Wings Over Scotland

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.

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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