Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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