Wings Over Scotland

These are the leaders of the nation’s business community, as they present themselves to us when explaining that they’re the mighty “masters of the universe” and require to be paid ever-soaring salaries in order to generate wealth and jobs and growth, because without them society itself will crumble to dust and we’ll all be reduced to foraging for berries in the shattered ruins of our once-proud civilisation.

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Scotland’s future within (or outside) the European Union (EU) has once again hit the headlines, with the Scotsman reporting that “the European Commission has written to a House of Lords committee stating that if Scots voters back independence, existing treaties which cover the UK’s EU membership will ‘cease to apply’”.

The Scotland Office is quoted in the article as saying that Scots have the right to know the full implications for Scotland if it were to “leave the UK family”. But just before we reach the meat of this topic, it’s rather disingenuous to claim that standing on your own two feet is akin to leaving a family.

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[FOOTBALL KLAXON.]

Okay, this has gone on long enough. We’ve been trying for quite a few months now to get anyone to explain something to us, and nobody ever has an answer. We’ve sat and watched with our heads in our hands as the SPL and SFL have competed to come up with the most bonkers, convoluted proposals for the reconstruction of Scottish football.

The SPL want two leagues of 12 splitting into three leagues of eight then merging back into two leagues of 12 again at the end, plus a league of 18 that just bumbles along feeling a bit left out of all the splitting fun. The SFL counters with a bizarre 16-10-16 (or possibly 16-10-18) system that has nowhere near enough fixtures in it, but proposes to fill the gaps with playoffs and by padding out the least popular competition in the Scottish game – the League Cup.

And all the while everyone pointedly ignores the most successful league system ever created in Scotland, which by coincidence was also the least embarrassingly stupid one, and which never ended with the team in 8th place in the final table having more points than the team in 5th place while all the other leagues laughed at us.

Please, for the love of God, someone tell us why.

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But enough about Labour. UKIP also put in some strong performances in the three Westminster polls last night, scoring two second-place finishes and one third place on a night when the Lib Dems sank to an astonishing EIGHTH and the BNP outpolled the Tories in the same Rotherham seat. The truly disturbing thing, though – speaking as a current resident of England – was the total absence of a single viable party of the left.

The turnout in all three elections was dismal, with two of them barely scraping past the 25% mark and the most popular just managing to get a third of voters out. And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that at least a significant part of the reason for that may be the near-total lack of meaningful choice available.

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The Scottish media is winding itself up for another sustained assault on the Scottish Government. Kerry Gill of the Scottish Daily Express has been pushing the story hard since last night along with some journalists from other English papers, and the BBC’s Scotland correspondent James Cook set the scene in a tweet this morning:

Sure enough, the Scotsman carried it as a front-page lead below only the Leveson Inquiry report – while inflating the figure by over £31,000 for effect – and the Herald also carries a prominent piece, although at least only rounding the amount up by £1,420.

The reports reveal that 36 people spent around a week in the US, taking part in various business events in addition to attending the golf tournament, which the Scottish Government was contractually obliged to send a delegation to as part of the agreement to host it at Gleneagles in 2014, and which is predicted to be worth £100 million to the Scottish economy. But as the papers line up to hand the Holyrood opposition a club to hit the First Minister with over the spending, there’s a very significant part of the equation missing from the coverage.

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It was reported in the Scotsman on Wednesday that the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus had raised doubts over whether an independent Scotland could successfully keep using Sterling, because when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993 it took only 38 days for the currency union to split.

His views led to a rush of comments from supporters of the UK union arguing that a currency union is only possible with political union. Then a spokesman from the Treasury asserted that protectionism grew between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic after the split.

The evidence cited by the Treasury spokesman was the fall in Slovak exports to the Czech Republic from 42% of all exports to 13% between 1993 and 2003. Conversely, Czech Republic exports to the Slovak Republic fell from 22% of total exports to 8%. He noted ominously that currently 59% of Scottish exports are to the rest of the UK.

While the basic facts cited are correct, the interpretations put on them by Vaclav Klaus and the UK Treasury spokesman are, shall we say, at odds with the truth.

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The Guardian carries a rather provocative piece today, suggesting that the SNP and the other nationalist parties at Westminster might do a deal with the Tories to push through their controversial proposals on changing (or gerrymandering, as some would have it) the UK’s constituency boundaries, in return for a radical overhaul of the Scottish constitution which would hand an unprecedented package of powers just short of full independence to the Holyrood parliament.

The plans are generally presumed to be electorally advantageous to the Conservatives, who currently have to secure considerably more votes to form a majority than Labour do, and the Lib Dems have vowed not to back their coalition partners on the issue after House Of Lords reform was shelved, leaving the Tories in need of votes from the smaller opposition parties to have any chance of getting the legislation through.

We’ll put aside for a moment the unworthy notion that if the Lib Dems are vowing to oppose the changes then that almost certainly means they’ll end up voting for them, and concentrate instead on the broader plausibility of the story, which appears to be sourced solely from a single former Tory MEP. Would the SNP really enter such a Faustian pact with the Tories for the sake of devo max? Let’s delve into the detail.

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When the No campaign launched its website, the Unionist parties behind it helpfully included video clips of what they called “real Scots” giving their reasons for wanting to keep the UK together. The most repeated assertion in the series of testimonies was that shipbuilding would cease to exist in an independent Scotland.

