Wings Over Scotland

I was introduced to politics at a very young age.

One of my first memories is of watching John Major giving a speech of some kind on television, possibly to do with Black Wednesday. I was only three at the time, so the conversation of the adults around me went somewhat over my head, but I learned early on that words like “government,” “Prime Minister,” and “economy” were important ones.

I was old enough to be aware of the palpable feeling of relief when Tony Blair won in 1997, and I remember celebrating with my mother when the double “Yes” result came in the same year. Devolution, I learned, was about getting the best deal for Scottish voters. But Scottish independence, for most of my life, simply never crossed my radar.

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Below is an extract from an article published in the US quarterly Dissent Magazine, entitled “Cockblocked by Redistribution: A Pick-up Artist in Denmark”.

We tweeted a link to it yesterday but dismayingly nobody seemed to notice it (not a single retweet last time we looked), and it really deserves reading. It’s an aspect of Nordic social democracy and gender equality that you don’t hear much about.

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As a child, I hated Alex Salmond.

He was everything I was raised to despise: most people around me were generally suspicious of his motives, the Daily Record painted him as a contemptible human being, and Prime Minister Tony Blair urged my country and I to reject his insane plans to split up the cuddly, all-encompassing United Kingdom.

As a youngster growing up in pre-devolution Scotland, still bearing the deep scars of Thatcherism, I almost viewed Blair as a God of sorts (I think he did too).

Here was a man who had dramatically ended 18 years of Tory rule, delivered a landslide Labour government that was finally in (apparent) line with the wishes of the Scottish people, and he’d even given us a nice shiny new Parliament to play with. What wasn’t to like?

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The new Scottish Secretary, Alistair Carmichael, in Holyrood magazine in 2010:

“Getting rid of the Scotland Office is a ‘job waiting to be done’, says Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, dubbing the current Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy as a ‘tax-funded campaign manager for the Labour Party in Scotland’.

In an interview with Holyrood magazine, Carmichael said that if his party got into power there would be no Scotland Office, asserting that he would instead head up a department of the Nations and Regions.

 He continued: “I think there is a job to be done but having the Scotland Office is not the right way to do it because it should be the clearing house between government in Edinburgh and government in London but now it is just a focal point for conflict.”

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Defence Secretary Phillip Hammond on independence in the Mail on Sunday:

“It is a real dagger poised at the heart of Scotland’s industrial infrastructure.”

And here’s our old pal Adolf “One Nation” Hitler in 1938, before his first invasion:

“Czechoslovakia is a dagger pointed at the heart of Germany.”

It’s looking increasingly as if someone at “Better Together” got a copy of “Speak Like A Nazi” for their birthday. We await their increased abrasiveness with some concern.

Here’s the BBC’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith on the surprise sacking of Michael Moore as Secretary of State for Scotland, having clearly been extensively and expertly briefed on the Scottish political situation by researchers beforehand.

(Click the image for the full audio.)

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As we watched the remarkable events of last month at Abertay University in Dundee, we were struck by something about the speech from Labour peer Lord Robertson, who was speaking against the motion “It is time for Scotland to become an independent nation state”. (Click image below for audio.)

His 15-minute address to the audience of 200+ students, we gradually realised, was a sort of compact distillation of the entire argument that’s been put forward by the No camp over the entire last year-and-a-bit.

If you ever needed to direct an undecided voter to the complete case for the Union, in the words of its own advocates, you couldn’t do much better than the couple of thousand words that Robertson put to the young people of Dundee.

To that end, it seemed worthwhile to get it down in writing for posterity and reference purposes, and to break it down into its constituent parts in the process.

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Not for the first time, we had to check that this really came from “Better Together”, not some cybernat satire site, but again it’s bona fide hypocrisy par excellence.

This really is what the No camp is trying to shovel, in the guise of a pseudo-socialist appeal made in the name of three political parties in hock to big business up to their eyeballs, in a campaign funded chiefly by a multi-millionaire oil executive with links to Saddam Hussein and the genocidal Serbian war criminal Arkan.

What, the big banks that, under the watchful eye of the Union and successive Westminster governments, were allowed such free rein for their dodgy dealings that they almost destroyed the entire UK economy, for which nobody’s ever been held to account, and which are still pocketing billions of pounds of our money in bonuses every year even though they’re owned by the taxpayer?

THOSE really big banks?

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There’s an interesting piece in today’s Scotsman, entitled “Why isn’t Scotland making more popular films?” and bemoaning the poor condition of the Scottish film industry.

At the end it contains the following paragraphs.

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My journey to Yes is probably a rather unconventional one. I’m from an establishment background: military family, English public school, Oxford. I’ve spent a lot of my life abroad and in England. My ancestors came from Hungary in the train of Saint Margaret of Scotland, who fled here from the Norman invasion and married Malcolm Canmore to become Queen Consort, way back.

When they weren’t involved in Scotland, my family were mercenary soldiers all over Europe, as were so many others. I tracked down a pair of boots in the Schottenstift in Vienna which one of my forebears left in exchange for masses to be said for his soul.

Another was granted lands and a castle in what is now Moravia, and when I visited, before the Iron Curtain was raised, there was a notice saying that he had oppressed the peasants mightily. Maybe that was just Communist propaganda. Maybe not.

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This was ex-Scotland rugby star Gavin Hastings in June:

“Former Scotland captain Gavin Hastings says it ‘beggars belief’ some Scots believe they would be better off being separate from the UK.

Speaking to The Scots Magazine he went on to warn about the dangers of complacency in the forthcoming referendum, as polls indicate the ‘No’ vote is currently ahead.

‘The danger comes with people being complacent that independence will never succeed… and people not voting or taking it for granted that we will remain part of the United Kingdom.

If we were independent would we not be doing everything in our power to find the benefits of joining up with England, Wales and Northern Ireland? Why, if we have that, would we be looking to divide it?'”

Heavens. Possibly the only man ever to sound angrier than Alistair Darling at the idea of the Scots having the sheer temerity to want to run their own affairs.

So who’s this daring have-a-go optimist in today’s Herald, then?

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When I was a child I was taught of a long-ago battle. It was a monumental battle, an invading army and a defending one, swords and shields, bows and arrows. The attackers were somehow both bad men and good and the defenders lost, their king dead in sight of the sea.

When I grew up, I realised that the defenders were not of my country, they were of what was then my country’s neighbour; the attackers from yet farther still. I felt a degree of confusion, that I should have been taught something that was not of my country’s past, but the past of my country’s neighbour.

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