Wings Over Scotland

After the huge fuss that was made in the media about Scottish and Welsh football players not singing “God Save The Queen” during their opening games at the Olympics, we were a bit surprised to find nobody mentioning the issue after their second matches. Even a Twitter enquiry unusually failed to produce a single person who knew if they had or not, and we eventually had to go and watch the recording of Great Britain vs the United Arab Emirates on iPlayer to find out.

As it turned out, the five Welsh players in the starting 11 had stayed resolutely silent while their English comrades on the field and in the technical area all strenuously implored God to intervene in the fate of the monarch. “Again the Welsh boys in the side chose not to sing the anthem, it’s not the national anthem of Wales of course”, said the BBC’s commentator Jonathan Pearce, having seemingly failed to notice that Wales was not one of the countries taking part in the competition.

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Just seven months ago, we ran a piece castigating some of Scotland’s nationalists for their ludicrously churlish and negative assessment of the SNP’s first half-year as a majority administration. Several high-profile pro-independence bloggers had attacked the Scottish Government for an opening programme that was variously described as “despairing, girning, partisan, vacuous and dreary”.

We criticised them at the time, and today we feel thoroughly vindicated in the light of the news that the SNP will indeed bring forward a bill to legalise gay marriage in Scotland, making it the first part of the UK to do so.

The bill will be the third major seriously contentious one to be put before Parliament by the majority government in barely over a year, following hot on the heels of the anti-sectarianism bill and minimum alcohol pricing. All three were faced with considerable political and/or public opposition, and it seems extremely likely that the sectarianism bill cost the SNP a significant number of votes in May’s local council elections, particularly in and around Glasgow.

The equal-marriage bill, opposed by around 65% of respondents to the consultation, may very well cost it more, particularly among the Catholic community it only recently won over after years of work. And it won’t win many in compensation from the gay community, which is noisy but vastly smaller than the Church and in any event spent most of last week engaged in a colossally ungrateful and petulant sulking fit that the Government hadn’t made the announcement on the exact day they wanted it to.

But even with an independence referendum to win, Alex Salmond’s cabinet has pressed ahead with doing the things it believes are in the interests of the people of Scotland, even if that means damaging their own party and jeopardising the thing some of them have fought their whole lives to achieve. This blog can think of no greater tribute to bestow on any government than that it’s prepared to lose votes, and considerable numbers of them, to do the right thing. We salute it without reservation.

Much of the media today reports a survey showing Scots are the happiest people in Britain. Naturally that seems to us a truth as self-evident as the sun being warm and the sea being wet, but we couldn’t help noticing a particular quirk. According to the Scotsman’s piece, with our emphasis added:

“four out of the top ten local authorities in Britain were in Scotland, with the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Shetland and Aberdeenshire rated highly for life satisfaction, the number of residents who felt happy and worthwhile. Aberdeen was rated the highest-ranking city in Britain for life satisfaction, while London and Birmingham were ranked at the bottom for wellbeing”

In other words, the further away you are from London, the happier you tend to be. We trust that in the autumn of 2014, the people of Scotland will take that maxim to its logical political conclusion.

As the sun made its first appearance of the summer yesterday, Wings over Scotland wasn’t slow off the mark. On the “B” of the “BANG!”, we leapt onto a train for a two-hour journey to the seaside, specifically the lovely and historic south-coast town of Weymouth. It’s a remarkable place, changing character every time you turn a corner.

The front is a traditional resort promenade, with beaches and ice-cream stands and arcades. Just behind it is a picturesque working harbour town, tatty fishing boats mingling with some extremely fancy millionaires’ yachts. (Don’t miss the tasty and gigantic battered faggots at Bennett’s On The Waterfront fish and chip shop, by the way, the closest thing you’ll find to haggis in an English chippy and heavenly with a splash of onion vinegar.) Adjacent to both is a scruffy but bustling town centre, almost entirely free of the empty shops littering every other urban conurbation in Britain.

And if you embark on about five minutes’ leisurely stroll from the western end of the prom or the busy, noisy harbour and marina, you’ll find the town’s only sizeable area of public green space, in the form of the beautiful and peaceful oasis that is The Nothe.

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In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We know it’s the summer silly season for politics, but there’s a difference between “silly” and “stark slavering buggo”, and we suspect some in the “No” camp might have just jumped the shark. (We’d say they’d been out in the sun too long, but, y’know.)

We have some sympathy, because it can’t be easy being a British nationalist in Scotland at the moment. Despite massive blanket coverage of the Jubilee and the Olympics, and despite the Scottish Government having to wrestle with some difficult and controversial legislation on top of a sustained and co-ordinated smear campaign about Rupert Murdoch, the Unionists have made barely a dent in the popularity of either the SNP or the First Minister (who still remains the most trusted party leader anywhere in the UK), and scarcely any progress in terms of referendum polling either.

