Wings Over Scotland

Some alert listeners picked up a curious story on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland, which was reported on the Tattie Scones blog and which we immediately set about investigating further. It was another outing for the “Scotland could be partitioned after the independence referendum” nonsense first peddled by a Tory peer back in January of this year, and picked up by unhinged Scotsman columnist Michael Kelly in August, but the latest advocate of slicing Scotland into countless separate parts that could require you to cross international borders a dozen times on a drive from Dumfries to Dingwall was our old pal Ian Davidson.

The Glasgow MP, who to the astonishment of alien observers from far-off galaxies has been placed in charge of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in order to conduct a fully impartial analysis of Scottish “separation”, apparently made the suggestion sometime this week, but GMS curiously failed to include either an interview or a quote in its 69-second news report, which you can hear in its entirety by clicking on this link.

The piece also suggested that some of Davidson’s own colleagues were among those pouring scorn on the ludicrous notion, but declined to identify any of them. It wasn’t repeated in the rest of the programme, and we’re still none the wiser as to when and where the comments were made. (Although we know when it wasn’t.)

If any reader can enlighten us, please feel free.

There was a shock admission from Anas Sarwar, “deputy” leader of Scottish Labour, when speaking about the referendum on BBC Scotland’s “The Big Debate” last night:

“This will be the biggest decision that any of you will make in your lifetime, and what we need actually is Yes.”

It’s not every day we agree with the often factually-challenged MP for Glasgow Central, but this time we think he’s hit the nail square on the head.

(Because it’s fine to just cut people’s quotes short to suit your own purposes, right?)

Here’s a little weekend brainteaser for you, folks. On the BBC’s This Week show on Saturday, veteran presenter Andrew Neil interviewed two former senior government ministers about the UK’s nuclear deterrent – one was a Conservative former Defence Secretary, the other a Labour former Culture Secretary. For now we’ll call them Politician A and Politician B.

See if you can match the following quotes to the person who said them.

ANDREW NEIL: What is your view – should [Trident] be renewed?

POLITICIAN A: No, I think it’s all nonsense.

NEIL: Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?

POLITICIAN A: No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent, because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent, because now largely we are facing the sorts of enemies – the Taliban, Al Qaeda – who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. It’s a tremendous waste of money, it’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige, it’s wasteful, and at the margins it is proliferatory.

NEIL: Okay. But the government – or at least the Conservative part of the coalition – looks like they’re going to proceed with it. What will [your party’s] position be on it [, Politician B]?

POLITICIAN B: Actually, the position that Phillip Hammond has taken is very close to the position that we agreed some time ago when [Politician C] was Defence Secretary. The decision about whether to proceed […] won’t be taken until 2016…

NEIL: …but you’re happy that Mr Hammond’s going ahead with the spending, the seed money, which allows the decision if you want to?

POLITICIAN B: Yeah, completely, yes, yeah.

We’re going to assume that you’re ahead of us here, readers. The former Tory Defence Secretary (Michael Portillo) is, of course Politician A, the one who thinks that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is a pointless, ineffectual waste of time and money aimed solely at letting the UK grandstand on the world stage, while the former Labour Cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) is Politician B, who wants to spend billions of pounds just on the preparatory research for upgrading it – let alone the £84bn cost of actually doing so – at a time when her party is telling us that we can’t afford to educate our young people or look after the elderly.

You can watch this remarkable development for as long as it’s still available on the iPlayer (from 31 minutes), or listen to a permanent audio clip here. The politics of the Union are now truly through the looking glass.

We’ve noted before that it’s both naive and unreasonable to expect the BBC to be impartial with regard to Scottish independence. The Corporation has a direct vested interest in the status quo, partly financial and partly self-preservation. It’s important, when watching BBC Scotland in particular, to keep in mind that independence will mean the journalists, producers etc in question losing their jobs and careers.

(They would, of course, in theory be able to join any replacement state broadcaster, but it’s fair to say that many of them have already burned their bridges in that respect.)

If you think that’s a little paranoid, have a listen to these two short interviews by (we think) Auntie Beeb’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith, which are currently being looped on the BBC website in the absence of any developments in the meeting between Alex Salmond and David Cameron.

Interview with Michael Moore

Interview with Nicola Sturgeon

Does the tone and content of the questioning strike you as fair and balanced? Or does one interviewee get, let’s say, a rather more sympathetic and less confrontational hearing than the other? We wouldn’t like to say. You call it.

BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” was interesting this morning, which isn’t a sentence you can use every day. The main topic of discussion was David Cameron’s planned 2014 “commemoration” of the start of World War 1, and as host Kaye Adams noted repeatedly during the programme, the overwhelming opinion among listeners was that it was a disgraceful and cynical piece of political opportunism.

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This week, we’ve been wondering just how much of a coincidence it was that Johann Lamont’s dramatic, rushed-sounding policy speech out of nowhere (surely that terrible pinched-from-the-Tories “something for nothing” line can’t have been the result of any extended scrutiny?) happened three days after the first independence rally.

Saturday 22nd September 2012 will go down in history as the moment the starting gun was fired on the referendum campaign for real. The event was a chance to show the public of Scotland that it wasn’t only “weirdy beardies” and “cyber-nuts” who support independence but everyday hard-working people just like the majority of other Scots.

And we can’t help but ponder whether the event put the wind up Scottish Labour a lot more than they spent that weekend frantically trying to pretend.

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