Wings Over Scotland

Way back at the start of this year, we remarked on an odd comment by Michael Moore, the Secretary of State for Scotland, in which he said that the UK government would not mount a legal challenge if the Scottish Government pressed ahead with conducting an independence referendum on its own terms without a Section 30 order from Westminster. It’s an assertion Mr Moore has repeated today in the Sunday Mail:

“I am not interested in the UK Government challenging this. It wouldn’t be for the UK Government to do it, it would be for others.”

We’re going to repeat what we said in January – it would be absolutely extraordinary if the British Government stood idly by and watched an illegal attempt to break up the United Kingdom, so why is Moore saying they won’t? And what does that reveal about the UK administration’s true opinion on the legality of the referendum?

As we noted yesterday, Michael Moore has pretty much nothing to do all day. The Scottish Office has no significant responsibilities, but if there was one thing you’d think WAS within its field of authority it’d be if the Scottish Government acted outwith its competence with regard to the UK Government, which he tells us is exactly what it’d be doing if it conducted an “unauthorised” referendum.

You’d imagine, therefore, that Mr Moore – who is paid a whopping £134,565 a year (plus expenses) by the taxpayer, about £5,000 more than the First Minister – would be thrilled to have a genuine task to undertake in return for his vast salary. Yet here we see him once again openly abdicating the only real responsibility of his office, in the hope that a member of the general public will do it for him at their own expense.

We can’t be the only people who find that odd, surely?

One ought to have some sympathy for Michael Moore. Secretary Of State for Scotland is such a pointless job the Liberal Democrats stood for election in 2010 on a policy of abolishing it altogether, but now one of their own has found himself in the not-very-hot seat the pledge appears to have gone the way of all Lib Dem election pledges.

With much of the business of running Scotland (education, health, policing) devolved to the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, and the rest of it (taxation, welfare, defence) controlled far above his head in Westminster, the unfortunate Mr Moore must therefore cast around hopefully for something with which to fill the long working day.

Latterly, he’s chosen to occupy himself by making assertions to anyone who’ll listen that the wrangling between Holyrood and London over the independence referendum must be concluded by next month. There appears to be no particular reason for this arbitrary deadline, and Mr Moore has made no explicit threat of consequences should it be breached, presumably because they would carry absolutely no credibility.

(The notion of Alex Salmond standing up in the Scottish Parliament in, say, early December and accepting a single-question referendum in return for a Section 30 order, only to be rebuffed by the Prime Minister on the grounds that he’d missed his chance, is so farcical we’re not even going to dignify it with any further analysis.)

Indeed, so hollow is the position of Scottish Secretary that the First Minister hasn’t even bothered to meet with Mr Moore to discuss the issue in recent months, quite reasonably indicating that he’d rather speak to the organ-grinder than the monkey. Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, perhaps aware that he’s currently trailing badly in this blog’s “Madman Of The Year” poll, today suggests that the organ-grinder in question may yet impose a Westminster-run referendum on the Scots, even in the same breath as acknowledging that such a move would be suicidally stupid and tear the Unionist alliance catastrophically asunder.

There are over two years until the SNP’s proposed date for the referendum, and therefore at least a year until its details absolutely must be finalised. That’s not our opinion, nor even that of the nationalists – it’s the view of the No camp, who’ve been insisting since the 2011 election that the referendum could be held in 2013 (or even sooner). If Mr Moore believed in February of this year that a referendum could be put together from scratch in 19 months, what’s his sudden rush now? Clearly, by his own reckoning, we’ve got until at least March to get the process going in earnest.

If Alex Salmond’s plan is to sit back, innocently whistling, and wait for his opponents to defeat themselves in a flailing rage that he won’t do what they tell him, Mr Moore and Mr Cochrane’s steadily-increasing panic suggests that it’s working. We suspect he’ll keep his powder dry a while yet.

We’ve mentioned previously that one of the core tactics the No camp appears to be utilising in the referendum debate is that of attrition through extremism. It’s a strategy borrowed from the terrifying American right wing, and has two main goals.

One is to recalibrate the perceived centre-ground by abandoning any kind of moderate position and instead arguing positions so self-evidently ludicrous and dishonest that the listener is nudged towards assuming that they must be true purely on the grounds that nobody would dare to present such an audacious lie with a straight face. The other is to simply exhaust your opponents by forcing them to constantly battle over even the most basic and obvious facts, long before you get to the real debating points.

It’s a nihilistic but clever ploy, particularly effective in broadcast media where time is often very limited and such obfuscatory stalling can completely prevent the serious issues from being addressed at all. So far it seems to be pretty much the only weapon in Scottish Labour’s armoury, not just in respect of the referendum but also politics generally – a good example being the party’s absurd claims about the cost of knife crime during the 2011 election campaign.

It applies at the macro level as well as at the top end of the scale. When we started this blog we subscribed to the Twitter accounts of lots of prominent Labour activists in a naive attempt at engaging in genuine constructive debate, but were gradually forced to the realisation that the primary (or only) point of their dialogue was to deliberately waste our time and exasperate us into submission, and unfollowed them all.

