Wings Over Scotland

Okay, we’ve steeled ourselves. We’re going back in. In this feature we’re going to attempt to pick out the few interesting snippets that could be gleaned from the abysmal shambles of last night’s referendum debate, because underneath all the juvenile squabbling and monkey applause there were a couple.

Don’t believe us? Put your foot through the telly after 20 minutes? Read on.

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The Scottish media’s response to Friday’s launch of the Yes Scotland campaign in an Edinburgh cinema has been, as you might expect, extensive and varied.

Some of the coverage was dismayingly predictable, some of it rather more surprising.

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If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you could be forgiven for thinking that the “positive case for the Union” was some sort of mythical beast, akin to the fabled unicorn. But that’s not quite the case. It did once exist, many moons ago, but has since become extinct – a victim of an ever-changing world where it was unable to compete and it couldn’t adapt to its new environment, thereby spelling its doom.

So just what was the positive case when it existed? Let’s find out.

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We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange this week with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green leader (sorry, “co-convenor”) Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the he-said-we-said in too much depth (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation took in the comradely and left-wing-solidarity-building, if somewhat distant from reality, assertion that “the Green Party make Salmond look like Thatcher“ before culminating in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, the obvious thing that might strike a passer-by would be that the Greens appear to be massively overplaying their hand from the off. They might claim their complaints are about a “democratic” process, but they speak for just 4% of the Scottish electorate, and even among those backing independence they’re a tiny (9%) minority. Democracy has spoken already, and it wasn’t for the policies of the Greens.

(Nor those of the Scottish Socialist Party, who have also offered the media a chance to portray division in the Yes camp over their policies that an independent Scotland must be a republic rather than a monarchy, and be outside of NATO – although the latter in fact remains SNP policy too anyway.)

Clearly, none of that means that they need to shut up and just go along with what the SNP says – the whole point of independence is to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here's some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you're a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

As lovers of a good stat-wade ourselves, we’re liking this terrific piece by Celtic Quick News detailing the amount of money that Rangers FC’s “financial doping” has cost the other Scottish Premier League clubs over the last decade-and-a-bit. We highly advise reading it all, but the headline is that the Ibrox side has effectively stolen a minimum of £49m, a statistically most-probable £69m and a maximum of £224m from the other 11 teams currently in the SPL, as well as further sums from teams since relegated.

For us, though, the most striking figures can be found in the detailed breakdowns, where you’ll notice certain figures crop up over and over again. The direct immediate cost (in lost SPL sponsorship and TV money) of relegation to the SFL Division 1, for example, can be seen to be £765,000.

But the real eye-opener comes if you look at the sums involved in dropping down one league place. We’ve mentioned it in previous pieces, but laid out in stark black-and-white numbers it shows just what a crooked deal the non-Old-Firm SPL chairmen lumbered their clubs with when, blinded by short-sighted greed, they collaborated with Rangers and Celtic in setting the league up as a cosy permanent duopoly:

Loss from finishing 2nd rather than 1st: £340,000
Loss from finishing 3rd rather than 2nd: £935,000
Loss from finishing 4th rather than 3rd: £170,000
Loss from finishing one place lower, 5th-11th: £85,000

Ouch. Were the premium for a 2nd-place finish to follow the pattern of the rest of the distribution, it would be just £255,000. Or put another way, the SPL is basically an agreement to give Rangers and Celtic £680,000 a year each, on top of the regular prize money, simply for being the Old Firm.

Since all but one SPL season has seen the two Glasgow clubs take the top two places, the league prize-money distribution alone has ensured that the other 10 clubs fall further and further behind every year, by roughly the amount needed to pay the salary of one international-class player.

(It comes out fractionally over £13,000 a week, a sum exceeded by only a couple of Rangers’ biggest stars before their in-administration pay cuts, which are about to end. It’s the same as the average wage for an English Premiership player at the mid-point of the period analysed by CQN.)

Over the 11 seasons of Rangers’ alleged EBT improprieties, that of course adds up to a complete international-class side, which the other SPL teams have in essence paid the wages for (with the additional millions brought in by annual Champions League participation providing the transfer fees), guaranteeing that Rangers continued to beat them, secure one of the two top spots and perpetuate the cycle.

(A grossly-unbalanced state of affairs which makes it all the more astonishing that Rangers STILL felt the need to cheat by robbing the taxpayer, and just about everyone else as well, in order to spend even more money.)

