Wings Over Scotland

Well, the Prime Minister dropped the hint on the Andrew Marr show, now the Guardian has dropped the bomb – the UK government wants to force the Scottish Government's hand on the timing of an independence referendum, offering the chance to make the referendum "binding", but only if it's held in the next 18 months. It's a dramatic development for sure, but the briefest of glances below the surface suggests that perhaps it's not the apocalypse a lot of pundits on both sides of the debate are presenting it as, for some pretty obvious reasons.

1. It is, so far as we're told, still just an offer. If Salmond says "No thanks, we'll do it in 2015 like we were going to anyway", what will Cameron do? Refuse to accept the result when it comes? Send in the tanks to prevent Scotland leaving if it votes Yes to independence? The idea is ludicrous. Wendy Alexander tried to rush the SNP into a referendum in 2008 and failed, there's no reason to imagine Cameron will have any more success.

2. It's an offer that isn't actually in Cameron's power to offer. ALL referenda in the UK are consultative, not binding. Even if Westminster ran its own referendum it wouldn't be legally binding, so it can't confer that ability on any other authority.

3. The two parties of the coalition both stood on an election platform of opposing a referendum on Scottish independence. They have no mandate whatsoever to bring one forward on behalf of the British people, let alone the Scottish people. (Between them they command a miserable 20% support in Scotland.) The electorate, on the other hand, voted overwhelmingly to give the SNP the power to conduct one whenever it chose.

4. It's a clear show of weakness and fright from the pro-Union camp. Why such a short timespan? What are they scared of? If they were confident that Scots didn't want independence it wouldn't matter when the poll was held. All it will do is fuel the SNP's conviction – and very probably the public perception – that opinion is travelling in the direction of independence, and that they can win the vote on their own terms and in their own time.

All this clumsy intervention is likely to achieve is to anger Scots who don't want to be told by an Eton millionaire how to run their affairs. We're not sure what Cameron's on, but after watching this evening's episode of Sherlock we suspect he might have been strolling in Dewar's Hollow. The name would certainly be appropriate.

Nick Clegg's been upsetting people this week. Now, you might reasonably retort that there was nothing unusual about that, especially in a week when newspaper headlines suggested that the Lib Dems were down to a single voter. But the unusual thing on this occasion is that he's upset people by telling the truth.

Much of the Scottish political village was up in arms about comments the Deputy Prime Minister made in an interview with the Scotsman, which the paper chose to present as Clegg calling supporters of Scottish independence "extremists". The story set various camps off into various types of huff. Liberal Democrats, for example, were angry both at the comments and at the Scotsman – which they accused of "misreporting" Clegg on the grounds that he hadn't actually used the word "extremists" – while some nationalists were predictably outraged at the perceived slur.

But these complaints are wrong on every level. Firstly and most obviously, Clegg DID use the word "extremists" – you can see it in paragraph 8 of the Scotsman piece, where the paper quotes him thusly:

"All the evidence suggests that [greater devolution] is the mainstream of opinion and the extremists are those who either think that we need to yank Scotland out of the United Kingdom tomorrow, or those who say there should be no further change at all."

This statement is, in itself, entirely accurate. When it comes to the constitution, independence and the status quo are the extremes of opinion (discounting the real lunatic fringe who want Holyrood closed down altogether). But even where more sober commentators recognised this fact, they misleadingly left out the last part of Clegg's quote, giving the false impression – just as the Scotsman had done – that he'd only applied it the nationalist camp, when in fact he'd explicitly labelled the supporters of the status quo in the same way.

And, indeed, himself. Because while the Deputy PM was clearly attempting to isolate Labour and the Tories and carve out the popular middle ground for his own party as it embarks on yet another consultation on "Home Rule" (despite the Calman Commission, whose findings the Lib Dems backed, having barely closed its doors), the fact of the matter is that whenever the referendum arrives, the Lib Dems will by default be campaigning for the status quo too, making them just as extremist as everyone else. And despite all the faux-shock, that's something that everyone already knew long before Clegg opened his mouth.

There is absolutely no chance that the latest Lib Dem talking shop will produce a devo-plus proposal to be included in the referendum. Even if they wanted to they'd never get such a thing approved by their UK coalition partners (and unlike independence, any altered devolution settlement requires the consent of the Westminster parliament), and they don't want to anyway – the Scottish Lib Dems have been absolutely unequivocal, along with the other opposition parties, in demanding a one-question Yes or No referendum. And the likelihood of the Lib Dems being in power on either side of the border by then, and therefore in a position to negotiate or grant any further devolution at a later date anyway, is pretty much zero.

