Wings Over Scotland

We’ve never in our entire lives wanted Scotland to do anything other than win a football match. Tonight, that might change. The dismal but all-too-predictable performance against Serbia on Saturday was another soul-crushing 90 minutes under Craig Levein. His tactic of playing every game looking for a 1-0 win on the counter-attack, despite having a defence almost totally incapable of keeping a clean sheet, was thrown into sharp relief last night as Andy Murray – once a notoriously passive and defensive tennis player who regularly failed at the last (or second-to-last) hurdle – finally completed his transformation into an attacking powerhouse capable of going toe-to-toe with the likes of the brutally talented Novak Djokovic and winning.

From Levein’s pronouncements since the feeble 0-0 draw with Djokovic’s Serbian countrymen at the weekend, the Scotland coach shows no signs of learning the lesson of Murray’s magnificent victory, and seems perversely determined to stick to a losing formula as much out of sheer stubborn petulance as anything else.

Starting the qualifying group with two home points from six would leave Scotland with a mountain to climb, but with eight games to come it wouldn’t be a completely insurmountable one. The catch, however, is that it WOULD by any sane analysis be an impossible task with Levein as manager.

If he plays this defensively at home – and incredibly, it’s by no means inconceivable that he’ll once again line up in a few hours in 4-1-4-1 formation with Kenny Miller alone up front – it’s safe to say our chances of securing the away wins we’d need to stand a chance would be nil. And more to the point, even four points from six are unlikely to be enough with the best teams in the group still to come, if we keep playing this way.

Scotland fans who don’t want the next two years to be over before they’ve begun now face a gruesome reality. Victory over Macedonia would secure Levein’s position for the forseeable future, which would almost certainly doom the qualification attempt to failure. Two more dropped points, on the other hand, might just be enough to see him sacked. The national side currently has a more talented group of players available than at any time in the last decade, and is stronger in attack than in defence for perhaps the first time in 20 years. A more positive manager might well still be able to save the campaign, even from such an inauspicious start.

But tonight’s game is the last point at which that will be true. The next round of matches sees us away to Wales and Belgium, and if Levein is allowed to oversee the dropping of any more points there then the situation will be utterly irretrievable. In this blog’s view, Scotland’s only hope of qualifying for World Cup 2014 is to draw tonight. (A defeat would be a catastrophe too far for any manager to recover.)

So do we pray for victory over 90 minutes no matter what, or take the long-term view? This blog, for more than just footballing reasons, finds itself – albeit uncomfortably, reluctantly and painfully – in the latter camp. What do you think? The poll’s at the top of the grey column just to the right of these words.

The CBI Director-General, John Cridland, came north this week to tell Scotland we shouldn’t be independent. He has every right to do so. But what he has no right to do is use half-truths as the basis for his scaremongering.

I hear that Mr Cridland told the CBI Annual Dinner in Glasgow on Thursday night that the “immediate effects [of independence] would be profound, and in the short term costly. When Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic, it cost the country four per cent of its GDP in the following year.” But what Mr Cridland won’t tell us is what happened next.

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We’re thrilled to welcome to the blog the YesScotland campaign’s estimable post-graduate European law expert Stephen Noon, with some intriguing stats.

The International Monetary Fund has just published its latest statistics for the relative wealth per head of different countries. And, for Iceland, Ireland, Norway and the UK, they paint a fascinating picture.

The figures are based on “purchasing power parity”, which allows us to make a fair comparison between the different countries, and they show that Norway, Ireland and Iceland are all wealthier per head than the UK. Indeed, at no point in the financial crisis did any of the countries dip below the UK in this IMF wealth league table.

If we take a look at 2010, when the full impact of the crisis was being felt, the wealth per head for each country, in current international dollars, was:

Norway     $52,165
Ireland      $39,492
Iceland     $36,535
UK           $35,344

The UK was $1,192 behind the ‘poorest’ of the three, Iceland, at this point. If we fast-forward to the current year, 2012, the IMF estimates are:

Norway     $54,479
Ireland      $40,443
Iceland     $39,083
UK           $36,605

This year, the average UK citizen is now forecast by the IMF to be $2,478 poorer than his equivalent in ‘insolvent’ Iceland. And putting the IMF’s crystal ball to full use, let’s take a look at referendum year, 2014. What will be the relative strengths of the four nations by then? Won’t being a powerhouse big country have propelled the United Kingdom above lowly Iceland at least?

Norway    $57,217
Ireland     $44,283
Iceland    $41,647
UK          $38,935

It seems not. In 2014, the UK won’t even reach the level of GDP per capita that Iceland enjoyed in 2012. The wealth gap between the two countries will have increased, once again, to $2,712 per person.

Similarly, for Ireland, 2010 saw the Irish $4,148 ahead of the UK in wealth per head, and according to the IMF that Irish advantage will increase to $5,348 in 2014.

And finally, Norway’s $16,821 advantage per person in 2010 is forecast to become $18,727 by 2012 – in other words, just short of 50% wealthier than the UK.

It’s not quite what you’d expect from listening to the rhetoric of the anti-independence parties. Perhaps they should actually go to Iceland, or Ireland or Norway – small, independent nations which, it seems, now form an arc of faster recovery.

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A version of this post appeared previously on SNmr.

The official website of UK Labour carries a page devoted to Willie Bain MP, the elected representative for Glasgow North-East. It contains a mission statement including the stirring sentence below:

“Politicians have to keep in touch with the people who elect them, and that’s why I’m working hard in the constituency too. I will never claim lavish expenses and never milk the system.“

(Our emphasis.) This week, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority published its official account of MPs’ expenses for the year 2011-12. Out of 650 MPs, Willie Bain was the 5th-highest claimer, racking up an incredible bill of £180,923.70 to the taxpayer on top of his £65,738 salary.

(If the current Parliament runs to its full length and these figures are typical, then the services of Willie Bain will have cost the UK public £1,233,305 over the term.)

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As regular readers will know, we've always been keen admirers of Bruce Everiss's almost-unparallelled videogames-industry knowledge and expertise. So we've been thrilled to recently see him storming back to the cutting-edge as chief of marketing for David Darling's new company Kwalee, which has hit on the genius idea of making it big in the ultra-competitive App Store market by employing a vast team of staff to come up with two-player-only knockoffs of ancient board games.

The well-documented problem with the App Store, of course, is visibility. To have a chance of getting your game noticed you need it to get lots of great reviews, and when your games are extremely mediocre and competing against hundreds and hundreds of existing clones of the same thing which DO offer single-player play as well as online, the chances of that happening are slim.

Unless you cut out the middleman and write the reviews yourself, of course.

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Recently we’ve highlighted a few of the more demented arguments made by Unionist politicians and commentators with regard to the independence referendum. But there’s one aspect in particular that we can’t quite get to grips with, so we’re going to throw it out there and see if anyone can enlighten us, especially some of the wilder-eyed carpet-chewers in the “No” camp who we know keep a keen eye on this blog:

“If, as you claim, Alex Salmond desperately wants to get out of holding a referendum on independence because he’ll lose it, why are you helping him?”

Answers on a postcard please.

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We’re quite cynical folks, especially when it comes to Scottish Labour. We expect little from them, although even then we’re still sometimes surprised. But a couple of pieces today from two of the Scottish party’s most prominent – well, let’s use the word “thinkers” and keep things civil – raised our eyebrows good and proper.

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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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