Wings Over Scotland

It’s got flowers on it and everything.

Gemma Fox is a rather strange lady who makes Lego dioramas of Royal Marine Commandos and who we had a childish but enlightening recreational argument with on Twitter last night. (Funnily enough after a long and tiring day visiting the Fleet Air Arm Museum in Yeovilton.) James Mackenzie is a Green activist and one of the editors of the once-popular and increasingly-ironically-named Better Nation blog.

(Mackenzie threw an impressive hissy fit earlier this week when we very politely challenged him to support a seemingly-baseless allegation about another blogger, even going so far as to claim “harassment” on the basis of someone responding civilly to comments made in an open public forum. Presumably, as a Better Nation editor he’s just not used to people answering him back without being able to censor them.)

Ms Fox generously warned us last night that we had until “2000 hrs” this evening to delete unspecified tweets from our account, and that we should also “warn yer pals”. (We’re not quite sure who that means, but it might be you, so we thought we’d better let you know.) If we vanish suddenly at 8.01pm under legal action – the threat of which we’re sure is real and serious, and definitely not just the mad rantings of a delusional internet lunatic – speak kindly of us when we’re gone. We had a good run.

Did anyone else notice that in last night’s Scotland Tonight interview (in which he noted that Labour’s tribal hatred of the SNP was blinding and damaging it), former First Minister Henry McLeish referred to Johann Lamont as “leader of the Labour Party in Scotland”, rather than as the leader of anything called “Scottish Labour”? As a current member and ex-head of the party’s Scottish division, you’d think Mr McLeish would know the proper name and internal structure of it. What aren’t we being told?

Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland both ran fairly decent shows last night leading with the issue of Trident and its replacement, but the most telling contribution to the debate came from the long-standing Labour columnist Polly Toynbee. In a frank and direct piece for the Guardian, Toynbee analysed the politics rather than the economic or defence arguments, and concurred with something this site and others have been saying for almost a year:

“We know where everyone stands – except Labour.”

But it’s just after that line where Toynbee drops the real bomb:

“Some in Labour are nuclear-heads because they occupy seats such as John Woodcock’s Barrow, a one-industry town dependent on defence. Others are nuclear out of strong conviction a unilateralist Labour would be dead at the polls. Probably no one in Labour actually believes we need a Trident replacement for national defence – only for political defence of Labour.“

It’s become fashionable in recent months to put forward the argument that the Scottish electorate isn’t as different to the English one as we often like to portray. There’s certainly a core sliver of truth to that, with the Scottish political spectrum slightly distorted by votes for the left-of-centre SNP that may be at least partly more to do with their competence – compared to an embarrassingly useless opposition – than with Scots being ragingly socialist.

But there are still specific issues where Scots consistently poll to the left of England and the rest of the UK. Welfare is one, and Trident is another. Whether that’s based on a deep moral opposition to the concept of nuclear weapons or merely the fact that it’s our backyard they’re parked in is a matter for conjecture. But the SNP can’t be accused of populist opportunism on the issue, because they’ve been solidly committed to an anti-nuclear platform since the day the first Polaris submarine sailed up the Clyde over 50 years ago.

Labour, on the other hand, are so dizzy from trying to face in every direction at once on the issue that their Scottish “leader” refuses to even say what her personal position is, let alone what she’d do were she to somehow, God forbid, find herself the First Minister of an independent Scotland.

Toynbee’s explosive column openly acknowledges the truth: the £83bn cost of Trident (and the reality, demonstrated over decades, is that it will in fact be several times that) is, as far as Labour are concerned, an expenditure primarily aimed at getting themselves elected. Not that they’ll pay for it – you and I, the gullible taxpayer – will pick up the tab, and the sick and the poor and the vulnerable will be the ones to suffer from the huge hole it’ll leave in the budget.

Labour don’t want Trident because they think it protects the people of the UK, because even Tony Blair admitted it was worthless for that. They want it to protect themselves.

Most people, it seems fair to say, expected more resignations from the SNP over the NATO vote at conference just over a week ago. As passions ran high, some Scottish political journalists went so far as to name the next expected departure (supposedly list MSP John Wilson). Yet no more transpired, and it seems reasonable to suppose that any who were going to would have done it by now. So why haven’t they?

There are numerous possible explanations, of course. Perhaps everyone’s just calmed down after the heat of debate and accepted that they lost a democratic vote and independence is still more important than any single policy, or that it still represents a vastly better chance of a nuclear-free Scotland than staying in the Union. Perhaps nobody wanted to be singled out as the person who cost the party its majority in Holyrood, even if only technically.

But it occurred to us this morning, as we watched Scotland On Sunday embark on a determined and multi-pronged attempt to keep the EU-advice row alive in the minds of a largely-disinterested public, that it might instead be the case that Labour’s hysterical, overblown handling of the matter has served to concentrate SNP minds away from internal disagreements and on the wider good of the party, and to have them close ranks in protection of a First Minister who’s still by a distance the most popular and trusted politician in Scotland (if not the entire UK).

