Wings Over Scotland

The modern Scottish independence movement is 84 years old, dating back to the 1928 formation of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. It is a peaceful, inclusive, civic and democratic movement – to the best of our knowledge, and almost uniquely, not a single life has been lost in pursuit of Scottish independence.

Despite this, so-called “Unionists” (more properly described as British nationalists) still regularly try to portray independence campaigners as violent racists. As recently as a few days ago, one prominent Labour activist frequently employed as a commentator on BBC Scotland political shows attempted to perpetuate baseless (but oft-repeated by Unionists) 70-year-old smears that the former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was a Nazi sympathiser engaged in attempts to collaborate with the Germans during WW2, sabotage the British war effort and set up a Vichy-style government in Scotland. These claims were cited, astonishingly, as evidence of “the SNP’s fascist past”.

Such attacks are all the more bizarre given the constant reminders on the news that the only nationalists attempting to secure their goals by violence in the United Kingdom are those who do so in the name of Britishness, waving the Union Jack.

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Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has said that in the event that Scotland votes for independence in 2014 then the new state of Scotland would have to apply for EU membership all over again. Well, I hope Scottish residents vote to stay in the UK and I think the possibility that they may not is mainly media and political hype. But I’d hate to see the kind of tosh we’re being treated to today become central to what should, after all, be a serious debate.

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Unionists are very excited this afternoon about the latest development in the EU membership debate. A BBC interview with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso repeated the assertion (or rather, the deduction from an implication) that an independent Scotland would have to apply for entry to the European Union as a new state. We’ll limit ourselves to a few factual observations.

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These are the leaders of the nation’s business community, as they present themselves to us when explaining that they’re the mighty “masters of the universe” and require to be paid ever-soaring salaries in order to generate wealth and jobs and growth, because without them society itself will crumble to dust and we’ll all be reduced to foraging for berries in the shattered ruins of our once-proud civilisation.

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Scotland’s future within (or outside) the European Union (EU) has once again hit the headlines, with the Scotsman reporting that “the European Commission has written to a House of Lords committee stating that if Scots voters back independence, existing treaties which cover the UK’s EU membership will ‘cease to apply’”.

The Scotland Office is quoted in the article as saying that Scots have the right to know the full implications for Scotland if it were to “leave the UK family”. But just before we reach the meat of this topic, it’s rather disingenuous to claim that standing on your own two feet is akin to leaving a family.

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We’re over the worst of the flu now, readers. You can blow out those prayer candles. Sadly, though, we’re still not quite at 100% fighting fitness, so it might be a wee bit too dangerous to wade recklessly into the pool of shrieking, panicked insanity that poor Brian Wilson is thrashing around in at the Scotsman today.

If you perhaps weren’t yet certain of the power of Nicola Sturgeon’s tremendous and widely-lauded keynote speech at Strathclyde University on Monday, Wilson’s furiously incoherent and plainly terrified response is the proof of the pudding. The No camp is losing the argument, and they don’t know what to do about it.

We’re not about to help them out with strategy tips as to the right way to make their case, but out of basic human decency we’ll give them one clue: this isn’t it.

We had a brief but enjoyable Twitter debate (Twebate? Twiscussion? Twargument?) with the Spectator’s excellent Alex Massie earlier today, on the question of whether it’s possible for a person to genuinely belong to two countries at once. Our view has long been that it isn’t, but Massie seemed incredulous, querying whether Sir Walter Scott and Donald Dewar really didn’t see Scotland as a “proper” country.

We’ve long pondered over the simplest analogy to explain our view, and for want of a better alternative (plus we still have the flu) reluctantly went down the war route.

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This last week has seen the publication of a report that saw the NHS in Scotland deliver its “best performance ever”. The NHS Scotland Chief Executive’s Annual Report 2010/11 was full of praise for the organisation and the efforts it has made to improve safety, service and value in times of dwindling budgets.

“Few issues are as important to us as our health and the quality of the health services we receive. When we come into contact with the health service, we want to know that we are receiving the best possible care – care that is compassionate and safe, delivered by the most competent practitioners and planned with us at the very heart of the decisions about our care. We want to have confidence in the quality and effectiveness of any treatment.

“Some of the most significant improvements in quality include the achievement of the shortest ever waiting times for outpatient and inpatient appointments, including progress towards achieving a maximum wait of 18 weeks between referral and treatment, significant reductions in Healthcare Associated Infection to the lowest levels ever recorded and other measurable improvements in safety in hospitals.

