Wings Over Scotland

The man who seems to rapidly be becoming the de facto leader of the No campaign gave a fascinating interview on The Sunday Politics at the weekend. Increasingly flustered under persistent questioning from Isobel Fraser, Alastair Darling repeatedly asserted that the Union as it currently stands is a busted flush. But weirdly, time and again he demanded that the Scottish people bet everything on it anyway.

In our specially-commissioned illustration above, the Ace (quite naturally) represents independence. It’s normally the best card, but of course that rather depends what the other one is, and if you’ve ever played blackjack you’ll know that only an idiot would make their decision with only one of the cards showing. But for some unfathomable and inexplicable reason, we’re being asked to throw all our chips onto the table blind.

The former Chancellor was pretty unequivocal about his view of the present constitutional arrangements, and he claimed to speak for everyone else too:

“I don’t think that anybody would argue that the status quo, what we have at the moment, is satisfactory.” (35.04)

“The settlement reached in 1998 is not what we want at the moment, we need to move on from that.” (38.58)

That seems pretty clear, then. But bizarrely, this unsatisfactory state of affairs is what Darling wants the people of Scotland to vote for in the most important decision they’ll take in 300 years. Irrationally, Darling doesn’t want to improve the nature of the Union until AFTER people have decided whether they want to stay in it or not. Eh?

The MP for Edinburgh South West was very firm on the timing. Over and over, as Fraser pointed out the strangeness of the position, he stuck to the story – the Union is rubbish, but rather than fix it with better devolution over the next two and a half years and THEN ask people whether they want to stay in it or not, we should rush to a referendum much sooner (in 2013), vote No to independence, and then trust a Tory government in Westminster to hand Scotland more powers out of the goodness of its heart, now that we’d given up all possibility of leverage in any negotiations.

If this guy is the Union camp’s Great White Hope, we’re ordering bunting.

So was that it? The Unionist media is briefing hard that David Cameron finally laid out the fabled “positive case for the Union” in Edinburgh this week. You can judge the positivity or otherwise for yourself by reading the full text of his speech (which was far more delicately-judged than his previous clodhopping intervention, but still contained the traditional doom-laden warnings of “danger”, terrorist attack, banking collapse and so on) here, but whether the message was positive or not, the one thing it certainly wasn’t was a case for the Union.

Cameron listed a fairly impressive set of reasons why Scotland was great (even managing to cite Keir Hardie through what must have been gritted teeth). He explained why the past was great, because in it the UK had forged great institutions like the NHS (which is already an entirely separate and fully-devolved body in Scotland) and a “generous” welfare state – both of which his government is now dismantling as fast as it humanly (and inhumanly) can. And he hinted at a great future, in which Scotland would enjoy greater devolved powers and responsibilities.

The problem is, the referendum will be a straight choice not between independence and a possible imaginary Union of the future, but between independence and the Union we have now. (Cameron is unequivocal on this, insisting that his hypothetical vision of a more devolved Scotland within the United Kingdom isn’t actually offered to the Scottish people, but left entirely in the trust of Westminster.) And for THAT Union, Cameron made no case at all. Indeed, it could plausibly be argued that he all but explicitly abandoned it.

It’s hard to construct any sort of plausible justification for the Prime Minister’s refusal, when repeatedly challenged by journalists after the speech, to outline the specific devolution proposals which might be negotiated or acknowledge any need for a democratic mandate for them. Cameron has two years in which he could, if he wished, put together an “enhanced devolution” package which could go on the ballot paper. That’s plenty of time, especially given that the Unionist parties have already had a  two-year head start while working on the Calman Commission and Scotland Bill. So why is he so implacably opposed to the idea?

It seems unlikely that the Scottish electorate will fall for such a flimsy pig in a poke. They have, after all, been here before (as the SNP will be sure to constantly remind them), and the vague implied promises of some sort of possible jam tomorrow will carry no more weight for also coming from the hopelessly discredited mouths of Nick Clegg and Michael Moore. (And less still if Labour join in, should they somehow get so far as managing to develop a policy at all.)

