Wings Over Scotland

We got an annoyed comment yesterday from a reader about the number of articles we’ve written on the Rangers fiasco. Only a tiny (fingers-of-one-hand) number of readers have ever objected to the football pieces, but we don’t want that number to grow, so we’re just going to put this here for future reference.

There’s a whole raft of reasons why the “crisis” at Ibrox is relevant to a Scottish political blog. As we’ve touched on before, we believe that were New Rangers to either disappear entirely or become a greatly-reduced force in football over the next two years, it could be a game-changer in the independence campaign. The parallel that could be drawn if the game survived in a healthy state bereft of the big Union Jack-waving institution everyone said we couldn’t do without would be pretty obvious.

Secondly, there’s no point pretending that Rangers stories don’t draw in a wider audience to the blog, from right across Scotland, exposing people to its core content who’d otherwise never see it. We’re not here to preach to the converted, that’s a waste of time. We have to speak to people who have no political axe to grind and may not have made up their minds about independence yet, and anything that puts more eyes on pages is a positive.

The third reason, though, is something much more personal.

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An alert reader recently pointed us to a story we’d missed in last week’s Sun. Headed “SICK TAUNTS FOR ‘NO’ GIRL CEILIDH WATSON”, it describes the “vile internet abuse” suffered by the 2010 Miss Inverness after she appeared at the “Better Together” campaign launch. Oddly, the worst (in fact the only) example of these attacks the paper felt able to provide was one alleged “cybernat” saying “It’s amazing how low some will stoop for 15 minutes of fame”, which is a bit unfriendly but we’re not sure it quite reaches the level of “vile abuse”, particularly when directed at someone who’s voluntarily and actively involved themselves in a heated political campaign.

The piece also referred (we presume, being unaware of any other incident that fits the description) to this blog’s own brush with infamy last week, noting that we’d “posted sick images of a funeral cortege of dead squaddies passing through Royal Wooton [sic] Bassett”, apparently in response to Ms Watson speaking of her soldier boyfriend.

We still haven’t seen the launch event – there appears to be no footage of it available on the campaign’s website – so we had, and have, no idea what Ms Watson’s boyfriend does for a living. The image in question had absolutely nothing to do with him or her or anything she may or may not have said at the No campaign launch.

As for “sick images”, though, the picture we used in our mockup poster wasn’t edited in any way (except for blurring out the numberplates of the hearses in an attempt to protect the identities of the dead men, which were then spread across the internet anyway by Labour activists), so if it constitutes a “sick image” then pretty much every newspaper in Britain – including the Sun – is guilty of the same crime.

You can see the full story below, without having to visit the Sun’s website.

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*Jonathan Edwards is the Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr. This piece first appeared on his own blog, but we asked if we could reprint it to bring some of its excellent insights to a wider audience. (And also to fix the original’s impressively esoteric rendering of “paraphernalia”. We’re real spelling Nazis.)

I’ve been meaning to write this blog ever since Ed Miliband’s car-crash speech on English identity. I have also taken part in a number of BBC interviews over recent months in which it is sometimes difficult to get your point across when you have an interviewer on the other end barking at you as you challenge unionist perceptions. It also supports why Leanne Woods’ intervention this week is an important one.

When the Miliband speech was being pre-briefed I had high hopes that we were about to hear something significant – that Labour were going to proclaim that their answer to the challenge posed by the SNP’s independence drive was a federal settlement for the British state. I expected Labour to position themselves as advocates of an English Parliament as the political expression of English identity. Instead what we got was hot air, followed by one of the most painful interviews I have seen by a Unionist leader on Channel 4 News.

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We’re bored of the “debate” about a second question in the independence referendum. The facts are plain and beyond any sensible dispute:

(a) the SNP has a majority government, and therefore a legitimate democratic mandate to conduct the business of government – including the referendum – any way it wants.

(b) The party’s 2011 election manifesto promised a referendum – it did NOT, contrary to the No camp’s constant assertions, specifically promise a single-question one. (A lie the media bizarrely never challenges.)

(c) All referenda in the United Kingdom are advisory rather than legally binding, so the reservation of the constitution to Westminster under the Scotland Act is therefore irrelevant, and

(d) …is in any event over-ridden by the universal principle of self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Charter and the Declaration Of Human Rights.

So that’s that. This blog, however, neither supports a two-question referendum nor believes for a moment that there will be one. As we’ve said numerous times, Alex Salmond has manoeuvered the Unionist parties onto the ground they instinctively want to occupy anyway – that of denying the people of Scotland the right to select their preferred form of government from the full range of choices – and has neither the desire nor the intention to actually put a second question on the ballot paper, which would all but guarantee the failure of the goal for which he has worked his entire adult life.

But more than that, a two-question referendum is unacceptable no matter which side you’re on. If we’re discounting the simple and reasonable “Yes-Yes” formula of the 1999 devolution referendum – as it appears we must on the grounds of Willie Rennie’s mendacious and disingenuous “51% rule” – and insisting on either-or voting, then the only legitimate number of questions for the referendum is either one or three.

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There seems to be a disconnect for many Scots between how they feel about the London Olympics and how they’ll act when the Games are on. Many will bemoan the cost, lost opportunities, lack of access or significant national legacy, but will simultaneously be cheering on the athletes in Team GB. Is it a form of Olympic schizophrenia that we should despise the Games and yet love them at the same time?

