Wings Over Scotland

While conducting an imaginary debate with myself in the mirror (not a euphemism), I struck upon an idea that I think is worth trying out on people who claim to be undecided about the referendum. You know the type – they ask you a question about how such and such would continue or otherwise if we become independent, and upon receiving a perfectly good answer, they then come up with another burning issue, and another, and another, etc, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

While some of these people no doubt have genuine issues of concern and just want some reassurance, I suspect a sizeable portion aren’t really interested in having these questions answered at all – they’re just asking them for the sake of it. The purpose of the question is not to find the answer, but to try to put independence supporters on the back foot and catch them out. They’re not looking to banish all the fears which are stopping them from voting Yes – they’re simply looking for an excuse to vote No.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

We don’t know if there’s ever been an official competition for “Most British Place In Scotland”, but if there was it’s a pretty safe bet that Ibrox Stadium would win it at a canter. So we don’t suppose we ought to be surprised that this is what happened there just before the kick-off of yesterday’s SFL3 match against Peterhead:

The display was only one part of a touching and solemn commemoration of the fallen of two world wars which also included the firing of an artillery gun on the pitch (“Hey, survivors of enemy barrages, here’s a fun trip down memory lane for you!”), Broxi Bear standing with his big comedy foam head bowed in the centre circle for the minute’s silence and – we promise we’re not making any of this up – a bunch of Royal Marines abseiling down from the Govan Stand roof with the match ball.

Now, we’re sure this whole grotesque circus was conducted with the best of intentions. But anyone juxtaposing the poppy with a national flag – with any national flag – has misunderstood what it is that the poppy is supposed to stand for in the most complete and catastrophic way imaginable. This was the poppy as symbol not of remembrance and sacrifice and tragedy, but of victory.

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We read something odd in the Herald yesterday.

“In a joint statement, Labour’s Johann Lamont, Tory leader Ruth Davidson and the Liberal Democrats’ Willie Rennie said: “It is vital that the referendum properly reflects the will of the Scottish people. We look forward to hearing the views of the Electoral Commission and will abide by its ruling.”

In the same spirit of magnanimity, Wings Over Scotland would like to humbly and solemnly announce that from today onwards we will abide by the law of gravity and the requirement for human beings to breathe oxygen in order to respire. Thank you.

It can be a full-time job keeping up with the many inconsistencies and contradictions in the anti-independence campaign. (Labour’s professed hatred for the Tories but willingness to let them govern Scotland when Scottish voters reject them, and the Conservatives’ belief in the UK Union but deep-seated antipathy to the European one, leap out as two of the more obvious examples.) Today’s is a corker, though.

Attentive readers will recall that the “Better Together” camp has spent the five months since its launch constantly warning Scots that independence would be “irrevocable”. Here’s figurehead Alistair Darling being reported in the Telegraph as saying just that at the No campaign’s launch in June of this year (our emphasis, as usual):

“This is not about picking a government for the next five years. If we decide to go down the independence route it is an irrevocable step – you’re talking about a completely different constitutional relationship, maybe for the next 200 or 300 years.”

Pretty unequivocal, then – independence is forever, no going back in our lifetime, or that of our children, or their children, or their children. But wait. Fast-forward to last night and the former Chancellor appears to have had a radical change of heart, in a BBC story headlined “Darling predicts independent Scotland would rejoin UK”:

“Speaking as he delivered this year’s John P Mackintosh Memorial Lecture in Prestonpans, East Lothian, on Friday evening, [Darling] said the ‘most obvious problem’ with a common currency was that ‘sooner or later it takes you to economic and then political union. So Scotland would leave the UK only to end up in the same place as it began, with all the trauma that would entail.'”

Of course, if you’re a Wings Over Scotland reader you already knew the “irrevocable” line was a load of rubbish that could only be true if the core claim – and indeed, the very name – of “Better Together” was a cynical lie. But it’s nice to see Mr Darling admit it this early in the day. Which strident assertion, we wonder, will he recant next?