David Cameron didn’t make the positive case for the Union on Thursday. He made a case for a positive version of the Union. It’s a version which exists only in abstract conceptual form and which the Prime Minister will neither describe nor commit himself to. (And indeed, one which he may be in no power to honour even if he wanted to, given that by the time the referendum is over a UK general election will loom a matter of months over the horizon.)

It is, in other words, a con trick – a honey trap, built with sugar-sweet words and little else. The Scottish people were badly stung 33 years ago. We suspect this time it’s Cameron who will come unstuck.

Scottish politics seems to be having a wee holiday this week. The First Minister has a little chat with the Scottish Secretary over the referendum, deciding nothing, the Unionists demand “answers” to questions on a completely different subject, Jim Sillars witters on about something or other in yet another bitter rage about how well the SNP’s doing without him, and the Scotsman quietly admits that some of its previous scare stories (this time the ones about Scottish membership of the EU) were cobblers and hopes nobody notices. In other words, business as usual.

The reason everyone’s putting out a skeleton service operating on auto-pilot is, of course, that they’re all transfixed with the goings-on at Ibrox. And rightly so, because it’s an enormous story which reaches out and touches the entire population in a way that politics almost never does.

For fans of Rangers, their entire world has fallen in. For fans of other clubs it’s either hilarious, or a time for rising above petty rivalries and showing solidarity with their fellow supporters, ie it’s secretly hilarious. For Rangers employees it’s a worry, for battered wives, social services and hard-pressed A&E staff it’s a blessing and for booze retailers it’s a catastrophe.

We also can’t ignore the possible political consequences. For decades Rangers FC has served as a weekly indoctrination service for the defenders of the Union – you can’t spend a large proportion of your leisure time waving Union Jacks and singing “Rule Britannia” with thousands of fellow loyal subjects of Her Majesty (she of the Revenue and Customs) without it having some sort of effect on your worldview.

But for the media, which for months on end has largely turned a blind eye to the scale of Rangers’ problems and left the blogosphere to pick up the slack, it’s a time of panic. If Rangers fall they’ll probably take half the circulation (and pagecount) of the Daily Record with them, and the tabloid media in general is desperate for the club to survive in something as close to its present form as possible.

So the story, told loudly and relentlessly, is that Scottish football couldn’t live by Celtic alone. Rangers, it’s insisted over and over, are vital to the continued health – nay, the very survival – of the domestic game.

Their friendly, loveable fans, we hear, are the lifeblood of every other club in the league as they turn up twice a season to swell the stands and consume the Scotch pies and Bovril that pay the wages of the home side’s gangly centre-half. The TV riches that pour into SPL coffers would vanish too, without the juicy prize of four Old Firm games a year to tempt Sky into opening their gold-plated chequebook. All in all, take Rangers away and you might as well padlock the turnstiles from Inverness Caley Thistle to Queen Of The South and call it a day.

But is it true? No. It’s a load of balls.

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This is Scottish Secretary Michael Moore in The Times (Saturday 11th February 2012, paywall link), in an interview widely interpreted as a pledge to move forward with greater devolution for Scotland should the country vote No to independence in 2014:

“The central point is to let Scotland decide whether it’s part of the part of the United Kingdom or not.  I’m confident it will say ‘we are’. Then we can work through the detail of what the next stages of devolution will be… The referendum is the start of the conversation, not the end.”

This, on the other hand, is Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, quoted by the Telegraph on the 22nd of December 2010 on the subject of the coalition government:

“Tuition fees [are] the biggest, ugliest, most horrific thing in all of this. I signed a pledge that promised not to do this. I’ve just done the worst crime a politician can commit, the reason most folk distrust us as a breed. I’ve had to break a pledge and very, very publicly, in what is a car crash, train wreck, whatever metaphor one wishes to put in terms of the politics of this, and it is deeply damaging to my party, to me individually and lots of others.”

Far be it from us to suggest that Mr Moore’s promises literally aren’t worth the paper they’re signed on. We don’t need to, because he’s just told you that himself. You’ll have to make your own mind up how far you trust him to deliver more powers to the Scottish Parliament if you decide to leave those powers in the hands of Westminster.

But when you’re doing that, be crystal clear on how things will stand in 2014 – a No vote is a vote for the status quo. Anything after that depends on the honesty of liars.

