Wings Over Scotland

When you hear an organisation is “linked to the Taxpayers’ Alliance”, you don’t build your hopes up too high. The TPA are a bunch of Tea Party-esque loons at the best of times, and the phrase suggests some sort of renegade splinter group too crazy even for that particular nut-house. We’re probably still just about entitled to expect fractionally higher standards from the Telegraph, though.

We were directed to this piece yesterday by a Labour source who really ought to know better, and who was citing it as conclusive proof that an independent Scotland’s economy would be crippled by debt repayments. (Our source later admitted to not actually having read the article before linking to it, which perhaps tells you something about the quality of debate one tends to get from Unionists.)

That anyone at the Telegraph, a once-respectable newspaper, actually thought this rubbish was worth putting its name to may be even more instructive as to how desperate the FUD camp is for scare stories which might frighten Scots away from independence. You can scour the “story” all day looking for how it arrived at the headline figure, or trying to piece it together yourself from the random fragments of made-up “data” scattered through the text (a spurious £9bn here, an invented £7.5bn there, a pulled-from-thin-air 30% somewhere else), but you’ll be out of luck.

If in occasional moments of weakness over the next two and a half years you doubt our chances of success, glance back at this and see just how afraid of us they are.

First Minister's Questions is rarely a hugely edifying spectacle, but this blog could barely watch to the end of yesterday's proceedings. Labour's leader exhibited a heady mix of ignorance and xenophobia, while the FM's Conservative counterpart opted for a barely-believable combination of direct personal abuse (which could truthfully be paraphrased as "You're fat, ha ha!") and petty timewasting. If we tell you, dear readers, that Willie Rennie took on the role of the calm, intelligent voice of reason (with a dull but substantive question about freedom-of-information laws), you'll perhaps grasp the full degree to which the other two opposition leaders lost the plot.

It was one of the rowdiest FMQs in recent memory, with the Presiding Officer forced to repeatedly call for order, specifically warn Labour's Jackie Baillie to behave herself, and on one occasion even resort to a sharp bang of her gavel in order to silence the cacophanous hooting and jeering coming from – mostly – the opposition benches. The First Minister himself looked dismayed, surprised and somewhat ashamed at the picture of Scotland's political elite being portrayed to the world, and it would be hard for any impartial observer to disagree with his judgement.

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(See here for the whole story.)

Like most people, we don’t pay a lot of attention to anything the Scottish Lib Dems say these days. But we always enjoy the reliably-petulant blusterings of their Nat-hating former leader Tavish Scott, if only because they never fail to bring to mind this picture from election night in May 2011. So we were sure to click on his column in today’s Scotsman, and thereby joined the tiny elite group who got to see these words:

“There is a desperate need to say why Scotland is better, stronger and more united as part of the UK. Make the case. Get the pro-Scotland in the UK side on the pitch and let battle commence.“

Now, we’re pretty sure Tavish is on that side. So we’re a little mystified as to why he didn’t just go ahead and make said case himself, rather than demanding that his team-mates did it. (Appropriately to his analogy, it’s a bit like the current Scotland rugby squad – nobody seems to want to take on the responsibility of picking the ball up and heading for the try-line, because they don’t appear to believe they can do it.)

Maybe he forgot, or a sub-editor deleted it by mistake, or perhaps he’d used up all his word count wittering on about Rembrandt and Canoletto to no obvious purpose for the first half of the article. We don’t know. All we know is, we’re still waiting.

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TIME ELAPSED: 32 years, 0 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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Credit to the Scotsman’s Eddie Barnes for finding this tremendous pic, which seems to have undeservedly escaped the attentions of a wider audience. On the left, we have the Scottish Sunday Express front page from 29th January 2012. On the right, the Scottish Daily Express front page from the following Tuesday, 31st January 2012.

Looks like the timing of the referendum will be even more crucial than we thought.

The Scottish independence campaign has been left reeling today, after two alert Wings Over Scotland readers brought our attention to the calamitous striking of a hammer blow that seems certain to all but guarantee a No vote in autumn 2014.

We don’t quite understand how persuading the English of anything is going to help, since they won’t have a vote in the referendum, but who are we to interfere in Unionist business? Rather more relevantly to the interests of this blog, the piece goes on to note that according to an unnamed “Scottish Tory spokesman”:

“We have to make a positive case for the Union.”

We couldn’t agree more. We are, as ever, all ears.