Labour today is a far cry from the party of old, a party that was set up to provide a voice for the working class so as to gain control over the means of production for the masses rather than to be dictated to by capitalism. The modern incarnation is now peddling the notion of “One Nation Labour”, with Johann Lamont decrying what she calls the “something for nothing country” of Scotland, presumably referring to the stubborn preference of the Scots for the social democractic principles of “old” Labour over the neoliberal New Labour. As justification for the rightward shift, Lamont asserts:

“If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.”

(Clearly she’s been using Gordon Brown’s sub-editor.)

On the face of it, that seems a relatively straightforward statement of fact: if you can’t pay for something then you have to cut back, go without or find new money to properly fund it. It should be noted that as we’ve seen, at present there’s no need to make this choice because current spending is fully funded. However, as costs rise and privatisation, budget cuts and PFI in England (along with some creative accounting of England-only spending as “UK” projects or reserve-budget items) continue to cause reductions in the Scottish block grant, we soon will.

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As with any long campaign, we’re a bit worried that we might have to spend the next two years saying the same things over and over again, because the main Unionist tactic seems to be to keep asking questions after they’ve been answered a hundred times. That said, when you’ve got your hands full with domestic mini-crises (as we’ve had all this week), it can be quite useful to have already covered the day’s main topics and be able to just point people at the archives before rushing off to fight the latest fire.

• On Ian Davidson moaning this morning about the “biased” referendum question.
• On Alastair Darling tonight joining the ranks of those in the Unionist camp who think being “foreign” is axiomatically a bad thing.
• And on Michael Moore yesterday promising new powers if Scotland votes No.

If we don’t have a heart attack before then, see you tomorrow.

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Sources: [1], [2] and [3].

There was a shock admission from Anas Sarwar, “deputy” leader of Scottish Labour, when speaking about the referendum on BBC Scotland’s “The Big Debate” last night:

“This will be the biggest decision that any of you will make in your lifetime, and what we need actually is Yes.”

It’s not every day we agree with the often factually-challenged MP for Glasgow Central, but this time we think he’s hit the nail square on the head.

(Because it’s fine to just cut people’s quotes short to suit your own purposes, right?)

Here’s a little weekend brainteaser for you, folks. On the BBC’s This Week show on Saturday, veteran presenter Andrew Neil interviewed two former senior government ministers about the UK’s nuclear deterrent – one was a Conservative former Defence Secretary, the other a Labour former Culture Secretary. For now we’ll call them Politician A and Politician B.

See if you can match the following quotes to the person who said them.

ANDREW NEIL: What is your view – should [Trident] be renewed?

POLITICIAN A: No, I think it’s all nonsense.

NEIL: Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?

POLITICIAN A: No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent, because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent, because now largely we are facing the sorts of enemies – the Taliban, Al Qaeda – who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. It’s a tremendous waste of money, it’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige, it’s wasteful, and at the margins it is proliferatory.

NEIL: Okay. But the government – or at least the Conservative part of the coalition – looks like they’re going to proceed with it. What will [your party’s] position be on it [, Politician B]?

POLITICIAN B: Actually, the position that Phillip Hammond has taken is very close to the position that we agreed some time ago when [Politician C] was Defence Secretary. The decision about whether to proceed […] won’t be taken until 2016…

NEIL: …but you’re happy that Mr Hammond’s going ahead with the spending, the seed money, which allows the decision if you want to?

POLITICIAN B: Yeah, completely, yes, yeah.

We’re going to assume that you’re ahead of us here, readers. The former Tory Defence Secretary (Michael Portillo) is, of course Politician A, the one who thinks that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is a pointless, ineffectual waste of time and money aimed solely at letting the UK grandstand on the world stage, while the former Labour Cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) is Politician B, who wants to spend billions of pounds just on the preparatory research for upgrading it – let alone the £84bn cost of actually doing so – at a time when her party is telling us that we can’t afford to educate our young people or look after the elderly.

You can watch this remarkable development for as long as it’s still available on the iPlayer (from 31 minutes), or listen to a permanent audio clip here. The politics of the Union are now truly through the looking glass.

