Wings Over Scotland

Those clued-up, cutting-edge sorts among you who follow our Twitter account will have seen this last night, but it definitely needs to reach a bigger audience.

It’s a recording of a meeting held by Clydebank TUC earlier this month on the subject of whether the working class should support independence. The working class is the sector of the Scottish public whose voice is least heard in the debate (which is largely dominated by middle-class media-intellectual sorts), and perhaps not coincidentally is the demographic which tends to favour independence most strongly.

The footage is raw and often angry, and readers sensitive to adult language might wish to steer clear. Anas Sarwar probably wishes he’d done the same.

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As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)

His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.

If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.

To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.

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Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.

This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.

What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?

THOSE really big banks?

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There’s an interesting piece in today’s Scotsman, entitled “Why isn’t Scotland making more popular films?” and bemoaning the poor condition of the Scottish film industry.

At the end it contains the following paragraphs.

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We’re not quite sure why the UK government has chosen this year, of all years, to start disaggregating tax receipts by nation, breaking down the UK’s income according to how much of it came from each of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and even calculating oil revenues on a geographical basis.

You might well imagine that such an exercise could only serve to provide fuel for the independence movement, and the initial release of figures (probably the only one before the referendum) certainly seem to confirm that impression.

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Oh, what the heck, let’s do all of it.

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(No. 3246 in a long and continuing series.)

The “Better Together” campaign director has a lengthy piece on the right-wing Labour “Progress Online” website today, which we won’t trouble ourselves with the usual disingenuous content of. We’re not even going to challenge the comical assertion that “recent polls show that support for independence currently stands at just one in four”, because if you’re selective enough it IS possible to find outliers with wildly flawed methodology producing that sort of number.

There was one claim we WOULD like to clarify, though.

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Sorry, folks. We haven’t quite managed to get going today. We’ve got a cold, the weather’s grey and miserable, and watching the TV feels like being stuck in a bad dream you can’t wake up from, as the Tories look for new ways to be evil and Labour’s response isn’t to condemn their grotesque, neo-feudal plans for the people of Britain, but to say “Hey, you’re stealing our ideas!”

(The ever-delightful Liam Byrne, there, apparently totally unashamed to say that “this announcement is little more than reheating of a Labour scheme – ‘Work for your Benefits’ – which the Tories scrapped when they came into power”.)

Beset by this avalanche of vile, spiteful idiocy (all of which was allowed to pass unchallenged by a subservient BBC), our germ-weakened mind has reeled like a punch-drunk boxer. But we’re not yet quite so addled and bewildered that the likes of Ruth Davidson can get anything past us.

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The strain of keeping up a three-year campaign of fearmongering and bile is starting to tell on the stout media defenders of the Union. This week the Telegraph’s blustering “Scottish Editor” Alan Cochrane flopped out a particularly limp effort on the subject of the scare du jour, an independent Scotland’s defence.

Never one to shy away from the sort of hyperbole you’d normally associate with some anonymous Twitter loony, Cochrane leapt straight in by dismissing the SNP’s proposals for Scottish defence as “the most ludicrous of all” of their policies, rating them 11 out of 10 for madness. But it was his attempts to put some numerical meat on the bones of this bold assertion that showed up just how lazy the Unionist narrative of Scottish inadequacy has become.

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We’re genuinely baffled by Ed Miliband’s big conference showstopper announcement this week that a Labour government would freeze people’s utility bills for a year and a half. Channel 4’s Fact Check is extremely sceptical that it can be done at all. The energy companies are predictably furious and making all manner of dire threats.

But what we really don’t get is what the point of it is.

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Because we keep telling you what a No vote really means:

“That is why I am talking quite passionately about getting English Labour MPs back up the road and for me, sitting down with Neil [Findlay] and Richard [Simpson] and Rhoda [Grant] and others and saying, let’s get health policies that can be consistent across England, Scotland and Wales.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing, pulling in the same direction as opposed to pulling our separate ways?

Devolution, in its early days, was about doing something different and it needs to enter a different phase where we start talking again more about a UK-wide policy because in the end, that helps everybody.”

That’s Labour’s shadow health secretary Andy Burnham talking to Holyrood Magazine this week, in comments strangely unpublicised in the rest of the Scottish media.

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Ed Miliband delivered just under 8,000 words to the Labour Party conference in Brighton yesterday. Of those, just 263 of them concerned Scotland. (The actual word “Scotland” was never uttered.) Here are all of them.

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