Wings Over Scotland

We were going to get 2013 up and running with a piece on how we’d like to see the independence debate approached in the coming year, but Ewan Crawford has rather kindly done the job for us in The Scotsman, in a snappy 113 words:

“Labour has decided to mount a campaign based primarily on a combination of all-out personal attack against the First Minister and an assault on what they characterise as Scotland’s “something for nothing culture” typified by free personal care for the elderly and the abolition of university tuition fees.

In 2013 they should feel free to get on with this to see if this is indeed the platform that people in Scotland have been crying out for from a potential party of government.

The overwhelming focus of the independence campaign should instead be about a sense of possibility and a conversation with people concerned about jobs and the economic prospects for themselves and their families.”

In an ideal world, the last paragraph on its own would probably have sufficed. But it’s vitally important to understand the opposition’s position not just on the superficial political level, but also what it tells us about the consequences of a No vote.

If there’s one truth the independence movement really needs to get across to the people of Scotland in the next 12 months if it’s to build towards victory, it’s that there will be no additional powers for Holyrood within the UK should Scots reject the opportunity to run their own affairs. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be the case.

Helpfully, the message compresses down neatly to just four words – words the Yes movement must, for all its positivity, drum into the minds of the Scottish people if it wants them to fully understand the choice they face in 2014: Vote No, Get Nothing.

Someone recently directed us towards a recording of an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “PM” news and current-affairs show broadcast early in June of this year. It featured a discussion between presenter Eddie Mair and Dr Alex Woolf, a listener to the show who’d contacted it after an interview with Alex Salmond.

You can listen to the whole discussion on YouTube, but we always prefer to see this sort of thing written down for ease of reflection and reference, so we gritted our teeth for another transcription session. (Though this one was made less painful by the superb Chrome plugin Transcribe, which we recommend unreservedly).

The result can be found below. It seems an appropriate way to start the year in which the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence will be published.

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We must admit, we thought Ian Davidson would be a shoo-in for this particular award after his unforgettable implosion on Newsnight Scotland in August. But then we read something twice as mad and half as comprehensible. It was a piece from STV News in October, based on some comments by unfortunately-named Scottish Labour “deputy” leader and hereditary MP Anas Sarwar. We’ve read it eight or nine times now, and we still have genuinely not the slightest clue what he’s wittering on about.

We’re going to step through it line-by-line and see if we can get it to make any sense. Feel free to join in if you’ve got any ideas, because we’re stumped.

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On Friday, the Guardian reported Ed Miliband’s New Year message to the people of Britain. The key passage was one in which he promised this would be the year his party actually came up with some policies:

“One nation Labour is about reaching out to every part of Britain, it’s about a party that is as much the party of the private sector as the public sector, a party of south as well as north, a party determined to fight for the future of the United Kingdom, and a party rooted in every community of our land.

I’ve set out a vision of what this county [sic] can be, one nation, and in 2013 we will be setting out concrete steps on making that vision a reality from business to education to welfare.”

There’s a pretty big hint there to Scottish voters about the consequences of a No vote in the independence referendum. But in case anyone needs it spelling out: you don’t create “one nation” by letting the different parts of it have powers to create their own individual approaches to business, education and welfare, which is why this year Johann Lamont started the job of softening the Scottish people up and getting them used to the idea of Holyrood obediently following London policies.

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Here’s a friendly tip – this is why people think you’re all biased Unionist stooges:

The sort of corporate tax avoidance perpetrated by companies like Vodafone, Amazon, eBay and Starbucks is indeed a scandal. It is, however, a scandal that resides entirely at Westminster. The Scottish Government has no control whatsoever over corporate tax policy, which rests wholly in the hands of David Cameron and George Osborne. For a newspaper to instead illustrate a story on the subject with a giant picture of Alex Salmond, then – on the very flimsiest of contrived justifications – is exactly the sort of thing that’ll lead people to believe you’re pursuing some sort of agenda.

(Given that the First Minister has absolutely no influence on how much tax Amazon pays, all he can do is at least try to get some benefit from them by securing hundreds of jobs for Scotland, rather than having them go elsewhere in the UK or Europe.)

So in 2013, please spare us all your hurt protestations of injured feelings at the terrible unfair slight on your integrity when awful cybernats say you’re Unionist mouthpieces. Because while your paper looks like a duck, walks like a duck and acts like a duck, nobody’s going to hear your complaint above all the quacking.

Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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One of our very favourite No-campaign scare stories of the year was the Huffington Post’s “Vote Yes And You’ll Die Of Cancer”. But if Scotland chooses independence in 2014, will it actually affect our healthcare? After all, we’ve already noted how NHS Scotland has been independent since inception (and why we need a Yes vote in order to provide it with a stable funding base that won’t be cut out from under it via the effect of Barnett consequentials under Westminster austerity).

But it’s also worth examining how it would work in practice. What about if we travel to the rUK or in Europe? What about the cross-border co-operation that currently characterises the relationship between the UK’s two health services? Would we still be able to be treated in an English hospital if we vote for independence? Let’s find out.

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With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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In a year characterised by a marked increase in heat, as the Holyrood opposition focused its efforts almost exclusively on personal attacks against SNP ministers in an attempt to decapitate the Yes campaign, very few things could be said to have united a wide spectrum of the political sphere, from the radical arch-left to soft nationalists and Labour traditionalists alike. But a speech in September saw almost the entire Scottish media and blogosphere react with one astonished, horrified voice.

You don’t need us to tell you which one, do you?

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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.