February 2012: “Don’t worry, Scotland – the Olympics might be costing you millions of pounds, but look at all the extra tourism you’ll be getting from it to compensate!”
What could possibly go wrong? Bring on the bonanza!
Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie should be commended for starting 2013 with a legitimate request rather than a party-political attack. The Herald today reports his renewed call for a public inquiry into the events of the Lockerbie disaster.
The call was prompted by the new Libyan government’s pledge to release documents relating to the incident “as soon as time, security and stability permitted”. But what will such documents reveal beyond what we already know?
Last week, unnoticed by the media, the “Better Together” website issued a rather disturbing “Activist Briefing”. It was based around what’s been a core facet of the anti-independence campaign for years – the notion that even with oil revenues, Scotland is too poor to go it alone. (Despite regular assurances to the contrary in more recent times, this is still a fundamental belief of the No camp.)
The alarming passage was this one:
“Even with a generous allocation of Scotland’s oil revenues (a geographical share) the best estimate is that in 2011-12 Scotland was running at a significant deficit. Assuming a geographical share of oil revenues – which would in no way be guaranteed – Scotland would have run at a significant deficit in each of the last ten years.”
The two troubling aspects of the quote above are pretty obvious. Firstly, the notion of Scotland receiving its clear rights under international law is described as “generous”, as if it was somehow in the gift of the UK to decide where Scotland’s maritime borders lay in the event of a Yes vote. But much more worrying is the second part, which reaffirms the assertion that such a share “would in no way be guaranteed”.
Any attempt by the rUK to annexe internationally-recognised Scottish resources after independence would be quite simply an act of war, and as such can be discounted as belonging to the realm of fantasy. But what such comments do point to is a mindset and possible strategy that’s barely any less discomforting.
When we wrote a story earlier today about another piece of embarrassing evidence falling off the Scottish Labour website, we thought it was nothing more than the latest in a long line of attempts by the party to clumsily cover its tracks over policy U-turns. But when we did a little digging, we found something altogether more interesting.
Because when we typed the page’s address into The Internet Wayback Machine for fun, we fully expected to find that the line about continuing free prescription charges had been deleted yesterday, or at least in the weeks since Johann Lamont made her infamous “something for nothing” speech.
Instead, however, TIWM listed only one previous version. While it’s not the sole factor, pages tend to show up on the archive site when they’ve been amended, and the only time the Wayback Machine had been called on to notice this particular page since its creation in November 2010 was on Friday the 6th of May 2011 – the day after the Scottish Parliament election delivered a historic landslide victory to the SNP, and an unprecedentedly humiliating defeat for Labour.
Results were still coming in on the 6th of May, but Scottish Labour had clearly already decided to eradicate mention of their promise to maintain free prescriptions. Now, it seems rather unlikely that the party convened a meeting of its executive committee, debated the policy, decided on a change and dutifully edited a page of its website while everyone was still digesting the scale of their defeat and/or catching up on some much-needed sleep after a long night of results.
(Indeed, it’s possible that the web page was changed even earlier than the 6th.)
The only reasonable conclusion it’s possible to draw, then, is that the policy was already internally a dead duck before election day. The party’s manifesto pledge (which can be found on page 41) that “with Scottish Labour, there will be no reintroduction of charges for prescriptions in Scotland” must therefore have been a deliberate and cynical lie, set to be abandoned even if the party won power.
It took almost 18 months from that day before Johann Lamont announced her “review” of policy to consider whether universal benefits like prescription charges would be retained under a future Labour government at Holyrood. The review isn’t due to publish its conclusions for almost two more years, and some prominent Labour MSPs have already suggested that free prescriptions will “probably need to stay” (despite the same member also describing them as a “right-wing policy”). But in the light of this evidence, we think it’s a reasonably safe bet what the final verdict will be.
Were readers to further conclude that it’s rather unwise – and perhaps even literally damaging to one’s health – to accept a word of anything Scottish Labour ever says at face value, we’d find it hard to disagree.
Okay, so here’s a fun teaser you can try out around the table after your Christmas dinner. What do the following far-flung countries have in common: Canada, Togo, Uzbekistan, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Gabon, Panama, Zambia, Haiti, Libya and the Cape Verde Islands? Give up? Here’s a clue:
Yep – all of them, and 60 other nations too, are now officially better at football than Scotland. Entirely coincidentally, in the same week this dismaying fact was revealed, it was confirmed that former national coach Craig Levein was to sue the SFA for only offering to pay him £35,000 a month for the next year-and-a-half to sit around and scratch his arse in front of the Jeremy Kyle Show.
We suppose we really ought to start saying “British nationalist”, but it’s a bit long.
We’ve found that “answering a different question to the one you were actually asked” is something of a Unionist specialist subject – Alistair Darling gave a masterclass in the strategy on today’s edition of the Daily Politics. Still, you heard it here first, folks.
The modern Scottish independence movement is 84 years old, dating back to the 1928 formation of the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. It is a peaceful, inclusive, civic and democratic movement – to the best of our knowledge, and almost uniquely, not a single life has been lost in pursuit of Scottish independence.
