Wings Over Scotland

We had a brief and dispiriting Twitter exchange back in May with a prominent Scottish Green activist (if there can strictly be said to be such a thing), in the shape of the party’s former head of media James Mackenzie. The discussion was sparked by a piece in the Guardian reporting the Green quasi-leader Patrick Harvie’s dire warning to Alex Salmond against a “bland, middle-of-the-road” prospectus for independence, which he suggested would risk “alienating” the left-leaning section of the Scottish public (ie most of it) and thereby losing the referendum.

Wading in with all our trademark gentle, reasoned tact, we recited our well-worn observation that referenda are for deciding single precisely-defined issues – in this case, who gets to elect the future governments of Scotland – rather than the fine details of multiple policies, and that starting the Yes campaign off by emphasising our differences perhaps wasn’t the smartest move.

To this Mr Mackenzie accused us of having “confused policy with constitution”, and while we won’t bore you with the full he-said-we-said (you can go and track it for yourself if you really want to), the conversation culminated in this rather huffy tweet:

Now, independence and the SNP are of course not interchangeable terms. Something like a third of SNP voters don’t back the policy, and the Greens and SSP are also in favour, as are various percentages of those who vote for the three London parties. And one of the loudest calls from the non-SNP sections of the independence movement has been that those in favour should formulate a constitution for the prospective nation in advance of the referendum, which could then form the basis of what people voted on, avoiding the danger of the referendum being seen as a party-political issue.

(Which is what the Unionist side desperately wants to make it, hence their strategy of trying to personally discredit the SNP leadership in recent months.)

The whole point of independence is indeed to give us the chance to debate every aspect of Scotland’s future. But demanding to have all these fights now is wrong in principle as well as pragmatically. We’ll come to the pragmatic part in a moment, but let’s take the moral high ground and examine the principle first.

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Disappointingly, since we examined the state of censorship in Scottish political blogs back in April, the situation has only got worse. Even those sites which previously sat atop the table for freedom of debate have gone backwards – Bella Caledonia now snootily demands a WordPress login before it’ll deign to allow you to comment without days in the moderation queue, and Lallands Peat Worrier has tragically fallen foul of the dreaded Curse Of Captcha – while many of the others have tightened their grip even further over the year, allowing only the most anodyne of opinions to be aired.

Our award for Moderator Of The Year, though, goes not to obvious suspects like Better Nation or Labour Hame (RIP). While both still reject wholly inoffensive comments by the bucketload lest they cause their delicate readers to faint at the prospect of civil disagreement (and the former now closes comments on stories as soon as three or four days after publishing them), at least within a few days the “offending” item tends to be deleted altogether so that the would-be commenter knows where they stand.

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Johann Lamont actually taught English, hard as that can be to believe sometimes. But for the sake of the children of Rothesay, Springburn and Castlemilk, we hope she was never asked to fill in on a Geography class, judging by this remarkable extract from her speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Dundee back in March:

“But let me tell you one phrase which really is meaningless. North of the border. And here is another one. South of the border. Because we have no border. We haven’t had one for three hundred years. We don’t need a border to be Scottish.”

You kinda do, Johann. How can you be Scottish if there’s no such thing as Scotland? And if there is, how do you know whether you’re in it or not, unless it’s got borders?

If there’s no border, how do we know whether a crime committed somewhere near Berwick comes under the jurisdiction of Scots law or English law? How do we know if the Scottish NHS or the English NHS is responsible for looking after the victim? And how do we know whether to charge the future lawyers who’ll fight the court case for their law degrees or not, if we don’t know which country their university’s in?

Okay, we know you’re working on that one.

While we’re not planning to shut Wings Over Scotland down during the festive break, obviously political stories are likely to be a bit thin on the ground with Parliament on recess and everyone plonked in front of Doctor Who full of turkey and booze. So to fill the gaps we’ll be resorting to some traditional methods – scattered in among new articles will be some end-of-year awards, best-ofs and perhaps the odd reprint of stories from earlier in the year when we had only a fraction of the readership we do now, and which most people therefore won’t have seen.

