Wings Over Scotland

This week, we’ve been wondering just how much of a coincidence it was that Johann Lamont’s dramatic, rushed-sounding policy speech out of nowhere (surely that terrible pinched-from-the-Tories “something for nothing” line can’t have been the result of any extended scrutiny?) happened three days after the first independence rally.

Saturday 22nd September 2012 will go down in history as the moment the starting gun was fired on the referendum campaign for real. The event was a chance to show the public of Scotland that it wasn’t only “weirdy beardies” and “cyber-nuts” who support independence but everyday hard-working people just like the majority of other Scots.

And we can’t help but ponder whether the event put the wind up Scottish Labour a lot more than they spent that weekend frantically trying to pretend.

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We’re confused again, readers. At its forthcoming conference the SNP will debate whether or not to change its policy on NATO membership, in full public view. After the debate, a vote of the party’s membership will determine what the policy will be. This wholly open and natural political process is of course variously described by the Scottish media as a “split”, a “U-turn”, an “internal battle” and a source of “rebel fury”.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats refuse to allow the YesScotland campaign to take a stall at their conference, and when some members offer dissent, leader Willie Rennie angrily castigates them in a letter describing their actions as a “disrespectful stunt”, on the grounds that the media might have covered the stall’s presence.

(Great work keeping it out of the press, Willie. Just the three stories in a week, then.)

We feel we must have somehow misunderstood the meanings of the words “liberal” and “democratic”. Can anyone point us towards a more up-to-date dictionary?

The Scottish media is enthusiastically continuing to follow Labour’s agenda with regard to slashing universal services. Both of last night’s current-affairs shows led with the topic again, and it’s all over the press once more today, in particular the Scotsman and the Daily Record. The former runs one story that carries a telling quote from Scottish Labour seat-filler Richard Baker MSP:

“We can’t wait to have these difficult decisions in a couple of years. The choices need to be debated now.”

While it’s been referenced in passing, the SNP oddly hasn’t really made much of the extraordinary hollowness of this demand, given than Scottish Labour have said their commission “investigating” the matter won’t produce a report for over two years.

We don’t know about you, readers, but our understanding of a debate is that two opposing sides both present their arguments and then there’s some sort of vote which determines who best convinced the audience that their view was the right one.

The SNP’s position is clear – universal benefits can be afforded, something that the Scottish Government has already demonstrated by balancing its budget since 2007, and it will prove its point by continuing to do so in coming years. Labour, however, want to somehow have a debate without having a position. It’s rather like demanding someone plays you at football and then not turning up for the match.

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The independence movement, for all the progress it’s made, has a core problem. Support for independence is strongest amongst the poor, and although it’s rarely acknowledged, the poor aren’t the majority any more. The home-owning middle class tend to feel that they’re better off than their parents were, and even if the (mortgaged) ownership of your home is a largely illusory form of wealth it’s the feeling that matters.

Because what that means is that people who are doing okay – and doubly so if that status is precarious – don’t want to risk voting for major change and upheaval. (Most of those who are doing very nicely, thanks, out of the status quo – the rich – are probably a lost cause.) So the big challenge for the YesScotland campaign in the next two years is to pick up a significant proportion of the “squeezed middle”.

And we can’t think of a better way to convince those who are getting by, but for whom the poverty line is a little too close on their heels for comfort, that independence represents the best future than to tell them that staying in the Union will mean they get hammered for hundreds or thousands of pounds extra a year in rising Council Tax, prescriptions, tuition fees for their kids and personal care for their elderly relatives.

A great many people are only just keeping their heads above water in this long, bleak recession. Johann Lamont just threw them an anvil. We’re the lifeboat. Let’s thank her, then fling out the ropes and do our best to pull them aboard to safety.

A personal comment/disclaimer first. Brian Wilson is probably the first specifically Scottish politician I remember (well, apart from one I knew personally and socially, but that’s a story for another day). He was a prominent Labour figure in the 1980s, and as a young teenager with a just-awakening interest in left-wing politics it’s fair to say he was one of the main things that put me off Labour. Even at the age of 14 I got the impression of a nasty, snide, arrogant and pious career politico who’d say anything he thought might score a point over his opponent whether he believed it or not.

So in the interests of fairness and transparency we’re declaring a prejudice in advance. Brian Wilson is a horrible little man, up to his ear hair in the corrupt crony culture of Glasgow Labour, and whenever we hear him speak on any subject we’re reflexively and overwhelmingly inclined to believe the opposite of whatever he’s saying.

Nevertheless, we can’t help seeing a particular significance in the fact that he of all people was chosen to put Labour’s case on last night’s Newsnight Scotland.

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You do sometimes have to admire the sheer barefaced chutzpah of Scotland’s Labour MPs and MSPs. Take this solid-gold passage from Douglas Alexander’s speech to the Labour conference today, which he apparently delivered with a straight face:

“Just two years into Government and that’s David Cameron in a nutshell: out of touch at home; out of his depth abroad.

But what’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the EU? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the G20? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for the WTO? Nothing, it’s a blank page.

What’s the Conservatives’ strategy for NATO? Nothing, it’s a blank page.”