As we’ve previously noted, 2012 is likely to prove the high-water mark of “Britishness” for a generation, and if the FUDs can’t build a significant lead now, when every last star in the sky is aligned in their favour, then they’re going to be fighting an extremely difficult uphill battle over the next two-and-a-bit years, and particularly in 2014 when Scottishness will be very much to the fore thanks to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn, the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles and of course Scotland’s inevitable qualification for, and victory in, the World Cup in Brazil.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.

First things first: the hysterical flouncing hissy fit that’s just broken out all over Twitter is a depressingly predictable, dismayingly stereotypical reaction to a piece of total non-news. The Scottish Government at no point announced that there would be an announcement on equal-marriage legislation today, and it therefore follows that said announcement has NOT, in fact, been “delayed“. It’s still due by the end of this month.

Nevertheless, the issue is hugely divisive, with a huge response to the government’s consultation document and mass organised opposition from religious groups. This blog believes unequivocally in full equal rights for heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, metrosexuals, retrosexuals, picosexuals, megasexuals and any other (legal) form of -sexuals, so the solution to the seemingly-intractable problem is in fact blindingly obvious – we need to ban marriage altogether. For everyone.

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There are, we’re certain, some twists to come yet in the “Rangers” story. But while we’ve been able to pretty clearly identify and understand the motivations of all the concerned parties in events to date (and our assessments and predictions have accordingly almost always been bang on the money), we’ve finally run into a logical roadblock where we just can’t make sense of anything.

Because we can no longer for the life of us figure out what the SFA is playing at.

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We’re finding it hard to get worked up about the media’s latest shock-horror revelations with regard to the SNP’s policy on NATO membership. All that’s been proposed is that the party debates its position at its annual conference, and if a party’s members agree – or not – on an alteration to a policy then that’s what the party’s policy should be. It’s an exercise of the most fundamental principle of democracy, and we can’t even really be bothered pointing out the laughable hypocrisy of it being criticised by a party that refuses to tell us its policy on just about anything, including defence.

That said, we were still deeply dismayed by Angus Robertson’s performance on last night’s Newsnight Scotland. Highly-rated by most political commentators, Robertson may be a whiz at actually drawing up policy and strategy but he’s hopeless at presenting it. While SNP figures like Nicola Sturgeon, Stewart Hosie, John Swinney and the First Minister himself have provided a breath of fresh air with direct and honest answers in interviews since coming to power, Robertson seems stuck in the mindset of Westminster, and his needlessly vague, waffling and evasive responses to Isobel Fraser’s perfectly legitimate and not especially challenging questions were like stepping back in time a decade, or watching Johann Lamont now.

To be honest, we don’t really care whether an independent Scotland is in NATO or not, so long as nuclear weapons are removed permanently from Scottish waters. We struggle to see how it would affect the day-to-day life of Scottish people, and we’re not the least bit convinced it’s a matter of pressing importance to the average voter.  But what we DO regard as a danger for the SNP and by extension the independence movement is if it comes increasingly to be seen as just like all the discredited and widely-loathed Westminster parties, rather than the genuinely different alternative to the neoliberal consensus that it actually is.

Appearances like Robertson’s last night will damage the SNP far more than an entirely reasonable debate about policy at conference, which is after all the very thing party conferences are supposed to be for. We hope someone takes him aside and points out that if we wanted useless Westminster politicians, we could just stay in the Union.

I was going to blog about Rangers today, but it can wait. I’ve been a professional journalist for over 20 years now, but I almost never write about my personal life. You can search those decades with a fine tooth comb for a mention of who I’m going out with and come up empty. When people ask “Are you really a Reverend?” I’ll go so far as to answer “Yes”, but when they then invariably enquire as to which church I always reply “The United Episcopalian Brotherhood Of Mind Your Own Damn Business”.

I have no objections at all to others baring their souls for the world to see if that’s how they want to go about their affairs, but I like to keep my private life private and that’s not about to change now, except for this picture and the paragraph after it.

It’s of my lovely Auntie Isobel, a saintly woman at whom life threw just about every crappy card in the deck but who always came back smiling and laughing, barely even acknowledging her own troubles as she devoted herself to caring for others. I hadn’t seen her in many years, and now I never will again after I helped my cousins and uncles and my dad, whose little sister she was, carry her coffin from a tiny village church to a quiet leafy graveyard and lower it gently into the ground of Argyll.

Rest in peace, Auntie Isobel. I think, and I hope, you’d forgive me for mentioning you on a politics blog – I have no idea who you voted for – because coming home to say goodbye to you showed me why it is that I do it.

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