It’s nearly always nice to get a surprise, and a couple certainly came our way from the mainstream press and blogosphere today when two of the most diehard Unionists in the field had sudden rushes of blood to the head, threw off the reins and revealed what they really thought. First up was Kevin McKenna in the Observer, who in his frustration at his FUD comrades presenting Alex Salmond with an endless series of open goals let slip this, in contravention of the constantly-expounded party line:

“There is a growing sense in this country that we must be allowed to become the masters of our own destiny, for good or for ill, and free from any Westminster interference. This has been reflected by significant increases in support for independence, two-and-a-half years before the event, in every opinion poll since the die was cast last month.”

Kevin will be getting his wrists slapped by Unionist Central on Monday, we’re certain – the official policy is that support for independence is stalled at either a quarter or a third of the electorate, depending how hardline you are. Admitting that it’s on the rise at all – far less significantly so – will doubtless have Mr McKenna in hot water, but it pales beside the weekend’s other great “Whoops, did I say that out loud?” moment.

That appeared on the blog of Labour activist and media commentator Ian Smart, talking about his appearance on today’s Sunday Politics, and the cat he let out of the bag was one concerned with this blog’s favourite urban myth, the positive case for the Union. Because what Ian did was give away the poorly-kept secret that Johann Lamont, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, Willie Rennie, Michael Moore, Ruth Davidson and David Cameron and all the others are lying through their teeth when they constantly promise to make said case. Quoth Ian:

“There is no need to make a “positive case for the Union”. We know, for good or ill, what the Union entails. There is simply the need to make a case against “Independence”.”

We can’t exactly affect surprise at this revelation. After all, we’ve been tracking promises of the “positive case” ranging back 32 years, without a single actual sighting of it. But Smart’s unguarded moment is no less depressing for its confirmation, because it tells us that Labour plan a scorched-earth strategy for the independence debate. They will happily destroy Scotland to keep it in the Union, by running a campaign based on fear, distortion and outright lies with no thought for the state that will leave the country in after the referendum, whether the vote is Yes or No.

Two and a half years of unrelenting, poisonous negativity can only have a hideously toxic effect on the entire body politic of Scotland, because for a negative campaign to win it must catastrophically undermine the confidence of the Scottish people in their ability to run their own country successfully. (Because if you DO believe you can do that, why on Earth would you ever let the voters of another nation impose on you governments and ideologies you consistently reject?)

Bewilderingly, and infinitely depressingly, Smart believes that independence supporters want Unionists to campaign positively only as some sort of trick, that it’s a trap we’re luring our unwary opponents towards. But in fact it’s because whichever way Scotland votes in autumn 2014, we’d like to move forward as a nation that hasn’t been torn in two by years of vicious infighting, bitterness and dirty trickery.

We’re not at all sure we’d like to live in Ian Smart’s future Scotland even if it did vote for independence. Such a divided country – set implacably against itself like an Old Firm derby writ large, and crushed by an inferiority complex – would be a dark, benighted place. But maybe that grotesque vision is exactly what Smart and his Unionist allies want – to tell the Yes camp that even victory would be Pyrrhic, the winners inheriting nothing but ashes and ruins. For such a despicable worldview and strategy we hold nothing but contempt. But we’re glad to see that at least it’s finally out in the open.

First Minister's Questions is rarely a hugely edifying spectacle, but this blog could barely watch to the end of yesterday's proceedings. Labour's leader exhibited a heady mix of ignorance and xenophobia, while the FM's Conservative counterpart opted for a barely-believable combination of direct personal abuse (which could truthfully be paraphrased as "You're fat, ha ha!") and petty timewasting. If we tell you, dear readers, that Willie Rennie took on the role of the calm, intelligent voice of reason (with a dull but substantive question about freedom-of-information laws), you'll perhaps grasp the full degree to which the other two opposition leaders lost the plot.

It was one of the rowdiest FMQs in recent memory, with the Presiding Officer forced to repeatedly call for order, specifically warn Labour's Jackie Baillie to behave herself, and on one occasion even resort to a sharp bang of her gavel in order to silence the cacophanous hooting and jeering coming from – mostly – the opposition benches. The First Minister himself looked dismayed, surprised and somewhat ashamed at the picture of Scotland's political elite being portrayed to the world, and it would be hard for any impartial observer to disagree with his judgement.

