Wings Over Scotland

We were going to get 2013 up and running with a piece on how we’d like to see the independence debate approached in the coming year, but Ewan Crawford has rather kindly done the job for us in The Scotsman, in a snappy 113 words:

“Labour has decided to mount a campaign based primarily on a combination of all-out personal attack against the First Minister and an assault on what they characterise as Scotland’s “something for nothing culture” typified by free personal care for the elderly and the abolition of university tuition fees.

In 2013 they should feel free to get on with this to see if this is indeed the platform that people in Scotland have been crying out for from a potential party of government.

The overwhelming focus of the independence campaign should instead be about a sense of possibility and a conversation with people concerned about jobs and the economic prospects for themselves and their families.”

In an ideal world, the last paragraph on its own would probably have sufficed. But it’s vitally important to understand the opposition’s position not just on the superficial political level, but also what it tells us about the consequences of a No vote.

If there’s one truth the independence movement really needs to get across to the people of Scotland in the next 12 months if it’s to build towards victory, it’s that there will be no additional powers for Holyrood within the UK should Scots reject the opportunity to run their own affairs. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be the case.

Helpfully, the message compresses down neatly to just four words – words the Yes movement must, for all its positivity, drum into the minds of the Scottish people if it wants them to fully understand the choice they face in 2014: Vote No, Get Nothing.

We must admit, we thought Ian Davidson would be a shoo-in for this particular award after his unforgettable implosion on Newsnight Scotland in August. But then we read something twice as mad and half as comprehensible. It was a piece from STV News in October, based on some comments by unfortunately-named Scottish Labour “deputy” leader and hereditary MP Anas Sarwar. We’ve read it eight or nine times now, and we still have genuinely not the slightest clue what he’s wittering on about.

We’re going to step through it line-by-line and see if we can get it to make any sense. Feel free to join in if you’ve got any ideas, because we’re stumped.

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On Friday, the Guardian reported Ed Miliband’s New Year message to the people of Britain. The key passage was one in which he promised this would be the year his party actually came up with some policies:

“One nation Labour is about reaching out to every part of Britain, it’s about a party that is as much the party of the private sector as the public sector, a party of south as well as north, a party determined to fight for the future of the United Kingdom, and a party rooted in every community of our land.

I’ve set out a vision of what this county [sic] can be, one nation, and in 2013 we will be setting out concrete steps on making that vision a reality from business to education to welfare.”

There’s a pretty big hint there to Scottish voters about the consequences of a No vote in the independence referendum. But in case anyone needs it spelling out: you don’t create “one nation” by letting the different parts of it have powers to create their own individual approaches to business, education and welfare, which is why this year Johann Lamont started the job of softening the Scottish people up and getting them used to the idea of Holyrood obediently following London policies.

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This’ll probably come off sounding sarcastic and snide, but it honestly isn’t meant that way. In a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to get paid for journalism, we’re genuinely full of admiration and no small amount of jealousy that weel-kent pundit Gerry Hassan yesterday managed to extract yet more money from the Scotsman by writing the same article for roughly the 50th time* this year.

The piece, in which – shock of shocks! – Gerry calls for a more mature, serious and respectful kind of debate about independence, comes at the end of a year in which the publications who keep commissioning him to write that same piece have determinedly undermined any possibility of that more mature, serious and respectful debate about independence ever happening, by engaging in a concerted campaign of smear, innuendo and malicious spin directed almost entirely against one side.

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The Panelbase poll from October that we referred to in this morning’s post deserves a little more analysis. There are two key sets of figures in it, relating to two alternative scenarios of how the UK political situation might look come autumn 2014, with a Westminster general election only a few months away.

IF LABOUR LOOK LIKE WINNING THE ELECTION
Yes: 37%
No: 45%
Don’t know: 18%

IF THE TORIES LOOK LIKE WINNING THE ELECTION
Yes: 52%
No: 40%
Don’t know: 8%

The survey also noted Holyrood voting intentions, with the constituency and regional polls averaging out at 45% SNP, 30% Labour, 12% Tory, 8% Lib Dem, 4.5% Green, 0.5% others. These numbers lead us to some interesting conclusions.

