Wings Over Scotland

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.

Below is a picture of the headline and opening paragraph of a David Maddox-penned story that appeared on the Scotsman website last night.

It is, as you can see, an essentially positive story, noting that independence per se represents no threat to RBS staying in Scotland. Those readers wondering if that was perhaps a little at odds with the Scotsman’s normal editorial position on the issue would be reassured, then, to see how the story looks this afternoon.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

Some alert listeners picked up a curious story on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland, which was reported on the Tattie Scones blog and which we immediately set about investigating further. It was another outing for the “Scotland could be partitioned after the independence referendum” nonsense first peddled by a Tory peer back in January of this year, and picked up by unhinged Scotsman columnist Michael Kelly in August, but the latest advocate of slicing Scotland into countless separate parts that could require you to cross international borders a dozen times on a drive from Dumfries to Dingwall was our old pal Ian Davidson.

The Glasgow MP, who to the astonishment of alien observers from far-off galaxies has been placed in charge of the Scottish Affairs Select Committee in order to conduct a fully impartial analysis of Scottish “separation”, apparently made the suggestion sometime this week, but GMS curiously failed to include either an interview or a quote in its 69-second news report, which you can hear in its entirety by clicking on this link.

The piece also suggested that some of Davidson’s own colleagues were among those pouring scorn on the ludicrous notion, but declined to identify any of them. It wasn’t repeated in the rest of the programme, and we’re still none the wiser as to when and where the comments were made. (Although we know when it wasn’t.)

If any reader can enlighten us, please feel free.

A front-page piece in today’s Scotland On Sunday expands on Gordon Brown’s attempted intervention in the independence debate yesterday with an extraordinary headline which appears to be based on an actual quote from the former Prime Minister: “SNP plan makes Scotland a colony, claims Gordon Brown”.

Sure enough, Brown is reported as saying that an independence for Scotland would be “a form of self-imposed colonialism more reminiscent of the old empire than of the modern world”. Which raises an obvious question: given that an independent Scotland would by any definition have vastly more control of its own affairs than it does now, doesn’t that mean it must currently be something far less than a colony?

The only status we can think of for a nation that’s arguably lower than a “colony” is that of a vassal state. Wikipedia’s definition of that term certainly seems to apply to Scotland: we pay “tribute” to the UK (by contributing a greater share of its revenues than we get back in spending), and we also “provide military power to the dominant state”, both directly in the form of troops and by giving a home to the UK’s nuclear weapons, an important political tool which it wouldn’t be able to retain otherwise.

Wiki goes on to add that a more common modern term for a vassal state is “puppet state”. If you’ve got a minute, Gordon, can you just confirm for us that you and the rest of the Unionist alliance currently see Scotland as a puppet state of England? Cheers.

Watching FMQs yesterday, a thought suddenly occurred to us. Is it possible that a lot of Scottish people’s reluctance to support independence isn’t because they think the south-east of England knows what’s best for Scotland, but because they’re simply terrified of the possibility of someone other than the SNP winning an election to an independent Scottish Parliament, and thereby risking putting the entire nation in the hands of the likes of Johann Lamont, Jackie Baillie and Richard Baker?

Have we been making a terrible tactical error all this time? Should we, in fact, spend the next two years bigging up Scottish Labour and the rest of the Holyrood opposition instead of mercilessly exposing their hapless ineptitude at every turn? Should we do our best to reassure a frightened electorate that should the SNP split after independence (which some people think it will, though we don’t), there’s nothing to fear from a government that might include Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and James Kelly and have control of ALL of Scotland’s finances, welfare and defence?

Because if so we’ll give it a shot. But frankly, that’s going to be a tough sell.

This film doesn’t need commentary.

Johann Lamont thinks these people want something for nothing. Ruth Davidson thinks they’re a burden on society. Willie Rennie is prepared to sacrifice them for a couple of token tax hikes on rich people. All three think nuclear weapons are a better use of Scotland’s money than looking after our people. Make your own decision.

