Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish media is predictably excited about Gordon Brown’s latest intervention in the independence debate. Giving a speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Kirkcaldy MP who’s barely turned up in Parliament to represent his constituents in the two-and-a-quarter years since being deposed as Prime Minister abandoned any pretence at a positive case for the Union and presented a doom-laden picture of a future Scotland slashing pensions, welfare and defence while increasing taxes.

The No camp’s united policy on the Scottish constitution, in so far as one can be ascertained at all, is that the Scottish people should reject independence and then rely on Westminster to give Holyrood more powers, though the campaign steadfastly resists any clarification on what those powers might be.

But the remarkable and eye-opening thing about the former PM’s dire vision regarding pensions, welfare, defence and taxation was that it professed – despite the Scotsman’s clumsily inaccurate headline and confused and contradictory text – to describe a future Scotland not under independence, but so-called “devo-max”.

So if we take Brown as an authoritative spokesman on Scottish Labour policy – and it seems eminently reasonable to do so – we can safely assume that the only other party with even a chance of power in either Holyrood or Westminster has no intention of devolving anything substantial to Scotland any time soon. The petty tinkering of the Calman Commission/Scotland Act does indeed appear to be the limit of devolutionary ambition. And if you think about it, it’s hard to see how it could be any other way.

Read the rest of this entry →

We noticed the image below doing the rounds on Twitter this morning, and were mildly surprised to trace it back to the official “Better Together” campaign account. Alert readers will already have noticed us satirically characterising it (in a tweet) as a claim that all but one of Scotland’s medal-winners at London 2012 were actually English, but in fact it’s something a little bit stranger than that.

Because what the image actually says is “Hey, Scotch people! Under successive UK governments you’ve suffered such chronic underinvestment in your sporting facilities that every talented athlete in Scotland has had to travel hundreds of miles from their home, leaving their families and friends behind, in order to get adequate training!”

We’re not sure that’s quite the red-hot selling point for the Union they think it is.

What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Prince Charles:

“This is a scandal and an anachronism. The idea that the Prince has a right to be consulted on legislation which might impact on his interests belongs to a bygone era.” (Daily Mail, March 2012)

What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Ian Davidson MP:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.” (Newsnight Scotland, August 2012)

Something’s not quite the same, but we can’t put our finger on it. Can anyone help?

There’s currently some dispute between the Scottish and UK Parliaments over who should ultimately determine the nature and details of the independence referendum currently scheduled for autumn 2014. The Scottish Government is adamant that the referendum must be run by Holyrood, the only place where a mandate for the vote exists. The Scottish Affairs Select Committee at Westminster, on the other hand, is vehemently proclaiming its own rights, as expressed by the committee’s chairman Ian Davidson MP on Newsnight Scotland earlier this week:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.”

There are arguments to be made, constitutionally speaking, for both viewpoints. Legal experts are divided on their interpretations of relevant law, and it seems unlikely that a definitive judicial consensus could be reached without legislation being brought forward and then challenged in court, a time-consuming and expensive process which could bog the referendum down for years.

How, then, might we break the deadlock? Well, a fundamental principle of law is that the arbiters of a decision should where possible not stand to gain personally from any particular outcome of it. And as it happens, one side in this particular dispute is operating under a vested interest that’s just about as big as they get.

Read the rest of this entry →

Strap yourselves in, readers. And scatter some cushions around your chair, because there’s a pretty good chance you’re about to fall off it. Not in surprise, though, because as we predicted yesterday the Scottish media has imposed a near-blanket ban on reporting Labour MP and Scottish Affairs Select Committee chairman Ian Davidson’s astonishing meltdown on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight Scotland.

The Herald buried a small neutral piece on it yesterday afternoon in an obscure corner of its website, with no bylines and no quotes from any of the parties (in either sense of the word) concerned. Interestingly the exact same story appears word-for-word in the Daily Record, still without attribution, but that’s it for news coverage.

