Wings Over Scotland

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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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.

There are, we’re certain, some twists to come yet in the “Rangers” story. But while we’ve been able to pretty clearly identify and understand the motivations of all the concerned parties in events to date (and our assessments and predictions have accordingly almost always been bang on the money), we’ve finally run into a logical roadblock where we just can’t make sense of anything.

Because we can no longer for the life of us figure out what the SFA is playing at.

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We’re finding it hard to get worked up about the media’s latest shock-horror revelations with regard to the SNP’s policy on NATO membership. All that’s been proposed is that the party debates its position at its annual conference, and if a party’s members agree – or not – on an alteration to a policy then that’s what the party’s policy should be. It’s an exercise of the most fundamental principle of democracy, and we can’t even really be bothered pointing out the laughable hypocrisy of it being criticised by a party that refuses to tell us its policy on just about anything, including defence.

That said, we were still deeply dismayed by Angus Robertson’s performance on last night’s Newsnight Scotland. Highly-rated by most political commentators, Robertson may be a whiz at actually drawing up policy and strategy but he’s hopeless at presenting it. While SNP figures like Nicola Sturgeon, Stewart Hosie, John Swinney and the First Minister himself have provided a breath of fresh air with direct and honest answers in interviews since coming to power, Robertson seems stuck in the mindset of Westminster, and his needlessly vague, waffling and evasive responses to Isobel Fraser’s perfectly legitimate and not especially challenging questions were like stepping back in time a decade, or watching Johann Lamont now.

To be honest, we don’t really care whether an independent Scotland is in NATO or not, so long as nuclear weapons are removed permanently from Scottish waters. We struggle to see how it would affect the day-to-day life of Scottish people, and we’re not the least bit convinced it’s a matter of pressing importance to the average voter.  But what we DO regard as a danger for the SNP and by extension the independence movement is if it comes increasingly to be seen as just like all the discredited and widely-loathed Westminster parties, rather than the genuinely different alternative to the neoliberal consensus that it actually is.

Appearances like Robertson’s last night will damage the SNP far more than an entirely reasonable debate about policy at conference, which is after all the very thing party conferences are supposed to be for. We hope someone takes him aside and points out that if we wanted useless Westminster politicians, we could just stay in the Union.

Charles Green’s new football club, currently registered under the name Sevco Scotland Ltd, is scheduled to play its first ever competitive game on July 28th, away to Brechin City in the Ramsden’s Cup. Three days after that, on July 31st, a meeting of the shareholders of Rangers Football Club PLC is due to take place.

The purpose of the meeting is to change the name of said Rangers Football Club PLC (the old about-to-be-liquidated Rangers) to RFC2012, in order that Sevco Scotland can then legally be renamed “The Rangers Football Club Limited”. (That name being too similar to that of the old Rangers for the two to be allowed to exist simultaneously.)

An interesting question therefore arises: What will be the name of the team that takes the field against Brechin on the 28th?

It can’t be “Rangers”. It has to be called something. What will it be?

We’re deeply flattered to be described as both a “key website” and part of “a renaissance in Scottish media” by the Guardian today, and to be mentioned in the same breath as such esteemed and high-quality entities as the Orwell Prize-winning Rangers Tax Case blog, the vibrant all-club news site/forum Pie And Bovril, the forensic and authoritative Random Thoughts Re Scots Law and more.

So we hope you’ll bear with us as we embark on what should be one of the very last few posts on the Rangers Fiasco. Events may overtake us as we write this, with the SPL meeting going on as we speak, but for the record we’ve rubbished the idea of an SPL2 being in any way feasible before and we absolutely don’t expect anything to have changed in that regard by the time we get to the end of this feature.

As things stand, and as we expect them to continue to stand for at least the next 24 hours, a football club of some sort and some name, owned by Sevco Scotland Ltd, will play in Division 3 of the Scottish Football League this coming season. More than that, though, it’s really not possible to say.

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This is a version of a piece I originally wrote for my personal blog way back in April 2011. Scottish Vote Compass no longer appears to be live, but the data is still extremely pertinent, as Labour continue to propagate the lie that left-of-centre social democrats can realise their goals by voting No to independence and electing Labour into power at Westminster.

It was called the “me-too” election. The Scottish media was (and still is) full of the widely-repeated wisdom that three of the four main parties contesting Holyrood seats (the other being the Tories, who nobody votes for in Scotland anyway) have triangulated (ie stolen each other’s policies) to such an extent that there’s almost nothing left to choose between them on ideology, and elections are now just a personality contest. But is it true?

Labour politicians and activists are fond of labelling the SNP with the tag “Tartan Tories“. This is because Labour’s primary strategy in most Scottish elections (whether for Westminster or Holyrood) is to paint themselves as the ideological opposite of the Conservatives, and therefore Scotland’s best protection against them.

It’s a message that plays well in Labour’s heartlands in and around Glasgow, because the Scottish electorate still has a visceral hatred of the Tories – especially if it’s framed around memories of Margaret Thatcher, a figure of near-mythical dread and evil in Scotland even though over 20 years have passed since she last held political office.

But even Labour’s most fervent supporters in the media grew tired of the party’s attempts to keep fighting decades-old battles, amid signs that the Scottish voters want the Scottish Government to decide what happens in Scotland rather than have them be used as an ineffectual stick to beat the Westminster coalition with.

