Wings Over Scotland

Much of the media today reports a survey showing Scots are the happiest people in Britain. Naturally that seems to us a truth as self-evident as the sun being warm and the sea being wet, but we couldn’t help noticing a particular quirk. According to the Scotsman’s piece, with our emphasis added:

“four out of the top ten local authorities in Britain were in Scotland, with the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and Aberdeenshire rated highly for life satisfaction, the number of residents who felt happy and worthwhile. Aberdeen was rated the highest-ranking city in Britain for life satisfaction, while London and Birmingham were ranked at the bottom for wellbeing”

In other words, the further away you are from London, the happier you tend to be. We trust that in the autumn of 2014, the people of Scotland will take that maxim to its logical political conclusion.

We’ve noted before that it’s flattering to see the grown-up media pinching this blog’s stories. Sometimes it’s possible to put it down to innocent coincidence, such as the Guardian’s report today on the sweatshop conditions of workers producing London Olympic mascots – something Wings Over Scotland readers were reading about almost a month ago. At other times, though, the plagiarism is rather more obvious.

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As we’ve said before, we really don’t see much point in getting worked up about opinion polls when we’re still more than two years out from any public vote on anything.  A new poll by Panelbase has some fairly standard results – the SNP well in front in Holyrood voting intentions (up 2% overall on the 2011 result, with Labour and the Greens both up 1%, and the Tories and Lib Dems down 1.5% each), independence trailing by 9% in a two-way vote with 20% undecided, and the three options (including greater devolution) neck-and-neck when set directly against each other (independence 30, devo-X 29, status quo 28).

While we’re encouraged by these numbers at the height of the Great 2012 Festival Of Britishness, they essentially mean nothing at this point, and don’t tell us anything we haven’t known for months or years already. But what IS mildly interesting is seeing how the Scottish print and online media handles them.

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We’re really hoping that there’s going to be some proper Scottish-politics news when we get down to scouring the newspapers today. But in the meantime, just for a quick bit of Monday-morning fun and to offer up an entirely unnecessary hostage to fortune by sticking our heads on the chopping block purely for the thrill of it, we’re going to have a go at predicting the outcome of the imminent negotiations between Sevco Scotland Limited and the Scottish football authorities.

The clock is ticking, so it won’t be long until we find out if we’re right or wrong.

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In the debate over whether the SPL buys the broadcast rights to SFL games featuring Rangers, we’ve just spotted a rather interesting quirk. Sevco Scotland Limited was accepted to the SFL as an Associate Member, and will not be eligible for full Member status for four years. Rule 19 of the SFL Constitution says:

“An Associate Member shall have no financial interest in the assets of the League and shall not be accorded any voting rights.”

We assume “the assets of the League” include its media rights. (Indeed, as far as we can see those would be pretty much the only assets jointly owned by the League.) Rule 19 would seem to suggest that if the SFL does want to sell “Rangers” games to the SPL – or indeed to anyone else – not only will the newco not be entitled to a vote on the matter, but it won’t be entitled to any of the money either.

We haven’t seen anyone else mention this. It seems quite significant.

(EDIT 23-7-12: See comments for SFL response.)

It looks as though we spoke far too soon when we suggested late last week that The Rangers Saga was effectively over. It had seemed that, with Charles Green having accepted the imposition of a deferred 12-month transfer embargo as a condition for assuming the old Rangers’ membership of the SFA, there were no remaining obstacles (in the short term, anyway) to his new club taking its place in SFL Division 3.

We know. We’re embarrassed too. What can we have been thinking? Yesterday saw a fresh outbreak of chaos and insanity which could yet derail the entire fiasco and see SFL3 kicking off with just nine teams, as Sevco Scotland manager Ally McCoist decided to act the chimp and launch a hefty pile of shit right at the fan(s).

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As the sun made its first appearance of the summer yesterday, Wings over Scotland wasn’t slow off the mark. On the “B” of the “BANG!”, we leapt onto a train for a two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely and historic south-coast town of Weymouth. It’s a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.

The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires’ yachts. (Don’t miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett’s On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you’ll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.

And if you embark on about five minutes’ leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you’ll find the town’s only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.

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As we predicted a few days ago, Sevco Scotland Limited has accepted the SFA’s condition of a 12-month transfer embargo in return for the company being allowed to take over the Association membership of the old Rangers Football Club PLC. In a novel twist, though, the SFA will not enforce the sanction until AFTER the closure of the summer transfer window on September 1st, allowing the Ibrox club to sign new players for the next six weeks, despite the embargo having been imposed in May.

Despite some of the wilder conspiracy theories circulating on the internet in recent days, the agreement was always going to happen, although we’re a little surprised (only a little, mind) at how blatantly the SFA has gone easy on the club – with over 40 players available to manager Ally McCoist even with the embargo in place, the deferral makes a mockery of the notion of punishment.

(An alert reader points out to us that the club will also be able to sign players, albeit briefly, in next summer’s transfer window, because a quirk of the calendar means it’ll be open for a day after Sevco’s embargo expires. There’s nothing to stop “Rangers” negotiating transfers next summer, then doing all the actual signings on September 2nd, so the punishment only really applies to the January 2013 window. In effect, rather than a 12-month ban it’s actually a four-week one.)

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In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.