Wings Over Scotland

When supprters of Scottish independence cite the infamous McCrone Report – a UK government document suppressed by both Conservative and Labour administrations in the 1970s because of its explosive revelations about the potential wealth of an independent Scotland – Unionists have a standard tactic.

Mumbling that it’s all ancient history, water under the bridge, and things are different now, they attempt – quite understandably – to swiftly move the discussion away from the uncomfortable reality of how much trust Scots should place in the word of London governments on the subject of oil revenues.

Today’s Sunday Post carries a front-page lead story which notes that in the 40 years since the original report was hidden from the Scottish people, nothing has fundamentally changed. As almost nothing of the Post is currently available online, we’ve included a hefty extract from the article below.

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We got an email from our Prague correspondent last night, but that’s not the only thing the disgraceful pun in the headline refers to. As Michael Moore was kicked around the playground by Nicola Sturgeon in the first Scotland Tonight debate that same evening, the soggy security blanket he clung to more than anything else was the currency issue, which the No camp appears to believe is now its most powerful weapon.

It’s a two-pronged Trident, if you’ll forgive the even more tortured wordplay in that metaphor. Firstly there’s the scaremongering part containing the (empty) threat that the rUK would refuse to enter a currency union with an independent Scotland, forcing it to join the embattled Euro, and as back-up there’s the claim that if we DID get a currency union, Scotland would somehow end up getting less consideration from the Bank of England governors when it came to monetary policy than the none it gets now.

Let’s take the briefest look we can manage at both of those assertions.

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We should point out in advance that we’re using the word “voter” quite wrongly here. But a piece in today’s Daily Record has us beaten all ends up for wrongness.

The article’s headline, “Texas singer Sharleen Spiteri: I wouldn’t vote for Scottish Independence”, is entirely accurate – the 1980s pop star lives in London and won’t be voting in the referendum. Her reasoning, though, is a touch unexpected.

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It’s come to our attention that despite all of our hard work transcribing interviews with Unionist politicians, some of our stupider readers still – incredibly – aren’t 100% clear on certain aspects of the policy alternatives the UK parties will be offering the Scottish electorate in hope of persuading them to vote No in 2014.

One such issue is Labour’s preliminary proposal to devolve income tax entirely to the Scottish Parliament, which is backed by Johann Lamont but strongly opposed by many of the party’s Westminster MPs.

Fortunately, an interview on last night’s Scotland Tonight with former Labour leader Gordon Brown eliminated any possible remaining doubts, with the sort of direct, straight-speaking approach for which the ex-Prime Minister was justly renowned.

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When we’ve been asked on a couple of different occasions why we started Wings Over Scotland, we’ve always given the same reply – to ask (and thereby try to answer) the questions that the Scottish media was dismally failing to ask on our behalf. It would be hard to illustrate that failure with a better example than what happened yesterday.

We’re not even talking about the bog-standard factory-default Unionist bias that’s seen not a single newspaper today depicting the launch of “United With Labour” as a “split” in the anti-independence movement – after a year of leaping on every single policy difference or minor spat between members of the Yes campaign as evidence of “chaos” and “turmoil” – despite the news/comedy value of an organisation devoted to “unity” and “togetherness” breaking into splinter groups just months into its existence.

We refer to something much more fundamental – basic journalistic competence.

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The Scottish media is full today of Gordon Brown’s latest attempted intervention in the independence debate. Scotland on Sunday and the Sunday Herald both report that the former Prime Minister will urge Scots to “ditch the Tories, not the Union” (as the original SoS headline put it before being changed online to the rather more sober “Brown urges Scots not to give up on UK”, presumably out of respect for the gentle sensibilities of the paper’s Conservative-leaning readership).

(We’d like to take a brief moment here to appreciate a couple of beautifully acidic, deadpan lines from the Herald’s piece, written by Paul Hutcheon. Our emphasis.)

