Wings Over Scotland

On watching today’s FMQs, we’re more and more coming to the conclusion that the Holyrood opposition’s chief campaign strategy is to make people so utterly scunnered with all politicians that nobody will ever vote for anything or anyone again, and that that way the Unionist parties might get at least a turn at power on the drawing of lots. From the bottom of our heart, readers, we’re struggling to explain it any other way.

Wowsers. We’re really feeling the love today, readers. There’s currently – as there always is – a debate going on about those dreadful cybernats and how they’re solely responsible for all the horribleness on the internet. Here’s an extract from it.

For those of you joining us late, that’s one Scotsman writer, one Green Party PR person and two loonies ranged against us, “Ergasiophobe” being our much-missed former comment troll “Longshanker”. (And we’ve just noticed our old pal Kate Higgins sticking her oar in too. Just one missing for the full set.)

What with the constant threats of defamation action from people we haven’t defamed and the open stalking from people threatening to reveal mysterious “info” about us, we’re getting pretty intimidated now. We’ll almost definitely stop. (Mr McColm, in another tweet, says “i have learned enough to stop him”, which might save us the bother.) Or maybe, on the other hand, we won’t. Who can tell?

If Alex Salmond and Mike Russell only learned one thing this week, it’s surely this: the only thing that looks worse that being smugly complacent is being smugly complacent when it turns out you’re completely wrong. We’re sure it was a painful lesson. So if you’re a newspaper columnist with a high opinion of yourself who planned to take them to task for it, you’d think you’d try not to fall into the same trap.

Perhaps one of the most self-satisifed of all Scotland’s political commentators is Euan McColm, whose Twitter bio boasts proudly of “poor people skills” and who regularly writes barbed, acerbic little pieces for the Scotsman. Today, for example, he lets rip at Mike Russell in full flow, with no holds barred:

“Is there a more delightful sitcom archetype than the puffed-up-but-thwarted little man? I’m struggling to think of one. Harold Steptoe, Captain Mainwaring, Basil Fawlty, Del Boy, David Brent… a string of lead characters, repeatedly brought low by their own unrecognised limitations, these are the greats, surely?

We laugh as they remind us of the silliness of men, and touch us with the pathos of their masculine delusion. But maybe, like me, you’ve watched those episodes too many times and the freshness has gone. Maybe you crave a new buffoon.”

It’s stinging stuff. We imagine Mr McColm was pleased with his work.

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It’s hard for any remotely aware and rational person not to be a misanthrope. If you can watch the news for any extended period of time and not come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole would be greatly served by a bird-flu pandemic or alien invasion, you’re a better person than we are (which is very likely the case anyway).

But even by our low expectations of humanity, it’s been a bad couple of weeks.

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We try not to get angry about stuff on this site. It’s nearly always more constructive to keep a detached outlook – whenever Anas Sarwar or Johann Lamont or Ken Macintosh come out with some new outrageous or offensive lie or smear against the independence movement, say, a calm head dispassionately detailing the reality is more useful than a foul-mouthed rant. But today we’re finding it hard to keep a lid on our emotions, and it’s not even anything to do with politics.

The Herald reports this morning that Craig Levein has initiated legal action against the SFA over the terms of his sacking as Scotland manager. Those terms, if you weren’t aware, are that Levein gets paid £35,000 a month for the next 20 months, a sum for which he is required to do no work whatsoever.

Levein’s complaint, according to the Herald, is that he isn’t being paid off in a single lump sum, which would then enable him to pocket £700,000 for being the worst national coach in Scotland’s history and then take up a lucrative new job with anyone stupid enough to employ him. Under the current arrangement, the SFA could cease paying his monthly £35K if he took a new position elsewhere, potentially saving the cash-strapped association a useful amount of cash.

Viewers, we’re almost shaking with rage as we type this. £35,000 a month is a borderline-obscene salary anyway (it’s more than three times what the First Minister gets for running the entire country). For someone who was absolutely appalling at their job it’s doubly scandalous. But for doing nothing at all it’s a jackpot for which Craig Levein should be spending every waking hour on his knees thanking the gods.

Craig, though, wants more. Craig wants to pocket £35,000 a month from the SFA for nothing AND grab anything else he can get his hands on. (Because, y’know, in these austere times it’s hard to scrape by on only £1,167 a day.) Where he should be pathetically grateful to the SFA for just firing him rather than hurling him off the top of the North Stand at Hampden for what he did to our national team, he’s bitching that he’s being somehow wronged by getting the annual salary of 26 nurses for sitting around on his useless arse watching Jeremy Kyle for the next year and a half. Instead, incredibly, he wants to suck even MORE money out of Scottish football in one of its most diffcult hours by engaging the SFA in a costly legal case.

We… we’re going to stop now before we say something that gets us in trouble.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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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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