Despite this, so-called “Unionists” (more properly described as British nationalists) still regularly try to portray independence campaigners as violent racists. As recently as a few days ago, one prominent Labour activist frequently employed as a commentator on BBC Scotland political shows attempted to perpetuate baseless (but oft-repeated by Unionists) 70-year-old smears that the former SNP leader Arthur Donaldson was a Nazi sympathiser engaged in attempts to collaborate with the Germans during WW2, sabotage the British war effort and set up a Vichy-style government in Scotland. These claims were cited, astonishingly, as evidence of “the SNP’s fascist past”.
Such attacks are all the more bizarre given the constant reminders on the news that the only nationalists attempting to secure their goals by violence in the United Kingdom are those who do so in the name of Britishness, waving the Union Jack.
These are the leaders of the nation’s business community, as they present themselves to us when explaining that they’re the mighty “masters of the universe” and require to be paid ever-soaring salaries in order to generate wealth and jobs and growth, because without them society itself will crumble to dust and we’ll all be reduced to foraging for berries in the shattered ruins of our once-proud civilisation.
Crybaby Nation is a land without borders. But a couple of recent news items from it do have a particularly Scottish flavour. One of them, also reported in the Daily Record, concerned an expat Scot and Motherwell supporter in the US banned from having “MWELLFC” on his car licence plate, on the barely-believable grounds that someone might interpret it as “ME WELL F**KED” and be offended. The other one, though, shames us more, because it happened on our own patch.
According to STV News, two new Grampian Fire & Rescue Service vehicles have had to be taken in and repainted after two people complained that the Saltire on their front grilles was a “political symbol”, connected to the SNP and independence movement.
We’re not even going to insult you by pointing out what pathetic, cringing, snivelling creatures those making a complaint against their own country’s flag must be, or how irrational the argument is. We’re just going to slump face-down onto our desk and sob for a couple of minutes about the gutless “corporate team” who allegedly decided to back down over it. We’ll be with you again shortly.
Wowsers. We’re really feeling the love today, readers. There’s currently – as there always is – a debate going on about those dreadful cybernats and how they’re solely responsible for all the horribleness on the internet. Here’s an extract from it.
For those of you joining us late, that’s one Scotsman writer, one Green Party PR person and two loonies ranged against us, “Ergasiophobe” being our much-missed former comment troll “Longshanker”. (And we’ve just noticed our old pal Kate Higgins sticking her oar in too. Just one missing for the full set.)
What with the constant threats of defamation action from people we haven’t defamed and the open stalking from people threatening to reveal mysterious “info” about us, we’re getting pretty intimidated now. We’ll almost definitely stop. (Mr McColm, in another tweet, says “i have learned enough to stop him”, which might save us the bother.) Or maybe, on the other hand, we won’t. Who can tell?
Crikey, Euan McColm seems to have an awfully thin skin. Today, for the second time this month, Wings Over Scotland has found itself the recipient of a cryptic threat, which on this occasion coincided with a spot of maintenance by our webhosts and accordingly caused some momentary alarm among readers.
Mr McColm apparently feels that yesterday’s post and/or some of the comments below it constitute his being, and we quote, “defamed to fuck on a cybernat smear site”, though despite our asking him some time ago to specify the offending material so that we might take any appropriate action he’s declined to identify any.
So far so ho hum, then, except that for some inexplicable reason Mr McColm is threatening to take his anger out on the SNP, and the party’s spin-doctor Kevin Pringle in particular. This morning he issued the menacing warning “dear @theSNP and @KevinJPringle. please thank @WingsScotland for what you are about to receive”, in a tweet he’s subsequently deleted.
Mr McColm has also deleted all the other tweets he directed to us, but you can see the original and some of the others here:
(Incidentally, the second and third tweets down in the image above see Mr McColm suggesting that he doesn’t know my name, which is odd as it’s clearly printed directly below the headline of every post I make on the site. He’s not the first Scotsman writer whose journalistic skills weren’t quite up to that level of in-depth investigation, and he also didn’t reply when I asked if I was eligible for the free curry.)
Now, this sort of moaning is pretty humdrum everyday stuff which comes with the territory if you dare to stick your head above the parapet and offer a political viewpoint on anything, let alone if you dare to critique the media itself. It’s water off a duck’s back to us. But it’s another tweet, which Mr McColm hasn’t yet deleted (and which was in any event helpfully retweeted by our dear friend Tom Harris MP and by unsuccessful Conservative “2010 Holyrood election” candidate Allan Smith), that takes this case somewhere altogether more sinister.
Euan McColm is a professional journalist regularly employed by the Scotsman, which claims political neutrality. Yet here, we appear to see him directly threaten to publish a story he considers will be damaging to the SNP and/or to Kevin Pringle personally, for purely vindictive reasons resulting from him being criticised on a website run by a 20-year Liberal Democrat voter.
We would invite readers to bear that fact in mind the next time a Scotsman column with Mr McColm’s name on it professes to be conducting an impartial analysis of Scottish political issues, and we’d further invite them to consider the point of issuing this threat in public, and in what ways it might conceivably be intended to intimidate or influence the actions of SNP MSPs and the independence campaign generally.
We keenly await hearing from Mr McColm’s solicitors with regard to the alleged defamation. Our contact form is at the top of the page.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
