union and presented a doom-laden picture of a future Scotland slashing pensions, welfare and defence while increasing taxes.

The No camp’s united policy on the Scottish constitution, in so far as one can be ascertained at all, is that the Scottish people should reject independence and then rely on Westminster to give Holyrood more powers, though the campaign steadfastly resists any clarification on what those powers might be.

But the remarkable and eye-opening thing about the former PM’s dire vision regarding pensions, welfare, defence and taxation was that it professed – despite the Scotsman’s clumsily inaccurate headline and confused and contradictory text – to describe a future Scotland not under independence, but so-called “devo-max”.

So if we take Brown as an authoritative spokesman on Scottish Labour policy – and it seems eminently reasonable to do so – we can safely assume that the only other party with even a chance of power in either Holyrood or Westminster has no intention of devolving anything substantial to Scotland any time soon. The petty tinkering of the Calman Commission/Scotland Act does indeed appear to be the limit of devolutionary ambition. And if you think about it, it’s hard to see how it could be any other way.

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We’ve only ever been ashamed to be Scottish once in our lives – when Craig Levein sent out our football team in a 4-6-0 formation in Prague. But there are occasionally other times when our fellow countrymen can be a source of a certain degree of embarrassment, and one of them was highlighted in, of all places, the local newspaper of the small English market town of Bourne this week.

Bourne is located in the East Midlands, a few miles north of Peterborough, and quite why its local paper is reporting Scottish independence news is a mystery to us, but Monday’s edition of The Local carried a story titled “Games bolster independence support”. It was based on a survey reported in the weekend’s Sunday Times, but picked up on a detail that none of the Scottish media chose to notice.

The survey put support for independence at 35%, just 9% behind the Union on 44%. But curiously, of the same respondents, 58% wanted Scotland to have its own Olympic team, with only half as many – 29% – wanting Scottish athletes to continue to compete under the Team GB banner at future Games.

That’s a whopping 23% of people who want Scotland to have the trappings of a proper nation, but aren’t prepared to accept the responsibilities. Almost a quarter of the population who want to act like a real country, but lack the courage to actually make it happen, who want a wee pretendy Olympic team to go with their wee pretendy Parliament that doesn’t get to make the really important decisions.

We don’t think it’s very productive to insult Scots whose political views differ from ours, so we don’t. You’ll scour this site in vain for any attacks on the Scottish people for voting Labour or being against independence. But when we see a huge chunk of the nation who clearly DO want independence, but are just too feart to actually vote for it, it’s hard not to wince a little at your own people’s lack of courage.

In 2014 Scottish voters will have to decide once and for all whether they’re Arthur or Martha, and they can’t have it both ways. Voting “No” in the belief that Westminster will then just voluntarily hand over a bunch of meaningful extra powers out of the sheer goodness of its heart, at exactly the point when we’d have given up all our bargaining chips, is naive bordering on outright stupid.

(Particularly given that the chances are it would be handing those powers to the SNP, which currently sits even further ahead in the polls than it did in May 2011 and whose support encompasses far more than just the people who back independence.)

Scots can’t have their cake and eat it, because – to borrow a highly apt phrase from our previous life – the cake is a lie. We hope they realise that before it’s too late.

We noticed the image below doing the rounds on Twitter this morning, and were mildly surprised to trace it back to the official “Better Together” campaign account. Alert readers will already have noticed us satirically characterising it (in a tweet) as a claim that all but one of Scotland’s medal-winners at London 2012 were actually English, but in fact it’s something a little bit stranger than that.

Because what the image actually says is “Hey, Scotch people! Under successive UK governments you’ve suffered such chronic underinvestment in your sporting facilities that every talented athlete in Scotland has had to travel hundreds of miles from their home, leaving their families and friends behind, in order to get adequate training!”

We’re not sure that’s quite the red-hot selling point for the Union they think it is.

We mean cyberBritNats, of course. Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony brought a charming collection of positive Unionists out of the woodwork with moving, heartfelt words of British unity such as these. We’re choking up a little even now as we type.

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We’re indebted to keen Wings Over Scotland reader “Holebender” for digging out this little nugget. Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, is at the forefront of Labour’s demands for the Scottish Government to hold a single-question referendum on Scottish independence, regardless of whether the Scottish electorate might want a third option. But it turns out Ian hasn’t always been quite so keen on restricting voters to straight yes/no choices.

Back in February 2008, he wrote to Nick Clegg about the Liberal Democrats’ proposed referendum on UK membership of the EU. You can find the full original text of his letter at this page on the Conservative Home website. Just for a bit of fun, though, we’ve reprinted it below with some extremely minor adjustments.

