Wings Over Scotland

It’s been remarkable watching the awkward reactions of Alex Salmond’s detractors to his appearance at the Leveson inquiry yesterday. Over two hours of questioning didn’t manage so much as a scratch on the First Minister, with even ardent Unionist hacks forced to admit that Salmond was “skooshing” the proceedings and describing it as an “effortless stroll” for the SNP leader. Even the Herald’s Iain Macwhirter, a normally-intelligent commentator recently driven half-demented by hatred for Murdoch, was forced to concede that Salmond had sailed through unharmed.

With opposition politicians and activists (and even some supposedly-loyal nationalists) having long been forecasting a humiliating inquisition for Salmond at the hands of Robert Jay, there’s currently a great deal of sour muttering and embarrassed shuffling of feet going on in Unionist ranks, personified on Newsnight Scotland last night by Labour’s unfortunate Paul Martin, who didn’t seem to quite know what to do with himself except mumble some vague waffle about there having been no conclusive proof that the Scottish Government maintaining cordial relations with one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers would likely be beneficial to Scottish employment.

The depressing thing about the opposition’s reaction is its sheer petulance and intellectual bankruptcy, typified by a thoroughly dispiriting argument we had yesterday. It doesn’t matter how comprehensively, how often or by whom the SNP are cleared of any sort of wrongdoing, or how many rational, logical, sensible explanations for things are offered – Labour and the other opponents of independence simply turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, flatly refusing to accept any reality they don’t like and endlessly repeating their demands for “answers”, even though they’ve just been given them.

For the record and easy reference, though, we’ll quickly run through them again below.

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Since the disaster that befell our Super HypocrisOMeter 5000, we’ve been pretty careful with our equipment budget. But this week, after being caught on the hop by the unexpected early conclusion to the Rangers CVA saga, Wings Over Scotland has taken the plunge and invested in another electronic aid to help us stay that all-important one step ahead of the zeitgeist.

The SeeAhead Industries Predictamatic XF12 is the state of the art in digital foresight technology, and we put it straight to work to see if it could give us some advance knowledge of how Alex Salmond’s appearance at the Leveson Inquiry this afternoon will turn out. The contents of the Device Output Log can be seen below.

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The fallout from HMRC’s rejection of the Rangers CVA has, of course, only just begun. Journalists and bloggers, us included, will be spending a considerable amount of time speculating wildly about the likely outcome of the club’s now-inevitable liquidation. So let’s quickly take stock of what’s fact and what’s guesswork.

(Please bear in mind that Wings Over Scotland is not a lawyer, and that your house may be at risk if you don’t pay tax on it for 20 years.)

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Much as Scots have grown accustomed to trying to pretend otherwise, you'll probably have noticed that there's currently another international football tournament going on without us. This evening sees the first appearance in the European Championship of the England team, the only side competing in the entire competition who don't have a national anthem to call their own.

Over two decades of living in England hasn't changed this writer's feelings towards the country's international team much. I still want them to lose – not because I hate the English people, but precisely because I like them.

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Thursday night’s Question Time from Inverness saw Johann Lamont once again trot out the line that the independence referendum doesn’t offer Scotland its only realistic chance of escaping Tory government for the forseeable future. Once again, the Labour quasi-leader insisted (56m 50s) that the choice between independence and the Tories was a false one, and that her party provided a genuine ideological alternative to the right-wing neoliberal philosophy which has dominated UK politics since 1979.

Unfortunately, that’s a lie. And the really troubling thing about it is that it means NOBODY is speaking for the majority of the British population, which almost certainly means that no mainstream political party is interested in representing your views. Which, you might think, is a pretty odd way to be running a supposed democracy.

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A surprise development today, as the moribund and long-neglected LabourHame website sprang suddenly back to life with its fourth post in as many months. And what a stirring comeback it was, as the party’s Shadow Secretary Of State for Scotland Margaret Curran launched into a vitriolic diatribe awkwardly entitled “Absurd to claim a separate Scotland would continue to be part of Britain“.

(There was plenty of room left in the headline to turn the car-crash grammar into English, for example by prefixing it with the words “Why it’s”.)

The centrepiece of the article’s argument was Curran’s unequivocal assertion that “Britain is the country we live in, not the island it exists on”, which is a claim only slightly spoiled by being completely factually wrong in every respect. Rather than waste all afternoon explaining why, we’ll just quote the Wikipedia entry and let you get on with your day. If you’re really pressed for time, you can stop after the first sentence.

“Great Britain or Britain (Welsh: Prydain Fawr, Scottish Gaelic: Breatainn Mhòr, Cornish: Breten Veur) is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, the largest European island, and the largest of the British Isles. With a population of about 60.0 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populous island in the world, after Java and Honshu. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west. Politically, Great Britain may also refer to the island itself together with a number of surrounding islands which comprise the territory of England, Scotland and Wales.