Schizophrenia isn’t, of course, really the correct term to use for this phenomenon. It’s a mental disorder characterised by a breakdown of thought processes and by poor emotional responsiveness. Despite the etymology of the term from the Greek roots, schizophrenia does not imply a “split mind” and it is not the same as Dissociative Identity Disorder – also known as “multiple personality disorder” or “split personality” – despite often being confused with it in the public’s perception.

So perhaps it’s more accurate to say that myself, and many others, suffer from a form of Olympic split personality disorder. But what is it that causes this affliction? In order to find out, we need to look at the history of London 2012.

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So we’d probably better comment on Willie Rennie’s personal attack yesterday. It was hardly surprising, and indeed a little flattering that the leader of a formerly-major political party would take time out of his day to send out a press release excoriating little old us and our insignificant wee blog, but it’s still a tad disappointing to see a senior politician happy to tell so many lies in a few short sentences.

We’ll skip through it quickly, then move on with our lives.

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For weeks now, if not months, the independence community has been bombarded with claims from Unionists that it’s not independence if you have a shared currency, cooperate on defence, keep the monarchy, share embassies or empower others to act on your behalf. There’s been a continuing drone to the effect that if you don’t do everything personally then you’re not independent.

This view, as any student of English will tell you, is flawed – doing everything for yourself is not independence, but rather self-reliance.

Self-reliance – Not requiring help or support from others while acting autonomously. Self-reliance is relative freedom from needing to rely on others for help with instrumental or task-oriented activities and is distinguished from independence as the latter is a pre-requisite to self-reliance and not predicated on its existence.

In other words, you need independence to act autonomously and to choose to be self-reliant, if you so wish. Yet it would seem, having watched various Unionist politicians and commentators struggle with the concept of independence, that it is necessary to provide a definition that can be easily understood. So I’ll have a go.

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Can you spot what’s strange about this statement, viewers?

“We believe that the process of setting a single question should be taken out of the hands of elected politicians and given to relevant experts the public can have faith in.”

It comes from the mouth of Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont, and forms part of her latest demand – along with her two partners in the Unionist coalition – that the Scottish Government should allow the defeated opposition parties to dictate the terms and conditions of the implementation of the flagship policy behind which it was so resoundingly and unprecedentedly elected a little over a year ago.

(Note in particular the sneaky way the overt demand also slips in a covert demand.)

We’re pretty sure that a general election is already, pretty much by definition, the primary means by which the public expresses who it does and doesn’t “have faith in”. We have, on the other hand, absolutely no way of knowing how much faith that same public does or doesn’t have in the ironically-unelected Electoral Commission, which is appointed by – who’d have guessed it? – the UK Parliament. And just by the by, below are a couple of other relevant snippets from the Commission’s Wikipedia entry:

“The Electoral Commission has a number of responsibilities in relation to referendums. These include:

• commenting on the wording of the referendum question (the government is responsible for proposing the wording)

The Commission has no legal position in the legislation concerning referendums proposed by the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations.”

Our emphasis, there. So, and we admit this is just a crazy madcap idea we’re putting out there, maybe the business of government should properly be conducted by the people the electorate have democratically chosen to do the job, no?

And so the phoney war rumbles on and gathers pace. The ‘No’ campaign – or whatever it decides to refer to itself as – will be unveiled shortly and we’ve heard (with a certain sense of deja vu) that the SNP has been debating the relative merits of the words “independenT” and “independenCE”. We have independence and Unionist groups galore appearing on Facebook and the web, we’ve got Cybernats and Britnats, republicans and monarchists, hawks and pacifists and goodness knows what else.

In the meantime, I still have the bills to pay, the washing to dry in the incessant rain, the mundane monotony of the “what’s for dinner?” conversations. Today a friend’s daughter is having a baby, while another lady I know has lost her best friend. The neverending cycle of joy and tears, grief and laughter rolls on.

Politicians would do well to stop and think about this – that away from Parliaments ordinary people are still living their everyday lives, and when we occasionally get to lift our noses from the grindstone we might appreciate a little passion from our politicians, a little honesty, some better research, and an end to the sniping and spin that threatens to suffocate the independence debate.

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The current issue of Private Eye (which also features a fascinating full-page piece on Craig Whyte) relates news of another Labour dividend for the people of Glasgow – the decades-long neglect and imminent destruction of a much-loved green space. We’ve attached the story below for your convenience.

On the upside, though, we’re pretty sure we know where another large green space, which already comes with goalposts, is about to become available.

To be honest, on the evidence we’ve seen on the rare occasions when Labour lets its Scottish “leader” speak to the public, we’ve been left with the impression that it doesn’t take all that much to confuse her. At the weekly joust of First Minister’s Questions, Johann Lamont is frequently exposed as unable to adapt her script to Alex Salmond’s replies, often leaving her haplessly repeating the question that’s just been answered.

Even in that context, though, the quote attributed to her in today’s Daily Record in regard of the latest referendum poll is a dismaying one for anyone concerned about the standard of Scottish political debate. With the stage set by an earlier quote from a “source” in the No campaign flatly asserting that the reason for the drop in support for independence was “There is just too much uncertainty – over jobs, defence, even the currency – everything, basically”, Lamont gallumphed in with her 2p’s-worth:

“This shows that the more people hear the arguments, the more they see through the absurdities of Alex Salmond’s case for separation”

Hang on. Is it because people ARE hearing the arguments and being convinced against independence by them, or is it because there’s “too much uncertainty” and people just don’t know where they stand, so they’re erring on the side of caution? We’re reasonably sure it can’t be both, and look forward to “Better Together” getting its story straight. We have a sinking feeling that might not be any time soon, though.