On the BBC website there’s not a peep, even in the Scotland Politics section, despite the direct and savage attack on the Corporation’s prized impartiality. (Political editor Brian Taylor hasn’t graced the site with a blog in six weeks.) Over at the Guardian, the paper’s fearless Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell – normally so keen to cover media matters – felt a five-minute fuss over an advertising poster at Edinburgh Airport was the big Scottish story of the day. And so on.

The Twittersphere was also strangely quiet, or at least the Union-friendly side of it was. Tom Gordon of the Herald and Eddie Barnes of the Scotsman both tried to play the story down as a storm in a teacup (here’s a fun game to play: imagine the Scottish media reaction if Stewart Hosie or Alex Neil had done the same thing, especially during the political slow news season), and every normally-prolific Scottish Labour activist adopted a policy of total radio silence on the subject.

Only Angus Macleod of the Times went public to suggest that Johann Lamont should discipline Davidson for his “bonkers” outburst, while Al Jazeera reporter (and former Scottish Labour senior media adviser) Andrew McFadyen called the performance a “bad misjudgement” directed at “one of the best broadcasters in Scotland”, while noting that the point of politicians giving interviews to TV news programmes is supposed to be “to win people over, not put them off”.

We were just about to congratulate ourselves on our powers of insight when we noticed a link hidden right down at the bottom of the Scotsman’s politics section. “Michael Kelly: Showdown has put BBC objectivity to the test”, it said. We went and made ourselves a drink. “This should be good”, we thought. We weren’t disappointed.

Read the rest of this entry →

When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

Read the rest of this entry →

We must confess to rarely finding ourselves either surprised or impressed by the Scotsman. Today, though, is one of those days. The staunchly Unionist paper’s leader column features a detailed assessment of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee’s latest pronouncements on the independence referendum, and it’s a damning one.

Under the headline “Law derives authority only from the people it serves”, the piece basically reprises this site’s feature from last weekend on sovereignty, and dismisses the report’s findings as in essence an irrelevant technicality, lecturing that “it is clear the committee has fundamentally misunderstood the way modern democracy works”.

The column’s appraisal of the political reality is unambiguous:

“The law only derives its authority from the people it is there to serve. No court, in Scotland or the United Kingdom, whatever its formal powers under law, can flout the will of the people. No court can say to the Scots: “This far and no further”. The select committee might like to ponder on this before attempting to fix the boundary of the march of the nation by putting spurious legal impediments in the way of the people determining their future.”

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic statement this is. Accusing the report of relying on biased “experts” for its conclusions, the editorial is a humiliating slap-down to Ian Davidson and the other members of his committee, which is left looking petty, partisan, arrogant and foolish even in the eyes of its own supporters. It also represents a direct and unequivocal assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, over the Westminster parliament the committee is a mouthpiece for.

We can only speculate as to whether the column is motivated by a genuine belief in that principle or by a realisation of the tactical blunder the Unionist parties have made, but either way it’s a remarkable development. We wouldn’t want to be in Mr Davidson’s shoes right now. One of his most steadfast allies has just given him a doing.

We think it’s quite cute that the Scottish Affairs Committee still imagines it can get away with presenting itself as a neutral arbiter when releasing the findings of an investigation with the pejorative title “The Referendum on Separation for Scotland”.

We also can’t help but admire the determination of the Unionist parties who stood in both Westminster and Holyrood elections on a platform of implacable opposition to any referendum taking place at all, in asserting that they nevertheless have the right to dictate the terms of such a vote after the Scottish electorate overwhelmingly elected the only party promising one.

What we don’t understand is quite what they’re trying to achieve.

Read the rest of this entry →

After we wrote this morning’s piece on party membership figures, we thought it might be interesting to look into what we’d initially intended as a throwaway last-line joke. Disturbingly, what we found out was that even in a society so tightly regulated that you can be fined thousands of pounds for using the word “summer” in the wrong place or threatened with imprisonment for making rude comments on Twitter, it’s apparently completely legal for our politicians to tell us outright lies.

We’re not talking about matters of opinion or interpretation or spin here. We mean that as far as we can establish, our politicians can openly lie to us about empirical, measurable facts, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.

