Wings Over Scotland

A picture’s been doing the rounds on the nationalist social networks today, to a mixture of merriment and a nagging sense of injustice. It’s a retraction by the Herald of some wildly-inaccurate figures it published a couple of weeks ago about the alleged threat posed by independence to jobs at Faslane Naval Base, which we highlighted at the time. Here’s the picture. (Click for the full-size version.)

As we say, some pro-independence types have been gloating at the Herald having to apologise at all, while others have bemoaned the correction being buried in a corner of an obscure inside page when the original was a front-page lead story. But there’s something much more worrying about it than that.

Read the rest of this entry →

Readers may well recall some very recent analysis we undertook on the Scottish Government’s investment in promoting Scotland abroad, and the huge returns it generated in jobs and tourism. They may also remember that the opposition parties in Holyrood, led by Labour, were incandescent with rage at the “waste” of around £500,000 of taxpayers’ money spent on sending government delegations numbering dozens of people to the USA to undertake the work.

Given the recent revelations that almost half as large a sum – £232,708 – was unnecessarily awarded by Glasgow Labour councillors to a Labour crony who formerly headed a charitable body (over and above a severance pay-off which was already mind-bogglingly generous at £240,000), we wonder if anyone could help us with some info on how many tens of millions of pounds and/or hundreds of jobs the Labour-run council’s expenditure has delivered to Scotland? We can’t seem to find anything.

Readers will recall that earlier this week we heartily recommended a fantastic article written by Irvine Welsh for Bella Caledonia. Talking of the “Trainspotting” author’s happy times living with family in England and discussing how Scottish independence could enhance British cultural unity, it was an enormously positive piece which was widely acclaimed and warmly received pretty much everywhere.

Scotland on Sunday saw it through rather different eyes. Ignoring the uplifting message of friendship entirely, it grasped on a couple of isolated lines (so to speak) from the 5000-word essay and used it as an excuse to run a story headlined “Irvine Welsh says young people better off dealing drugs than studying for meaningless degree”.

After being on the website for just a couple of hours (at time of writing we can’t confirm if it was in the print paper), the piece mysteriously vanished, not even being visible in Google Cache. But an alert Wings Over Scotland reader was on the cut-and-paste case. If you want to see SoS’s twisted interpretation of Welsh’s words, they’re below.

Read the rest of this entry →

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!

Read the rest of this entry →

Oh dear, BBC.

That’s a very poor effort at impartiality indeed.

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?

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →