Wings Over Scotland

Someone asked us yesterday for some facts and figures to help them with a debate, and it got us remembering one that we never see being brought up, perhaps because it’s buried in the archives of the Herald under Sport > SPL > Aberdeen (no, really).

It’s a piece that pre-dates the Scottish Parliament (and is written in a style that makes it seem older still), but it’s a complete mess of broken formatting, clearly the victim of numerous website redesigns, and painfully hard to read even when rescued from behind the paper’s paywall.

So we’re going to preserve it for posterity here in a cleaned-up, more user-friendly presentation, because it’s pretty much dynamite.

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We haven’t done a “We said, he said” argument transcript for months and months, because as a rule they’re of extremely limited interest to anyone outside the political nerdosphere who isn’t familiar with the people involved.

But you don’t need any background to follow this one. So buckle up and do your best to wade past the obvious personal antagonism, because you won’t get a better illustration of the tortured mental twisting and squirming of the No campaign this year.

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Here’s the Secretary Of State For Portsmouth, legendary bruiser Alistair “Crybaby” Carmichael, in this morning’s Herald on the subject of the dastardly SNP Scottish Government intimidating businesses out of speaking up for the Union:

“Asked if there was a fear factor, Mr Carmichael replied: ‘There is very much. This is what business people tell me; they are scared of the consequences for their business of getting on the wrong side of the Scottish Government.’

Without naming names, he noted: ‘I see it in the media sector. I have seen media outlets feel constrained in their coverage.'”

A random sample from the front page of our “PressReader” newspaper app, there, covering just a single month (March 2013). Heaven help us all if the media suddenly breaks free of these draconian constraints and tells us what it REALLY thinks.

The Scottish media often complains that the supporters of independence attack it as biased merely for reporting news that they don’t like. It’s sometimes justified in doing so – it’s foolish to indulge the delusion that amid the constant avalanche of “Major blow to SNP/Yes campaign” headlines, there aren’t some actual blows now and again.

Of course, the media has only itself to blame that nobody listens when it cries “Wolf!” for the 20th time that month. There are times when a “story” is so nakedly a piece of agenda-driven propaganda rather than journalism that in publishing it the press abandons all right to expect to ever be treated as an impartial chronicler of events.

Today is one of those times.

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The Daily Record, 13 December 2013:

But phew – luckily, in the UK there’s always an alternative.

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We’ve been having a dig through the recent YouGov poll (fieldwork 26-29 November) commissioned by The Sun. It’s full of all manner of interesting data, strengthened by a rather bigger-than-usual sample of 1,919 voters.

We were intrigued to note, for example, that 56% of respondents in England and Wales disapproved of the government’s record (with just 30% in favour), but 55% of those same people thought Scotland should vote to stay in the Union they themselves were so unsatisfied with (just 21% said they’d vote Yes if they had a vote).

Now, it’s possible to explain some of this apparent contradiction away. For example, fully 90% of UK Labour voters disapproved of the UK government, but 60% still wanted Scotland to vote No and remain subject to it. The rationalisation, of course, is that they think everything would be fine under a Labour UK government.

Don’t they?

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Here’s Baron Wallace Of Tankerness on Spain, in 1997:

“Jim Wallace, leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, part of the pro-devolution alliance, dismissed the SNP argument and pointed to the success of devolution in Catalonia and Bavaria. ‘Those countries that have devolved have proved successful because they meet the will of the people.'”

Yeah, because devolution killed Catalan nationalism stone dead too, right Jim?

Now and again, the independence debate gets so dismally stupid that we despair for a few hours and just sit around with our head in our hands trying to understand how professional, apparently-rational people can be so hopelessly, galactically thick.

Today the trigger was The Times, which issued the latest in a flurry of “post-White Paper” polls that have appeared with indecent haste and proclaimed the document’s failure, this time under the ridiculous headline “Poll sinks hope for a ‘yes’ vote”.

Do we even need to write the next bit? Does it really have to be spelled out?

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Imagine working for a trade union; one which is formidable and respected, one forever being sought by Radio 4. An indomitable body of professionals who never resort to strikes and scuffles, braziers and megaphones, because they’re so heavy with influence and history that they need only tap the right minister on the shoulder to have their voice heard and heeded.

Imagine working for the magnificent British Medical Association.

When I saw the BMA were recruiting in Glasgow a few years ago I was delighted and surprised. My surprise increased when I was sent to a call centre for the interview. Sitting prim and nervous in the reception area, a tacky room with walls that trembled if you brushed against them, I wondered what this cheap and nasty office could possibly have to do with the great and august BMA.

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Alert readers will doubtless recall the recent shenanigans at Holyrood concerning the bedroom tax, in which Labour furiously demanded that the Scottish Government subsidised the Westminster government’s brutal attack on the poor by slashing £50m from services elsewhere, but refused to say what they’d cut to find the money.

(Although Jackie Baillie did have one memorably creative idea to achieve almost 15% of the necessary savings by travelling back in time and undoing some investment that paid for itself 20 times over.)

We condemned Labour’s craven cowardice at the time, but information revealed this week casts the party’s action in, remarkably, an even worse light.

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We must confess ourselves perplexed by the Messianic awe in which much of the Scottish media appears to hold Douglas Alexander. The epitome of the modern career politician (as far as we’re aware he’s never had any sort of job outside politics), Alexander has risen without trace through the Labour ranks, and his Wikipedia profile is unable to attribute one noteworthy achievement to the former minister despite his having held some of the most senior offices of state.

We’re unable to recall a single instance of Alexander ever expressing a view on any subject that was anything other than 100% in line with the official orthodox party position, and in Scotland his name is perhaps most associated with the shambolic conduct of the 2007 Holyrood election.

Nevertheless, for some reason Scottish newspapers appear to regard him as some sort of intellectual powerhouse within Scottish Labour, and the fact that his speeches don’t consist exclusively of tangibly bitter, hate-filled attacks on the SNP also seems to have him marked down as the party’s great thinker.

Which means that roughly every two months we have to endure a vacuous torrent of middle-management duckspeak such as the one Scotland on Sunday has inexplicably chosen to make its front-page lead this morning.

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That was always a pretty silly lyric. But anyway.

We had to switch the telly off after about 10 minutes of the news this morning. The piety was too much to take. So intead we’re just going to quote two things from the avalanche of comment that’s appeared this morning on the death of Nelson Mandela.

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