Napoleon famously once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Scottish Labour waded into Alex Salmond at a time when his party seemed in danger of being seriously split for the first time since he regained the leadership, and in doing so may well have pushed his dissenters back into line for him. Not for the first time, the FM may have cause to thank his opponents for the blind tribal hatred that so often seems to drive them into sheer blundering ineptitude.

The Scotsman reports today that the Lib Dems are prepared to accept Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals to limit child benefit and child tax credits to the first two children in a family, in return for some tax increases on the rich.

The plans, which echo China’s extraordinarily punitive “one child per family” laws, have caused a storm of controversy because of the obvious catastrophic impact they could have on some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the country – costing them thousands of pounds a year – as well as the nightmare of bureaucracy and obvious cases of farcical unfairness that could and will result from them.

(What if you’ve worked all your life and have four children, then get made unexpectedly redundant or become ill? Are you supposed to put your two most expensive kids into care because you can no longer afford to feed all of them? What if you already have one child and fall pregnant with what turns out to be twins or triplets? Do you have to pick your favourite and leave the others at the hospital? What if people ignore the changes and have children they can’t afford? Do we just let their kids die, saying “Hey, you knew the rules”? What if someone gets raped and can’t have a termination on religious grounds? Etc etc.)

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems have signalled their support, ensuring the policy will have a Parliamentary majority and be enacted. Some tax rates on the wealthy may be raised, and the rich will continue to get their accountants to find imaginative ways of avoiding paying that tax as usual. Even if additional tax revenues were to be raised by the measures, we’re not sure how that helps the starving extra children of the poor, since they won’t be getting any of the money.

It’s clear that the poor are going to continue to bear most of the burden of austerity. With this latest development following on from Scottish Labour’s recent abandonment of the principle of universal services, all three main Westminster parties and their subsidiaries north of the border are now fully committed to savage attacks on the welfare state. If you’re poor in the UK, it no longer matters who you vote for.

You know the rest by now.

It’s nice to see some blue-sky thinking in the British government. These are difficult times and everything needs to be on the table for discussion, such as the decadent, indulgent luxury of letting old people retire.

“We are now prepared to say to people who are not looking for work, if you don’t look for work you don’t get benefits, so if you are old and you are not contributing in some way or another maybe there is some penalty attached to that.”

Those are the words of Lord Bichard, a “crossbench” peer who has worked for both Labour and Tory governments and is the former head of the Benefits Agency. He’s suggesting, quite openly, that in the near future the UK’s old folk should have their pensions cut if they don’t keep working until they die. He thinks this an “imaginative idea”, necessary because we must “cut the costs of an ageing society”.

We hesitate to suggest that one way to cut the costs of an ageing society might be to reduce the size of the pension paid to Lord Bichard, which at a cosy £120,000 a year could probably stand a little trimming. (His Lordship retired at the grand old age of 53, so we’ll be paying it for a long time.) Nevertheless, we thank the noble peer for giving us another indicator of what the future holds for the people of Scotland should they choose to remain part of the UK. Decision time in two years and counting.

The Scottish media is in full-on outcry mode at the Scottish Government for keeping things from the Scottish people with regard to the possible status of the country’s EU membership status in the event of independence, and to be fair it’s quite understandable when you read official statements like this:

“Whilst there is a strong public interest in seeing what legal advice has been provided to the Government on the implications of EU membership if Scotland were to achieve independence, we have concluded that this is outweighed by a strong public interest in the Government being able to seek free and frank legal advice.”

Of course, in the spirit of Scottish Labour’s creative editing of the First Minister’s words yesterday, we’ve deftly removed a word from that sentence so that it suits our purposes better. Specifically, in between “has been provided to the” and “Government”, we’ve removed the word “UK”.

We’re really not sure how the UK government’s actions differ in any way from those of the Scottish Government in respect of the same issue, particularly when a Scottish Office minister goes on to add that “I have not received formal representations on the possible status of an independent Scotland within the EU.”

It would seem, to the casual observer, that in both cases the respective governments have declined to seek out specific legal advice about an independent Scotland’s EU status, but have sought to conceal that information (or lack of information) from voters on the grounds that confidentiality ensures the government receives candid expert advice undistorted by public opinion.

So perhaps someone can explain to us why only one of them is currently subject to a huge nationwide media storm about it.

It’s not like we didn’t already know that, of course. But while Labour desperately distort and edit Alex Salmond’s words to try to justify an allegation of untruth, ably assisted by the Scottish media doing the same to Nicola Sturgeon by cutting her microphone when she attempted to answer questions on the subject, their Scottish leader – sorry, “deputy” leader – quietly gets on with doing what he does best: telling outright, unambiguous, empirical lies.

We’ll let the veteran Scottish journalist George Kerevan (a former Scotsman editor, Labour councillor and SNP candidate), who did all the hard work of digging out the stats, tell you all about it. But here’s a quote from the piece just for flavour.

“Following the publication of the latest official employment figures on 17 October, Anas Sarwar announced to the BBC: “In the last three months, 7,000 people in Scotland have lost their jobs while employment in the rest of the UK is going up – this SNP government has to start taking responsibility for that”.

Mr Sarwar is factually wrong.

The figures published by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) do not say that 7,000 people “have lost their jobs” in the period June through August (i.e. the summer).

