Wings Over Scotland

I’m not a feminist. I’m barely feminine come to that: a pushing-40 tomboy. My initial reaction to comments about gender balance is a cringe. So what if there are four men and no women on a panel? What do women bring to a debate that a man can’t? If I’m really honest, a man will often persuade me to a cause long before a woman – they can exude an air of authority most women would feel embarrassed to display.

It’s only very recently, partly thanks to Women for Independence, I’ve realised it’s an issue that does matter. On this site – below the line – the question of gender balance has been dismissed as hysterical feminism. On Twitter, a debate last week had the lack of women in politics dismissed with “Well, they exclude themselves, don’t they?”

The irony for me, as a woman, is how those kind of comments mirror the independence debate itself. An “I’m not a feminist but…” article echoes the now common, “I’m not a nationalist but…” refrain. The cringe when women speak up about gender imbalance is similar to the Scottish cringe: a lack of confidence in who you are; in standing up for yourself or others in your position; in insisting you on your right to be heard over those exuding more authority.

The “Well they exclude themselves don’t they? If women want to be involved what’s stopping them?” line carries within it the same lack of insight into power structures and barriers as, “What are those Jocks whinging about now? They’re represented at Westminster, aren’t they?”

The issue, as far as I’m concerned – and other women may disagree, we don’t all think the same – isn’t one about straight gender balance. Simply replacing male politicians and panellists with women who’ve made it within the same system misses the point. The issue is with politics itself, and the style of UK political and media debate.

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From last year, but no less pertinent for it:

“Labour campaigned in Scotland on the basis of being the only party that will stand up to savage Tory cuts in local councils. Whilst the Tories’ vote declined significantly, their influence in Scotland has increased massively due to Labour’s willingness to enter into coalitions with them to keep the SNP out. It goes without saying that this is a complete betrayal of those who thought a Labour vote was an anti-Tory vote.”

(Ben Wray for International Socialist Group.)

Karine Polwart is a Scottish folk singer and Green Party supporter. Earlier today we highlighted a curious editorial choice by Scotland On Sunday, which framed a column she’d written on independence as an attack on the SNP, despite Ms Polwart not mentioning the SNP anywhere in the text, either directly or indirectly.

Below is the text of a post on her Facebook page this morning, after SoS deputy editor Kenny Farquharson tried unsuccessfully to defend the use of the anti-SNP headline:

“Full text of my wee rant in favour of Yes Scotland in today’s Scotland on Sunday. For clarity, the title is not mine. If I’d wanted to frame my piece as an explicit go at the SNP then I would’ve done so.

YES Scotland is not a covert SNP operation. I believe the independents, Greens, socialists, and growing number of pro-Indy Labour and Liberal activists bless if there are any of the latter left) must shape that agenda too. Anyway, here’s to more voices being heard, and more proper heartfelt and visionary exchange between us about what’s WRONG, and why, and what might fix it (whether you think Independence is a possible answer or not).”

(Two small typos fixed for readability, otherwise unchanged. Original here.)

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Headlines can be the bane of a writer’s life. Often – including on this site – an article will go out with a different title to the one the author originally envisaged, as part of the subbing process. Occasionally (if the sub-editor or editor isn’t very good at their job) the title can be one which the author feels misrepresents what they’ve written.

We have no idea whether or not that’s the case with a column in today’s Scotland On Sunday, penned by folk singer Karine Polwart, which goes under the eye-catching headline “Why I’ll vote Yes despite the SNP”. We’ll simply observe that there’s a fairly important word in that title which doesn’t appear at all in the actual article – and that indeed the thing the word describes is not referred to, or even obliquely implied, anywhere in the author’s words – and leave you to arrive at your own conclusions.

As the son of a multi-millionaire, hereditary Labour MP Anas Sarwar has probably never had to think very much about money in his life. We’re not sure that’s an excuse for the mind-numbing arithmetical stupidity of what he says in the Daily Record today.

Proposing to “turn up the heat on the SNP by tearing apart some of their main policies”, and more specifically by continuing Labour’s enormously unpopular assault on universal services, Sarwar is reported by the paper as saying:

“there is no point funding free care for the elderly when half the people in the poorest parts of Scotland do not live long enough to take advantage.”

Bizarrely – and not for the first time it pains us to be obliged to spell out something so blindingly obvious – it seems to have escaped Mr Sarwar’s attention that dead people don’t require care. Therefore, the policy only requires to be funded for the people who DO live long enough to obtain its benefits, which means that the only financial savings to be made would be those made at the expense of old, sick, but still alive people.

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In this site’s view, the single most important truth that YesScotland will need to convey to the Scottish electorate if it wants to win the 2014 independence referendum is the reality of what a No vote will mean for devolution. It’s a theme we’ve covered extensively, and will continue to highlight because it’s the core thing the Unionist campaign don’t want people to know.

All three London-run parties are engaged in the pretence that if Scots reject full control of their own affairs they’ll be showered with new powers by Westminster, despite that premise collapsing under the slightest scrutiny. But today an alert reader pointed us towards something that reveals a much more convincing reality.

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Unionists never miss a chance to sneer at “Braveheart”, a film which won five Oscars and tells a true story (very heavily embellished by Hollywood) about a people’s fight for self-determination. Only last night, Scotland Tonight retweeted one eager young No voter using it as an explanation for the increase in support for independence among the 18-24 demographic, even though the film came out almost 20 years ago.

This sort of thing, though, is fine:

That’s because nationalism is great, so long as it’s British.

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There’s a faintly astonishing story in today’s Scotsman. As if belatedly realising the damage that they’d done to the No campaign by detailing Labour’s toys-out-of-pram tantrum in the House Of Commons this week, the paper runs a firefighting exercise of a follow-up piece which reveals no new information, but gives the party a helpful platform from which to try to winch itself out of the hole.

(A “senior party source” duly obliged with the comically-absurd assertion that “the party’s main concern was that without a reference to independence, an MP could be stopped from speaking for going off the subject.”)

That’s not the astonishing part, of course – giving Unionist parties a platform is what the Scotsman exists for. The amazing thing is the size of the gulf between what the story reports as the reason for the debate’s cancellation and what the person whose debate it was had already said in public a full day earlier.

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Fans of TV panel shows will probably be aware of a regular strand on the BBC’s Mock The Week called “Between The Lines”, in which one comedian delivers lines from a speech in the persona of a public figure, while the other translates what they really mean. There’s a chucklesome example here.

For a bit of fun we’ve decided to have our own attempt, with a letter sent out this week to the No campaign’s mailing list by the independence debate’s own Hugh Dennis: “Better Together” campaign director and creative truth interpreter Blair McDougall.

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We’ve spoken before on this site about a couple of political concepts based around different ways of winning votes by bombarding the electorate with untruths so relentlessly that they come to be accepted as fact.

One of them, the “Big Lie”, was a term infamously coined by Hitler to describe a strategy regularly deployed by the Nazis in which a falsehood would be perpetrated which was so diametrically and spectacularly at odds with the reality, people would instinctively reject the thought that anyone would have the bare-faced audacity to say it if it wasn’t true, and therefore it must be.

Language needs some kind of brand new term, though, to accurately encapsulate the magnitude of what Scottish Labour have just tried to pull off.

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It defies belief, in a way. It’s now been a full week since we mocked Willie Rennie’s embarrassingly clueless claim that an independent Scotland would need to negotiate “14,000 international treaties”, in a feature which was widely circulated and quoted.

So ridiculed was Rennie’s claim that even the Scotsman couldn’t make it stick, acknowledging on Monday that it had been exaggerated by at least 70%, with a maximum of 8500 actually still being in effect, let alone relevant to Scotland. An entertaining introductory package on last night’s Newsnight Scotland even highlighted our particular favourite of the UK’s treaties.

At which point the programme brought on the rare protected species that is Scotland’s only Tory MP, the Scotland Office minister David Mundell.

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Unionists can often be heard protesting that the phrase “too wee, too poor, too stupid” is a dreadful Nat calumny which nobody on the No side has ever actually uttered. And of course they’re technically right – not even “Better Together” is quite stupid enough (and certainly not honest enough) to come out and use the phrase in its overt form.

A Coalition source said the report would highlight the weakness of Scotland’s negotiating position with the EU if it was to leave the UK, given the size of its population and economy, which would relegate the Scots to Europe’s minor leagues.

“At these European summits, you see all the key players moving around, the French, the Germans and the British. But where are the Danish? They’re nowhere. It’s not that Denmark is not significant, but it’s not as important as these other nations, simply because of its size.”

That quote, taken from a story in today’s Sunday Herald, seems to be pretty closely related to the first two of the unholy trinity, though.

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