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What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Prince Charles:

“This is a scandal and an anachronism. The idea that the Prince has a right to be consulted on legislation which might impact on his interests belongs to a bygone era.” (Daily Mail, March 2012)

What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Ian Davidson MP:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.” (Newsnight Scotland, August 2012)

Something’s not quite the same, but we can’t put our finger on it. Can anyone help?

There’s currently some dispute between the Scottish and UK Parliaments over who should ultimately determine the nature and details of the independence referendum currently scheduled for autumn 2014. The Scottish Government is adamant that the referendum must be run by Holyrood, the only place where a mandate for the vote exists. The Scottish Affairs Select Committee at Westminster, on the other hand, is vehemently proclaiming its own rights, as expressed by the committee’s chairman Ian Davidson MP on Newsnight Scotland earlier this week:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.”

There are arguments to be made, constitutionally speaking, for both viewpoints. Legal experts are divided on their interpretations of relevant law, and it seems unlikely that a definitive judicial consensus could be reached without legislation being brought forward and then challenged in court, a time-consuming and expensive process which could bog the referendum down for years.

How, then, might we break the deadlock? Well, a fundamental principle of law is that the arbiters of a decision should where possible not stand to gain personally from any particular outcome of it. And as it happens, one side in this particular dispute is operating under a vested interest that’s just about as big as they get.

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Strap yourselves in, readers. And scatter some cushions around your chair, because there’s a pretty good chance you’re about to fall off it. Not in surprise, though, because as we predicted yesterday the Scottish media has imposed a near-blanket ban on reporting Labour MP and Scottish Affairs Select Committee chairman Ian Davidson’s astonishing meltdown on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight Scotland.

The Herald buried a small neutral piece on it yesterday afternoon in an obscure corner of its website, with no bylines and no quotes from any of the parties (in either sense of the word) concerned. Interestingly the exact same story appears word-for-word in the Daily Record, still without attribution, but that’s it for news coverage.

On the BBC website there’s not a peep, even in the Scotland Politics section, despite the direct and savage attack on the Corporation’s prized impartiality. (Political editor Brian Taylor hasn’t graced the site with a blog in six weeks.) Over at the Guardian, the paper’s fearless Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell – normally so keen to cover media matters – felt a five-minute fuss over an advertising poster at Edinburgh Airport was the big Scottish story of the day. And so on.

The Twittersphere was also strangely quiet, or at least the Union-friendly side of it was. Tom Gordon of the Herald and Eddie Barnes of the Scotsman both tried to play the story down as a storm in a teacup (here’s a fun game to play: imagine the Scottish media reaction if Stewart Hosie or Alex Neil had done the same thing, especially during the political slow news season), and every normally-prolific Scottish Labour activist adopted a policy of total radio silence on the subject.

Only Angus Macleod of the Times went public to suggest that Johann Lamont should discipline Davidson for his “bonkers” outburst, while Al Jazeera reporter (and former Scottish Labour senior media adviser) Andrew McFadyen called the performance a “bad misjudgement” directed at “one of the best broadcasters in Scotland”, while noting that the point of politicians giving interviews to TV news programmes is supposed to be “to win people over, not put them off”.

We were just about to congratulate ourselves on our powers of insight when we noticed a link hidden right down at the bottom of the Scotsman’s politics section. “Michael Kelly: Showdown has put BBC objectivity to the test”, it said. We went and made ourselves a drink. “This should be good”, we thought. We weren’t disappointed.

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When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

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We must confess to rarely finding ourselves either surprised or impressed by the Scotsman. Today, though, is one of those days. The staunchly Unionist paper’s leader column features a detailed assessment of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee’s latest pronouncements on the independence referendum, and it’s a damning one.

Under the headline “Law derives authority only from the people it serves”, the piece basically reprises this site’s feature from last weekend on sovereignty, and dismisses the report’s findings as in essence an irrelevant technicality, lecturing that “it is clear the committee has fundamentally misunderstood the way modern democracy works”.

The column’s appraisal of the political reality is unambiguous:

“The law only derives its authority from the people it is there to serve. No court, in Scotland or the United Kingdom, whatever its formal powers under law, can flout the will of the people. No court can say to the Scots: “This far and no further”. The select committee might like to ponder on this before attempting to fix the boundary of the march of the nation by putting spurious legal impediments in the way of the people determining their future.”

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic statement this is. Accusing the report of relying on biased “experts” for its conclusions, the editorial is a humiliating slap-down to Ian Davidson and the other members of his committee, which is left looking petty, partisan, arrogant and foolish even in the eyes of its own supporters. It also represents a direct and unequivocal assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, over the Westminster parliament the committee is a mouthpiece for.

We can only speculate as to whether the column is motivated by a genuine belief in that principle or by a realisation of the tactical blunder the Unionist parties have made, but either way it’s a remarkable development. We wouldn’t want to be in Mr Davidson’s shoes right now. One of his most steadfast allies has just given him a doing.