So when it comes down to it in 2015 or 2016, by Nick Clegg's definition everyone will be an extremist. Only the two extreme positions will be on offer, and the voters will have to pick one or the other. This blog, for one, commends Nick Clegg on stating that simple and obvious fact, and isn't quite sure why anyone else would be offended by it.

We're a bit confused today, and the only people who can assist us are Labour supporters. In the interests of frank and informed debate over the coming year, we've been trying to work out exactly where Labour stands on the independence referendum. So far as we can tell, Labour's position over the last five years has been as follows:

4th May 2007 to 3rd May 2008:
There should be no referendum.

4th May 2008 to 6th May 2008:
We should have a referendum immediately.

7th May 2008:
There should definitely be no referendum now – we must wait for the Calman Commission to deliver its report on devolution in a year's time.

8th May 2008 to 14th May 2008:
We must have a referendum immediately, in order to end uncertainty.

13th May 2008 to 30th August 2009:
There should definitely be no referendum.

31st August 2009 to 30th April 2011:
There can be a referendum, but definitely not now, and not until the economy has recovered and is in sustained and steady growth.

1st May 2011 to 6th May 2011:
Definitely no referendum, not even if it's held very early in the new Parliament to end uncertainty and help the economy recover*.

7th May 2011 to present day (we think):
There must be an early referendum, even though the economy is stagnant and heading back into recession.

Labour types: are we up to speed now, or did something happen this afternoon?

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Wings Over Scotland continues to regret the Scotsman's failure to provide a viable link to the commentary of former Glasgow Lord Provost, Michael Kelly. The veteran Old Labour stalwart's columns rarely fail to provide a chuckle, and today's is a peach.

Kelly is no stranger to the barking mad, particularly where the SNP is concerned, but his latest column makes an extraordinary assertion even by his standards.

"By bringing down the Callaghan government in 1979, the SNP forced a general election at the time most propitious to the Tories, and thereafter they ruled the UK for the next 18 years. This was not a mistake. The SNP calculated that by allowing the Tories to inflict maximum damage on Scotland they could portray themselves as saviours."

That's right, folks – the SNP quite deliberately installed the Tories in power for two decades, apparently able to accurately foresee that a subsequent Labour administration would create Scottish devolution (a strategy, let's remember, that was designed by Labour to "kill nationalism stone dead"), then handle it so badly that the SNP would be able to form a minority administration eight years later, then oppose that administration so spectacularly ineptly that the SNP would win a majority at the next election and finally be able to hold a referendum on independence.

(With such an incredible vision stretching 32 years into the future, you have to wonder why the SNP didn't also back every Grand National winner in the intervening time and have a lot more money than it does now.)

But we shouldn't be too unkind to poor Dr Kelly, an elderly man who appears to be suffering from the early stages of dementia. Later in the piece he attacks the SNP's scandalous intent to determine the Scottish Parliament's legislative schedule, on the tissue-thin basis that it runs the Scottish Govermnent. Barely controlling his rage, Kelly accuses Alex Salmond of

"trying his best to fix both the timing and wording of the referendum question – the former on the grounds that he promised it would be held late in this parliament: a promise for which there is as little evidence as for a dragon’s fiery breath."

We're not sure how many dragons Dr Kelly sees in the average day around Parkhead, but evidence of Salmond's promise on the referendum timing is rather easier to come by. A quick Google initially produces this Telegraph article, which quotes the First Minister saying during a BBC leaders' debate on May 1st that economic concerns would take priority and push the referendum bill "into the second half of this Parliament", gleefully reporting the statement as a "massive retreat".

(The Telegraph piece also quotes the then Lib Dem leader Tavish Scott making the case for not bothering with a referendum at all, which he'd go on to repeat on an STV debate a couple of days later, saying "If you want independence you can vote for it on Thursday". He had in fact made the exhortation several times on the BBC debate, going so far as to say "This election is about independence, if people want it they can vote for the SNP". Oddly, neither Scott nor the rest of the Lib Dems have since been heard describing the election result as a vote for independence.)

Should the former Provost not wish to take the Telegraph's word for it, the relevant part of the debate can be seen and heard on the BBC website. Now, about those dragons.