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TIME ELAPSED: 32 years, 0 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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Keen followers of the “is it or isn’t it?” debate surrounding the legality of an independence referendum conducted without “permission” from Westminster have had much to digest recently. The much-travelled Dr Matt Qvortrup wrote a piece for the Herald yesterday [paywall] averring that – if we might strip it down to its barest bones – the legal status was actually quite strong, but didn’t really matter anyway as political reality would trump boring, nitpicky old law.

Unsurprisingly, this enraged Lallands Peat Worrier, who took several of the good Doctor’s assertions as something akin to a professional slight and launched a stinging rebuke in uncharacteristically blunt and earthy terms. Meanwhile, the UK Constitutional Law Group (comprising a number of distinguished academics) published a paper more in keeping with the Peat Worrier’s usual loquacious style, thoughtfully analysing both the legalities and the political ramifications and concluding that everyone really needed to knock their heads together and deliver the requisite mechanisms to Holyrood with the least possible delay.

Support for this view came from the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, who offered the opinion [Herald paywall link] that Holyrood should be given the explicit legal right to conduct the referendum by the UK government without any strings attached. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly the organisation went even further in suggesting that the Electoral Commission would not – despite the strenuous and sustained demands of the Unionist parties – be the appropriate body to oversee the vote.

Finally, blogosphere newcomer the Scottish Times revealed that the Scottish Democratic Alliance (yep, a new one on us too) has asked the Council of Europe to step in and monitor the referendum, fearing interference from Westminster that would contravene the UN Charter on the right of peoples to self-determination.

Pressure from impartial quarters does seem to be building on the UK Government to confer a Section 30 order on Holyrood swiftly and without conditions, although as we saw with the blunt refusal last May to enhance the Scotland Bill with measures commanding cross-party support in Edinburgh, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll listen. But with the SNP having added 2000 new members in a single month since David Cameron’s initial intervention in the debate, perhaps they should.

The image below is a (slightly edited) graph (untouched original here) from The Poverty Site, an independent blog which monitors official UK government stats relating to poverty. It shows the gaps between the two richest and two poorest deciles of society, and covers almost the entire period of the last three Labour governments.

We haven’t amended the data in any way – all we’ve done to it is add a couple of shaded grey boxes to make it easier to judge the positions of the lines over time, and two thin vertical black lines immediately to the right of the vertical axis, again for ease of illustration. The line on the left shows the size of the gap when Labour came to power in 1997 (about 26%) and the one to its right shows the size of the gap in 2009, just before Labour lost the 2010 election (about 29.5%).

What that tells us is that under 13 years of UK Labour governments with thumping majorities, the size of the inequality gap between the richest and poorest grew by around 13% – or if you like, a steady 1% a year. (Luckily and famously, Labour were “intensely relaxed” about that.) So next time you’re thinking of voting Labour – or voting to remain in a Union where either they or the Tories will always form the government – because you want a more equal society, all we’re saying is, maybe bear it in mind.

Well, we had quite the fun time yesterday. Having revealed by virtue of our ace investigative-journalism skills that the Telegraph’s dear Alan Cochrane had something of a beam in his own eye when it came to attacking the First Minister for using the word “Gauleiter”, we were mildly surprised when the Telegraph – which normally has a pretty liberal comment-moderation policy, certainly when it comes to its readers hurling abuse at the Scots – experienced a sudden outbreak of censorship.

Comments on Mr Cochrane’s column – which rumour has it are moderated by Alan himself – referring to the mildly embarrassing hypocrisy started to disappear at a rate of knots. We counted over 22 comments either linking to or quoting our piece which vanished, before the moderator gave up as user after user simply kept re-posting them. The result – as tends to be the case when people try to suppress information on the internet – was the biggest single day’s traffic in Wings Over Scotland’s history. But over and above our daft wee comedy tussle with Mr Cochrane hovers the wider agenda.

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We were perhaps a little unfair on Alan Cochrane earlier today. After all, the core of his comment about Alex Salmond’s reaction to being banned from commenting on the Six Nations at the weekend:

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi. “
(Alan Cochrane, the Telegraph, 5 February 2012)

…is a fair point, strongly made. After all, what sort of thoughtless idiot would casually toss around a highly-charged, potentially-offensive word like “Gauleiter” in reference to an obviously petty and trivial matter?

“I am on the horns of a dilemma this weekend. I have been invited to a posh dinner in the Scottish Parliament later this week and there are to be pre-dinner drinks in the Members’ Bar at Holyrood.

