Wings Over Scotland

This week, we’ve been wondering just how much of a coincidence it was that Johann Lamont’s dramatic, rushed-sounding policy speech out of nowhere (surely that terrible pinched-from-the-Tories “something for nothing” line can’t have been the result of any extended scrutiny?) happened three days after the first independence rally.

Saturday 22nd September 2012 will go down in history as the moment the starting gun was fired on the referendum campaign for real. The event was a chance to show the public of Scotland that it wasn’t only “weirdy beardies” and “cyber-nuts” who support independence but everyday hard-working people just like the majority of other Scots.

And we can’t help but ponder whether the event put the wind up Scottish Labour a lot more than they spent that weekend frantically trying to pretend.

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The Scottish media is enthusiastically continuing to follow Labour’s agenda with regard to slashing universal services. Both of last night’s current-affairs shows led with the topic again, and it’s all over the press once more today, in particular the Scotsman and the Daily Record. The former runs one story that carries a telling quote from Scottish Labour seat-filler Richard Baker MSP:

“We can’t wait to have these difficult decisions in a couple of years. The choices need to be debated now.”

While it’s been referenced in passing, the SNP oddly hasn’t really made much of the extraordinary hollowness of this demand, given than Scottish Labour have said their commission “investigating” the matter won’t produce a report for over two years.

We don’t know about you, readers, but our understanding of a debate is that two opposing sides both present their arguments and then there’s some sort of vote which determines who best convinced the audience that their view was the right one.

The SNP’s position is clear – universal benefits can be afforded, something that the Scottish Government has already demonstrated by balancing its budget since 2007, and it will prove its point by continuing to do so in coming years. Labour, however, want to somehow have a debate without having a position. It’s rather like demanding someone plays you at football and then not turning up for the match.

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It even happened in Bath. Even in one of the richest corners of Britain – a city so posh that it refused a local organic dairy farm permission to open a boutique ice-cream concession in its expensive new shopping area in case it “lowered the tone” – there was an Occupy protest. A couple of dozen tents huddled together in Queen Square, a small green space in the middle of a busy traffic junction that’s more accustomed to hosting farmers’ markets and games of boules.

To be honest, I’m surprised there were that many. Bath’s housing, parking and public transport are all so cripplingly costly that poor people can barely get into the centre of town even for a visit. But still, like most of the Occupy protests nationwide (those that weren’t shut down, anyway), the numbers were pretty pitiful. At a time when the government has all but openly declared class war, when everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail is furious at the greed of the wealthy, why weren’t there millions on the streets, rather than a few little pockets out camping in the cold?

The answer is obvious, but for some reason is never spoken aloud. Despite the Occupy movement’s catchy and evocative slogan, we aren’t the 99%. But that’s understandable, because “we are the 33%” doesn’t carry quite the same moral punch.

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The independence movement, for all the progress it’s made, has a core problem. Support for independence is strongest amongst the poor, and although it’s rarely acknowledged, the poor aren’t the majority any more. The home-owning middle class tend to feel that they’re better off than their parents were, and even if the (mortgaged) ownership of your home is a largely illusory form of wealth it’s the feeling that matters.

Because what that means is that people who are doing okay – and doubly so if that status is precarious – don’t want to risk voting for major change and upheaval. (Most of those who are doing very nicely, thanks, out of the status quo – the rich – are probably a lost cause.) So the big challenge for the YesScotland campaign in the next two years is to pick up a significant proportion of the “squeezed middle”.

And we can’t think of a better way to convince those who are getting by, but for whom the poverty line is a little too close on their heels for comfort, that independence represents the best future than to tell them that staying in the Union will mean they get hammered for hundreds or thousands of pounds extra a year in rising Council Tax, prescriptions, tuition fees for their kids and personal care for their elderly relatives.

A great many people are only just keeping their heads above water in this long, bleak recession. Johann Lamont just threw them an anvil. We’re the lifeboat. Let’s thank her, then fling out the ropes and do our best to pull them aboard to safety.

There’s something odd about this series of pictures from the last eight years of Labour Party conferences, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Can anyone help out?

2005

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A personal comment/disclaimer first. Brian Wilson is probably the first specifically Scottish politician I remember (well, apart from one I knew personally and socially, but that’s a story for another day). He was a prominent Labour figure in the 1980s, and as a young teenager with a just-awakening interest in left-wing politics it’s fair to say he was one of the main things that put me off Labour. Even at the age of 14 I got the impression of a nasty, snide, arrogant and pious career politico who’d say anything he thought might score a point over his opponent whether he believed it or not.

So in the interests of fairness and transparency we’re declaring a prejudice in advance. Brian Wilson is a horrible little man, up to his ear hair in the corrupt crony culture of Glasgow Labour, and whenever we hear him speak on any subject we’re reflexively and overwhelmingly inclined to believe the opposite of whatever he’s saying.

Nevertheless, we can’t help seeing a particular significance in the fact that he of all people was chosen to put Labour’s case on last night’s Newsnight Scotland.

