Wings Over Scotland

On watching today’s FMQs, we’re more and more coming to the conclusion that the Holyrood opposition’s chief campaign strategy is to make people so utterly scunnered with all politicians that nobody will ever vote for anything or anyone again, and that that way the Unionist parties might get at least a turn at power on the drawing of lots. From the bottom of our heart, readers, we’re struggling to explain it any other way.

There’s already been an avalanche of cobblers talked about yesterday’s surprise verdict of the First Tier Tribunal on alleged tax evasion by Rangers. RFC fans are triumphantly howling vindication for their claims that the whole thing was a giant conspiracy, insisting the verdict shows the club hadn’t been cheating for a decade and that it should still be playing in Scotland’s top division. The club’s former chairman even told Scotland Tonight that it wouldn’t have gone into administration at all, let alone liquidation, if not for the pressures caused by the infamous “Big Tax Case”.

The Scottish media, meanwhile, is mostly painting a picture of unadulterated victory for, and terrible injustice against, the Ibrox club. But let’s see if we can cut through the persisting fog, establish some solid facts and lay a couple of myths.

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We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, which examined whether oil revenues were enough to sustain future Scottish public spending. Remarkably, it even interviewed Professor Gavin McCrone, and highlighted the fact that his infamous report was suppressed by the Westminster government for 30 years. And yet bizarrely – but as always seems to be the case – the programme insisted on analysing the economy of a future devolved Scotland, not an independent one.

That, however, is a startlingly stupid thing to do. Let’s keep this simple.

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Crikey, Euan McColm seems to have an awfully thin skin. Today, for the second time this month, Wings Over Scotland has found itself the recipient of a cryptic threat, which on this occasion coincided with a spot of maintenance by our webhosts and accordingly caused some momentary alarm among readers.

Mr McColm apparently feels that yesterday’s post and/or some of the comments below it constitute his being, and we quote, “defamed to fuck on a cybernat smear site”, though despite our asking him some time ago to specify the offending material so that we might take any appropriate action he’s declined to identify any.

So far so ho hum, then, except that for some inexplicable reason Mr McColm is threatening to take his anger out on the SNP, and the party’s spin-doctor Kevin Pringle in particular. This morning he issued the menacing warning “dear @theSNP and @KevinJPringle.  please thank @WingsScotland for what you are about to receive”, in a tweet he’s subsequently deleted.

Mr McColm has also deleted all the other tweets he directed to us, but you can see the original and some of the others here:

(Incidentally, the second and third tweets down in the image above see Mr McColm suggesting that he doesn’t know my name, which is odd as it’s clearly printed directly below the headline of every post I make on the site. He’s not the first Scotsman writer whose journalistic skills weren’t quite up to that level of in-depth investigation, and he also didn’t reply when I asked if I was eligible for the free curry.)

Now, this sort of moaning is pretty humdrum everyday stuff which comes with the territory if you dare to stick your head above the parapet and offer a political viewpoint on anything, let alone if you dare to critique the media itself. It’s water off a duck’s back to us. But it’s another tweet, which Mr McColm hasn’t yet deleted (and which was in any event helpfully retweeted by our dear friend Tom Harris MP and by unsuccessful Conservative “2010 Holyrood election” candidate Allan Smith), that takes this case somewhere altogether more sinister.

Euan McColm is a professional journalist regularly employed by the Scotsman, which claims political neutrality. Yet here, we appear to see him directly threaten to publish a story he considers will be damaging to the SNP and/or to Kevin Pringle personally, for purely vindictive reasons resulting from him being criticised on a website run by a 20-year Liberal Democrat voter.

We would invite readers to bear that fact in mind the next time a Scotsman column with Mr McColm’s name on it professes to be conducting an impartial analysis of Scottish political issues, and we’d further invite them to consider the point of issuing this threat in public, and in what ways it might conceivably be intended to intimidate or influence the actions of SNP MSPs and the independence campaign generally.

We keenly await hearing from Mr McColm’s solicitors with regard to the alleged defamation. Our contact form is at the top of the page.