I'm often struck by the ability of the Unionist parties to switch their narrative back and forward on the hoof. They showed not the slightest shame or equivocation, for example, in the way they flipped overnight on the 6th of May 2011 from saying that there should never be a referendum on independence, particularly at times of economic crisis, to the emphatic insistence that there must not only be such a referendum, but that it must happen immediately. Labour opposed the Council Tax freeze and supported tuition fees, only to wake up one morning last spring and decide to swap those principles over, instantly campaigning for the new reversed positions as if they were lifelong principles.

But today's reaction to the news that Scotland's economic output almost precisely mirrors that of the UK as a whole, and is in fact the second most-productive region of the country after the South-East of England, provides us with a particularly good example. Having spent most of the last seven months doggedly trotting out the "too wee, too poor, too stupid" line and urging Scots to stick with their benevolent Southern neighbours without whose financial assistance an independent Scotland would be an economic basket case, suddenly the fact that the Scots more than pull their weight is evidence that the Union is working for us.

It's an odd spin on the figures. For one thing, these numbers are merely relative – the fact that Scotland is doing as well as the UK isn't in itself saying much, as the UK is currently one of the world's most indebted nations, requiring brutal surgery to try to balance the books. Secondly, the stats clearly show that Scotland is indeed subsidising most of the UK, rather than the other way round. Given that there are ten times as many people in that area as in Scotland, it doesn't take an arithmetical genius to work out that were all of Scotland's output to stay within her borders, it would make a huge positive impact on the country's economy. If you go out to dinner and you pay for ten other people's starters, that's an awful lot of money you could otherwise have spent on your own pudding and drinks.

(The elephant in the room is of course London, which generates 171% of the national average GDP. But since most of that is accounted for by the machinations of the City – which bring benefit to nobody but themselves – it's a rather false picture, rather like hacking one of your legs off and proudly turning up at Weight Watchers proclaiming that you've shed a stone and a half in a week. We wouldn't be all that surprised if it turned out that the Bank Of England's creation from thin air of hundreds of billions of pounds of imaginary money counted towards London's GDP, for example.)

GDP isn't a very reliable guide to anything*, but in so far as these figures show anything they demonstrate that Scotland has absolutely no economic reason to fear independence. Nevertheless, we keenly await the next set of stats which can be spun to suggest otherwise, so that the FUDs can once more switch seamlessly from proclaiming Scotland's happy equal partnership in the Union to dire fearmongering about how we're underperforming subsidy junkies who mustn't dare try to go it alone. We're sure it'll be along in a matter of days.

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January 3rd is our favourite day of the year. Lovely though the extended break is (and thanks very much to the surprisingly high numbers of you who kept visiting the blog while we sat back and stuffed ourselves with mince pies and Crabbies Mulled Ginger Wine for most of a fortnight), there’s nothing quite like cracking the wrapper off a whole shiny 12-pack of sparkling freshly-baked months, full of potential and that great new-year smell. Sadly, though, you can always rely on Scotland’s proud Unionists to come along and let off a few rancid trouser-coughs into the room.

In 2012, they’ve kicked off with a particularly bizarre brace of Christmas-sprout-fuelled rotten gas expulsions. First, prolific Tory blogger and pundit David Torrance let off a rather spiteful blast of foul air at Alex Salmond in response to the string of garlands festooned on the First Minister far and wide by the political media in 2011. Making the faintly astonishing claim that Salmond had had “a disappointing year”, Torrance attempted to back the assertion up by calling His Eckness’ personality into question, highlighting the intemperate attack on the Supreme Court and, er, not much else.

Having painted the FM as a ranting, all-smearing loose cannon, Torrance immediately backtracks and portrays the SNP’s first seven months of majority government as a policy “damp squib”, with Salmond now described as a “safety-first” conservative who doesn’t really want to rock the boat, who “just wants to be loved” and who “has curiously little to say”. Quite how Torrance squares this impression with the explosively controversial passing of the anti-sectarianism legislation, the return of the contentious minimum-pricing bill and the backing of gay marriage in the face of bitter opposition from churches (in particular the Catholic church, whose voters the SNP had only finally wrenched away from Labour in 2011) is something we’re at a loss to explain.

(We did try politely asking him to, via the Steamie’s comments, but our contribution was mysteriously declined.)

Torrance’s sour personal assault on the First Minister, though, paled into insignificance beside an extraordinary piece from Labour’s Ian Smart, which also span off from the Times awarding Salmond the Briton Of The Year title in December.

