Wings Over Scotland

Perhaps we’re being overly suspicious here. But the “sex scandal” incident currently surrounding Glasgow City Council leader Gordon Matheson actually happened over a month ago – December 12th to be precise. Having evaded the attention of the press for so long, there’s no obvious reason for the story to have suddenly broken now.

Except, that is, if there was another story centred on Glasgow City Council – a much more serious one, that the Labour council wanted to deflect attention from with a juicy bit of sleaze gossip. And hey, guess what?

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We thought you might like to see the statistics for Tuesday’s section 30 debate in the House Of Commons in at-a-glance pictorial form, so we’re delighted to share this graphic sent in by alert reader Stewart Bremner. (NB we default to anonymity when people send us things, just in case we get them in trouble at work or something, but we’re always very happy to give full attribution where desired.)

Click the image for full-size version. Detailed data here (OpenOffice format).

Readers may well recall some very recent analysis we undertook on the Scottish Government’s investment in promoting Scotland abroad, and the huge returns it generated in jobs and tourism. They may also remember that the opposition parties in Holyrood, led by Labour, were incandescent with rage at the “waste” of around £500,000 of taxpayers’ money spent on sending government delegations numbering dozens of people to the USA to undertake the work.

Given the recent revelations that almost half as large a sum – £232,708 – was unnecessarily awarded by Glasgow Labour councillors to a Labour crony who formerly headed a charitable body (over and above a severance pay-off which was already mind-bogglingly generous at £240,000), we wonder if anyone could help us with some info on how many tens of millions of pounds and/or hundreds of jobs the Labour-run council’s expenditure has delivered to Scotland? We can’t seem to find anything.

We’ve been delving around in the innards of some poorly-documented WordPress plugins recently, and we think we’ve finally worked out how to include polls in the body of a post rather than cramming them awkwardly into a sidebar. (You live and learn.) So as much as an equipment test as anything else, and in the light of the First Minister committing the SNP to a written constitution in an independent Scotland, we thought we’d conduct a wee snap survey.

The first thing to note is that not all of the issues below are actually matters for a constitution at all – some of them are properly party manifesto issues, to be decided regularly at elections rather than enshrined into the country’s founding principles. But since the FM’s speech specifically raised the possibility of things like free university education being made constitutional, we’ve taken a wide-ranging view and picked a dozen of the most common pressing topics of debate.

Secondly, as this site is predominantly read by those of a nationalist persuasion, any results will of course likely be skewed in that direction, and should not necessarily be taken as a representative cross-section of Scottish public opinion. But supporters of Unionist parties are encouraged to take part anyway – it’s just a bit of fun. What sort of Scotland would you like to live in?

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We don’t make a habit of printing press releases at Wings Over Scotland – in fact if our memory serves us correctly, as it rather intermittently does, we’ve never done so. But we’re going to make a partial exception here by printing half of one.

It’s from a speech given by the First Minister on the occasion of yesterday’s unopposed passing of the Section 30 order by the House of Commons, enshrining the right of the Scottish Parliament to hold the independence referendum. We’ve left out all the stuff about that, though, in favour of the much more interesting matter of the FM’s comments on a written constitution for an independent Scotland. It’s an incredibly important commitment, and we welcome it unreservedly.

We’ll let him take it from there.

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Ten days ago, Scottish Labour “deputy” leader Anas Sarwar issued a press release in his capacity as head of Labour’s referendum campaign, noting that “[Nicola Sturgeon] is right to say there has been a lot of negative campaigning. We will be raising the level of debate and ensuring that Scotland gets the level of debate it deserves.”

Here are some extracts from Sarwar and his independence-fearing colleagues’ contributions to yesterday’s epic House of Commons “debate” (in which one side got a little over 10 times as long to put its case as the other) on the motion giving the Scottish Parliament the power to conduct the independence referendum.

Make your own judgement as to how they did, and the level of debate they apparently consider Scotland deserves.

