Wings Over Scotland

The Daily Record carries the results of an interesting poll today. Carried out by the paper itself among its own readers, it shows conclusive support for a range of SNP policies. For example, 79% of Record readers want to retain Sterling should Scotland become independent, in line with the Nats’ position. They want Scotland to remain a member of the EU by a ratio of almost two to one (55% to 29%). They want to stay in NATO by an overwhelming margin of 68% to 13%. And abolishing Trident is backed by more than three-to-two (47% vs 31%) among the poll’s respondents.

You’d imagine that Scotland’s second-biggest-selling newspaper might be pleased that the country’s government so comprehensively reflects the desires of its own readers, wouldn’t you? And yet unaccountably, the Record appears to be furious about it.

“Our poll shows voters back the SNP’s blueprint for independence – and that’s exactly how Alex Salmond planned it”, the Record froths, as if putting forward a manifesto that people like and support was some kind of dishonourable, underhand tactic. “The SNP have thrown political beliefs out of their window in a desperate attempt to convince Scots to put a cross beside the Yes box in 2014”, it continues, seemingly in the belief that listening to the electorate is the most dastardly crime in the government playbook.

Much of the piece is of course given over to angry reactions from Labour and Unionist spokespersons, who we commend the Record on getting to actually turn up. And it ends rather abruptly, as if the Record’s exasperation at the sheer effrontery of the SNP in continuing to be popular has rendered it speechless. But ultimately, even Labour’s most loyal propaganda organ reluctantly faces the basic fact that the SNP can legitimately claim to be speaking for the people of Scotland, while Scottish Labour can’t even speak for itself. We suspect the Record has more such dark days ahead.

No. No it won’t.

A front-page piece in today’s Scotland On Sunday expands on Gordon Brown’s attempted intervention in the independence debate yesterday with an extraordinary headline which appears to be based on an actual quote from the former Prime Minister: “SNP plan makes Scotland a colony, claims Gordon Brown”.

Sure enough, Brown is reported as saying that an independence for Scotland would be “a form of self-imposed colonialism more reminiscent of the old empire than of the modern world”. Which raises an obvious question: given that an independent Scotland would by any definition have vastly more control of its own affairs than it does now, doesn’t that mean it must currently be something far less than a colony?

The only status we can think of for a nation that’s arguably lower than a “colony” is that of a vassal state. Wikipedia’s definition of that term certainly seems to apply to Scotland: we pay “tribute” to the UK (by contributing a greater share of its revenues than we get back in spending), and we also “provide military power to the dominant state”, both directly in the form of troops and by giving a home to the UK’s nuclear weapons, an important political tool which it wouldn’t be able to retain otherwise.

Wiki goes on to add that a more common modern term for a vassal state is “puppet state”. If you’ve got a minute, Gordon, can you just confirm for us that you and the rest of the Unionist alliance currently see Scotland as a puppet state of England? Cheers.

Gordon Brown doesn’t turn up in the House Of Commons very much. He’s represented his Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath constituents at just 14% of votes since stepping down as Prime Minister two-and-a-half years ago, not bothering to voice an opinion on their behalf at 545 out of 635 divisions. But at least we’ve now found out why.

Brown has barely signed in to earn his £200,000-a-year salary for the last 30 months because he’s been busy working on a list of 22 questions to ask the SNP. We can tell he’s devoted his time to it single-handedly, because the list – unveiled at a speech in his constituency yesterday – has clearly never been anywhere near a sub-editor. It’s a clunking, bloated lump of leaden prose, almost entirely bereft of punch, coherence and even basic readability – any primary-school English teacher worth their salt would hold the former Prime Minister back for some extra lessons on first glance.

Nevertheless, because we’re professionals we’ve ploughed through the double negatives, split infinitives and stultifying repetition to make some sort of sense of it, and in the interests of opening up debate we’ve come up with answers to all of Gordon’s queries, even though we’re not actually in the SNP. Read on below.

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The Yes campaign wins the referendum in October 2014.

Labour wins the May 2015 UK General Election, securing a majority of 21 with the help of 35 Scottish MPs, who have to be elected because Scotland still needs representation at Westminster until the independence arrangements are completed.

That happens in early 2016, just in time for an independent Scotland’s first elections.

The rUK now has over 50 foreign MPs in its Parliament, who if removed would reverse the balance of power, turning a Labour government into a Conservative one overnight, with chaotic ramifications. To the best of our knowledge, no country on Earth permits citizens of another country to elect members to its Parliament. So what now?

Poor old The Herald. The paper’s political editor Magnus Gardham must have felt today was a safe day to keep piling attacks on the SNP about an independent Scotland’s status within the EU. So he went ahead and penned “Further Blow For Salmond Over Europe”, a front-page lead concocted out of comments from an obscure European politician about Catalonia, which observant readers may be aware is not Scotland.