So let’s start with our favourite piece of terrier-like interrogation from the nation’s broadcast journalists, reporters and presenters. These are the people ultimately charged with holding our politicians to account on our behalf – literally so in the case of the BBC – so it’s vital they keep on top of their game with a firm grasp of the issues and an ability to cut through the waffle and obfuscation of their interview subjects and get to the heart of the matter.

So for a gem that dates way back to almost the first political programme of the year but which nobody managed to better for the entire 11-and-a-bit months that followed it, our first-ever “Wingy” goes to… Raymond Buchanan of BBC Scotland!

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The core claim of the No campaign, or “Better Together” as it prefers to be called, is that Scotland is economically, politically and socially stronger as a partner within the United Kingdom. This status is defined, according to the campaign’s website, by three key factors: Prosperity, Security and Interdependence.

Each deserves scrutiny, but for now let’s focus on the first one, with reference to Alistair Darling’s recent speech at the John P. Mackintosh lecture. This was the claim that Darling made on trade and business:

“Scotland is far better represented abroad as part of the UK than we could ever hope to be as a separate state. The nationalists tell you that the UK embassies and consulates do not represent Scots. Try telling that to Scots who find themselves in trouble in a far-flung part of the world and can rely on the UK embassy to help them out. To the businesses seeking trade. They open doors for our people and businesses across the globe.

Farmers, fishermen and women, businesses big and small all reap the benefits of the UK’s global reach and global influence. Losing this influence would be a massive loss. It would be impossible to replicate it on a smaller scale.”

I’ve worked in 27 countries around the world in all six inhabited continents, so I think it’s fair to call myself a global businessman. I’m operating in a medium-sized company, but in 11 years of travel I cannot bring to mind a single case where association with Britain has differentiated our business.

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When we wrote a story earlier today about another piece of embarrassing evidence falling off the Scottish Labour website, we thought it was nothing more than the latest in a long line of attempts by the party to clumsily cover its tracks over policy U-turns. But when we did a little digging, we found something altogether more interesting.

Because when we typed the page’s address into The Internet Wayback Machine for fun, we fully expected to find that the line about continuing free prescription charges had been deleted yesterday, or at least in the weeks since Johann Lamont made her infamous “something for nothing” speech.

Instead, however, TIWM listed only one previous version. While it’s not the sole factor, pages tend to show up on the archive site when they’ve been amended, and the only time the Wayback Machine had been called on to notice this particular page since its creation in November 2010 was on Friday the 6th of May 2011 – the day after the Scottish Parliament election delivered a historic landslide victory to the SNP, and an unprecedentedly humiliating defeat for Labour.

Results were still coming in on the 6th of May, but Scottish Labour had clearly already decided to eradicate mention of their promise to maintain free prescriptions. Now, it seems rather unlikely that the party convened a meeting of its executive committee, debated the policy, decided on a change and dutifully edited a page of its website while everyone was still digesting the scale of their defeat and/or catching up on some much-needed sleep after a long night of results.

(Indeed, it’s possible that the web page was changed even earlier than the 6th.)

The only reasonable conclusion it’s possible to draw, then, is that the policy was already internally a dead duck before election day. The party’s manifesto pledge (which can be found on page 41) that “with Scottish Labour, there will be no reintroduction of charges for prescriptions in Scotland” must therefore have been a deliberate and cynical lie, set to be abandoned even if the party won power.

It took almost 18 months from that day before Johann Lamont announced her “review” of policy to consider whether universal benefits like prescription charges would be retained under a future Labour government at Holyrood. The review isn’t due to publish its conclusions for almost two more years, and some prominent Labour MSPs have already suggested that free prescriptions will “probably need to stay” (despite the same member also describing them as a “right-wing policy”). But in the light of this evidence, we think it’s a reasonably safe bet what the final verdict will be.