As the Scottish people ponder the merits of independence, it can be useful to examine areas in which Holyrood rather than Westminster already controls policy, and one of the most obvious is healthcare. The NHS is in almost all operational senses already independent in Scotland, and operates in a markedly different manner to the way the service is run in England and Wales.

But as we recently revealed, the Scottish NHS remains subject to hidden budget cuts as a result of the Barnett Formula, as well as the headline cuts imposed to Scotland’s block grant under Westminster austerity. The question, then, is whether this devolved form of “independence” is enough to maintain the standards of healthcare Scots have come to expect.

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After ten days, we have an answer, of sorts.

“Dear Rev Campbell

Reference CAS-1714825-RP7R5W

Thank you for your e-mail. Your comments were passed to the Editor of Newsnight Scotland, who has asked that I forward his response as follows:

“Thank you for getting in touch with us about the Newsnight Scotland interview with Nicola Sturgeon on 23rd October.

We have received a number of complaints about this item, most of them concerning the sound quality of the interview and a number alleging politically-motived bias.

To take each in turn:

I accept that the sound quality of this item fell short of the standards we would expect and apologise if this detracted from your enjoyment of the interview. However, I do not believe that the editorial sense of that interview was compromised by the technical problems. I have investigated what went wrong in this instance and have taken appropriate steps to ensure that something similar does not occur in future.

Some have suggested that the BBC in some way deliberately ‘doctored’ the interview for reasons of political bias; others suggested that it was not a technical fault but a deliberate attempt to suppress the words of the Deputy First Minister. Either suggestion implies that we were happy to be grossly unprofessional and, thereby, seriously to breach all of the journalistic standards which the BBC has striven for so many years to achieve and which are encapsulated in the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines. I can only repeat – this was an unfortunate technical matter for which I again apologise.

Thank you again for taking the time and the trouble to be in touch about the programme.”

Details of the BBC complaints process are available online at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle.shtml

Kind Regards

Patrick McManus
BBC Complaints”

As often tends to be the case with BBC responses, it produces more questions than answers. The nature of the “technical fault” is not clarified, there’s nothing on how it managed to get past the producer without the failure being noticed and be broadcast, and nor – more tellingly – is there any explanation of why there was no apology broadcast on either that night’s show or the following evening’s. Even if we take the reply at face value with regard to the incident itself, we all pay a significant (and mandatory) fee for the BBC and we deserve more respect than that.

But most curiously of all, if you read it closely the reply doesn’t in fact deny the suggestions of bias. It merely says, if we might paraphrase, “If you believe we’d do such a thing, then you must be prepared to believe that we’re biased.” It rather conspicuously doesn’t go on to add “But we’re not”, instead merely leaving the reader to infer it without it actually being said.

We feel compelled to note once again that in the event of a vote for independence, everyone at BBC Scotland would be out of a job. We’re not sure how conducive to impartiality that is, and we suspect it could certainly stretch to turning a blind eye to an initially non-deliberate gremlin in the works. We will, as ever, continue to monitor.

Watching FMQs yesterday, a thought suddenly occurred to us. Is it possible that a lot of Scottish people’s reluctance to support independence isn’t because they think the south-east of England knows what’s best for Scotland, but because they’re simply terrified of the possibility of someone other than the SNP winning an election to an independent Scottish Parliament, and thereby risking putting the entire nation in the hands of the likes of Johann Lamont, Jackie Baillie and Richard Baker?

Have we been making a terrible tactical error all this time? Should we, in fact, spend the next two years bigging up Scottish Labour and the rest of the Holyrood opposition instead of mercilessly exposing their hapless ineptitude at every turn? Should we do our best to reassure a frightened electorate that should the SNP split after independence (which some people think it will, though we don’t), there’s nothing to fear from a government that might include Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and James Kelly and have control of ALL of Scotland’s finances, welfare and defence?

Because if so we’ll give it a shot. But frankly, that’s going to be a tough sell.