Remarkably, it seems from their comments to the media so far that most of the SPL chairmen will be minded to vote in favour of continuing this slow suicide, out of fear that the alternative could somehow be worse. We hope that New Rangers will at least have the courtesy to pay for the cranberry sauce.

We stumbled across this old quote from a Daily Record interview with Ed Miliband earlier while we were doing something else, and we hadn’t heard it before. It’s from just after he was elected Labour leader, and it struck as us a little odd. See if you agree.

“Asked if he planned to move Britain to the left, he said: “I think that those labels don’t help. That is not the way I would see my leadership. It is not about some lurch to the left, absolutely not. I am for the centre ground of politics but it is about defining where the centre ground is.”

Ed joked his famous Marxist intellectual dad Ralph Miliband would not recognise him as a left-winger.”“

If you’ve just found yourself thinking “If you don’t have any plans to move Britain to the left, then WHAT THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU DOING AS THE LEADER OF THE LABOUR PARTY, YOU SIMPERING NEO-TORY HALFWIT? WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THE LABOUR PARTY FOR IF IT’S NOT TO MOVE BRITAIN TO THE BLOODY LEFT?” then don’t panic, gentle viewer – you’re not alone. God help us all.

There can surely have been no real doubt that the SFA was going to (at least) uphold the ban on Rangers registering any new players for a year. Having just published a 63-page dossier setting out in meticulous and crushing detail the severity of the club’s crimes, the Association would have set some sort of world record for “All-Time Largest Rod For Your Own Back” had they then backed down on the punishment.

What occurs to us, though, is that the upholding of the ban makes it considerably more likely that a Newco Rangers (which has to be the only plausible future – a CVA is purest delusional fantasy) will be admitted directly to the SPL.

The league’s nightmare scenario is New Rangers winning the title in 2012/13, because then they really will be seen to have gotten away with everything. If the club is forced to field a team of old journeymen and fresh-faced teens that gets a lot less likely, and the gutless SPL chairmen will probably feel that the Ibrox side will be sufficiently humbled by a few seasons of mid-table finishes that their own clubs might just avert a disastrous boycott from angry fans, while still clinging onto the Sky Sports deal.

We’re not sure they’d be right in that assumption, but we suspect it’s one they might make anyway, and that tonight’s events will strengthen their belief in it. Time will tell.

We’ve noticed, and perhaps you have too, that things have been very quiet on the “positive case for the Union” front recently. (Partly, we suspect, because the constant hooting of nationalists over its continued absence was starting to become so loud and embarrassing that even the Unionist media couldn’t keep ignoring it.)

Ever since David Cameron visited Scotland in February and mumbled some vague platitudes about maybe getting more powers someday if we voted No in 2014, Unionists seem to have given up on even promising a “positive” case and have concentrated more doggedly than ever on the blood-curdling scare tactics that they’re much more familiar and comfortable with.

(Recent weeks have delivered a particularly fine crop, which can be concisely and accurately summed up by the sentence “Vote Yes and Scotland will be blown up by terrorists and bombed by England, then everyone left will die of cancer.”)

We’ve spotted a couple of stray mentions – neither of which, it probably goes without saying, go on to actually offer the positive case they cite – but nothing very significant:

“Although Unionists seem to find it difficult to articulate a positive argument for union, Scottish nationalists are not afflicted by the same inhibitions.”
(Colin Kidd, The Scotsman, 15 May 2012)

“It’s our job to drown out [Alex Salmond’s] separatist rhetoric with a positive case for keeping the Union intact.”
(Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Conservative Party chairman, 23 March 2012)

That was until today, however. Our regular bout of hope-over-expectation Googling threw up a site called “Free Advice For Unionists”, in which someone by the name of Rob Marrs who lays claim to no fewer than THREE nationalities (Scottish, English and British) boldly attempted to go where no Unionist had gone before.

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The sheer speed and barely-concealed enthusiasm with which Scottish Labour has reverted to its true neo-liberal type given even the slightest sniff of any kind of electoral success has been startling. Having gained a few dozen seats, almost all from the Lib Dems, in the council elections, the party has lurched back to the centre-right positions it occupied before the 2011 Holyrood parliamentary election, having abandoned several of them in the run-up to that vote in a desperate attempt to avert defeat.