All of the island is territory of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and most of the United Kingdom’s territory is in Great Britain. Most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, as are their respective capital cities: London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

The Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the political union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland with the Acts of Union 1707 on 1 May 1707 under Queen Anne.”

You’d hope someone aiming to be the Secretary of State for a part of somewhere would at least have a grasp of the most rudimentary geopolitical facts about it, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Scottish Labour.

We would be lying if we said we were surprised by Johann Lamont’s line of attack at today’s First Minister’s Questions, but “dismayed, disappointed and depressed” would be a fair enough summary. With her finger as ever on the pulse of what really matters to the Scottish public, for some reason the Labour quasi-leader chose to repeat last week’s bewildering and incomprehensible assault about the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England. (Possibly because it garnered her some rare good press from the Unionist section of the Scottish media.)

The situation is in fact a straightforward one, which Lamont and Labour are doing their best to complicate and obfuscate in furtherance of their own agenda. The Bank of England – which despite the name is the central bank of the United Kingdom – is an independent body, and has been since Gordon Brown surrendered Government control of it in 1997. While the Treasury retains certain emergency powers, in all normal circumstances the Bank’s activities in respect of the UK’s monetary policy are determined by the MPC, which has no Government representatives on it.

(A minority of the committee’s members – four out of nine – are appointed by the Treasury, but are all external, non-political advisers.)

The SNP’s policy is that an independent Scotland would negotiate as part of the independence process a Scottish voice on the MPC (presumably an appointee along the same lines as those of the Treasury), given that Scotland currently “owns” 8% of the BoE. At present there is nobody on the Committee specifically tasked with representing the interests of Scotland, which is an entirely unsurprising and unsinister state of affairs – as a UK body, the Bank’s responsibility is to the UK as a whole, and at such times as Scotland’s interests might conflict with those of the wider UK, the Bank’s duty is clearly, quite properly, to act in the interests of the majority at all times.

Johann Lamont, and the Unionist cause in general, has gleefully seized on an uncharacteristically sloppy choice of words by Nicola Sturgeon during BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last month, in which she presented Scotland’s future representation on the MPC as axiomatic rather than merely a goal. Scottish representation on the Committee would in fact be the realistic and reasonable outcome of any independence negotiations, given both Scotland’s part-ownership of the bank and the simple realpolitik of the economics that would arise from the dissolution of the Union, but it’s clearly not a done deal and Sturgeon was careless to present it as one.

Nevertheless, that does nothing to obscure the inherent disingenuousness and dishonesty of the point Lamont has spent two FMQ sessions clumsily attempting to make. The fact is that Scotland has no form of representation now on the MPC, and (more crucially) as we noted two paragraphs above, the MPC has no duty to consider the impact of its policies on Scotland specifically – indeed, if anything it has the opposite responsibility. So even in the worst-case scenario of failing to secure any representation, Scotland would be no worse off independent than it is now.

Equally crucially, and more pertinently to what passes for Lamont’s argument, the same thing applies to the Treasury. In all situations, the duty of the UK government is to the whole UK, not to any individual region of it. Regardless of the nationality of a Chancellor Of The Exchequer, if faced with a decision where the interests of Scotland and those of the wider UK were to be somehow mutually exclusive, it is ALWAYS that Chancellor’s duty to decide in favour of the UK.

Once again, there is nothing evil or wrong about this. For as long as Scotland chooses to remain inside the Union, its national interests will and must rightly be subordinate to, and subsumed within, those of the UK. Lamont’s insistence that Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling or any future Scottish-born UK Chancellor would ever abdicate their responsibilites and act against the interests of the UK simply because they happened to be born in Scotland is insulting both to the men in question and to the intelligence of the nation. (It also borders on racist, but we’ll let that slide for now.)

By definition, then, Scotland CANNOT possibly have less influence over its monetary or fiscal policy should it become independent than it does within the UK, because it currently has – and must have – none at all. It is, not for the first time, embarrassing to watch Lamont peddle this fatuous, mendacious drivel on behalf of the ever-shrinking proportion of the Scottish people who still vote Labour. They deserve better.

Ed Miliband, the nation was famously told a while back, “gets” Scotland. The Labour leader has done his damnedest to prove that assertion wrong ever since, first telling Scots that they were simply a stepping stone in getting Labour back into power at Westminster – helping the Scottish party to its disastrous defeat in 2011 as a result – and then not being able to remember the names of the Scottish Labour leadership candidates, despite there only being three of them, a few months later.

(To be strictly fair to Miliband, he did also show some perceptive insight in April 2011, noting that “I think people are really focusing on this question: who do you want standing up for Scotland against the Conservative-led Government in London?” just before the Scottish electorate delivered their crushingly unequivocal answer.)