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The lawyer and Labour activist Ian Smart has had a few strong things to say in the last couple of weeks, not least a coruscating attack on the poor quality of the Scottish party’s leadership candidates. But the piece that caught our eye was one last Monday which was ostensibly about the EU and Eurozone crisis. Commenting relatedly on the internal machinations of the last Labour government, Smart said:

“Any time Blair did anything really unpopular Gordon’s people would let it be known that he would have done things differently. They were careful never to say what they would actually have done, just that it would have been something different. Thus, that ‘something different’ could be whatever you wanted it to be… if the leader of the Labour Party wants to become Prime Minister then he or she will require to win a General Election. And that requires an ability to answer the question ‘What would you do?’ with something more than ‘something different’.”

And yet, when we look at Smart’s party in Scotland, what clearly-specified, active policies do we find that it presently stands for (rather than just against)?

– on the constitution? “Vote for the status quo and we’ll change things at some undetermined point in the future, in some unspecified way or ways (even though we’ve just finished spending several years on the Calman Commission supposedly coming up with a settled and lasting position on devolution).”

– on local taxation? “We’ll get back to you on that.“

– on higher education funding? “We haven’t made a decision yet.“

– on fighting sectarianism? “We refuse to participate in the discussion.“

– on minimum alcohol pricing? “We’re for doing something, but not this.“

– on gay marriage? “The time is right to consult on options.“

– on maintaining/upgrading nuclear weapons? “No comment.“

– on building a new generation of nuclear power stations? “We haven’t ruled new nuclear power in, but neither have we ruled it out.“

Help us out, readers (or Mr Smart, if you’re there) – is there anything Scottish Labour and its new leader actually DOES currently have a policy on?

Johann Lamont's speech to Labour at the announcement of her victory in the leadership elections had a number of quite interesting soundbites in it. But one in particular leapt out at us. At 3m 55s, Lamont spoke of:

"…people who want to build a prosperous Scotland that can pay its own way, a wealth-creating Scotland."

Note the future tense ("want to") there. For such a Scotland to require building, it must not currently exist. In other words, Lamont believes the narrative of the right-wing English Tory press that she lives in a Scotland which is a subsidy junkie, reliant on the munificence of England to survive, a parasite on the wealth of others rather than a nation which creates its own. That's a view she shares with Margaret Thatcher, who infamously told the Times in February 1990 that "We English, who are a marvellous people, are really very generous to Scotland."

We do not recognise that Scotland, either in the present or the future. If that's what Johann Lamont (who represents a deprived area of Glasgow ruled by Labour for most of the last century) believes to be the case, then we understand more clearly her terror of independence. But we share neither her vision nor her fear.

The illusion lasted almost six minutes.  At 1m 47s into her victory speech, new Labour leader Johann Lamont offered a stirring pledge:

"While I am leader, nothing will be off limits. There will not be one policy, one rule, one way of working which cannot be changed".

But as the speech wore on, there wasn't a single sign that any of them actually would. And at 7m 30s, when Lamont reached the matter of the constitituon, Scottish Labour's line in the sand had concrete poured into it and an electric fence planted on top. Demanding (impotently) that the SNP bring forward the referendum immediately, and that it should comprise just one question, Lamont declared:

"Separation and devolution are two completely different concepts which cannot be mixed together."

For a start, it's an obviously nonsensical sentence. The two concepts are inherently bound up with each other – if you devolve, say, control of the health service from Westminster to Scotland, then you are inescapably "separating" the NHS into two discrete parts. All and any devolution is by its very nature a subset of independence, and an empirical (although not necessarily chronological) step towards it.

Lamont then laid out her position – Scots should be made to choose starkly between independence and the status quo, but if they chose the latter Labour would promise them more powers. Which powers? We don't know. When would they be delivered? We weren't told. And how would Labour get itself into a position to make good on even that vague promise in the first place? That's the question nobody has an answer for.

Kenny Farquharson in Scotland on Sunday was the first to say it:

"I’m sorry, but this 'jam tomorrow' approach won’t do. We have been here before. In 1979, as Scotland prepared to vote in the first devolution referendum, former Tory leader Alec Douglas-Home urged Scots to vote No, promising that the Tories would come up with a better form of home rule afterwards. Of course, when No.10 became Maggie’s Den, that prize proved illusory. Scots are unlikely to fall for a Labour version of the same pitch."

But it seems to be the pitch Lamont is going to try to sell. Rather her than us.

