Wings Over Scotland

You tend to expect legal professionals to be a bit more careful with their words than this. Over the last few days we’ve been documenting the bizarre mental collapse of staunch Scottish Labour activist Ian Smart, a practising solicitor from Cumbernauld who’s managed to arrive at the conclusion that there won’t be an independence referendum at all, but if there is and there’s a Yes vote then Scotland will almost instantly degenerate into a poverty-stricken fascist dictatorship with no elections, 100% unemployment, compulsory Gaelic in schools and cannibalism in the streets.

We don’t plan to carry on doing so beyond today, because right now it’s starting to feel like laughing at a car crash while the fire brigade are still frantically trying to saw bodies out before the petrol tank goes up. But the extraordinary breakdown Mr Smart suffered late last night on his Twitter account isn’t an isolated incident among Labour figures at the moment, and we’re a bit worried there could be a toxic leak of some sort in the water system at John Smith House which might harm innocent visitors.

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We’ve mentioned previously that one of the core tactics the No camp appears to be utilising in the referendum debate is that of attrition through extremism. It’s a strategy borrowed from the terrifying American right wing, and has two main goals.

One is to recalibrate the perceived centre-ground by abandoning any kind of moderate position and instead arguing positions so self-evidently ludicrous and dishonest that the listener is nudged towards assuming that they must be true purely on the grounds that nobody would dare to present such an audacious lie with a straight face. The other is to simply exhaust your opponents by forcing them to constantly battle over even the most basic and obvious facts, long before you get to the real debating points.

It’s a nihilistic but clever ploy, particularly effective in broadcast media where time is often very limited and such obfuscatory stalling can completely prevent the serious issues from being addressed at all. So far it seems to be pretty much the only weapon in Scottish Labour’s armoury, not just in respect of the referendum but also politics generally – a good example being the party’s absurd claims about the cost of knife crime during the 2011 election campaign.

It applies at the macro level as well as at the top end of the scale. When we started this blog we subscribed to the Twitter accounts of lots of prominent Labour activists in a naive attempt at engaging in genuine constructive debate, but were gradually forced to the realisation that the primary (or only) point of their dialogue was to deliberately waste our time and exasperate us into submission, and unfollowed them all.

So rather than be drawn into attempting to intelligently and forensically deconstruct three of the most recent outpourings of (calculated) lunacy from some of the No camp’s leading mad old men, we’re going to treat them with the amount of respect they deserve. Read the three articles below, then use your skill and judgement to decide (via the poll over in the central column) who’s the most barking-mad mental.

Michael Kelly in the Scotsman, insisting that an independent Scotland having its own defence forces is a hilarious joke

Alan Cochrane in the Telegraph, burbling about Alex Salmond sacrificing the referendum in return for more powers

Ian Smart in his shed, banging his worn-out drum of how Salmond doesn’t want to have a referendum in the first place

Vote now!

We mean cyberBritNats, of course. Last night’s Olympic closing ceremony brought a charming collection of positive Unionists out of the woodwork with moving, heartfelt words of British unity such as these. We’re choking up a little even now as we type.

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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?

There seem to be a lot of things disappearing from the Scottish media today. First the interesting Robbie Dinwoodie story on Olympic football in the Herald does the Bermuda-Triangle routine, and then we see this odd piece in The Scotsman. It opens powerfully, promising to refute (or at least contest) one of the commonest and most compelling arguments made in favour of independence:

“ED MILIBAND has attacked the SNP’s suggestion that Scots face a choice of either independence or Conservative rule from Westminster as the Labour leader made his latest intervention in the referendum debate.”

We’ve read the rest of the short article three times now, however, without being able to locate a single sentence in which Mr Miliband (pictured in the piece as the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) refers to said choice in even the most oblique passing manner, far less “attacks” it. We’re rather keen to hear the official Labour answer, too. Can any eagle-eyed readers help us out?

In an earlier piece today, we referred to an error on the Herald’s website, where it was displaying a story about Madonna rather than a comment piece by Ian Smart. We note that the error appears to have now been fixed and the correct page is again displayed, in which Mr Smart offers his opinion on Scottish Labour’s choice of current leader.