“Definitely not Red” Ed’s latest brainwave to win over the reluctant voters of Her Majesty’s Great Empire Of Britain (Northern Administrative Region) is to tell Scots it’s not just up to them to decide whether Scotland becomes independent or not. Doubtless inspired by a ComRes poll in today’s Independent showing just 30% of English and Welsh voters want Scotland to leave the Union (far fewer than most previous surveys), Miliband will today tell a London audience that England “must have its say”. What isn’t clear is what he actually meant by that.

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At least, that’s the impression you’d get from today’s Guardian. Not one but two pieces by Severin Carrell are both illustrated with pictures of the Deputy FM this morning – one in front of a Saltire for good measure – with very little justification to be found in the text below.

The first piece, which is prominently displayed on the front page of the Guardian website doesn’t even feature a quote from the Health Secretary – she gets just a single passing mention in the fourth paragraph – while the second at least does include a couple, but not until seven paragraphs in.

You can’t avoid pictures of Sturgeon whichever of the paper’s four articles on the outbreak you choose – every single one has her image on either the story or itself or the “related” column, sometimes doubled up. It’s clear that the reader is meant to associate the outbreak with Sturgeon, and while it’s a slightly more nuanced approach than Carrell has adopted previously, there’s no mistaking the intent, especially when it’s backed up by innuendo from reliable Labour rent-a-quotes:

The first case of Legionnaires’ Disease in Edinburgh was identified on Sunday, and the 16 cooling towers thought to be responsible were discovered and sterilised on Sunday night and Monday morning, despite the public holiday. We’re not sure how much more rapidly Lord Foulkes imagines the Scottish Government could have acted, but with the help of friendly media the subtle smear will seep out anyway. The Scotsman’s first “SNP accused” headline can surely only be hours away.

I was scurrying around in the WoS Archives this evening looking for something else, and I stumbled across this. It’s a piece from April 2000 for now-defunct games-industry trade paper CTW, in which I interviewed Andy Smith of Future Gamer, the email magazine that eventually evolved into GamesRadar.

Marvel through your tears, viewers at the eerily accurate foretelling of the state of games journalism that was about to unfold.

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The independence referendum is roughly two and a quarter years away. (Remember how recently it was two and a half? Time flies when you’re having fun.) But two things that could happen within the next three weeks could do more to decide it than a thousand embarrassing TV “debates” or multi-million pound campaigns. For those of you in the heretic camp, we apologise in advance, because to find out why we’re going to have to talk about football some more.

This week sees the announcement of the final 18-strong Team GB football squad for the Olympics. We’ve already looked at the potential implications of any Scot featuring in the selection, although to be frank with just 18 players to be chosen we’ll be surprised if any make it on merit anyway, never mind the politics of the situation.

The other thing happening this month, of course, will be the SFA Appellate Tribunal’s reassessment of the club’s punishment on charges of bringing the game into disrepute. Or at least, it might – according to the Herald, Rangers haven’t yet ruled out a further appeal to the Court of Session:

“Rangers welcomed the verdict that the SFA were not in a position to hand down a signing embargo but may yet appeal the decision to return the case to the Appellate Tribunal, believing the case should instead be judged by a panel at the first stage of the process.”

It is extremely difficult to overstate how much such a course of action would enrage FIFA, who are already furious that civil law courts have been involved in the case at all rather than purely sporting ones. Were the Ibrox club to be insane enough to engage the CoS a second time, the international body would be likely to impose savage sanctions on the SFA, which could very well include the banishment of the Scottish national side from competitions.

The phrase “90-minute patriots” was coined as a slight on Scottish people whose sense of national identity was restricted to the duration of football matches. Nonetheless, there are a great many such people. This month, Team GB and Rangers FC between them could set in motion a chain of events which will bring about the end of Scotland as a footballing nation. In our view, such a scenario would turn the polling figures for the referendum round overnight. We’ll be watching with interest.

There’s a famous scene in the first Indiana Jones film where our hero, faced with a swordsman performing an elaborate duelling ritual prior to an anticipated bout of formal combat, simply pulls out a gun and wearily shoots him. (Inspired, no doubt, by the legend of the Gordian Knot.) We’re feeling a bit like that this morning as we peer into the bewildering, constantly-shifting looking-glass that is the affairs of Rangers FC.

Either of yesterday’s events would have been enough to try to untangle by itself, but the two smashed head-on into each other and created a grisly heap of tortured, twisted, smoking metal that’d take half a Scottish fire brigade all day to separate into identifiable components, and with about the same chance of anyone walking away intact. But we’re so stupid we’re going to have a go by ourselves. Read on, if you dare.

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