Yet even as Gardham (and colleague David Leask) thundered about how a mandarin from Luxembourg’s personal opinion about a situation almost entirely incomparable with that of the United Kingdom could nevertheless be extrapolated to dire consequences for Scotland (with a Yes vote in the referendum leading to Scots being ejected from the EU and forced to apply for membership as a new nation), a document published by the UK’s own Parliament came to light offering exactly the opposite view.

The document, dated 24th September and 17th October this year, is a submission to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee by Graham Avery, who is identified as a “Senior Member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Senior Adviser at the European Policy Centre, Brussels, and Honorary Director-General of the European Commission”, and whose CV notes that he spent “40 years as a senior official in Whitehall and Brussels, and took part in successive negotiations for EU enlargement”. Sounds like a chap who might know what he was talking about in this field.

You can read the whole thing here. But a few passages leap out. (Our emphasis.)

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"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)

Let's see what we can do, eh?

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Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland both ran fairly decent shows last night leading with the issue of Trident and its replacement, but the most telling contribution to the debate came from the long-standing Labour columnist Polly Toynbee. In a frank and direct piece for the Guardian, Toynbee analysed the politics rather than the economic or defence arguments, and concurred with something this site and others have been saying for almost a year:

“We know where everyone stands – except Labour.”

But it’s just after that line where Toynbee drops the real bomb:

“Some in Labour are nuclear-heads because they occupy seats such as John Woodcock’s Barrow, a one-industry town dependent on defence. Others are nuclear out of strong conviction a unilateralist Labour would be dead at the polls. Probably no one in Labour actually believes we need a Trident replacement for national defence – only for political defence of Labour.“

It’s become fashionable in recent months to put forward the argument that the Scottish electorate isn’t as different to the English one as we often like to portray. There’s certainly a core sliver of truth to that, with the Scottish political spectrum slightly distorted by votes for the left-of-centre SNP that may be at least partly more to do with their competence – compared to an embarrassingly useless opposition – than with Scots being ragingly socialist.

But there are still specific issues where Scots consistently poll to the left of England and the rest of the UK. Welfare is one, and Trident is another. Whether that’s based on a deep moral opposition to the concept of nuclear weapons or merely the fact that it’s our backyard they’re parked in is a matter for conjecture. But the SNP can’t be accused of populist opportunism on the issue, because they’ve been solidly committed to an anti-nuclear platform since the day the first Polaris submarine sailed up the Clyde over 50 years ago.

Labour, on the other hand, are so dizzy from trying to face in every direction at once on the issue that their Scottish “leader” refuses to even say what her personal position is, let alone what she’d do were she to somehow, God forbid, find herself the First Minister of an independent Scotland.

Toynbee’s explosive column openly acknowledges the truth: the £83bn cost of Trident (and the reality, demonstrated over decades, is that it will in fact be several times that) is, as far as Labour are concerned, an expenditure primarily aimed at getting themselves elected. Not that they’ll pay for it – you and I, the gullible taxpayer – will pick up the tab, and the sick and the poor and the vulnerable will be the ones to suffer from the huge hole it’ll leave in the budget.

Labour don’t want Trident because they think it protects the people of the UK, because even Tony Blair admitted it was worthless for that. They want it to protect themselves.

The quotes below come from an April 2007 piece entitled "And The Winner Is", concerning the inaugural Games Media Awards of later that year, written by Kyle Orland for GameDaily.com. The site no longer exists, but you can still read the article via the ever-handy Internet Wayback Machine.

""We actually found a lot of people in the games media don't feel well recognized by the industry they served," said Stuart Dinsey, Managing Director for Intent Media and the brains behind the awards show. "We felt this was a good way to give them some of that recognition and have a great party for everyone to get together at the same time."

"As for the all-important judging itself, Dinsey said the exact process was still being tweaked. Dinsey added that he'd like to get votes from "all the leading companies" in the games industry, probably by asking PR representatives to consult with their colleagues and place a vote to represent the company as a whole. Dinsey said the exact makeup of the judging panel will be kept secret until after the voting is done, to prevent any quid pro quo situations from developing."

But the mere specter of industry voting was enough to give some members of the press pause about the awards. "The games industry are the last people who should be voting for awards in games journalism," said British game freelancer Kieron Gillen. "It's a bit like the prisoners voting for who's their favourite prison guard." Gillen said he worries that the industry voting will make the award one "you wouldn't want to win…. because it's basically shorthand for 'Lapdog Of The Year award'.""

(Despite these comments, Gillen accepted a GMA that very year, and this month pocketed the "Games Media Legend" prize to bookend it with. He attempted to justify his instant U-turn the day after the 2007 award by saying "The awards don’t really matter. PRs are fine. They’re just people." In a fine twist of irony he now pontificates at highbrow public events about how independent games journalism is of PR, and is also a judge in the "Games Journalism Prizes" awards, along with a number of other "concerned games industry types", several of whom are also GMA winners.)