“Brown, who led his party to defeat at the last General Election, will be the special guest at an event in Glasgow. Although Labour has a dominant role in the cross-party Better Together campaign, senior party sources last year pushed for a separation to convey Labour’s distinctive message.”

The substance of Brown’s argument, in so far as it can be said to have any, is founded on a lie that was comprehensively disproved on this very website well over a year ago – namely that “if Scottish Labour supporters vote to leave the UK it would mean abandoning colleagues in England to years of Tory rule”.

That proposition is demonstrably untrue (not to mention a remarkably defeatist assertion that Labour can’t now defeat the Tories in England, despite having done so in 1997, 2001 and 2005). But even if it wasn’t, what then?

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If there’s one area where you really have to hand it to “Better Together”, it’s sheer shamelessness. Despite having been humiliatingly exposed for inflating attendance figures at their events by at least 100% twice on this site alone, to the great merriment of Yes campaigners, they just keep right on going without a hint of embarrassment.

We can’t help starting to wonder if this might all be one of those sort of “When I was going to St Ives…” trick riddle things. How many Darling Youth kids make 70?

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Yesterday we were reading an engrossing article by Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov. It’s only available in PDF form as far as we can tell, and in terms of formatting it’s a bit of a trial to get through, but the information within is fascinating.

It’s a study of the difficulties faced by Labour in their attempt to win the 2015 election, and without wanting to spoil it for you, Kellner’s conclusion is that it’s going to be extremely difficult. That won’t be news to Wings Over Scotland readers, of course, but the depth of detail is well worth getting into if you’ve a head for that sort of thing.

We gleaned something different from the piece, though.

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We’re a little suspicious of yesterday’s Ipsos MORI poll on Scottish politics.

It’s not so much the numbers for independence, which are within normal fluctuations and error margins and may also reflect a recent tsunami of doom-laden, irrational and hyperbolic media coverage on the currency issue. No, what’s got us in sceptical mood are the frankly ridiculous Holyrood voting intentions figures, which appear to suggest a shift towards Labour of about 16 points in the space of two months during which the party did nothing but make a laughing-stock of itself.

Frankly, if we could find even a single Labour supporter who thought Johann Lamont was actually going to be Scotland’s next First Minister we’d be astonished, so we’re putting the poll down as a rogue until it’s corroborated by another one. But there was something even stranger about it.

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There’s more to the campaign for independence than merely putting forward a good case for independence. People in general are afraid of change – they avoid it if possible and need not only good reasons to change, but also reasons why what they have at present isn’t working.

If a salesperson were to try to sell you a car, would they succeed if you already owned a car that you liked and felt performed the function it needed to perform? They might try to highlight the increased fuel efficiency, smooth ride, warranty and additional extra features that your current vehicle doesn’t have. They could offer options on financing to show that you can afford it.

But what if in addition to pointing out the positive benefits of a new car, they also begin to highlight where your own car was serving its purpose poorly? The fortune you’re paying in petrol, the discomfort you suffer as you drive, the constant breakdowns and repair fees, and so on. Would you start to be more interested in changing then?

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In this site’s view, there are just two things the Yes campaign needs to get across to the Scottish people in order to win the independence referendum. All the quibbling over this detail and that detail, as seen in the No camp’s ridiculous (and so far mythical) “500 questions”, will ultimately come down to two simple facts at the ballot box:

1. There will be NO significant new powers for the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote. If anything, the opposite will be true.

2. The Scottish people already want independence. They simply haven’t yet realised that the thing they want is called independence.

Win on those two, and the Yes side will win everything.

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Are we doomed to decline if Scotland separates? I can think of lots of good reasons why Scotland might want to vote to remain part of the United Kingdom. But the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee report this week is not one of them.

According to the report, if Scotland votes for independence, it would mean the UK was “a world power in irreversible decline”. Setting aside the question of whether we should expect folk to vote in the interests of geopolitical greatness, does being small mean you’re doomed to be weak? Not at all. The assumption that in geopolitics strength comes from scale is simply not true.

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