Wings Over Scotland

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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Nick Clegg’s speech on demonising and punishing the poor and sick (in which he displayed a heroic willingness to take one for the coalition team by declaring “the Liberal Democrats are now the party of welfare reform”) brought the issue of the “something for nothing” culture back to the forefront today.

Scots, of course, are already familiar with the leader of the Holyrood opposition standing up and angrily telling the chamber how unsustainable and morally wrong it is that well-off people such as herself are entitled to universal benefits at state expense.

Yet numerous reports emphasise that universality is a solution that’s practical as well as desirable, because it’s economically efficient as well as solving the problem of people suffering because they’re unable or unwilling to claim benefits they need and ultimately costing the state far more money in remedial care.

It’s a tricky old pickle and no mistake. So entirely free of charge, we’ve had a wee think and come up with a policy that squares the circle, so that Johann Lamont can offer to solve the problem without condemning hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Scots (and Labour MSPs) to lives of unending misery.

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There’s been a lot of talk recently about the implications of independence for Scotland and its membership of the EU. As we’ve noted this week, the SNP has long acknowledged that the Scottish government would have to renegotiate terms of EU membership, but it’s highly unlikely that the EU would move to expel Scotland from the EU given the interaction between Scotland and the continent in goods, services, finances and people. As John Swinney recently noted:

“Scotland would not be applying for membership. Scotland is already a member of the European Union, our citizens are EU citizens today, we follow all of the EU relevant provisions that we are required to follow.

“So the key point is any negotiation would be taking place not to apply for membership, but for membership from within the European Union, which is the key distinction which has to be remembered in this debate.

“What we have always accepted is there has to be a negotiation about the detail and the terms of Scotland’s membership of the European Union, but crucially that will be taking place at a time when we are still part of the United Kingdom, still part of the European Union, of which we have been members for 40 years.

But if, just for the sake of argument Scotland was declared a new state and somehow cast out of this expansionist community, would it be the end? By being declared a brand-new nation Scotland would inherit all of the fixed assets and natural resources within our internationally-recognised borders, but none of the obligations of the old state – like a share of the national debt or being bound by international treaties.

Tempting, no? Sure, it would be awkward for a while, what with having to negotiate new treaties and being known as the only country in European history that the EU didn’t want in it, but there are alternatives to the EU.

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The Irish Times, 26 November 2012:

“The DUP will campaign against Scotland voting for independence in 2014, party deputy leader Nigel Dodds told his party’s annual conference on Saturday. The North Belfast MP said that Unionists watched with sadness the attempt by Scottish nationalists to “undo the bonds of union which bound us through history”.

“But just as we have advocated the Union here in Northern Ireland, so we will be the advocates for the union in the midst of a Scottish referendum. Just as we have been proved right here, so, I believe, the people of Scotland will see that we are better together, better when we are united as one,” said Mr Dodds.

“This party believes strongly that, together, the United Kingdom has significant influence in the world. The break-up of the Union would be financially, culturally and politically devastating for all of the British people. As Unionists we oppose any action that would erode the shared cohesion of the constituent parts which make up this kingdom,” he said.”

Yes. We saw you “advocating the Union” last week.

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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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