Never having read a “Harry Potter” book or watched any of the films on account of being adults, we were unaware until today of the meaning of a word used in the column as a description of Ms Lamont, having simply assumed it to mean “madperson”. Having now looked it up, we thought it merited sharing:

“A Dementor is a Dark creature, considered one of the foulest to inhabit the world. Dementors feed off human happiness, and thus cause depression and despair to anyone near them. They can also consume a person’s soul, leaving their victims in a permanent vegetative state, and thus are often referred to as “soul-sucking fiends” and are known to leave a person as an “empty-shell.”

Mr Smart wishes to see such a creature as the First Minister of Scotland, and predicts such an event will take place should the electorate vote No in the 2014 independence referendum, which seems to us to be a highly compelling reason to vote Yes.

We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Whichever religion you belong to, or if you belong to no religion at all, most Scottish people are aware of the significance of the 12th of July. The Scottish Conservative blog Tory Hoose chose that day to publish a post from Jason Lingiah, the Chairman of the Edinburgh and South West Conservative Association and also the party’s defeated 2011 Holyrood-election candidate for the Loyalist stronghold of Coatbridge & Chryston.

In it, Mr Lingiah called for the Conservative Party to “do more to reach out” to the Orange Order, stating that its value system “echoes core Conservative beliefs” and that the Tories should try to reverse a situation where “Labour has become the Unionist party of choice” for the Order.

On the same day, just across the water in the New Lodge area of Belfast, the body which Mr Lingiah believes “stands for civil and religious freedom” was up to this:

The clip shows an Orange July-12th parade stopping and repeatedly circling in front of St Patrick’s Chapel, which you may not be entirely surprised to discover is a Catholic place of worship. They then start to play a tune which innocent English readers might know only as the Beach Boys hit “Sloop John B”, but which Scottish people will recognise under its alternative guise as “The Famine Song“, a cheerful ditty beloved of and regularly aired by Rangers supporters. When members of the Order belatedly notice that someone is filming this display, they violently attack him.

Given that the events took place in Northern Ireland, it would perhaps appear to be understandable under normal circumstances that no Scottish newspaper or broadcaster reported on them. But in the context of Mr Lingiah’s comments, on a site officially endorsed by the Scottish Conservative Party and which has hosted a number of articles by both the party’s leader Ruth Davidson and its Rangers-supporting former deputy Murdo Fraser, it’s a touch more strange that they attracted so little notice.

The SNP is regularly called upon to condemn and/or accept responsibility for the actions of random supporters of independence who make offensive or merely controversial comments on the internet. Yet the Scottish media seem oddly disinclined to castigate the Tories for failing to publicly attack these provocative and despicable sectarian actions, and actual violent assault, by an organisation a senior Conservative was lauding in print the very same day. (And which Labour is keen to see taking a more active and prominent role in Scottish society.)

Labour and the Tories are fighting for the backing of these people. The media turns a blind eye. If we were more paranoid we’d find that a bit worrying.

Can anyone help reconcile these two facts for us?

“Seventy-one per cent of people trust the Scottish Government to act in Scotland’s best interests (up from 61 per cent in 2010), compared to just 18 per cent who trust the UK Government (down from 35 per cent in 2007).“

“The number of people prepared to support Scottish independence is falling substantially, new polling suggests. A Mori Scotland poll found just 35% said they would vote ‘yes’ to independence north of the border, compared to 55% saying ‘no’.“

It’s not a rhetorical question. We don’t get it.

After all, we can’t blame a Unionist conspiracy for the borderline-criminal trousers that Alex Salmond inexplicably chose to wear to the world premiere of Brave, and also on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson the same evening.

But we couldn’t help noticing an odd quote in The Scotsman’s report of the event, which the paper happily let end its story, forgetting to close the quotation marks as it did so. According to Kelly MacDonald, voice of the central character:

“She [Merida] is an adventurous tomboy and very happy young woman. The spell is broken when her mother says she has to get married and take on adult responsibilities. That’s when she takes things into her own hands and makes a mess of everything.“

It’s just coincidence, right?