It is true that the figure for the total jobless rose by 7,000 to 222,000. But most of that 7,000 figure has nothing to do with people losing their jobs, as Mr Sarwar claims. Rather, it is due to young people joining the labour market from school of university, which is normal in the summer. And from people previously not looking for work returning to the labour market – usually a positive sign of returning economic confidence.

The ONS figures actually show that the fall in the number of jobs in the Scottish economy of the summer was only 1,000. Certainly that is going in the wrong direction. But it does not help policy analysis to misquote the true figures, or exaggerate actual job losses by a factor of seven.”

We look forward keenly to the media reporting Mr Sarwar’s lie, and grilling him on Newsnight Scotland about it while muting his replies.

The prime raison d’etre of a government is to provide for its citizens defence, security and services that either an individual would be unable to provide for themselves, or where such services are in the public interest but cannot be adequately served by market forces. Government is there to act on our behalf and in the common interest of our society, and in order to do so is funded by the people through taxation.

It’s the responsibility of any government to ensure that the services that the public pay for are maintained and that the money that is paid in taxation is spent as effectively as possible in delivering those services. These are not “giveaways”, but the reallocation of public funds to meet the needs of the populace, a transaction in which the recipient of the service has already provided payment – in many cases far more than they would ever recoup themselves.

Historically this was the most basic founding principle of the Labour Party, which advocated socialist policies such as public ownership of key industries, government intervention in the economy, redistribution of wealth, increased rights for workers, the welfare state, publicly funded healthcare and education. These principles were duly enshrined in “Clause IV” of the Labour constitution.

In 1995, however, “Clause IV” was abolished by Tony Blair, heralding the birth of “New Labour” and the adoption of market based solutions and neo-liberalisation. Labour in Scotland was less keen to accept this new creed than its compatriots south of the border, but when Johann Lamont recently signalled Scottish Labour’s final submission to the triangulated centre-right doctrine, many whose traditional sympathies lay with the party rounded bitterly on her policy shift.

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Do Ed Miliband, Tony Benn and George Galloway and now Sir Menzies Campbell (who appeared on today’s edition of The Sunday Politics Scotland) have some sort of problem with foreigners? It sounds like they do. For instance, read these words from Tony Benn, the great elder statesman of the Labour Party, this summer:

“If Scotland wants to be independent they have the absolute right to do so. But I think nationalism is a mistake. And I am half Scots and feel it would divide me in half with a knife. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.”

When asked about Benn’s views in a recent Holyrood magazine interview, Labour leader Ed Miliband had this to say:

“I am not the only person with family ties abroad and family is family, whatever the accent or postcode. But the Scottish people with family in England, or vice versa, will be living in a foreign country if Alex Salmond gets his way, that’s just a fact. We live in an increasingly interconnected world; we shouldn’t be building artificial barriers, we should be working out how to work more closely together.“

And on an episode of Scotland Tonight a few months ago, where Galloway discussed the issue of Scottish independence with YesScotland chair Dennis Canavan, the Respect MP talked passionately of solidarity between working-class people, which Scottish independence would, he claimed, damage. He felt just the same solidarity, he suggested, with bus drivers in Glasgow, Bradford and Belfast.

To which the most obvious immediate response is “What about bus drivers in Dublin, Oslo, Marseilles, Toronto or Lagos?” Does George Galloway not have the same sense of solidarity with them? Clearly not, if he feels that Scottish independence is somehow contrary to his solidarity with bus drivers either side of the border. If Scottish bus drivers somehow becoming citizens of a different country to bus drivers in his own Bradford constituency has any relevance to his ability to be in solidarity with them, you have to wonder about the nature of his socialism and his solidarity.

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Well, we’re still a bit out of breath. The SNP conference debate on NATO membership was an incredible, grab-you-by-the-throat piece of political theatre, with the outcome in doubt all the way to the end. Social media was all but unanimous in its praise of the debate, with even some Labour MPs clearly a bit wistful for the Kinnock-era days when their own gatherings used to have this sort of proper democratic ding-dong instead of just stage-managed rallies.

The leadership carried the day in the end, with Angus Robertson’s motion for a wide-ranging “update” of the party’s old defence policy passed more or less unaltered. We had absolutely no position before the debate so watched it with a completely open mind, and purely on the strength of arguments the right side won.

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Something’s been puzzling us for a while now, readers. We’ve been a bit reluctant to mention it before because it’s the sort of thing people can spin in misleading ways, and because it’s something we neither want to see happen or believe ever would. But purely by way of an intellectual exercise, let’s ask the question.

Ever since being unveiled as the figurehead of the anti-independence campaign, Alistair Darling has insisted that a Yes vote in 2014 would be “irrevocable”. It’s a word that crops up frequently from the No camp, in what appears to be a strange and misconceived extension of the standard-issue fearmongering approach which has characterised most Unionist campaigning to date.

(Because we very much doubt that even one person who votes for independence will be doing so with the thought “Och, if it doesn’t work out we’ll just rejoin the UK”.)

Nevertheless, if we’re really “better together”, why would it be impossible to go back?

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