Wings Over Scotland

We note with micro-interest that the Unionist parties have today announced their preferred question for the independence referendum – a policy they all strenuously opposed at the election, in which they were overwhelmingly defeated. And unusually for this blog, as a result we find ourselves having something in common with the “No” camp, because nobody gives a toss what we think the question should be either.

Bearing that in mind, we invite readers to suggest their own proposed question. We’ll gather up all the best ones at the end of the day and send them to the Electoral Commission, in case they’d like to scrutinise them.

Courtesy of the sadly-deceased CalMerc, here’s an example to get you started.

In the last 24 hours we’ve now asked at least half-a-dozen different people, of various party loyalties and none, if they can explain exactly what crime Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie apparently considers Martin Sime of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations to be guilty of. Curiously, every time we’ve asked the question the conversation has immediately gone dead and stayed that way.

So far as we’ve been able to establish, an SNP adviser called Alex Bell sent Mr Sime an unsolicited email bringing to his attention a poll that showed a large majority of trade union members to be in favour of a second question in the independence referendum, which would provide the option of more powers for the Scottish Parliament while remaining in the Union.

The core question, then, seems to be whether this is an inappropriate position for SCVO to be taking, and therefore whether Mr Sime would be acting inappropriately in receiving such an email (leaving aside for a moment the issue of how he’d be supposed to have avoided receiving it).

To answer that question, first we need to consult the SCVO’s mission statement, which states the organisation’s purpose as “To support people to take voluntary action to help themselves and others, and to bring about social change”.

That’s perhaps a little vague, so instead let’s examine the submission the Council sent to the Scottish Government’s consultation on the subject of the independence referendum and specifically the number of questions therein, which it published in May of this year.

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We live, perhaps more than at any time in history, in a world characterised by open lies. Only this week, the coalition government was caught red-handed understating the number of school playing-field closures under its administration by 50%. A punk band in Russia singing a protest song about the President’s attacks on human rights are accused of religious hatred, in a show trial every bit as transparently corrupt as anything Stalin or Hitler would have ordered.

Meanwhile in the West, a man dedicated to exposing truth and criminal activities is wanted by the USA to put on trial for espionage. Democratically elected politicians in the “home of the free” call for him to be executed or extra-judicially assassinated as a terrorist. Conversely, the same man portrays as political persecution attempts to have him extradited to another country to face allegations of rape and sexual assault.

(We’re surprised that the UK authorities don’t solve the problem at a stroke by simply getting Kenny Farquharson of the Scotsman to determine whether Assange is guilty or innocent while he’s still in the Ecuadorian embassy. After all, Kenny is apparently able to judge these things without all the tedious and time-consuming business of presenting evidence, hearing a defence and establishing or corroborating facts. So long as the accused doesn’t have access to highly-paid lawyers, of course.)

Here in Scotland things are no different. In the last week alone, two senior Unionist politicians have perpetrated enormous and deliberate lies cynically calculated to poison and undermine discourse. Ian Davidson and Willie Rennie have made inflammatory statements no intelligent human being could possibly believe to be true (we’ll pass tactfully over the issue over whether such a definition in fact includes either man), and angrily reasserted them when challenged.

There is only one purpose for actions like these. They are knowingly designed to create an intimidatory atmosphere where journalists are cowed into following the agenda desired by the culprits, and deflected from areas that said culprits don’t wish reported on. The wider intent is to control the media by recalibrating the centre ground of “impartiality”, and thereby achieve a strategic shift of coverage in their favour.

Here’s how it works.

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The Scottish media is predictably excited about Gordon Brown’s latest intervention in the independence debate. Giving a speech at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Kirkcaldy MP who’s barely turned up in Parliament to represent his constituents in the two-and-a-quarter years since being deposed as Prime Minister abandoned any pretence at a positive case for the Union and presented a doom-laden picture of a future Scotland slashing pensions, welfare and defence while increasing taxes.

The No camp’s united policy on the Scottish constitution, in so far as one can be ascertained at all, is that the Scottish people should reject independence and then rely on Westminster to give Holyrood more powers, though the campaign steadfastly resists any clarification on what those powers might be.

But the remarkable and eye-opening thing about the former PM’s dire vision regarding pensions, welfare, defence and taxation was that it professed – despite the Scotsman’s clumsily inaccurate headline and confused and contradictory text – to describe a future Scotland not under independence, but so-called “devo-max”.

So if we take Brown as an authoritative spokesman on Scottish Labour policy – and it seems eminently reasonable to do so – we can safely assume that the only other party with even a chance of power in either Holyrood or Westminster has no intention of devolving anything substantial to Scotland any time soon. The petty tinkering of the Calman Commission/Scotland Act does indeed appear to be the limit of devolutionary ambition. And if you think about it, it’s hard to see how it could be any other way.

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We’ve only ever been ashamed to be Scottish once in our lives – when Craig Levein sent out our football team in a 4-6-0 formation in Prague. But there are occasionally other times when our fellow countrymen can be a source of a certain degree of embarrassment, and one of them was highlighted in, of all places, the local newspaper of the small English market town of Bourne this week.

Bourne is located in the East Midlands, a few miles north of Peterborough, and quite why its local paper is reporting Scottish independence news is a mystery to us, but Monday’s edition of The Local carried a story titled “Games bolster independence support”. It was based on a survey reported in the weekend’s Sunday Times, but picked up on a detail that none of the Scottish media chose to notice.

The survey put support for independence at 35%, just 9% behind the Union on 44%. But curiously, of the same respondents, 58% wanted Scotland to have its own Olympic team, with only half as many – 29% – wanting Scottish athletes to continue to compete under the Team GB banner at future Games.

That’s a whopping 23% of people who want Scotland to have the trappings of a proper nation, but aren’t prepared to accept the responsibilities. Almost a quarter of the population who want to act like a real country, but lack the courage to actually make it happen, who want a wee pretendy Olympic team to go with their wee pretendy Parliament that doesn’t get to make the really important decisions.

We don’t think it’s very productive to insult Scots whose political views differ from ours, so we don’t. You’ll scour this site in vain for any attacks on the Scottish people for voting Labour or being against independence. But when we see a huge chunk of the nation who clearly DO want independence, but are just too feart to actually vote for it, it’s hard not to wince a little at your own people’s lack of courage.

In 2014 Scottish voters will have to decide once and for all whether they’re Arthur or Martha, and they can’t have it both ways. Voting “No” in the belief that Westminster will then just voluntarily hand over a bunch of meaningful extra powers out of the sheer goodness of its heart, at exactly the point when we’d have given up all our bargaining chips, is naive bordering on outright stupid.

(Particularly given that the chances are it would be handing those powers to the SNP, which currently sits even further ahead in the polls than it did in May 2011 and whose support encompasses far more than just the people who back independence.)

Scots can’t have their cake and eat it, because – to borrow a highly apt phrase from our previous life – the cake is a lie. We hope they realise that before it’s too late.

We noticed the image below doing the rounds on Twitter this morning, and were mildly surprised to trace it back to the official “Better Together” campaign account. Alert readers will already have noticed us satirically characterising it (in a tweet) as a claim that all but one of Scotland’s medal-winners at London 2012 were actually English, but in fact it’s something a little bit stranger than that.

Because what the image actually says is “Hey, Scotch people! Under successive UK governments you’ve suffered such chronic underinvestment in your sporting facilities that every talented athlete in Scotland has had to travel hundreds of miles from their home, leaving their families and friends behind, in order to get adequate training!”

We’re not sure that’s quite the red-hot selling point for the Union they think it is.

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.