Wings Over Scotland

(And finally… #26)

If only someone would come and free us from the burden of these terrible riches.

We’ve just noticed a report published by Scottish CND on the 26th of February, detailing the likely results of the UK actually using the submarine-based Trident nuclear weapons system in the event of some sort of unimaginable global conflict.

While we share SCND’s revulsion at the very notion of such weapons of mass destruction, the report makes a compelling anti-Trident argument that we’re absolutely certain wasn’t the one it meant to, and which SCND will doubtless find highly distasteful. We have no such compunction, though.

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A powerful reality check from Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald:

“Scotland bailed out the UK economy in the 1980s with Scottish oil revenues, and received precious little in return except factory closures and the highest mortality rates in Europe. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that any improvement in the UK economy is going to happen in London and the southeast, rather than in Scotland. Like the high-speed rail link, it might eventually extend to Manchester but no further. Scotland is on its own whether it likes it or not.”

The devil, they say, is in the detail, and that certainly seems to apply to the UK Government’s first paper on the consequences of Scottish independence. With remarkably little fanfare, the coalition appears to have dropped an atomic bomb into the heart of the constitutional debate, and not even realised it.

The core premise of the document appears to be the counter-intuitive idea that the UK can have it both ways – it can insist that an independent Scotland would be a brand-new nation with no rights to any of the shared property of the UK, but that it would somehow simultaneously be responsible for its full share of the UK’s liabilities. Michael Moore is quoted saying precisely that in today’s Herald.

The justification for this outwardly-absurd claim rests on an astonishing assertion lurking unassumingly in a series of paragraphs in the middle of the paper. We’ve copied it below and highlighted a couple of the relevant phrases.

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In a slightly surprising development reported late this afternoon by the Guardian, the Ministry of Defence appeared to suddenly and officially confirm what most supporters of independence have asserted for some time: that if Scotland becomes independent the rUK will lose its nuclear deterrent, as it has nowhere else to put it.

In a surprisingly direct response to a question from CND, the Ministry revealed that “the safety arrangements for Devonport [naval base near Plymouth, widely regarded as the only possible alternative berth for the submarines] do not permit the presence of submarines carrying Trident nuclear warheads”, and that “The MoD’s safety experts are not considering changing that“.

It was already known that even if the submarines themselves could be docked in Devonport, there was no possibility of replicating the Coulport weapons base without years of work costing billions of pounds, but the MoD’s unexpected revelation, as well as being an apparent reversal of the Ministry’s position of a year ago, is a dramatic intervention with radical and complex implications for the independence debate.

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We’re sure yesterday was a trying day for SFA chief executive Stewart Regan. Indeed, on the basis of the evidence you’re about to read below, it’s sent him stark raving mad. It’s a story which appeared briefly on the Scotsman website, only to vanish again minutes later. (EDIT: It’s back now, slightly edited where Regan claimed the Scotsman had misrepresented his position – most noticeably in the opening paragraph – and boasting a new and slightly less apocalyptic headline.)

It’s several steps past the sober, measured impartiality that might be reasonably expected of an administrator, some distance beyond outright dereliction of duty, and even wildly-irresponsible lunacy is just a tiny dot receding fast in the rear-view mirror as Regan hurtles off into the distance, towards the edge of a cliff.

Try as we might, we cannot see how he can possibly now remain in his position until the weekend and still have the universe make any sense at all. Judge for yourself.

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An Ipsos-MORI poll in this morning’s Times has shown a small decrease in support for independence, with figures among those certain to vote running at 35% Yes (down 4%) to 55% No (up 5%). The poll was the first full-sample one conducted in several months, and asked respondents the Scottish Government’s favoured question, so it’s a sound enough survey, and the headline figures clearly aren’t great for nationalists.

What’s odd, though, is that most commentators seem to be treating it as evidence of a fundamental shift in the direction of opinion. The reality is that at this moment in time, these numbers are something close to miraculously good for the Yes camp.

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The fallout from HMRC’s rejection of the Rangers CVA has, of course, only just begun. Journalists and bloggers, us included, will be spending a considerable amount of time speculating wildly about the likely outcome of the club’s now-inevitable liquidation. So let’s quickly take stock of what’s fact and what’s guesswork.

(Please bear in mind that Wings Over Scotland is not a lawyer, and that your house may be at risk if you don’t pay tax on it for 20 years.)

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For the thousands of readers who slightly startlingly visited yesterday's piece on Bath's retail economy (you never know which are going to be the popular stories in this business), here's the December 2009 WoS feature on Newport referenced in it, which I've unlocked from the WoS subscriber section. (I tried to just copy it over into this blog, but it was a hideous technical nightmare.)

How To Commit A Terrorist Atrocity And Get Away With It

If I can find the time one day next week, I'm going to try to go back to Newport and see how it's getting along two years on. Stand by for upbeat feelgood action!

And so tick follows tock. Alert WoS viewers may recall a subscriber feature from way back in December 2009 in which we chronicled the grim retail decay of the Welsh city of Newport. But two years into the Tories' medieval bloodletting "cure" for Britain's financial woes, the evidence of the country's slow but inexorable economic collapse can no longer be contained in the ghettoes of the working class. Because this is Bath.

This compact city of just 80,000 or so is swelled all year round by swarming hordes of well-heeled tourists (because you have to be well-heeled to come here at all) who troop in in their literally-millions to admire the pretty architecture and spew money into a local economy that's already cherry-pink with high-earning professionals.

I've lived here, lurking unnoticed in one of Britain's wealthiest corners, for over 21 years now. In all that time, it's hard to think back and recall even a single instance of a city-centre shop that's been empty for anything other than a brief transitional period between owners. Not any more.

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Some frightening numbers and home truths from Iain Macwhirter in the Herald today. The piece reaches the only conclusion it's possible to draw from the evidence, namely:

"There will have to be redistribution to claw back the 40% or so of wealth hoarded by the top 1%."

But which party  – particularly in the UK – does one vote for to achieve this? Who stands on a platform of serious wealth redistribution, calling the "But we'll leave!" bluff of the obscenely rich? (Who avoid as much of their tax burden as they can anyway.) The imminent Second Great Depression is a lot like the First World War – everyone can see it coming, nobody actually wants it, but we've hitched ourselves to an ideological bandwagon that's hurtling towards a terrible abyss and nobody's prepared to shoot the horse that's pulling it.

As the growing horror that is the coalition government unfolds more hideously every day, the British people could easily be forgiven for harbouring a sense of complete and utter hopelessness.

The choices presented to them in May 2010 already amounted to little more than three slightly different shades of the same colour. But the moment when even any manufactured pretence at significant difference between the policies offered by the three major parties evaporated – the minute Nick Clegg got behind his Deputy Prime Minister desk – it became impossible to maintain the delusion that Britain remains a democracy in any meaningful sense any more.

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