Despite all the coverage about the SNP and Labour having near-identical policies (after the latter experienced sudden road-to-Damascus U-turns on long-standing policies about freezing the council tax and university funding), though, nobody seems to have done any actual research on whether it’s true or not – and if it isn’t, who’s actually closest to who. As ever, then, it was left to Wings over Scotland to apply some journalistic skills and discover the reality.

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After a seemingly endless “phoney war“, we’ve now reached the point where both teams for the 2014 independence referendum have ended their pre-season training and taken to the field for real. The “Yes” campaign saw the launch of the Yes Scotland in a cinema in Edinburgh, with readings from politicians and celebrities, music, the affirmation of goals and the rolling out of a new independence declaration.

Yes Scotland set an ambitious target of 1 million signatures to the declaration, and backed up the document with stirring calls to action from the likes of former Labour MP and independent MSP Dennis Canavan, Patrick Harvie of the Scottish Green Party, Alex Salmond of the SNP and the always-brilliant Hollywood actor Brian Cox – a man who was proud to support Labour at the start of the Blair project but subsequently became disillusioned and convinced of the merits of independence as a means to improve the chances of achieving what were once traditional Labour goals.

The Yes Scotland site argues that the core reasons for independence are good governance, an end to nuclear weapons on the Clyde, the divergence in cultures and attitudes between the rest of the UK and Scotland (reflected by Scotland’s consistent rejection of the Tories), the maintenance of the social contract, control over our own resources to secure the best returns, and the maintenance of health and education as cornerstones of our society rather than generators of private profit.

By explicitly targetting specific groups like women, “New Scots”, young Scots, businesspeople and creatives for independence, the Yes campaign’s website seeks to provide an all-encompassing platform of civic nationalism focused on inclusiveness and positivity. In contrast, while the “Better Together” hub pays lip service to those two ideals, the essence of its approach is entirely different.

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A possible watershed: Annan Athletic have declared their opposition to admitting Sevco Scotland FC (change of name pending) to Division 1 of the Scottish Football League. By our calculations, that means that the Charles Green-owned company can NOT now obtain the 15 votes it needs to secure admission – 14 clubs are opposed, two have declared in favour, two are abstaining and 12 have not made their position known, leaving Sevco with a maximum of 14 votes.

Much water remains to pass under the bridge before Friday’s meeting, of course. The SFA, SPL and SFL might yet pull some desperate new trick with the rulebook, or increase their bribes to the lower-league clubs enough to turn some heads. But at the present moment in time, Sevco FC will be playing – at best – in SFL3 next season.

We’re a bit bemused by a story reported in the Herald this morning, which makes a fairly dramatic headline claim:

“Scottish voters are turning strongly against independence, according to the latest opinion poll, which shows the cross-party No camp charging ahead with a record 20-point lead.

The snapshot by TNS BMRB – taken after both campaign launches – puts those against independence on 50% and those in favour on 30%; the latter figure being the lowest received for independence in five years of surveys by the Edinburgh-based pollster.”

We were even more bemused when we went to the TNS BMRB site to examine the details and found no mention of it. Now, we’re sure the Herald hasn’t just made it up and that it’ll appear shortly, but the odd thing was that we DID find mention of some other polling by the same company on the subject, conducted just two weeks ago.

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We should be grateful for the ongoing Rangers circus. With both the Scottish and UK Parliaments now off on their summer recesses, we’re entering what newspapers traditionally call the “silly season”, where there’s little for political reporters to cover and they’re reduced to fabricating copy out of nothing to fill their sections.

Even so, the Herald’s front-page splash today is a bit desperate. Watch in amazement as the dramatic headline (“Cameron under pressure to stage vote on independence“) crumbles to pieces before your very eyes in the space of a few short sentences:

Frustration is growing in Whitehall that Alex Salmond is “dragging his feet” on sorting out key issues surrounding the 2014 poll, most notably on whether there should be one or two questions.

To be able to deliver the SNP Government’s preferred time-table, it is thought there is just a matter of months to pin down the technical details of the referendum. By next spring, if agreement has not been reached, then the Prime Minister faces a major political dilemma.

Asked if he might have to decide Westminster will legislate to hold an independence referendum in Scotland, a senior Coalition source told The Herald: “Potentially, this is a scenario he may have to face.””

So let’s break that down. “A few months” in fact means “almost a year”, while “Cameron under pressure” actually translates into “POTENTIALLY, Cameron MAY come under pressure, at some point in the fairly distant future, IF the Scottish Government’s consultation process hasn’t resolved itself in a manner everyone can live with, and IF Cameron then decides to commit electoral suicide by imposing a London-run referendum on Scotland”. Well, hold the front page.

We’re reminded of a popular Scottish phrase regarding the addition of certain physical appendages to the person of one’s grandmother in order that she might be denoted one’s grandfather. We commend the Herald on their powers of invention in a lean news period, and will now get back to our piece on what the constitutional implications will be if Michael Moore is unexpectedly revealed to be a Nazi from the moon.

It’s becoming impossible to keep track of all the lies, disinformation, smoke and mirrors surrounding the Rangers fiasco at the moment. We’ll try to update this page with at least the more egregious ones as they arise. Let’s get started.

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