Wings Over Scotland

In the wake of a duller-than-usual First Minister's Questions, most of the press today is covering the report released by the Electoral Commission detailing the various parties' spending in the 2011 Holyrood election. The headline soundbite is that the SNP's expenditure was, in the words of The Scotsman, "close to the combined total of the three other largest parties", at £1.14m compared to £1.27m for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories together.

Predictably enough, Labour seize the opportunity to complain about large donations, with MSP Drew Smith pouting that "the SNP is addicted to big money, reliant on huge donations from a small number of wealthy individuals", in the light of the SNP having received two such large sums in recent months from the will of the former Makar Edwin Morgan and lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

We're not aware of Mr Smith having raised any such objections when, for example, Lord Sainsbury donated £2.5m to Labour in 2003 – eclipsing the SNP's two big donations put together – but we'll gladly publish any corrections should he have done so. We're also not sure that Mr Smith's party will enthusiastically welcome his objections to large donations from wealthy individuals, as a cap on such contributions (currently being proposed by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life) would have slashed Labour's income by 72% over the last five and a half years.

Most of the coverage today notes the growing financial health of the SNP compared to the other parties relative only to the situation in the 2007 Holyrood election, with its spending rising while that of the Unionist parties declines. What we found curious, though, was that none of the papers took the trouble to also make what would seem to be the most obvious comparison in a recent Scottish context – the parties' expenditures in 2011 compared to the 2010 UK General Election.

We had a little dig around on the Electoral Commission's website, and turned up its 2010 report, whose figures reveal some moderately interesting things.

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Okay, so after yesterday's fit of grand polemic for St Andrew's Day we've got some normal news to catch up on again. We left off mentioning this before because the Newsnet Scotland server had a bizarre extended outage and because the feature itself is horribly written, but the statistical fact that the mainstream Scottish media is 11,319 times more likely to run a story based on the SNP being accused of some terrible wrong than they are to do the same thing to the Tories, and that "accused" stories directed against the SNP make up 88% of all such articles, is definitely worth examining if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, the BBC and Herald run a pair of bone-chilling pieces about the economic future of the UK (the latter one also echoed in the Scotsman). In the coming years before the independence referendum, it's increasingly clear that it's going to get harder and harder for the Unionist parties to credibly push the "stronger together, weaker apart" line, because it's hard to imagine how an independent Scotland bursting with natural resources could possibly be in a bigger mess than successive Labour and Tory governments have left Britain in, even if we elected The Krankies to run it for a laugh.

The Scotsman also runs with an interesting piece linking the gay marriage consultation with the independence referendum, highlighting comments by former SNP leader Gordon Wilson suggesting that the SNP can ill afford to alienate a single voter in the run-up to the vote with such controversial policies. It's a fair enough point, except that with Labour and the Lib Dems on the same side as the SNP on the issue, and the Tories actually led by a lesbian, we're not sure there's much scope there for the opposition to exploit it politically. (Curiously, while the Scotsman piece makes great play of Wilson's SNP connection, it neglects to mention anywhere that Bashir Maan, one of the other opponents of gay marriage extensively quoted in the piece along with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is a prominent former Labour figure.)

And as with the sectarianism bill and minimum pricing, the SNP is wisely front-loading its more contentious policies into the first half of the Parliament – presumably counting on any furore having long died down by the time of the referendum, as armies of angry Old-Firm-supporting gay couples enraged by the price of booze for their weddings fail to materialise on the streets.

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It’s even happening in Bath. Even in one of the richest corners of Britain – a city so posh that it refused a local organic dairy farm permission to open a boutique ice-cream concession in its expensive new shopping area in case it “lowered the tone” – there’s an Occupy protest. A couple of dozen tents huddle together in Queen Square, a small green space in the middle of a busy traffic junction that’s more accustomed to hosting farmers’ markets and games of boules.

To be honest, I’m surprised there are that many. Bath’s housing, parking and public transport are all so cripplingly costly that poor people can barely get into the centre of town even for a visit. But still, like most of the Occupy protests nationwide (those that still survive at all, anyway), the numbers are pretty pitiful. At a time when the government has all but openly declared class war, when everyone from the Socialist Worker to the Daily Mail is furious at the greed of the wealthy, why aren’t there millions on the streets, rather than a few little pockets out camping in the cold?

The answer is obvious, but for some reason is never spoken aloud. Despite the Occupy movement’s catchy and evocative slogan, we aren’t the 99%. But that’s understandable, because “we are the 33%” doesn’t carry quite the same moral punch.