No, you’re not imagining that, folks, it really happened – a senior figure from Scottish Labour genuinely just criticised someone else for having no policies on something, less than a week after his own supposed leader had announced that we’ve got at least two more years to wait before their party will deign let the people of Scotland know what they stand for on any subject at all.

We take our hat off to Wee Dougie. Maybe he can hide his bright red face behind it.

Scrapping universal free prescriptions would, after the administrative costs of means-testing and suchlike, save Scotland somewhere in the region of £50m a year. By our calculations, it’d take just 254 years before the policy recouped this gigantic Labour waste of NHS money. But every little helps, right, Johann?

This week, Johann Lamont called for an end to the “something for nothing culture” with regard to the provision of universal benefits in Scotland. We found the phrase oddly familiar. But where had we heard it before, and from whom?

“This is our contract with the British people – to bring an end to the something for nothing culture”
– Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative minister, October 2011

“We are repairing the damage of an age of irresponsibility. Ending the something for nothing society that flourished during it”
– George Osborne, Conservative Chancellor Of The Exchequer, October 2011

“The hard working people of Britain want their government to bring an end to Labour’s something for nothing culture”
– Baroness Warsi, Conservative peer and former chairman, December 2011

“[The welfare state] has sent out some incredibly damaging signals. That it pays not to work. That you are owed something for nothing”
– David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, June 2012

“There are some who really are sitting at home and putting little effort into moving on in life… A something for nothing culture does no one any favours”
– Chris Grayling, Conservative minister, August 2012

“Jobless young adults will soon be forced to do three months’ full-time work or have their benefits cut under a scheme being piloted in Croydon to tackle its “something for nothing culture””
– Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London, September 2012

Oh yeah. Now we remember.

Ever since May 2007, one of the strangest aspects of Scottish politics has been the poisonous hostility of the Scottish Liberal Democrats to the SNP. The parties sit very close to each other on the political spectrum, and the SNP are sympathetic to some key Lib Dem policies – most obviously a local income tax – which the Lib Dems stood no chance of implementing in coalition with anyone but the nationalists.

(The Lib Dems are also still officially a party of federalism, committed to far stronger devolution than Labour or the Tories.)

Yet a succession of leaders have treated the SNP as little short of pure evil. Nicol Stephen, Tavish Scott (especially) and now Willie Rennie appear to regard Alex Salmond’s party with undisguised hatred, for no immediately obvious reason, and the idea of any sort of co-operation on any issue about as unthinkable as Barack Obama announcing a treaty of friendship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In this site’s view, that approach was at least as responsible for the Scottish Lib Dems’ humiliation in 2011 as the UK party’s Westminster coalition with the Conservatives. Most people had expected the Lib Dems to form a coalition with the SNP in 2007, and when they refused we suspect that middle-ground Scottish voters no longer saw the party as serving any sort of practical purpose.

But the reduction of the Scottish Lib Dems to a tiny, embarrassing rump of just five MSPs, without a single constituency on the entire Scottish mainland, has given them a useful role in the service of the anti-independence campaign: that of cannon fodder.

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Scottish Labour mouthpiece the Daily Record is currently running a long series of horror stories about Atos “Healthcare” and their appalling persecution of the sick and disabled. We heartily and sincerely commend the Record for doing so, even if it usually fails to note that Atos were unleashed on the poor and vulnerable by a Labour government, and occasionally just outright lies about it.

You might expect, then, that the valid concerns of the Record and its readers would be earnestly reflected by the nation’s Labour MSPs when the Scottish Parliament debated the issue of Atos’ conduct of Work Capability Assessments yesterday.

You’d be wrong, of course.

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So, who saw that coming? Johann Lamont, leader of Scottish Labour, just abandoned over a century of Labour values in a single speech. More so even than Tony Blair did when he set light to Clause 4 in the name of “New Labour”,  Lamont made a bonfire of pretty much the entire set of founding principles of social democracy. Because, as George Eaton succinctly put it in today’s New Statesman:

“universal public services, to which all contribute and from which all benefit, are the essence of social democracy. Once this principle is abandoned, greater cuts will inevitably follow as the rich, no longer receiving, have less incentive to give (you could call it “nothing for something”). For this reason, as Richard Titmuss sagely observed, “services for the poor will always be poor services””

And let’s make no mistake: what Johann Lamont did yesterday was consign the entire notion of universal services to the dustbin of history. Because if you accept her argument that universal services mean “the poorest pay for the tax breaks for the rich”, then you inescapably also accept that they’re a fundamentally, inherently bad thing whether a country can afford them or not.

Is it EVER good to have the poor subsidise the rich? You’d have a job finding even the most extreme right-wing Tory prepared to say such a thing out loud, so Johann certainly isn’t going to, and that means that all universal services must go, because every one of them is subject to the same “unfairness”. (In the perverted modern sense of the word.) Every service provided free to a person who could afford to pay for it themselves must by definition rob the poor to do so.

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We’re having a technical issue trying to cope with the content of Johann Lamont’s extraordinary speech of earlier today. We’ll have some analysis for you just as soon as we’ve replaced some blown fuses and cleaned up all the soot.