Wings Over Scotland

We’re indebted to keen Wings Over Scotland reader “Holebender” for digging out this little nugget. Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee, is at the forefront of Labour’s demands for the Scottish Government to hold a single-question referendum on Scottish independence, regardless of whether the Scottish electorate might want a third option. But it turns out Ian hasn’t always been quite so keen on restricting voters to straight yes/no choices.

Back in February 2008, he wrote to Nick Clegg about the Liberal Democrats’ proposed referendum on UK membership of the EU. You can find the full original text of his letter at this page on the Conservative Home website. Just for a bit of fun, though, we’ve reprinted it below with some extremely minor adjustments.

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We haven’t said much about the Lib Dems’ recent revival of their assertion that the Northern Isles should be allowed to remain in the UK if Scotland voted for independence, largely because we’re shamefully ignorant on the subject of the islands. So we were delighted when Páll Thormod Morrisson, curator of the Viking Scotland site, offered to help us out with some informed comment.

The attempts of the Liberal Democrats to cause distraction and disruption in Orkney and Shetland continued this week. Their presumption appears to suggest two main scenarios – that Orkney and Shetland would remain tied to Westminster if Scotland chose independence, or that the islands would cut loose entirely from both Scotland and the UK and look after themselves.

The problem for the Lib Dems, however, is that these ideas appear to lack general public support in the Northern Isles. Like flies coming in unwelcome and proceeding to buzz around where they have no business, Tavish Scott, Liam McArthur and Alistair Carmichael’s fuss over nothing can be viewed as little more than attention-seeking and sour grapes from a party of increasing irrelevance.

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What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Prince Charles:

“This is a scandal and an anachronism. The idea that the Prince has a right to be consulted on legislation which might impact on his interests belongs to a bygone era.” (Daily Mail, March 2012)

What Ian Davidson MP, chair of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee assessing the independence referendum, thinks about people with financial vested interests being consulted on political matters if one of those people is Ian Davidson MP:

“We have the opportunity if we wish simply to hand over our powers to the Scottish Parliament, but we choose not to do so, and what we are saying in the committee is that the Scottish MPs, and the Scottish Affairs Committee, should have the responsibility for reviewing and supervising and assessing any Section 30 notice that is proposed.” (Newsnight Scotland, August 2012)

Something’s not quite the same, but we can’t put our finger on it. Can anyone help?

Strap yourselves in, readers. And scatter some cushions around your chair, because there’s a pretty good chance you’re about to fall off it. Not in surprise, though, because as we predicted yesterday the Scottish media has imposed a near-blanket ban on reporting Labour MP and Scottish Affairs Select Committee chairman Ian Davidson’s astonishing meltdown on Tuesday’s edition of Newsnight Scotland.

The Herald buried a small neutral piece on it yesterday afternoon in an obscure corner of its website, with no bylines and no quotes from any of the parties (in either sense of the word) concerned. Interestingly the exact same story appears word-for-word in the Daily Record, still without attribution, but that’s it for news coverage.

On the BBC website there’s not a peep, even in the Scotland Politics section, despite the direct and savage attack on the Corporation’s prized impartiality. (Political editor Brian Taylor hasn’t graced the site with a blog in six weeks.) Over at the Guardian, the paper’s fearless Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell – normally so keen to cover media matters – felt a five-minute fuss over an advertising poster at Edinburgh Airport was the big Scottish story of the day. And so on.

The Twittersphere was also strangely quiet, or at least the Union-friendly side of it was. Tom Gordon of the Herald and Eddie Barnes of the Scotsman both tried to play the story down as a storm in a teacup (here’s a fun game to play: imagine the Scottish media reaction if Stewart Hosie or Alex Neil had done the same thing, especially during the political slow news season), and every normally-prolific Scottish Labour activist adopted a policy of total radio silence on the subject.

Only Angus Macleod of the Times went public to suggest that Johann Lamont should discipline Davidson for his “bonkers” outburst, while Al Jazeera reporter (and former Scottish Labour senior media adviser) Andrew McFadyen called the performance a “bad misjudgement” directed at “one of the best broadcasters in Scotland”, while noting that the point of politicians giving interviews to TV news programmes is supposed to be “to win people over, not put them off”.

We were just about to congratulate ourselves on our powers of insight when we noticed a link hidden right down at the bottom of the Scotsman’s politics section. “Michael Kelly: Showdown has put BBC objectivity to the test”, it said. We went and made ourselves a drink. “This should be good”, we thought. We weren’t disappointed.