The thing that sparked our inquiry was Scottish Labour’s assertion on its Twitter page that it’s “Scotland’s largest political party”.

Now, as far as we can make out, that statement isn’t true in any meaningful sense whatsoever. In so far as it’s possible to establish, Scottish Labour has thousands fewer members than the SNP, collected 300,000 fewer votes in the last Scottish election, has fewer MSPs and fewer councillors than the SNP, and generates much less money. But that’s not really the point.

One reader suggested to us that the basis for the party’s claim is that it has more elected representatives than any other if you include Westminster MPs as well as Holyrood ones. While it’s stretching grammar to its breaking point to suggest that that constitutes being the “largest political party” in any sense that an average person would interpret the term, we can see how there’s just about a semantic defence.

But the point is that even if there wasn’t, there isn’t anything we could do about it.

Read the rest of this entry →

After several weeks asleep, the Scottish political scene has stirred itself into a bit of life today with several interesting bits of news. The one that most caught our eye was a piece by Michael Crick for his Channel 4 blog, which noted the catastrophic collapse in Lib Dem party membership numbers – down an eyewatering 25% in a single year since entering a coalition government with the Tories.

The post is chiefly concerned with UK party membership, pointing out that Labour had gained all of 39 members in the same period (despite Harriet Harman putting the figure at a slightly more impressive 65,000) and also noting that the Tories didn’t release any UK membership stats. Buried away in the second-to-last paragraph, however, is the fact that SNP membership grew by a hefty 24% over the same 12 months, and has apparently jumped a further 16% in the first half of 2012 to stand at 23,376. That’s a massive 44% increase in 18 months.

(On current trajectories, the SNP will overtake the UK-wide Lib Dems well before the next UK election, and indeed before the independence referendum.)

Scottish Labour, meanwhile, are inexplicably shy of revealing their membership, and have been for some time. A couple of years ago the Caledonian Mercury looked into some odd discrepancies in their stats, and concluded that while Labour were claiming to have 20,000 members in Scotland, some extremely creative counting meant that the real number was likely to be much closer to half that.

In any event, it seems certain that the SNP has now overtaken even Labour’s wildest and most Stalinist estimates of its own membership in Scotland, which means that we won’t be hearing any official figures from Labour any time soon. We can’t blame them for that – we’d want to hide the fact that our main rivals were now twice our size too. But given that Scottish Labour still claims to be “Scotland’s largest political party” (and also claims on its website to have a “growing membership”), perhaps there might be a case for the Advertising Standards Authority to investigate.

A recent YouGov survey for the Fabian Society has made a few headlines this week, and justfiably so because it’s rather more interesting than the usual ones we get. It covers a wide range of topics, with a particular focus on Labour, resulting in an entertaining but ultimately not very useful headline in the Scotsman. (Though if the poll had asked respondents to select characteristics for the other parties too, our guess is that the SNP would still have come out on top.)

Other places have chosen instead to highlight the outcome of a curiously-worded question about independence, showing a 54-30 lead for the No campaign with 16% still undecided, while Lallands Peat Worrier breaks down some of the demographics to his usual fascinating effect. But it’s a derivative of one of those breakdowns that produces an intriguing result.

Read the rest of this entry →

After the huge fuss that was made in the media about Scottish and Welsh football players not singing “God Save The Queen” during their opening games at the Olympics, we were a bit surprised to find nobody mentioning the issue after their second matches. Even a Twitter enquiry unusually failed to produce a single person who knew if they had or not, and we eventually had to go and watch the recording of Great Britain vs the United Arab Emirates on iPlayer to find out.

As it turned out, the five Welsh players in the starting 11 had stayed resolutely silent while their English comrades on the field and in the technical area all strenuously implored God to intervene in the fate of the monarch. “Again the Welsh boys in the side chose not to sing the anthem, it’s not the national anthem of Wales of course”, said the BBC’s commentator Jonathan Pearce, having seemingly failed to notice that Wales was not one of the countries taking part in the competition.

Read the rest of this entry →