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The papers this week have been full of stories about the SNP’s plans for foreign aid from an independent Scotland. The Herald led with a story entitled “Yousaf plans £1.5 billion foreign aid budget”, while the Scotsman went for the slightly more inflammatory headline ‘Scottish independence: International aid budget would soar to hundreds of millions’ with the clear implication that this compared to the modest £9 million the devolved Scottish Government currently spends directly on foreign aid.

The headlines were designed to make people think that under independence the Scottish government would be diverting hundreds of millions of pounds away from Scots, increasing our foreign aid over 100-fold. Opposition MSPs claimed such move would mean spending cuts at home or tax rises in order to fund the increased international aid budget.

You need to delve a little deeper into the articles to find the truth.

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Writing a site like this is in one sense an exercise in idealistic cognitive dissonance. No matter how often the opposite turns out to be the case, you always sort of hope, deep down, that if you highlight someone’s occasional failings in a calm and factual manner they’ll say “Oh well, that’s a fair cop”, and even if they don’t change their ways they’ll at least acknowledge the validity of legitimate, honest criticism.

But as we say, it rarely turns out that way. Last night we picked up on what was at heart a fairly minor semantic quibble with high-profile Scottish-politics commentator David Torrance, arising from the evening’s edition of Scotland Tonight. He got in touch with us on Twitter almost immediately to object in rather strong terms to our views, and an exchange went on until around 2am when everyone seemingly went to bed.

We thought no more of it, although we hoped this morning that there might be some answers to some questions that Mr Torrance had explicitly invited during the debate. Instead, to our surprise (we know, still) and dismay, not only were none to be found, but the entire discussion – at his end, anyway – had completely vanished.

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Tory commentator* David Torrance was a little mean about us on Twitter last night, but we won’t hold it against him. As a ubiquitous cross-media Scottish pundit, though, we’re a bit more concerned about his journalistic diligence and grasp of arithmetic.

The bespectacled biographer appeared on the evening’s edition of Scotland Tonight, and tweeted a question about the preceding interview with Blair Jenkins, in which the Yes campaign chief had claimed to recall opinion polls in recent years showing a majority for independence. Helpfully, we sent over a link, annotated with details of several that fitted the criterion of a higher Yes vote than No vote.

But it turns out that according to Mr Torrance, getting more votes than the only other option in a two-choice referendum doesn’t count as a win.

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Sorry, readers. It’s our fault. Around teatime on Sunday we rather recklessly tweeted “Is Magnus Gardham on holiday? The Herald’s been a much more balanced paper this last week or two”, and in doing so appear to have summoned him back, Candyman-style, despite only saying his name once. It must have been retweets or something.

Gardham’s sticky fingerprints are all over the Herald’s front-page splash this morning, even though he shares the byline with the now-rarely-seen Robbie Dinwoodie. The piece reports a TNS-BMRB poll showing a rather remarkable 2.5% swing towards independence since October – despite that period being depicted uniformly across the Scottish and UK political media as a quarterium-annus horribilis for the Yes campaign, and for the SNP and Alex Salmond in particular – under the extraordinarily contrived headline “Blow to SNP as support for independence stalls”.

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The final aspect of the independence debate touched on by Alistair Darling’s interview on Newsnight Scotland last night brought some more much-needed clarity to the situation. In this segment of the programme the issue being pursued by Gordon Brewer was what the Unionist parties were going to offer the Scottish electorate in the way of greater devolution in the event of a No vote.

Uncharacteristically, Darling was a little evasive when Brewer first raised the issue, but thankfully some hard facts were soon forthcoming.

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While we welcomed the definitive answer on the question of an independent Scotland’s relationship to the United Kingdom, we were a little disturbed by something Alistair Darling said about Europe in his Newsnight Scotland interview last night.

It happened at 13m 42s. See what you think. (Emphasis Darling’s own this time.)

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