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As reported by many outlets today, Labour's latest complaint to the Parliamentary Standards Committee – this time an allegation that Scottish ministers conspired improperly in the decision to nominate Brian Souter for a knighthood – has met with an unambiguous rebuke, as the independent inquiry cleared the government of any wrongdoing. Only the Scotsman bothers to print Labour's bitter and graceless response to the committee's findings, one which suggests the party still isn't quite ready to approach opposition (or anything) in a positive and constructive manner.

Labour's previous complaints to the standards committee have all been similarly dismissed, whereas when accusations against the party have been upheld Labour has dismissed them as "partisan" and "politically motivated". It's tempting to wonder why Labour persists in filing complaints with a body it clearly does not consider to be impartial, and how much taxpayers' money it's wasting by doing so.

With the weather getting increasingly foul and wintry, why not curl up this weekend with an intriguing collection of Scottish political stories and commentary? The stuff's coming thick and fast these days, so get cosy on the sofa with a blanket and your laptop/iPad and work your way through this lot.

Over in the Scotsman, Joyce McMillan – not exactly noted as an SNP cheerleader – takes a sober look at the state of the nation(s) and concludes poetically that the times they are a-changin' in terms of people's attitudes towards independence, as the Scottish electorate looks for an alternative to the austerity future that isn't forthcoming from the UK opposition parties. Deeply sceptical of nationalism, McMillan nonetheless arrives at a near-Damascene epiphany: "in the absence of any better progressive project, there is a strong temptation to take a deep breath, and give it a go".

Dear old Alan Cochrane on the Telegraph is suffering no such doubts, lashing out at Labour's former First Minister Henry McLeish for giving succour to Cochrane's hated Nats over such issues as the anti-sectarianism bill, apparently in the belief that having held Holyrood's highest office somehow makes a person less entitled to offer his honest opinions than anyone else. Even Cochrane, however, is forced to also note the humiliating gaffe by the Tory leader Ruth Davidson at FMQs on Thursday.

The Express carries the latest attack on the SNP's referendum plans by Scottish CBI leader Iain McMillan, who fulminates furiously that uncertainty over independence will damage business – exactly as he's previously said of devo max, and indeed as he said back in 1997 about devolution. (McMillan's claims to speak for all of Scottish business in these outbursts, incidentally, has been disputed in the not-too-distant past by significant members of that community.)

Labour comedy relief Tom Harris, meanwhile, puts forward the view that what the Scottish people need most urgently in the coming years is someone who can make fun of the First Minister. Given that Harris is currently amusingly ranked by the bookmakers as fifth in a three-horse race for the Labour leadership, we're not sure he's going to have much chance to test that theory out.

Malcolm Harvey, formerly of the increasingly-erratic and confused Better Nation (which this week bizarrely invited us to take pride in the achievements of current Tory MPs who are implementing the coalition's brutal austerity measures but happened to be born in Scotland), has left BN and started a brand-new blog which promises an assessment of the current state of all the Holyrood parties. He opens proceedings by examining the condition of Scottish Labour, and his prognosis isn't good.

And on a related note, Labour Hame slightly surprisingly publishes a piece which faces up to the reality of Labour's current positioning on the political spectrum – namely, the fact that by any empirical and rational measure it is currently a party of the centre-right rather than the centre-left. The piece, by previously-unknown correspondent James Chalmers, concludes by saying the unsayable – that the only hope for Scottish Labour is to decouple itself from the right-wing UK party and operate in an independent Scotland, which would be more sympathetic to Labour's old values.

More tomorrow.

There's a fair old explosion of activity in the Scottish political scene today, with what appear to be some potentially highly significant policy movements starting to creak into life. In the Scotsman, slightly-renegade Labour MSP Malcolm Chisholm once again urges his party to back a referendum offering a devo-max option (or as he describes it, "devolution plus"), albeit one which stops short of full fiscal autonomy. Chisholm doesn't specify precisely how far the new devolution should go, instead proposing a cross-party convention – also including representatives of civic Scotland – to agree on the details of the option. While a commendable and sensible approach in theory, Chisholm is likely to struggle to get his own party to back such a plan, let alone persuading the Lib Dems and Tories to join in as well.