We’ve already seen Johann Lamont doggedly refuse to oppose the renewal of Trident, and Glagow council leader Gordon Matheson prepare to backtrack on years of anti-sectarian progress by allowing the Orange Order to greatly increase its toxic presence on the city’s streets (a prime example of the Bain Principle at work, in the wake of the SNP’s controversial Offensive Behaviour At Football Act – if the SNP are taking steps to tackle sectarianism, Labour must take steps to encourage it, however insane that is or whatever their previous policy might have been).

And last week we saw a party whose 2011 manifesto opened with the dire warning “Now that the Tories are back” take every possible opportunity to jump into bed with the Tories in councils all over the country, giving the lie to the constantly-pushed official media narrative that the SNP and Labour are two near-identical centre-left social-democratic parties separated only by their disagreement over independence.

(Since the constitution is outwith the remit of councils, you might therefore imagine that Labour-SNP coalitions would be the norm all over the country, aimed at fighting savage Tory cuts together while Holyrood argues about the referendum, but Labour seems far more concerned with battling the nationalists rather than the right-wing Coalition and its increasingly discredited austerity programme.)

So perhaps nobody ought to be surprised that at the weekend Johann Lamont decided to test public opinion by suggesting that Scottish Labour – which is currently strangely at odds with the UK party on the subject – might once again abandon its opposition to university tuition fees.

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We don’t know if anyone still reads the BBC’s “Blether With Brian” column since the Corporation banned Scottish readers – uniquely in these islands – from posting comments on it, nor can we normally think of a reason why anyone would. It’s generally the blandest-possible summary of events people have already seen for themselves, with no effort to impart any sort of insight or analysis.

However, once in a while the understated approach yields a more profoundly powerful result than screeds of polemic, and we can think of no way to better illustrate the bizarreness of Johann Lamont’s chosen line of attack at yesterday’s First Minister’s Questions than to simply relate the events as they transpired, in the most neutral and factual manner, as the national broadcaster’s Scottish political editor does today.

“How to decide who has won an election? The customary method is to count the ballot papers – and to award victory to the one with the most votes. Now the Single Transferable Vote in multi-member constituencies adds a degree of sophistication to that. But, still, the spoils tend to go to those with evident popular support.

This, apparently, is an old-fashioned outlook. Just so Twentieth Century. At Holyrood, Labour’s Johann Lamont suggested another test might be used instead. The SNP, she said, might have won the council elections “on the arithmetic”. But “on the politics” they “got stuffed.”

It is difficult to be entirely certain, but I suspect that most political leaders would probably settle, on balance, for winning “on the arithmetic”.“

Stranger still was Brian’s citation of Fat Les in support of his assertion, but other than to wistfully dwell for a moment on our long-held dream of Scottish fans repurposing the song in question with the words “Irn Bru” replacing the title, we’ll let that one pass.

Alert readers may have noticed a certain undercurrent of cynicism about the Scottish political media in this blog on occasion. But now and again you have to put all sarcasm aside and take your hat off to a professional who bangs the nail straight in with one swing of the hammer. Today it’s Iain Macwhirter in the Herald, who thankfully seems to be returning to form after his Murdoch-inspired red mist of recent weeks.

“‘It’s the big question of separation,’ said the Stirling Labour group leader, Corrie McChord, when asked why he was unable to form a coalition with the SNP – a party which he accepted had almost identical social policies to Labour.

Now, I may be missing something here, but I wasn’t aware that Stirling Council was in danger of separating from the United Kingdom. Why the independence referendum should have had such a decisive bearing on who runs council refuse and leisure services in Stirling is not entirely clear. Perhaps Labour believe the Nats will put something in the water or plant separatist propaganda in the wheelie bins.

Whatever, it seems that Labour think they have more in common with the party that wants to privatise most council services than the party that wants to use them as a bulwark against the austerity plans of, er, the Conservative-led Coalition in Westminster.”

We couldn’t have put it better, or more concisely. As Labour chum up with the Tories across the country (Edinburgh looking like being the sole honourable exception), and the Glasgow party prepares (as widely rumoured by SNP supporters a couple of days beforehand) to set the Orange Order loose on the city’s streets in gratitude for their help, we can’t help but ask the hundreds of Labour activists whose efforts secured the party its better-than-expected result last week: “Is this what you worked so hard for?”