There have been impressive increases in the numbers of people accessing smoking cessation and alcohol brief intervention services, increases in the proportion of older people being supported to stay at home through improvements in services for those with long term conditions, and reductions in the need for people to stay overnight in hospital for treatment or procedures.”

The findings were reported in the national news in a generally positive manner, such as this BBC article published on the 24th of November, detailing the efforts of the management and staff in Scotland and the results they’d managed to achieve.

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Unionist Collective. Radical Unionist Conference. Women For The Union. March & Rally for Scotland in the Union. Scottish Unionist Convention. That’s a list of things you probably won’t see appearing between now and 2014, and with good reason. In fact, the thought of such groups starting up seems inherently preposterous. But why?

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Good piece about Parliamentary standards today by Iain Macwhirter over on his personal blog. It covers a lot of ground, and we’re not 100% sure we go along with the comments on Nadine Dorries, but this passage (our emphasis) leapt out:

“And by the way, the PO should ban the practice of applauding at question time. Holyrood has turned into a bear-pit. It isn’t anyone’s fault in particular – though Labour’s conduct has been pretty inexcusable. You can’t win any argument by ranting – except in a pub. The Nats have been behaving in a heavy handed manner since they won their landslide majority and their packing of parliamentary committees hasn’t helped.

Labour’s frustration is partly down to their being locked out of all influence. But it was their fault they lost the election by such a crushing majority, and they aren’t helping their chances of re-election by restoring to the politics of closing time.”

We’ve said several times before that applause should be banned from all forms of televised political debate except at the start and end. It swallows up precious time and serves no purpose – all sides of any given debate will (or at least should) be represented in the audience, and will obediently clap their own man or woman, telling us nothing. It wasn’t permitted in the 2010 UK general election leaders’ debates, and so far as we can tell it wasn’t missed. Holyrood should be no different.

But it’s the second paragraph quoted above that’s even more on-the-nose. In much the same way that they didn’t ever seem to genuinely accept the fact that they lost the 2007 election – seeing it instead as a blip, a grudgingly-permitted technicality, that the SNP got more seats than them – Labour in Scotland have absolutely refused to acknowledge the much bigger hiding they took four years later.

Johann Lamont constantly demands an input that her party simply didn’t earn – the electorate chose, entirely democratically and after looking at the conduct of the previous administration and opposition, to give the SNP the power to run the country without any petty, obstructionist interference this time round. Labour are going to have to suck that up for another three-and-a-half years at least, and if they don’t get a grip on themselves pretty soon they’re going to burst a blood vessel.

Crybaby Nation is a land without borders. But a couple of recent news items from it do have a particularly Scottish flavour. One of them, also reported in the Daily Record, concerned an expat Scot and Motherwell supporter in the US banned from having “MWELLFC” on his car licence plate, on the barely-believable grounds that someone might interpret it as “ME WELL F**KED” and be offended. The other one, though, shames us more, because it happened on our own patch.

According to STV News, two new Grampian Fire & Rescue Service vehicles have had to be taken in and repainted after two people complained that the Saltire on their front grilles was a “political symbol”, connected to the SNP and independence movement.

We’re not even going to insult you by pointing out what pathetic, cringing, snivelling creatures those making a complaint against their own country’s flag must be, or how irrational the argument is. We’re just going to slump face-down onto our desk and sob for a couple of minutes about the gutless “corporate team” who allegedly decided to back down over it. We’ll be with you again shortly.

There’s a very good piece in the Scottish Sun today by Andrew Nicoll – entitled “Why promise more devolution when it will never happen?” – on the consequences of a “No” vote in the 2014 referendum. It’s well worth reading in full, but if you’re in a rush we’ll just quote the last line of it to give you the flavour:

“Independence has been a gun at Westminster’s head for decades. What do you think will happen when they find out there are no bullets in it?”

We are, as ever, pleased to see the mainstream Scottish media catching up with the stuff we’ve been saying for months, although the reality is in fact even worse than Nicoll suggests. Nonetheless, it’s good to see the analysis disseminated in Scotland’s biggest-selling paper, and by a proper senior staff journalist rather than the cop-out option of an opinion columnist. The Scottish Sun has almost ten times the circulation of the Scotsman, the country’s supposed “quality” broadsheet, and it’s worth remembering that pieces like this will therefore reach far more people than the likes of Michael Kelly, Brian Wilson or Magnus Gardham could ever dream of. Slowly but surely, the independence campaign is winning the argument, and the opposition’s panicked response tells the story. Stay out of the mud, folks.