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When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

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We can’t really be bothered working ourselves up into an outrage about the despicable behaviour of a number of Unionist politicians (far less the angrily triumphant online hordes of British nationalists) in the immediate aftermath of Andy Murray’s magnificent gold medal in the Olympic tennis. GA Ponsonby has written an excellent analysis of the No camp’s mindset over on NNS that we can’t add much of value to.

All we’d like to point out is that the normally relatively-sensible Tory MSP Murdo Fraser has made an even bigger clown out of himself than it initially appears if this tweet from yesterday afternoon is what he genuinely believes:

Quite aside from the crass ugliness of attempting to politicise Murray’s victory at all (on the basis of an embarrassed, half-hearted mumbling of a couple of lines of “God Save The Queen”), Fraser’s comment is wrong on the most fundamental level.

Nationalists do NOT want to “destroy” Team GB, only to leave it and compete in our own right, thereby sending far MORE Scottish athletes to the Olympics to realise their dreams than is possible in a combined team. If and when Scotland becomes independent Team GB will continue to exist, and will take part in the Games with the best wishes of most Scots (except when it’s in competition with us, of course).

For his own personal ideological and political reasons, Murdo Fraser wants to see fewer Scots winning medals in the Olympics than there could be – and indeed fewer English, Welsh and Northern Irish athletes too, since a Scottish team would obviously free up more spaces in the GB ranks for them. For the sake of petty politics, he wants there to be fewer people from these islands at the Olympics. We want there to be more. We’re not sure how that makes us the small-minded ones.

As part of their desperate attempts to politicise the Olympics, a number of Unionist pundits and comedians have this week been pointing out that some of the talented Scottish athletes who’ve won medals wouldn’t have been able to do so were they not able to join together in a team with English, Welsh and Northern Irish competitors.

This is, of course, perfectly true and fair comment (though it’s also a fact that Scotland would be likely to have around four times as many competitors at the Games as an independent nation as it does within “Team GB”, and Union Flag-waver Sir Chris Hoy would have been able to defend the individual cycling title he so brilliantly won in Beijing 2008 rather than being pushed out in favour of an English rider).

However, when set against the ability to expel Trident nuclear submarines from Scottish waters, to protect the NHS from Tory privatisation, to save Scottish soldiers from dying in illegal foreign wars, to keep university tuition available to everyone rather than just the rich, to avoid mortgaging the futures of our children and grandchildren with crippling PFI bills, to look after our elderly and sick with free personal care and prescriptions, to build new social housing rather than condemn tens of thousands to homelessness, to power our country with clean, renewable energy rather than risking another Fukushima, and most of all to never again in our lifetimes be ruled by a Tory government, to be quite honest this blog would willingly sacrifice half of a gold medal in the Lightweight Women’s Rowing (Double Sculls) every four years, and the rest.

Maybe our priorities are just off. Sorry.

We’re delighted to welcome another new voice to Wings Over Scotland, this time in the shape of Peter Thomson of the Tarff Advertiser.

The most fundamental concept of Scottish constitutional practice is the right of the people of Scotland to remove their sovereign. It is a right which has been exercised on at least two famous historical occasions: the forced abdication of Mary, Queen of Scots, which brought about her flight to England, and the removal of James VII from the Scottish crown, based on evidence of James’ attempts to usurp the Scottish people’s sovereign power to the crown alone, in line with his belief that he was king by God’s will and right.

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After we wrote this morning’s piece on party membership figures, we thought it might be interesting to look into what we’d initially intended as a throwaway last-line joke. Disturbingly, what we found out was that even in a society so tightly regulated that you can be fined thousands of pounds for using the word “summer” in the wrong place or threatened with imprisonment for making rude comments on Twitter, it’s apparently completely legal for our politicians to tell us outright lies.

We’re not talking about matters of opinion or interpretation or spin here. We mean that as far as we can establish, our politicians can openly lie to us about empirical, measurable facts, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it.

The thing that sparked our inquiry was Scottish Labour’s assertion on its Twitter page that it’s “Scotland’s largest political party”.

Now, as far as we can make out, that statement isn’t true in any meaningful sense whatsoever. In so far as it’s possible to establish, Scottish Labour has thousands fewer members than the SNP, collected 300,000 fewer votes in the last Scottish election, has fewer MSPs and fewer councillors than the SNP, and generates much less money. But that’s not really the point.

One reader suggested to us that the basis for the party’s claim is that it has more elected representatives than any other if you include Westminster MPs as well as Holyrood ones. While it’s stretching grammar to its breaking point to suggest that that constitutes being the “largest political party” in any sense that an average person would interpret the term, we can see how there’s just about a semantic defence.

But the point is that even if there wasn’t, there isn’t anything we could do about it.

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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.