Meanwhile, over on the Herald Iain Macwhirter identifies signs of Labour beginning to shift on their current policy of backing the status quo, and examines the implications for the other parties if Labour manages to successfully occupy the middle ground. His conclusion is that should Labour suddenly become converts to the cause of devo max, the SNP may backtrack on its offer of a devo-max question and instead run a straight Yes/No referendum on full independence. In this blog's view, those are two very big assumptions – Labour (and the other opposition parties) are going to find it very hard to change their position now without looking utterly ridiculous, and the SNP would similarly find it extremely tricky, having made such a play of offering a devo-max question, to then retract the offer if the Unionists actually did manage to come up with a defined interpretation.

In the Guardian, Severin Carroll offers a different perspective on the debate over the number of questions on the referendum, from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, which represents over 50,000 voluntary charity workers. The organisation, while not explicitly taking a view on the referendum itself, urges that in the light of the Westminster government's brutal attacks on the poor and the sick, Scotland must take control of its own welfare revenue spending – a status which would in practice require either independence or an extreme version of devo max.

Carroll then spins off in some odd directions from the SCVO's comments, for example getting Labour's Margaret Curran to apparently support the coalition's policy, claiming that "a million voters supported Labour's tougher stance on benefits". (She presumably means Scottish voters, and is presumably citing Labour's 2010 general election result in Scotland as backup for the assertion, which is a rather strained assumption about what people were voting for.)

He also states that "Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and most powerful Scot in the shadow cabinet, confirmed last Saturday that Labour's stance on more powers for Holyrood had now shifted, in favour of greater devolution", which is something of a stretch. What Alexander actually did in his speech to Scottish Labour's youth wing was express a personal opinion which at present is still explicitly rejected by all three of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates in favour of the status quo. If the party is indeed now in favour of greatly-expanded devolution, it's not letting on.

Finally, the Dundee Courier picks up on an embarrassing display of hypocrisy by the UK Government. Having spent weeks and months demanding that the SNP publish the Scottish Government's legal advice on an independent Scotland's position with regard to membership of the EU and the Euro, the Westminster coalition has now refused to publish its own legal advice on the same issue. Oops.

We'll let you digest that little lot for a while.

(See here.)

"The starting point is that we are equal nations choosing to come together and that equality means we in Scotland can make demands in a claim of right for the powers and responsibilities that we want. Beyond that however we need to describe the positive advantages of being part of a new United Kingdom."
(Malcolm Chisholm, Labour MSP, November 2011)

"[the proponent for independence] deserved to win, because he did the thing which usually wins a debate: he asked the question which mattered, and didn’t get a satisfactory response. And the question was this: what is the positive case for the Union?"
(Andrew McKie, conservative political commentator, November 2011)

Still waiting.

As a newspaper, The Scotsman is under absolutely no obligation to report the news impartially (a fact frequently misunderstood by a great many people). But it's becoming less and less subtle in its distortions of the truth the further we get into the SNP majority administration. One of its big politics stories today is a case in point. As a reader of Wings over Scotland you are by definition a normal, well-adjusted person, so how would you interpret the following headline?

"Swinney demands £20bn to secure the economy"

Since John Swinney is an MSP with a remit which covers only the devolved Scottish Government, naturally you'd assume he was demanding this £20bn for Scotland, right? Particularly as the story opens with this sentence:

"Finance secretary John Swinney has demanded billions of pounds from the UK government for major building projects in Scotland"

Even for the most ardent nationalist it sounds an outrageous demand, even in less austere times than these. £20bn is around two-thirds of the Scottish Government's entire annual block grant, and would pay for every conceivable major infrastructure project in Scotland – finishing the Edinburgh trams and the Edinburgh and Glasgow airport rail links, dualling the entire A9, building the new Forth road crossing, completing the Borders railway, implementing the Beauly-Denny power line and opening the carbon-capture plant at Longannet – with a good £10bn still left over.

But with readers duly inflamed, the next paragraph quietly reveals the truth. Swinney wants the Chancellor to spend £20bn on capital investment projects in the whole of the UK, with just a tenth of that money coming to Scotland. He's asking for £2bn, not £20bn, and – we find out another nine paragraphs later – that £2bn would be spread over three years, amounting to a somewhat more modest £0.67bn a year for Scotland, set against the UK government's total annual Scottish spending of £53bn.

The arguments for extra capital investment to drive growth, create employment in the construction sector and avoid a double-dip recession are economically sound, but that's another debate entirely. The Finance Secretary has in fact asked for approximately one-thirtieth of what the Scotsman's highly-misleading headline implies. It's hard to see that misrepresentation as an accidental one.