Alex Salmond, rumoured to have a fiery temper, must be hopping mad today. Johann Lamont wasted her time on a speculative exercise at First Minister’s Questions, aiming (as is her wont) for nothing more than a petty point of snark, and instead a clumsy piece of SNP briefing allowed her to extract an embarrassing retraction and apology to the chamber, which the Unionist press has of course seized on gleefully.

(The Scotsman has emblazoned no fewer than THREE links to the same article across this morning’s front page to make sure none of its remaining readers miss it. The Herald, meanwhile, had Magnus Gardham write a frothing piece entitled “Salmond apologises for misleading MSPs at Holyrood”, only to bizarrely pull it – and all its comments – and replace it with an almost-identical one in order to change the headline to “Salmond says sorry for misleading MSPs again“. The original has been deleted from the Herald’s search facility, but can still be found on the server.)

In fact, rather than being increased by 0.18% as Salmond claimed at FMQs, the budget for Further Education colleges has been reduced by 1.7%. Given the austerity measures being inflicted on the Scottish Government by Westminster, that’s actually a near-miraculous protection of funding, particularly given the other investments being made in education, and a properly-briefed Salmond could have calmly and effectively pointed that out. He might also have noted that Lamont had no genuine interest in FE funding and nothing constructive to say on the subject – such as where Labour would make the savings necessary to maintain/increase it.

The Labour “leader” sought only to make party-political hay out of semantics, at Mike Russell’s expense, to give her hapless back-benchers something to cheer, but in her flailing landed herself an unexpected hit on the First Minister himself. Someone somewhere in a dark corner of SNP headquarters will be nursing a severely chewed ear this morning, and deservedly so.

Labour, meanwhile, will crow delightedly about the Nats’ own-goal. But at the end of the day, we suspect the electorate will remember who it is who wants to impose crippling tuition fees on students, and who wants to end free personal care and bus travel for the elderly, and free prescriptions for the sick, and increase Council Tax, and use the money to pay for nuclear weapons so that Westminster politicians can strut around on the world stage. We know we will.

Well, it’s all been a pretty confusing business in Scottish football this week, with the SFL or SFA or B&Q or someone releasing some rather vague documents with baffling talk of “Hotspots” and no mention of half the things that people had been trailing (like Celtic and The Rangers “colt” teams, which is a dynamic, thrusting new way of saying “reserves” that someone’s apparently just invented) and whether the new leagues would have splits or would prefer an Orange Maid.

However, to keep our readers as immaculately informed as they’re used to, we’ve been digging deep and speaking to all the right people, and we think we’ve finally managed to definitively figure out the complete plans. They’re actually reasonably easy to follow as long as you concentrate, so take a deep breath and jump in.

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Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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A press release on the always-positive Scottish Labour website this morning blares a wake-up call to the reckless and irresponsible Scottish Government. “IPPR Report Shows SNP Economic Policy Is Financially Illiterate”, it rages, going on to quote the party’s finance spokesman Ken Macintosh:

“This report shows that the SNP’s economic policy is financially illiterate. Not only do we get more spending than we raise as a result of being in the Union, but the SNP’s commitment to turn Scotland into a low-tax corner of Europe would see revenues plummet and public spending slashed to the bone. Scotland would be crippled by what could only be described as economic suicide.”

Oof. Strong words for sure. Hang on, though – which SNP economic policy are we actually talking about here? The preamble to Macintosh’s furious blast references “the SNP’s plans to cut Corporation Tax to 12.5%”. But the only problem with that is that the SNP doesn’t appear to have any such plans.

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The Daily Record carries not one but two “Fury” stories today. One is headlined “Fury as new Labour councillor takes seven-week holiday just six months after being elected”, which tells pretty much the whole story without having to read the article.

(In case you were wondering, the compelling defence of the East Ayrshire comrade in question is “It’s only seven weeks.” We commend Councillor Mair’s thrift in being able to save the cost of a two-month cruise from his modest £16,000 municipal salary.)