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On the one hand, there’s this, from Michael Kelly in the Scotsman on Thursday:

“Fatal errors made by Alex Salmond this year have ruined his chances of a 2014 referendum victory. The year of reversal for the cause of independence – that’s how 2012 will be recorded in footnotes to the political history of the United Kingdom.

The SNP tries to convince us that the new Scotland will be the same, only better – dependent independence. That is the fatal flaw, the fundamental inconsistency that has ensured the failure of the SNP’s only real policy. Fat ladies don’t sing in tragedies, but the chorus has begun to lament the fall of the hero. It’s all over bar the shouting.”

And on the other, there’s this, from PoliticalBetting.com in mid-February 2011:

“Unless all opinion polls are utterly wrong in Scotland, Labour will be comfortably the largest party in the Scottish Parliament post-May 5th. Labour should either win outright or come fairly close. Iain Gray will probably form a new Scottish Government. His decision is likely to be whether to go it alone or to invite the remaining Scottish Lib Dems to join him.”

Aside from comedy idiots like Kelly, though, a great many more sober commentators have also been proclaiming 2012 as a terrible year of catastrophe for the Yes campaign – by which they usually explicitly or implicitly mean its chief protagonists, the SNP. Yet for all the disasters which they allege have befallen the independence movement – the great patriotic celebrations of the Jubilee and Olympics, the supposed unravelling of SNP policy on Europe, the dogged personal smearing of Alex Salmond and his cabinet – what’s actually happened to the polling figures for independence?

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Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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One of our very favourite No-campaign scare stories of the year was the Huffington Post’s “Vote Yes And You’ll Die Of Cancer”. But if Scotland chooses independence in 2014, will it actually affect our healthcare? After all, we’ve already noted how NHS Scotland has been independent since inception (and why we need a Yes vote in order to provide it with a stable funding base that won’t be cut out from under it via the effect of Barnett consequentials under Westminster austerity).

But it’s also worth examining how it would work in practice. What about if we travel to the rUK or in Europe? What about the cross-border co-operation that currently characterises the relationship between the UK’s two health services? Would we still be able to be treated in an English hospital if we vote for independence? Let’s find out.

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With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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In a year characterised by a marked increase in heat, as the Holyrood opposition focused its efforts almost exclusively on personal attacks against SNP ministers in an attempt to decapitate the Yes campaign, very few things could be said to have united a wide spectrum of the political sphere, from the radical arch-left to soft nationalists and Labour traditionalists alike. But a speech in September saw almost the entire Scottish media and blogosphere react with one astonished, horrified voice.

You don’t need us to tell you which one, do you?

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We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange back in May with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green quasi-leader Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with all our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the full he-said-we-said (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation culminated in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, independence and the SNP are of course not interchangeable terms. Something like a third of SNP voters don’t back the policy, and the Greens and SSP are also in favour, as are various percentages of those who vote for the three London parties. And one of the loudest calls from the non-SNP sections of the independence movement has been that those in favour should formulate a constitution for the prospective nation in advance of the referendum, which could then form the basis of what people voted on, avoiding the danger of the referendum being seen as a party-political issue.

(Which is what the Unionist side desperately wants to make it, hence their strategy of trying to personally discredit the SNP leadership in recent months.)

The whole point of independence is indeed to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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Fewer than one in ten of our readers follow us on Twitter, which is a bit annoying as it’s a great way of passing on interesting stuff quickly without having to put together a whole post on it. (We don’t really understand people’s objections to using Twitter. Some say it’s full of daft trivia about what celebrities had for their tea and suchlike, but that’s only true if you choose to follow those people. There’s no law that says you have to follow 1000 folk, you can follow just one if you like.)

Anyway, the point is that while everyone on Twitter is talking about it, if you aren’t you might well not have come across this piece by baby-faced left-wing wunderkind Owen Jones for the Independent yet. Called “The Strange Death Of Labour Scotland” (in a nod to Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw’s recent book of the same title), it doesn’t contain much we haven’t been saying here for the last year. But it’s always interesting to see the English left slowly starting to notice what’s going on in North Britain. Their assessment is rarely kind, and currently readers are approving of Jones’ analysis by a margin of around 15 to 1. It’s well worth a read.