"Those who have been angry about all this – don’t investigate the people, investigate the system." (Robert Florence, writing on John Walker's blog last week.)

Let's see what we can do, eh?

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The quotes below come from an April 2007 piece entitled "And The Winner Is", concerning the inaugural Games Media Awards of later that year, written by Kyle Orland for GameDaily.com. The site no longer exists, but you can still read the article via the ever-handy Internet Wayback Machine.

""We actually found a lot of people in the games media don't feel well recognized by the industry they served," said Stuart Dinsey, Managing Director for Intent Media and the brains behind the awards show. "We felt this was a good way to give them some of that recognition and have a great party for everyone to get together at the same time."

"As for the all-important judging itself, Dinsey said the exact process was still being tweaked. Dinsey added that he'd like to get votes from "all the leading companies" in the games industry, probably by asking PR representatives to consult with their colleagues and place a vote to represent the company as a whole. Dinsey said the exact makeup of the judging panel will be kept secret until after the voting is done, to prevent any quid pro quo situations from developing."

But the mere specter of industry voting was enough to give some members of the press pause about the awards. "The games industry are the last people who should be voting for awards in games journalism," said British game freelancer Kieron Gillen. "It's a bit like the prisoners voting for who's their favourite prison guard." Gillen said he worries that the industry voting will make the award one "you wouldn't want to win…. because it's basically shorthand for 'Lapdog Of The Year award'.""

(Despite these comments, Gillen accepted a GMA that very year, and this month pocketed the "Games Media Legend" prize to bookend it with. He attempted to justify his instant U-turn the day after the 2007 award by saying "The awards don’t really matter. PRs are fine. They’re just people." In a fine twist of irony he now pontificates at highbrow public events about how independent games journalism is of PR, and is also a judge in the "Games Journalism Prizes" awards, along with a number of other "concerned games industry types", several of whom are also GMA winners.)

Now the owner of the PR-driven GMAs uses their power to censor journalists with legal threats for expressing honest opinions and accurately quoting people's own public comments to illustrate a valid and fair point. Now maybe we're just old and bitter (well, there's no "maybe" about it), but it seems a pretty odd way of "recognising" games journalism to us. Unless, that is, you ponder who voted on the first GMAs (and still vote on them now), and start wondering to yourself exactly which industry it was that Stuart Dinsey meant when he said "recognised by the industry they serve".

The Scotsman reports today that the Lib Dems are prepared to accept Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals to limit child benefit and child tax credits to the first two children in a family, in return for some tax increases on the rich.

The plans, which echo China’s extraordinarily punitive “one child per family” laws, have caused a storm of controversy because of the obvious catastrophic impact they could have on some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the country – costing them thousands of pounds a year – as well as the nightmare of bureaucracy and obvious cases of farcical unfairness that could and will result from them.

(What if you’ve worked all your life and have four children, then get made unexpectedly redundant or become ill? Are you supposed to put your two most expensive kids into care because you can no longer afford to feed all of them? What if you already have one child and fall pregnant with what turns out to be twins or triplets? Do you have to pick your favourite and leave the others at the hospital? What if people ignore the changes and have children they can’t afford? Do we just let their kids die, saying “Hey, you knew the rules”? What if someone gets raped and can’t have a termination on religious grounds? Etc etc.)

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems have signalled their support, ensuring the policy will have a Parliamentary majority and be enacted. Some tax rates on the wealthy may be raised, and the rich will continue to get their accountants to find imaginative ways of avoiding paying that tax as usual. Even if additional tax revenues were to be raised by the measures, we’re not sure how that helps the starving extra children of the poor, since they won’t be getting any of the money.

It’s clear that the poor are going to continue to bear most of the burden of austerity. With this latest development following on from Scottish Labour’s recent abandonment of the principle of universal services, all three main Westminster parties and their subsidiaries north of the border are now fully committed to savage attacks on the welfare state. If you’re poor in the UK, it no longer matters who you vote for.

You know the rest by now.