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The Scottish independence campaign has been left reeling today, after two alert Wings Over Scotland readers brought our attention to the calamitous striking of a hammer blow that seems certain to all but guarantee a No vote in autumn 2014.

We don’t quite understand how persuading the English of anything is going to help, since they won’t have a vote in the referendum, but who are we to interfere in Unionist business? Rather more relevantly to the interests of this blog, the piece goes on to note that according to an unnamed “Scottish Tory spokesman”:

“We have to make a positive case for the Union.”

We couldn’t agree more. We are, as ever, all ears.

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TIME ELAPSED: 32 years, 0 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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Keen followers of the “is it or isn’t it?” debate surrounding the legality of an independence referendum conducted without “permission” from Westminster have had much to digest recently. The much-travelled Dr Matt Qvortrup wrote a piece for the Herald yesterday [paywall] averring that – if we might strip it down to its barest bones – the legal status was actually quite strong, but didn’t really matter anyway as political reality would trump boring, nitpicky old law.

Unsurprisingly, this enraged Lallands Peat Worrier, who took several of the good Doctor’s assertions as something akin to a professional slight and launched a stinging rebuke in uncharacteristically blunt and earthy terms. Meanwhile, the UK Constitutional Law Group (comprising a number of distinguished academics) published a paper more in keeping with the Peat Worrier’s usual loquacious style, thoughtfully analysing both the legalities and the political ramifications and concluding that everyone really needed to knock their heads together and deliver the requisite mechanisms to Holyrood with the least possible delay.

Support for this view came from the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, who offered the opinion [Herald paywall link] that Holyrood should be given the explicit legal right to conduct the referendum by the UK government without any strings attached. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly the organisation went even further in suggesting that the Electoral Commission would not – despite the strenuous and sustained demands of the Unionist parties – be the appropriate body to oversee the vote.

Finally, blogosphere newcomer the Scottish Times revealed that the Scottish Democratic Alliance (yep, a new one on us too) has asked the Council of Europe to step in and monitor the referendum, fearing interference from Westminster that would contravene the UN Charter on the right of peoples to self-determination.

Pressure from impartial quarters does seem to be building on the UK Government to confer a Section 30 order on Holyrood swiftly and without conditions, although as we saw with the blunt refusal last May to enhance the Scotland Bill with measures commanding cross-party support in Edinburgh, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll listen. But with the SNP having added 2000 new members in a single month since David Cameron’s initial intervention in the debate, perhaps they should.

The image below is a (slightly edited) graph (untouched original here) from The Poverty Site, an independent blog which monitors official UK government stats relating to poverty. It shows the gaps between the two richest and two poorest deciles of society, and covers almost the entire period of the last three Labour governments.

We haven’t amended the data in any way – all we’ve done to it is add a couple of shaded grey boxes to make it easier to judge the positions of the lines over time, and two thin vertical black lines immediately to the right of the vertical axis, again for ease of illustration. The line on the left shows the size of the gap when Labour came to power in 1997 (about 26%) and the one to its right shows the size of the gap in 2009, just before Labour lost the 2010 election (about 29.5%).

What that tells us is that under 13 years of UK Labour governments with thumping majorities, the size of the inequality gap between the richest and poorest grew by around 13% – or if you like, a steady 1% a year. (Luckily and famously, Labour were “intensely relaxed” about that.) So next time you’re thinking of voting Labour – or voting to remain in a Union where either they or the Tories will always form the government – because you want a more equal society, all we’re saying is, maybe bear it in mind.

Well, we had quite the fun time yesterday. Having revealed by virtue of our ace investigative-journalism skills that the Telegraph’s dear Alan Cochrane had something of a beam in his own eye when it came to attacking the First Minister for using the word “Gauleiter”, we were mildly surprised when the Telegraph – which normally has a pretty liberal comment-moderation policy, certainly when it comes to its readers hurling abuse at the Scots – experienced a sudden outbreak of censorship.

