Wings Over Scotland

When we knocked up this image in Paintshop for a bit of fun a month ago, we had no idea it was going to turn out to be quite so prophetic. The final act of the Rangers saga is going to play out just like the three-way Mexican standoff at the end of Reservoir Dogs, with Sevco, the SFA and the SPL all shouting furiously, pointing guns at each other and daring the other to crack first.

Charles Green’s consortium is still, at time of writing, thought to be refusing to accept the SPL’s right to pursue the dual-contracts investigation against Rangers Football Club PLC (in liquidation) and apply its findings to Sevco Scotland Limited. By doing so, it is in effect holding the whole of Scottish football to ransom. If our game is to survive the next 48 hours with any integrity and meaning whatsoever, the SPL, having (with massive reluctance) come this far, must not blink.

Because any Doctor Who fan will tell you what happens if you blink now.

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There seem to be a lot of things disappearing from the Scottish media today. First the interesting Robbie Dinwoodie story on Olympic football in the Herald does the Bermuda-Triangle routine, and then we see this odd piece in The Scotsman. It opens powerfully, promising to refute (or at least contest) one of the commonest and most compelling arguments made in favour of independence:

“ED MILIBAND has attacked the SNP’s suggestion that Scots face a choice of either independence or Conservative rule from Westminster as the Labour leader made his latest intervention in the referendum debate.”

We’ve read the rest of the short article three times now, however, without being able to locate a single sentence in which Mr Miliband (pictured in the piece as the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) refers to said choice in even the most oblique passing manner, far less “attacks” it. We’re rather keen to hear the official Labour answer, too. Can any eagle-eyed readers help us out?

The headline above (and slight variants thereof) is a time-honoured response to reports of any event at which the reader’s interpretation of proceedings might differ significantly to that of the writer. Today’s press provides a striking example of the phenomenon.

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We’ve noted before that it’s flattering to see the grown-up media pinching this blog’s stories. Sometimes it’s possible to put it down to innocent coincidence, such as the Guardian’s report today on the sweatshop conditions of workers producing London Olympic mascots – something Wings Over Scotland readers were reading about almost a month ago. At other times, though, the plagiarism is rather more obvious.

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As we’ve said before, we really don’t see much point in getting worked up about opinion polls when we’re still more than two years out from any public vote on anything.  A new poll by Panelbase has some fairly standard results – the SNP well in front in Holyrood voting intentions (up 2% overall on the 2011 result, with Labour and the Greens both up 1%, and the Tories and Lib Dems down 1.5% each), independence trailing by 9% in a two-way vote with 20% undecided, and the three options (including greater devolution) neck-and-neck when set directly against each other (independence 30, devo-X 29, status quo 28).

While we’re encouraged by these numbers at the height of the Great 2012 Festival Of Britishness, they essentially mean nothing at this point, and don’t tell us anything we haven’t known for months or years already. But what IS mildly interesting is seeing how the Scottish print and online media handles them.

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We’re really hoping that there’s going to be some proper Scottish-politics news when we get down to scouring the newspapers today. But in the meantime, just for a quick bit of Monday-morning fun and to offer up an entirely unnecessary hostage to fortune by sticking our heads on the chopping block purely for the thrill of it, we’re going to have a go at predicting the outcome of the imminent negotiations between Sevco Scotland Limited and the Scottish football authorities.

The clock is ticking, so it won’t be long until we find out if we’re right or wrong.

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In the debate over whether the SPL buys the broadcast rights to SFL games featuring Rangers, we’ve just spotted a rather interesting quirk. Sevco Scotland Limited was accepted to the SFL as an Associate Member, and will not be eligible for full Member status for four years. Rule 19 of the SFL Constitution says:

“An Associate Member shall have no financial interest in the assets of the League and shall not be accorded any voting rights.”

We assume “the assets of the League” include its media rights. (Indeed, as far as we can see those would be pretty much the only assets jointly owned by the League.) Rule 19 would seem to suggest that if the SFL does want to sell “Rangers” games to the SPL – or indeed to anyone else – not only will the newco not be entitled to a vote on the matter, but it won’t be entitled to any of the money either.

We haven’t seen anyone else mention this. It seems quite significant.

(EDIT 23-7-12: See comments for SFL response.)

It looks as though we spoke far too soon when we suggested late last week that The Rangers Saga was effectively over. It had seemed that, with Charles Green having accepted the imposition of a deferred 12-month transfer embargo as a condition for assuming the old Rangers’ membership of the SFA, there were no remaining obstacles (in the short term, anyway) to his new club taking its place in SFL Division 3.

We know. We’re embarrassed too. What can we have been thinking? Yesterday saw a fresh outbreak of chaos and insanity which could yet derail the entire fiasco and see SFL3 kicking off with just nine teams, as Sevco Scotland manager Ally McCoist decided to act the chimp and launch a hefty pile of shit right at the fan(s).

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When watching the Olympics over the coming couple of weeks, it’s probably not likely that you’ll be pondering the massive spending that goes into the defence and security industry as a result of such events. Yet in both superficial and deeper senses, it now represents the primary purpose of the Games, with sport merely the disguise under which the true agenda is smuggled past the unsuspecting public.

The precedent for this phenomenon was set over 70 years ago, by the event which would go on to become the template on which all subsequent Games were based. We refer, of course, to the 1936 Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany.

On the 13th of May 1931, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 1936 Summer Olympics to Berlin. The choice was intended to signal Germany’s return to the world community and its rehabilitation after the defeat and humiliation of World War I. However, two years after the award was made Adolf Hitler seized power, and spurred on by his Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels he set about making the games a showcase for Nazi Germany.

The intention was simple – set up the games to portray the new Germany in the best light possible. The Games were to be a place to play down plans for territorial expansion, and would be exploited to instead bedazzle foreign spectators and journalists with an image of a peaceful, tolerant Germany. The opportunity to portray an image of how the Nazis wanted to be seen, with the world watching and listening, was too good to pass up, and so political will was deployed behind the Games, with Hitler himself becoming an ardent supporter.

Plans to boycott the Games in response to the maltreatment of Jews and non-whites already apparent under the regime were discussed in the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, and the Netherlands, but were short-lived. The outcry was more vociferous in America, but the President of the American Olympic Committee at the time, Avery Brundage, declined to back a boycott, on the now-familiar grounds that “The Olympic Games belong to the athletes and not to the politicians”. Little did he know what the Nazis had in store.

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As we predicted a few days ago, Sevco Scotland Limited has accepted the SFA’s condition of a 12-month transfer embargo in return for the company being allowed to take over the Association membership of the old Rangers Football Club PLC. In a novel twist, though, the SFA will not enforce the sanction until AFTER the closure of the summer transfer window on September 1st, allowing the Ibrox club to sign new players for the next six weeks, despite the embargo having been imposed in May.

Despite some of the wilder conspiracy theories circulating on the internet in recent days, the agreement was always going to happen, although we’re a little surprised (only a little, mind) at how blatantly the SFA has gone easy on the club – with over 40 players available to manager Ally McCoist even with the embargo in place, the deferral makes a mockery of the notion of punishment.

(An alert reader points out to us that the club will also be able to sign players, albeit briefly, in next summer’s transfer window, because a quirk of the calendar means it’ll be open for a day after Sevco’s embargo expires. There’s nothing to stop “Rangers” negotiating transfers next summer, then doing all the actual signings on September 2nd, so the punishment only really applies to the January 2013 window. In effect, rather than a 12-month ban it’s actually a four-week one.)

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In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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