So the new leader of Scottish Labour (or as some would have it, the first true leader of "Scottish Labour") is Johann Lamont, with Anas Sarwar as her deputy. The result came as no surprise to those of us who 12 hours earlier had spotted Henry McLeish giving the game away in the Scotsman by saying "the new leader should not put all her political eggs in one basket", but the nature of the result is the intriguing thing.

Lamont actually lost the popular vote within the Labour membership to Ken McIntosh. She won by securing a far greater share of the trade-union section of Labour's electoral college, taking 21% to McIntosh's 8%, in order to win the overall race by 52% to 40% (with dear old Tom Harris trailing in last with an embarrassing 8%). Why is that intriguing? Because the trade union vote isn't restricted to Labour members, voters or supporters. Anyone who's in a trade union, even if they're members of the SNP (or the Tories or the Lib Dems or anyone else) could vote in the leadership election.

The bare electoral arithmetic suggests that SNP voters make up a very large chunk of trade union membership, quite possibly even a majority. Could it be that they all voted for Lamont (knowing Harris couldn't win) as a deliberate act of sabotage against Labour? We'll never know. But it's interesting to think about, isn't it?

The internet is currently abuzz with rumours that the Tories plan to call a general election next March. We're not quite sure if such a thing would even be legal – the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 doesn't seem to actually come into effect until 2015, as far as we can gather from a staggeringly superficial skim – but WoSland is going to EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that it won't happen, and here's why.

Chris Terry of Britain Votes posted a series of tweets today which raise some fascinating points. Firstly, the polls are currently very close – the Tories just moved two points ahead of Labour this week – so a hung Parliament would be almost inevitable. Secondly, everyone expects the Lib Dems to be massacred if an election is held any time between now and 2055. And thirdly, the SNP are riding spectacularly high in Scotland at the moment – the last poll, published a few days ago, gave them 51% with Labour trailing a dismal second with 26%.

The SNP suffer badly from the crooked first-past-the-post system used in Westminster elections. They got around half as many Scottish votes as Labour in 2010, yet won just six seats to Labour's 41. (The Lib Dems got fewer votes than the SNP, but almost twice as many seats, with 11. The poor Tories, meanwhile, got only 2% fewer votes than the Lib Dems but secured just a single MP.)

However, the nature of FPTP means that when a party's vote reaches a certain tipping point, the same system that previously worked against them begins to discriminate massively in their favour. The current surge in SNP support – with recent polls putting them in the unusual position of being ahead in Westminster voting intentions as well as Holyrood ones – might well be enough to trigger that phenomenon.

So what? Well, as Terry points out, the "so what" is that it's not at all implausible that a 2012 general election could see the SNP gain 20+ seats in Scotland. Combined with a Lib Dem wipeout, that could leave the nationalists in the extraordinary position of being the third-biggest party in the House Of Commons, and holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.

The concessions that such an SNP group would extract in return for their support in such an eventuality would be considerable. And while in fact there's a pretty strong argument that such a situation would by no means be entirely disagreeable to the Tories, politically it's pretty much impossible to imagine.

Much more compelling, of course, is the argument that such a fragile opinion-poll lead simply makes an election a suicidally risky move for the Tories. Not only might they fail to improve their current standing, but theoretically they could even lose. With three and a half years of power still to come, they're never going to take that chance, unless their poll ratings keep rising. (We suspect their current lead is just a short-term boost as a result of Cameron's EU madness.) But if they were considering it in a brief fit of daring, the Scottish Factor ought to ensure that more sober judgement wins the day.

Perhaps it's because the source of the news is the notoriously thirsty Labour peer Lord Foulkes, but we're amazed more hasn't been made of yesterday's bringing forward of an amendment to the Scotland Bill by the aforementioned Baron of Cumnock. We're not entirely sure how this fits in with the good Lord's previous assertion just last month that the Bill would in fact have to be scrapped altogether, but if passed the amendment would be nothing short of political dynamite.

At a stroke it would grant what amounts to "devo max", massively spiking the SNP's guns by delivering overnight the constitutional arrangement favoured by around 70% of the Scottish people. The battle lines of the independence referendum, which are currently hardening with every passing day around the two most extreme options, would be hugely blurred, and it would seem obvious that full independence would be far more likely to be rejected by the electorate, if only in favour of giving the new settlement a fair crack of the whip first.

We can find no informed commentator anywhere in the professional media offering a view as to the amendment's likely chances of success, and even the blogosphere has shown almost no interest, so we can only assume that they're low. We must admit that, not for the first time, we're at a loss to understand the FUD camp's ineptitude.

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