The second piece, though, is much more disturbing. Titled “Fury at £729m bill to build schools worth a fifth of that amount”, it reveals SNP Cumbernauld MSP Jamie Hepburn’s discovery that the Labour-controlled (a fact the Record strangely overlooks) North Lanarkshire Council signed a PFI contract in 2006/07 to build and renovate schools in the area, to the value of £150m.

While that sum will have been repaid to the contractors by 2017, unlucky North Lanarkshire taxpayers will continue to hand them money for a further two decades, in the amount of a staggering £29m a year.

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It can be a full-time job keeping up with the many inconsistencies and contradictions in the anti-independence campaign. (Labour’s professed hatred for the Tories but willingness to let them govern Scotland when Scottish voters reject them, and the Conservatives’ belief in the UK Union but deep-seated antipathy to the European one, leap out as two of the more obvious examples.) Today’s is a corker, though.

Attentive readers will recall that the “Better Together” camp has spent the five months since its launch constantly warning Scots that independence would be “irrevocable”. Here’s figurehead Alistair Darling being reported in the Telegraph as saying just that at the No campaign’s launch in June of this year (our emphasis, as usual):

“This is not about picking a government for the next five years. If we decide to go down the independence route it is an irrevocable step – you’re talking about a completely different constitutional relationship, maybe for the next 200 or 300 years.”

Pretty unequivocal, then – independence is forever, no going back in our lifetime, or that of our children, or their children, or their children. But wait. Fast-forward to last night and the former Chancellor appears to have had a radical change of heart, in a BBC story headlined “Darling predicts independent Scotland would rejoin UK”:

“Speaking as he delivered this year’s John P Mackintosh Memorial Lecture in Prestonpans, East Lothian, on Friday evening, [Darling] said the ‘most obvious problem’ with a common currency was that ‘sooner or later it takes you to economic and then political union. So Scotland would leave the UK only to end up in the same place as it began, with all the trauma that would entail.'”

Of course, if you’re a Wings Over Scotland reader you already knew the “irrevocable” line was a load of rubbish that could only be true if the core claim – and indeed, the very name – of “Better Together” was a cynical lie. But it’s nice to see Mr Darling admit it this early in the day. Which strident assertion, we wonder, will he recant next?

Labour today is a far cry from the party of old, a party that was set up to provide a voice for the working class so as to gain control over the means of production for the masses rather than to be dictated to by capitalism. The modern incarnation is now peddling the notion of “One Nation Labour”, with Johann Lamont decrying what she calls the “something for nothing country” of Scotland, presumably referring to the stubborn preference of the Scots for the social democractic principles of “old” Labour over the neoliberal New Labour. As justification for the rightward shift, Lamont asserts:

“If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.”

(Clearly she’s been using Gordon Brown’s sub-editor.)

On the face of it, that seems a relatively straightforward statement of fact: if you can’t pay for something then you have to cut back, go without or find new money to properly fund it. It should be noted that as we’ve seen, at present there’s no need to make this choice because current spending is fully funded. However, as costs rise and privatisation, budget cuts and PFI in England (along with some creative accounting of England-only spending as “UK” projects or reserve-budget items) continue to cause reductions in the Scottish block grant, we soon will.

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As with any long campaign, we’re a bit worried that we might have to spend the next two years saying the same things over and over again, because the main Unionist tactic seems to be to keep asking questions after they’ve been answered a hundred times. That said, when you’ve got your hands full with domestic mini-crises (as we’ve had all this week), it can be quite useful to have already covered the day’s main topics and be able to just point people at the archives before rushing off to fight the latest fire.

• On Ian Davidson moaning this morning about the “biased” referendum question.
• On Alastair Darling tonight joining the ranks of those in the Unionist camp who think being “foreign” is axiomatically a bad thing.
• And on Michael Moore yesterday promising new powers if Scotland votes No.

If we don’t have a heart attack before then, see you tomorrow.

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Sources: [1], [2] and [3].