Although I have accepted the dinner invite, I am somewhat constrained in accepting the one to the pre-prandial cocktails. The reason is that the Scottish Parliamentary Journalists’ Association, of which I have the honour to be a member, is boycotting the said watering hole. We have taken this principled – if unusual – stance because we have been offered only limited rights of access by that Gauleiter of Holyrood’s catering facilities, Labour MSP Duncan McNeil.”
(Alan Cochrane, Scotland On Sunday, 22 January 2006*)

Whoops! Still, you have to admit, if the First Minister has sunk to Alan Cochrane’s level, maybe he DOES need to stop and think for a minute about his comportment.

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Not that it’s unusual or surprising or anything, but sometimes it’s hard not to raise a smile at the lack of self-awareness and the sheer brass neck of it.

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi.” (dear old Alan Cochrane, frothing away furiously as usual in the Telegraph today)

The word “gauleiter”, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean a Nazi. According to Collins, it can also simply mean “a person in a position of petty or local authority who behaves in an overbearing authoritarian manner”, which is clearly the sense Alex Salmond used it in at the weekend – and perfectly appropriately, after ludicrously being banned from the BBC’s coverage of the Six Nations. But we were disappointed all the same to hear the FM – normally so careful with words – use a term which would so easily and so certainly be misrepresented by the Unionist media.

However, we’re not sure anybody writing for the Telegraph can be the one to lay any claim that particular moral high ground, as one of the paper’s alert readers pointed out.

“GERMANY HAS EVERY RIGHT TO IMPOSE A GAULEITER ON GREECE
I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with the general sense of outrage sparked by calls for an EU bureaucrat – or German gauleiter, as depicted in some quarters – to take control of the Greek economy.” (Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph, Jan 2012)

“I always love Ken’s attempts to blame Boris Johnson for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong in the world, from global warming to the death of Shergar. Now, game as ever, the old boy is trying to drag City Hall’s despised blond gauleiter into the News of the World hacking affair.” (Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph, July 2011)

“A section of Ms Britton’s interview concerned itself with how Blair took his church attendance incredibly seriously, how it re-energised him in office when he was exhausted, with his former Gauleiter and evidently still very current image masseur Alastair Campbell popping up to confirm Blair’s duty to his devotions. “ (George Pitcher, the Telegraph, Dec 2009)

Is the Telegraph saying Angela Merkel, Ken Livingstone and Alastair Campbell are all Nazis, then? (The last of those using the capital-G form of the word which Collins specifically notes as normally being used in the Nazi context. And yikes, the first one might conceivably be seen as just a little on the tactless side.) We think someone should investigate. Are you busy today, Mr Cochrane?

This is, of course, all an absolutely standard modus operandi for the Unionist camp – see also their propensity to bleat piously about being called names and “bullied“ by Nat supporters, while simultaneously likening Alex Salmond to a whole string of murderous, psychopathic dictators. We shouldn’t expect anything to change in the next two-and-a-half years: indeed, it’s likely to get a lot worse. But it’s always comforting to have their clumsy, overt hypocrisy laid bare in black and white.

As our fast-growing number of readers (all viewing records broken again last week) will be glad to hear, we’re just about back online after a weekend cursing the ineptitude of the laughably-named TalkTalk Business (“Here to help you 24/7, where by 24/7 we mean 10/5”). We’ve still got a somewhat restricted service, but fortunately enough access to direct you to this excellent piece on Newsnet Scotland, which eschews the site’s unfortunate tendency towards wild-eyed polemic in favour of a calmly insightful and perceptive look at the reality of one of the Unionist camp’s favourite scare stories – that Scotland would be kicked out of the EU if it became independent.

It’s a terrific bit of analysis, pointing out how disastrous such a scenario would be for the rump UK and how it would also mean Scotland being able to walk away from the Union without any share of Britain’s crippling £1trn (and rising) debts. Call us optimists, but we’d love to believe it means the end of that particular tired old canard from the FUDs. We’re not holding our breath, though.

The Scotsman is a big paper (in terms of content if not readership). Today’s issue is 104 pages long, a full five of which are devoted to its front-page lead story. But here at Wings Over Scotland we appreciate that you’re busy people and can’t always afford to devote hefty chunks of your day to reading everything in full, especially when there’s so much happening in the world of Scottish politics at the moment.

So to save you some time we’ve helpfully edited the article down, cutting it off at the point where you can safely stop reading without fear of missing anything. (It doesn’t just work today – any time you see these three words, you can confidently move on.)

“ONE of Scotland’s leading experts on public finance has cast doubt on the Scottish Government’s ability to produce fair and accurate economic reports, ahead of the debate on independence. Professor Arthur Midwinter -“

That’s a good 15 minutes of your life rescued there, in which you can get on and do something more productive and rewarding instead, such as seeing if you can make the sky turn purple just by thinking at it. No need to thank us, it’s all part of the service.