Comments on Mr Cochrane’s column – which rumour has it are moderated by Alan himself – referring to the mildly embarrassing hypocrisy started to disappear at a rate of knots. We counted over 22 comments either linking to or quoting our piece which vanished, before the moderator gave up as user after user simply kept re-posting them. The result – as tends to be the case when people try to suppress information on the internet – was the biggest single day’s traffic in Wings Over Scotland’s history. But over and above our daft wee comedy tussle with Mr Cochrane hovers the wider agenda.

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We were perhaps a little unfair on Alan Cochrane earlier today. After all, the core of his comment about Alex Salmond’s reaction to being banned from commenting on the Six Nations at the weekend:

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi. “
(Alan Cochrane, the Telegraph, 5 February 2012)

…is a fair point, strongly made. After all, what sort of thoughtless idiot would casually toss around a highly-charged, potentially-offensive word like “Gauleiter” in reference to an obviously petty and trivial matter?

“I am on the horns of a dilemma this weekend. I have been invited to a posh dinner in the Scottish Parliament later this week and there are to be pre-dinner drinks in the Members’ Bar at Holyrood.

Although I have accepted the dinner invite, I am somewhat constrained in accepting the one to the pre-prandial cocktails. The reason is that the Scottish Parliamentary Journalists’ Association, of which I have the honour to be a member, is boycotting the said watering hole. We have taken this principled – if unusual – stance because we have been offered only limited rights of access by that Gauleiter of Holyrood’s catering facilities, Labour MSP Duncan McNeil.”
(Alan Cochrane, Scotland On Sunday, 22 January 2006*)

Whoops! Still, you have to admit, if the First Minister has sunk to Alan Cochrane’s level, maybe he DOES need to stop and think for a minute about his comportment.

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Not that it’s unusual or surprising or anything, but sometimes it’s hard not to raise a smile at the lack of self-awareness and the sheer brass neck of it.

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi.” (dear old Alan Cochrane, frothing away furiously as usual in the Telegraph today)

The word “gauleiter”, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean a Nazi. According to Collins, it can also simply mean “a person in a position of petty or local authority who behaves in an overbearing authoritarian manner”, which is clearly the sense Alex Salmond used it in at the weekend – and perfectly appropriately, after ludicrously being banned from the BBC’s coverage of the Six Nations. But we were disappointed all the same to hear the FM – normally so careful with words – use a term which would so easily and so certainly be misrepresented by the Unionist media.

However, we’re not sure anybody writing for the Telegraph can be the one to lay any claim that particular moral high ground, as one of the paper’s alert readers pointed out.

“GERMANY HAS EVERY RIGHT TO IMPOSE A GAULEITER ON GREECE
I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with the general sense of outrage sparked by calls for an EU bureaucrat – or German gauleiter, as depicted in some quarters – to take control of the Greek economy.” (Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph, Jan 2012)

“I always love Ken’s attempts to blame Boris Johnson for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong in the world, from global warming to the death of Shergar. Now, game as ever, the old boy is trying to drag City Hall’s despised blond gauleiter into the News of the World hacking affair.” (Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph, July 2011)

“A section of Ms Britton’s interview concerned itself with how Blair took his church attendance incredibly seriously, how it re-energised him in office when he was exhausted, with his former Gauleiter and evidently still very current image masseur Alastair Campbell popping up to confirm Blair’s duty to his devotions. “ (George Pitcher, the Telegraph, Dec 2009)

Is the Telegraph saying Angela Merkel, Ken Livingstone and Alastair Campbell are all Nazis, then? (The last of those using the capital-G form of the word which Collins specifically notes as normally being used in the Nazi context. And yikes, the first one might conceivably be seen as just a little on the tactless side.) We think someone should investigate. Are you busy today, Mr Cochrane?

This is, of course, all an absolutely standard modus operandi for the Unionist camp – see also their propensity to bleat piously about being called names and “bullied“ by Nat supporters, while simultaneously likening Alex Salmond to a whole string of murderous, psychopathic dictators. We shouldn’t expect anything to change in the next two-and-a-half years: indeed, it’s likely to get a lot worse. But it’s always comforting to have their clumsy, overt hypocrisy laid bare in black and white.