First there was Tanya, who reckons we’re stronger as a “family unit”, that apprenticeships will vanish overnight somehow (or possibly be made illegal, we haven’t ascertained the logic of them just vanishing yet) and that we should stick together to build big warships to show the world what we can do.

Next up we had Robert, whose view is that there would be no shipbuilding in an independent Scotland. Presumably we’ll just be using strong language to keep enemies from our waters. (In fairness, Robert does admit that he hopes, rather than knows, that shipbuilding on the Clyde will have a future within the UK.)

Then there was Craig, proud to build UK warships and who believes there will be no work under independence. His argument takes a subtly different tack: “There’s no commercial shipping at all, it’s all MoD work, that’s all we get, that’s what sustains us, that’s what keeps these doors open here is MoD work, and Rosyth as well, so if we’re not going to build commercial ships and all we’re going to build is defence and frigates and aircraft carriers then that’s our livelihoods and that’s what keeps us alive”.

Finally we have Frank, who believes that shipbuilding is safe within the UK. “We build ships to the world and we’re fantastic at that!” is his view, though he offers no explanation as to why we would suddenly lose the ability to construct a seaworthy vessel if not ruled from Westminster.

So that’s four repetitions of the same argument – that an independent Scotland would have no shipbuilding as only the MoD uses the yards on the Clyde. But does any reality underpin the assertion? Let’s find out.

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Most newspapers today are reporting concerns over the future of the UK’s three remaining naval shipyards, located in Portsmouth on the south coast of England, and at Govan and Scotstoun on the Clyde. Owners BAE Systems have strongly hinted that at least one is likely to close, with a decision expected by the end of 2012, and the two Glasgow yards (which more or less face each other across the river) tend to be treated as a single unit.

The relevance of the outcome to the independence debate is obvious. Shipbuilding on the Clyde has long been a totemic feature of the argument for the Union, with Labour and Conservatives alike long having insisted that there would be no chance of the rUK commissioning warships from an independent Scotland – Labour MP Ian Davidson is quoted today saying that very thing:

“Obviously if Scotland were to separate from the United Kingdom, then the terms of business would preclude any orders for the Type 26 being placed on the Clyde.”

So the problem for the Westminster government is clear: shut the Clyde yards, handing the SNP and the Yes campaign huge propaganda victories, or shut Portsmouth, costing thousands of jobs in an almost entirely Tory area where only one of the seats currently held by the party (Gosport, a majority of 15,000) could be classed as “safe”.

It’s difficult to picture a world in which the Conservatives would sacrifice 5000 jobs in their own heartland in order to save 3000 in Glasgow, but to not do so would be to torpedo the “Better Together” campaign to devastating effect – an option which the party may find more tolerable if only because the explosion would also damage Labour in its biggest remaining Scottish stronghold.

Of course, the independence movement gets a big stick to beat the Union with in either case – were Portsmouth to be closed, the rUK would be left with no facilities for warship construction at all, making the threats of the likes of Ian Davidson sound even more hollow. Non-combat vessels are one thing, but would the rUK really commission its battleships, frigates and aircraft carriers from the other side of the world rather than a tried-and-trusted contractor a few miles across the border – particularly if it was seeking co-operation from its neighbour over the location of Trident submarines while London found somewhere in its own waters to base them?

Not only shipyard workers will be awaiting the decision with trepidation.

I sometimes worry about the leftward edge of the Yes Scotland coalition. My own politics are very much at that end of the spectrum, but a few times in recent months – most notably when the SNP changed its policy on NATO – I’ve been concerned about the campaign putting the cart before the horse. Some very angry commentary on the NATO issue appeared to imply that we might as well stay in the Union if an independent Scotland was going to sign up to the Alliance, petulantly throwing away all the other progress that independence would enable like a toddler in a huff.

The crucial thing to remember about the referendum is that the “downtrodden masses” are no longer the majority. The great triumph and great evil of Thatcherism, as practiced by both Tory and Labour governments over the last 30 years, was to deliberately and successfully marginalise the poor by bribing those just above them. Hard-pressed homeowners are understandably terrified of falling into the apocalyptic pit of misery that seethes just below them, and have been conditioned to view the poor below, not the rich above, as the greatest threat to their security.

Years and years of attack pieces in the right-wing press have created a culture where working-class people have been persuaded to hate “scroungers”, in the form of the unemployed, the sick, and the disabled rather than those who’ve actually bankrupted the country. The word “fairness” has been cynically inverted and perverted to depict the relatively well-off as victims and the poor as the greedy villains.

Poll after poll suggests support for independence is greatest among the poor, and weakest – rationally enough – among those who are doing best out of the status quo. But the poor alone are not great enough in number to win the referendum. If we unite around a “soak the rich” banner, and a vision of Scotland dictated by those who garner just a few percent of the vote between them in elections, we will enjoy a great feeling of moral superiority, and we will lose.

So I was a little nervous about the tenor and outcome of the “Radical Independence Conference” which took place in Glasgow this weekend.

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As regular readers will know, we very rarely bother reporting opinion polls on this site, for a whole raft of reasons (the main one being that opinion polls two years out from any possible vote are basically meaningless). But today we were doing a little digging into one and came up with something modestly interesting.

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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.