Were readers to further conclude that it’s rather unwise – and perhaps even literally damaging to one’s health – to accept a word of anything Scottish Labour ever says at face value, we’d find it hard to disagree.

There’s been much hot air unleashed in Holyrood in recent weeks over various “wastes” of money by the Scottish Government. First the opposition accused the SNP of spending £100,000 (which turned out to be a wild piece of back-of-a-fag-packet guesswork vastly overestimating the actual £4,000 cost) in fighting a Freedom Of Information request over EU legal advice. Then there were complaints about £48,000 spent sending a team to the premiere of Brave, despite the obvious benefits to be had marketing Scotland’s tourism industry on the back of the movie.

And finally, Labour in particular screamed themselves hoarse (and were still doing so as recently as yesterday’s FMQs) about the £470,000 the Scottish Government delegation to the Ryder Cup cost, even though it was a contractual obligation, encompassed numerous other business engagements which generated Scottish jobs, and in fact represented a 30% saving on comparable trips by the last Labour-led Holyrood administration. (Which weren’t contractual obligations.)

But still. If just for the sake of argument you were to accept the Unionist parties’ line, that’s a whopping £522,000 the Scottish Government has cavalierly thrown away in recent months. Meanwhile, how has the UK government in Westminster been doing?

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This was the “Education” page of the Scottish Labour website this morning:

After Alex Salmond referred to it at FMQs, the page has now been deftly amended to fall in line with the rest of party policy, as you can see in the image below:

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Okay, so here’s a fun teaser you can try out around the table after your Christmas dinner. What do the following far-flung countries have in common: Canada, Togo, Uzbekistan, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gabon, Panama, Zambia, Haiti, Libya and the Cape Verde Islands? Give up? Here’s a clue:

Yep – all of them, and 60 other nations too, are now officially better at football than Scotland. Entirely coincidentally, in the same week this dismaying fact was revealed, it was confirmed that former national coach Craig Levein was to sue the SFA for only offering to pay him £35,000 a month for the next year-and-a-half to sit around and scratch his arse in front of the Jeremy Kyle Show.

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We don’t often get to see Johann Lamont on the telly, so when she made one of her rare appearances in a five-minute interview with STV’s excellent Bernard Ponsonby this week we couldn’t only do half a job. As we’re still stuck in the house fighting off this year’s unusually-horrible and persistent germs – and as Lamont repeated most of the speech at today’s FMQs – we steeled ourselves, sat down with a large medicinal hot toddy and transcribed the rest of the piece.

What with it being Christmas and everything, though, you’re probably busy, so if you’re in a rush we’ve condensed all of Johann’s umming and aahing and stumbling and waffling down to its essence, where there is such a thing. The parts highlighted in red below are all you really need to read.

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21st November 2012

Dear Sir,

The Herald was the daily newspaper in our house when I was a child. My parents took both it and the Evening Times. When I started to outgrow the Bunty I eschewed the Jackie and its like and graduated straight to the newspapers. My father cancelled his Evening Times subscription when I was coming up to my Highers because he thought reading two newspapers every evening was interfering with my homework.

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We’ve spent the last 90 minutes watching an incredible video someone linked us to in a reader comment earlier today. It’s a public meeting of the Clydebank Trades Union Council on November 29th, headed by a panel comprising Gil Paterson (SNP MSP for Clydebank and Milngavie), Jackie Baillie (Labour MSP for Dumbarton), chairman Tom Paterson (secretary of Clydebank TUC), Stephen Boyd (assistant secretary of Scottish TUC) and Cathy Leach (Scottish Pensioners’ Forum).

Throughout the meeting the sense of anger and hurt coming from the traditionally-Labour audience and directed mostly at Baillie is overwhelming. Time and again the party’s betrayal of its core audience is bitterly attacked. But an hour and 25 seconds in, there’s a particularly remarkable exchange.

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