An alert viewer draws attention to an interesting historical curio in the Scotsman today. It's a letter to the paper from Labour MSP Hugh Henry, dating from a few days after the 2011 Holyrood election, in which he rejects the idea of an early independence referendum in the most unambiguous of terms:

"Mr Salmond and the SNP clearly stated that any referendum would be held later in the life of this parliament. That's what many Scots voted for, that's what gave Mr Salmond his majority and that's the mandate which the SNP has."

Henry isn't exactly a radical dissident in Scottish Labour – he was Education Minister and Deputy Justice Minister in the second Lab-Lib coalition administration, and was mainstream enough to be the party's nomination for Presiding Officer earlier this year. In the light of Labour's recent threats to back the Westminster government in forcing an earlier UK-controlled referendum over the Scottish Parliament's head, it would be interesting to find out if his position is the same now as it was six months ago.

Scottish Viceroy Michael Moore is banging away on the same old drum in the Herald today, demanding that the SNP detail every last conceivable detail of policy in an independent Scotland before the referendum, continuing to rather clumsily miss the entire point of what referenda are for. But as we wearily ploughed through the rhetoric one more time, a thought dawned on us.

The only way Moore's complaints would make any kind of sense would be if a vote for independence was also a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity. Only if the SNP are going to rule an independent Scotland forever would it be incumbent on them to lay out every last line of what they stood for before the referendum, because then (and only then) the electorate would have no opportunity to reject at the ballot box a government implementing policies that voters objected to.

Could it be that Moore believes no other party could ever rise to power in an independent Scotland, and that the nation would in effect become a one-party dictatorship, lost to democracy forever under the iron thistle of the First McReich? (He's at least two-thirds right, after all – the Tories and Lib Dems aren't going to be providing a First Minister any time soon.) If so, we think he should come out and say so instead of beating around the bush. The people deserve to be warned. 

The growing rift between Labour and the trade union movement in Scotland was highlighted yesterday by a statement from the STUC flatly contradicting the narrative spun by all three opposition parties this week, namely that that uncertainty over the date of the independence referendum was damaging the prospects of business investment in Scotland.

In a statement striking for its lack of ambiguity, an unnamed spokesman for the congress was reported by the Scotsman as saying that the unions "had come across no evidence that the forthcoming poll was deterring investment in the country", and that as a result it "did not believe it was necessary to hold a referendum as soon as possible, as is being urged by both the UK government and opposition parties", adding that "There are far more immediate problems that need to be looked at."

Oddly, this fairly dramatic divergence of opinion was afforded just 126 words by the paper, compared to the 2,348 devoted to Douglas Alexander's rather less newsworthy speech to a Labour youth conference.

Not for the first time, the Scotsman is today apparently guest-edited by Douglas Alexander. The paper offers blanket coverage – including a secondary article, analysis, leader column and a personal profile, as well as the front-page lead story itself – to the shadow foreign secretary's latest speech to a Labour audience, in which he urges the Scottish party to back greater devolution rather than campaign alongside the Tories and Lib Dems for the status quo. (The Herald doesn't mention the speech at all.)

The story barely justifies such excitable trumpeting. Alexander has already made public his concerns about how Labour should approach its policy on the constitution, in a speech which was heavily-featured across the Scottish media just a month ago. The latest one puts no meat on the bones of his earlier effort – Alexander makes no specific proposals as to what further devolution the party should support, and maintains Labour's position of opposing a devo-max question on the referendum paper.

Alexander is not an MSP, and therefore has no control over the Scottish party's decisions. (If, that is, Scottish Labour is an entity as autonomous as its supporters frequently insist.) So basically what we have is an outsider with no official influence suggesting that Scottish Labour should slightly change its pronouncements about devolution, but not its actual policies or actions. In other words there is, in essence, no actual news to report here at all.

The Scottish electorate still overwhelmingly supports greatly-extended powers for the Scottish Parliament, albeit with roughly half of the backers of devo-max also supporting independence. Scottish Labour is desperate to tap into this support and create clear Saltire-blue water between itself and the UK coalition, but has painted itself into a difficult corner by  opposing a devo-max option in the referendum.

It's a circle that the party is going to find very difficult (perhaps impossible) to square – it would, in effect, be campaigning on a position of "Vote No to independence and we might give Scotland some (unspecified) extra powers, at some unspecified point in the future, probably after yet another Calman Commission, if we win a Westminster majority under Ed Miliband, and if we keep our promises (unlike with electoral reform and tuition fees), and if we haven't changed our minds again by then".

At present, all Alexander is really achieving is drawing attention to that fact.