Now the owner of the PR-driven GMAs uses their power to censor journalists with legal threats for expressing honest opinions and accurately quoting people's own public comments to illustrate a valid and fair point. Now maybe we're just old and bitter (well, there's no "maybe" about it), but it seems a pretty odd way of "recognising" games journalism to us. Unless, that is, you ponder who voted on the first GMAs (and still vote on them now), and start wondering to yourself exactly which industry it was that Stuart Dinsey meant when he said "recognised by the industry they serve".

Most people, it seems fair to say, expected more resignations from the SNP over the NATO vote at conference just over a week ago. As passions ran high, some Scottish political journalists went so far as to name the next expected departure (supposedly list MSP John Wilson). Yet no more transpired, and it seems reasonable to suppose that any who were going to would have done it by now. So why haven’t they?

There are numerous possible explanations, of course. Perhaps everyone’s just calmed down after the heat of debate and accepted that they lost a democratic vote and independence is still more important than any single policy, or that it still represents a vastly better chance of a nuclear-free Scotland than staying in the Union. Perhaps nobody wanted to be singled out as the person who cost the party its majority in Holyrood, even if only technically.

But it occurred to us this morning, as we watched Scotland On Sunday embark on a determined and multi-pronged attempt to keep the EU-advice row alive in the minds of a largely-disinterested public, that it might instead be the case that Labour’s hysterical, overblown handling of the matter has served to concentrate SNP minds away from internal disagreements and on the wider good of the party, and to have them close ranks in protection of a First Minister who’s still by a distance the most popular and trusted politician in Scotland (if not the entire UK).

Napoleon famously once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Scottish Labour waded into Alex Salmond at a time when his party seemed in danger of being seriously split for the first time since he regained the leadership, and in doing so may well have pushed his dissenters back into line for him. Not for the first time, the FM may have cause to thank his opponents for the blind tribal hatred that so often seems to drive them into sheer blundering ineptitude.

The Scotsman reports today that the Lib Dems are prepared to accept Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals to limit child benefit and child tax credits to the first two children in a family, in return for some tax increases on the rich.

The plans, which echo China’s extraordinarily punitive “one child per family” laws, have caused a storm of controversy because of the obvious catastrophic impact they could have on some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the country – costing them thousands of pounds a year – as well as the nightmare of bureaucracy and obvious cases of farcical unfairness that could and will result from them.

(What if you’ve worked all your life and have four children, then get made unexpectedly redundant or become ill? Are you supposed to put your two most expensive kids into care because you can no longer afford to feed all of them? What if you already have one child and fall pregnant with what turns out to be twins or triplets? Do you have to pick your favourite and leave the others at the hospital? What if people ignore the changes and have children they can’t afford? Do we just let their kids die, saying “Hey, you knew the rules”? What if someone gets raped and can’t have a termination on religious grounds? Etc etc.)

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems have signalled their support, ensuring the policy will have a Parliamentary majority and be enacted. Some tax rates on the wealthy may be raised, and the rich will continue to get their accountants to find imaginative ways of avoiding paying that tax as usual. Even if additional tax revenues were to be raised by the measures, we’re not sure how that helps the starving extra children of the poor, since they won’t be getting any of the money.

It’s clear that the poor are going to continue to bear most of the burden of austerity. With this latest development following on from Scottish Labour’s recent abandonment of the principle of universal services, all three main Westminster parties and their subsidiaries north of the border are now fully committed to savage attacks on the welfare state. If you’re poor in the UK, it no longer matters who you vote for.

You know the rest by now.

The Scottish media is in full-on outcry mode at the Scottish Government for keeping things from the Scottish people with regard to the possible status of the country’s EU membership status in the event of independence, and to be fair it’s quite understandable when you read official statements like this:

“Whilst there is a strong public interest in seeing what legal advice has been provided to the Government on the implications of EU membership if Scotland were to achieve independence, we have concluded that this is outweighed by a strong public interest in the Government being able to seek free and frank legal advice.”

Of course, in the spirit of Scottish Labour’s creative editing of the First Minister’s words yesterday, we’ve deftly removed a word from that sentence so that it suits our purposes better. Specifically, in between “has been provided to the” and “Government”, we’ve removed the word “UK”.

We’re really not sure how the UK government’s actions differ in any way from those of the Scottish Government in respect of the same issue, particularly when a Scottish Office minister goes on to add that “I have not received formal representations on the possible status of an independent Scotland within the EU.”

It would seem, to the casual observer, that in both cases the respective governments have declined to seek out specific legal advice about an independent Scotland’s EU status, but have sought to conceal that information (or lack of information) from voters on the grounds that confidentiality ensures the government receives candid expert advice undistorted by public opinion.

So perhaps someone can explain to us why only one of them is currently subject to a huge nationwide media storm about it.