So rather than be drawn into attempting to intelligently and forensically deconstruct three of the most recent outpourings of (calculated) lunacy from some of the No camp’s leading mad old men, we’re going to treat them with the amount of respect they deserve. Read the three articles below, then use your skill and judgement to decide (via the poll over in the central column) who’s the most barking-mad mental.

Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, insisting that an independent Scotland having its own defence forces is a hilarious joke

Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph, burbling about Alex Salmond sacrificing the referendum in return for more powers

Ian Smart in his shed, banging his worn-out drum of how Salmond doesn’t want to have a referendum in the first place

Vote now!

An alert reader points out a story in today’s edition of the once-popular regional periodical. See if you can pick out the curious inconsistency.

Headline: “Concern at decline in PE teacher numbers under SNP”

Third sentence: “However, schools have made up the shortfall by appointing additional PE teachers on temporary contracts – most of them part-time – which has led to an overall increase.”

We’ve emphasised some of the words as a clue. Did you get it?

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Nationalists like to taunt Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont for her reluctance to reveal her position on nuclear weapons. But in fairness to the little-seen notional chief, she’s hardly alone in her ambiguity. Despite the UK’s nuclear force being a huge issue, costing taxpayers tens of billions of pounds and being central to Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, one of the country’s two biggest political parties simply doesn’t seem to know – and hasn’t known for years, despite being in government on both sides of the border – whether it’s in favour of it or not.

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We were intrigued to notice a small piece in today’s Herald in which Ian Davidson MP made the claim that a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum could lead to the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the UK.

Mr Davidson’s assertion may well be correct. Both CND and senior figures in the UK military have suggested that while finding a replacement dock for the nation’s Trident submarines if they’re expelled from Faslane would be a relatively straightforward task, replacing the vital weapons facility at Coulport would be a much more difficult proposition, and could easily take ten years to come to fruition. In practice, it would be close to impossible to maintain the Trident force in such circumstances.

What’s slightly puzzling, however, is that the tone of the senior Labour MP’s comment appears to indicate that it’s intended as a warning, rather than a celebration.

In March 2010, the UK Parliament held a vote on whether the Trident fleet should be replaced with a new system. The vote passed comfortably with a majority of over 230, despite a majority of Scottish MPs (31 out of 59) voting against it. The intriguing thing is that one of the 15 Scottish Labour rebels who defied the party whip to oppose the renewal motion was Ian Davidson, then as now the MP for Glasgow South West.

Given that Mr Davidson is opposed to retaining Britain’s nuclear “deterrent”, and given his declaration this week that Scottish independence is the only means of bringing about the abolition of the UK’s nuclear weapons, we can only conclude that Mr Davidson has become a convert to the Yes campaign. We welcome his change of heart, but urge the campaign’s director not to appoint him as a spokesman.

Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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So we’re halfway through “an unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” by the No camp, trying to persuade Scots to stay in the Union (but without being Unionist, of course). Twitter was alive on Saturday morning with Unio- sorry, Better Together activists all loudly (and oddly uniformly) proclaiming the “great response” they’d had on the streets of Scotland from voters, and publishing the pictures to prove it.

For those of you who couldn’t make it out to one of the “events” yourself, here’s a taste of the sort of pulsating, dynamic and above all positive action you missed.

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The YesScotland campaign website conducted an interesting thought experiment last week, turning the independence referendum question on its head by asking “If Scotland was still an independent nation, would you vote to join the Union?” It was an interesting and imaginative piece, penned by campaign head Blair Jenkins, and it got us pondering over which other aspects of the referendum might take on a different perspective if viewed a different way.

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We were frankly staggered today to see that the Herald is still determined to flog the dead and rotting horse that is the Martin Sime “scandal”. It had seemed that the paper had slunk away with its “exclusive” between its legs after the widespread contempt generated by the first story, but incredibly it seems doggedly insistent on destroying the remaining shreds of its journalistic integrity by digging the hole even deeper.

The original piece was written by the Herald’s new political editor Magnus Gardham, until recently a faithful servant of the staunchly Unionist and staunchly Labour-supporting Daily Record. Entitled “Salmond in secret push to obtain a devo max option”, the story didn’t present a scrap of evidence of Salmond doing anything, secretly or otherwise. In fact, it was fabricated almost entirely from empirical lies, from the headline down. Let’s take a look at some of them.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, “Devo Max” is dead. Since the turn of the year, the current Prime Minister and the last one have both issued clear declarations that the idea of full fiscal autonomy for Scotland within the UK is simply a non-starter.

Even while Scottish labour “leader” Johann Lamont umms and aahs and coyly refuses to reveal which additional powers she might or might not want devolved to the Scottish Parliament in future, Ruth Davidson of the Scottish Tories hops from one position to another according to whether the London party have told her what she believes that day or not, and Willie Rennie’s increasingly-laughable Scottish Lib Dems put their faith in what we think is the party’s 57th Home Rule talking shop, David Cameron and Gordon Brown have unceremoniously slammed the door on the notion. So what’s left?

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By now most of you should have seen the latest circulation figures for newspapers in Scotland. As you’ll know, though, Wings Over Scotland likes to delve around below the headlines when it comes to stats, so we’ve had our own rummage, done a little data-bashing and come up with a few hopefully-interesting findings.

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