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Ed Miliband spoke to the Labour conference for over an hour this week. The transcript of his speech ran to almost seven-and-a-half thousand words. The vast bulk of them, however – well over six thousand – comprised a collection of well-worn anecdotes and homilies which the party’s leader has been peddling for many months already.

So given that we all live busy lives these days and you probably don’t want to sit through the entire speech including 20 minutes of guff about how he’s from a family of immigrants and went to a comprehensive AGAIN, we’ve filtered it down a bit for you.

Below is an edited transcript redacting all the waffle, the stuff about how the other parties are simply beastly and the things he WON’T do, and leaving only the actual bits of policy (a term we’ve interpreted as broadly as possible), helpfully highlighted in red (or at least as close to red as Labour is prepared to get these days), along with our own brief analysis in bold. We hope you find it useful.

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We’d be getting a little nervous at the moment if we were citizens of Northern Ireland who wanted to stay part of the United Kingdom. Because over recent weeks and months, the concept of the UK has been increasingly pushed aside, in favour of that of Great Britain. (A construct which, of course, excludes the entire island of Ireland.)

The home team at the London Olympics, lavishly celebrated at the Labour conference yesterday, was branded “Team GB”, rather than “Team UK”, and although there are three devolved administrations and parliaments within the UK, only two of them were featured at the same conference’s “Better Together” session.

The situation in Northern Ireland is none of this site’s concern. But it’s not just the Unionists across the sea who ought to be worried. Because on the strength of what Ed Miliband said in his keynote speech yesterday afternoon, Scotland and Wales face a future of being absorbed, in every practical sense, into a Greater England.

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Ed Miliband’s address to the Labour conference yesterday was billed as one which would completely alter the public perception of the party leader, and revolutionise whether voters saw him as a potential future Prime Minister or not. As you can clearly see from these two snapshots from a Scotland On Sunday poll on the subject, the strategy has been a spectacular success.

This image was from Tuesday morning, before the speech:

And here’s one from a few minutes ago, with the public having had a good 20 hours or so to digest both the speech and the media’s mostly-glowing reaction to it:

Go back to your homes and prepare for the next Labour government, readers. No rush.

So we’re told that Scottish Labour are to launch yet another devolution commission, which will report on which new governmental powers Labour has suddenly realised the Scottish Parliament needs since the Calman Commission closed down in 2009.

(We like to imagine that as they proudly published their last report, someone at the press conference casually asked what they’d concluded about fiscal autonomy, and the Commission board all slapped their foreheads and wailed “Doh! We knew there was something we’d forgotten to talk about!”)

We’ve already examined the commission’s yawning credibility gap ourselves, but over the weekend we digested a couple of articles from more impartial sources that make it even clearer just how hollow and meaningless any Labour promises of greater devolution to come after a No vote in 2014 will be.

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Hilariously, the Scottish Labour Party has just announced the personnel for its latest commission on devolution. We’re not quite sure which dramatic events have occurred since its last one, the Calman Commission, concluded that all Scotland needed was a few extra powers over speed limits and airguns. Oh, wait – yes we are.

It seems that a mere 18 months after it happened, Scottish Labour has finally come to terms with the electorate’s contemptuous rejection of its pathetically feeble vision of enhanced devolution. In just a year and a half, it appears to have finally dawned on the slow-witted dinosaurs at John Smith House that the Scottish people are no longer prepared to accept the status quo with a couple of trivial tweaks at the outer edges.

And in a panic, Labour are flailing desperately in all directions at once.

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Sadly these pieces all arrived too late to be included in yesterday’s round-up and poll. But all of them are still pretty unmissable reading. (And didn’t we tell you weeks ago that Kevin McKenna was starting to see the light? Oh ye of little faith.)

LABOUR STILL LOST IN THE WILDERNESS
(Herald View in the Herald)

“Denied power at Holyrood for a second term, Labour appear so warped by their tribal hatred of the Nationalists that they would rather align with the Coalition than the SNP. Instead of recognising a fellow progressive force, they would rather collude in dismantling the welfare state. It is a pitiful sight.”

LABOUR’S WRETCHED SILENCE ON CHILD POVERTY
(Kevin McKenna for the Observer)

“Ms Lamont’s use of the phrase “something for nothing”, as well as coming straight from the grimoire of Margaret Thatcher is, at best, misleading, at worst, downright false… It’s difficult to assess which body of Labour supporters will be most insulted and alienated.”

HOW DID THE PARTY OF SMITH AND DEWAR COME TO THIS?
(Iain Macwhirter for the Herald)

“As a presentational disaster this ranks alongside John Major’s back to basics speech which helped seal the fate of the UK Conservatives in the 1990s. There has been a whiff of decay around Scottish Labour for some years, but I’m beginning to think it has finally popped its clogs.”

LABOUR THROWN INTO A CRISIS
(Socialist Party Scotland for socialistworld.net)

“Labour’s leader has signalled her support for a vicious extension of the cuts agenda and the tearing up of those modest but important advances that still survive in Scotland. In doing so she could also sound the death of Labour in Scotland.”