Wings Over Scotland

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?

Maybe you’re a Hearts fan (or a Chelsea one), and you’re not sure whether you’re still a bit drunk and imagining things or not, so allow us to clear something up for you.

No, you’re not dreaming. This actually happened. Tragically, this is really the picture that Scotland’s LEAST moronic newspaper thought most appropriate to illustrate their story on the imminent launch of the “Yes Scotland” campaign. (And, indeed, as the front-page lead of the entire website.) We’re not joking. We imagine the Daily Record is lining up Russ Abbott in a Jimmy hat and Rab C Nesbitt even as we speak.

We seriously can’t imagine how ashamed anyone with even the last shred of an ounce of conscience who works for the Herald must be today. Please, readers – don’t berate and chastise these poor, fearful souls. Take pity on them, for their dignity is ruin’d.

We stumbled across this old quote from a Daily Record interview with Ed Miliband earlier while we were doing something else, and we hadn’t heard it before. It’s from just after he was elected Labour leader, and it struck as us a little odd. See if you agree.

“Asked if he planned to move Britain to the left, he said: “I think that those labels don’t help. That is not the way I would see my leadership. It is not about some lurch to the left, absolutely not. I am for the centre ground of politics but it is about defining where the centre ground is.”

Ed joked his famous Marxist intellectual dad Ralph Miliband would not recognise him as a left-winger.”“

If you’ve just found yourself thinking “If you don’t have any plans to move Britain to the left, then WHAT THE BLOODY HELL ARE YOU DOING AS THE LEADER OF THE LABOUR PARTY, YOU SIMPERING NEO-TORY HALFWIT? WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS THE LABOUR PARTY FOR IF IT’S NOT TO MOVE BRITAIN TO THE BLOODY LEFT?” then don’t panic, gentle viewer – you’re not alone. God help us all.

You don't even need to be a particularly alert reader to recall WoSland's worrying piece about recession-hit Bath just a few weeks ago, which drew thousands of viewers from all corners of the net to become one of the all-time top 10 most popular posts on the blog. But this week, Bath's fall from grace was rendered complete.

The image above comes from a piece in Monday's Guardian about dereliction and decay in urban England (click the pic to read the story). The feature talks about northern working-class cities like Bradford, Redcar, Sheffield and Preston, particularly the various consequences (and, it posits optimistically, opportunities) presented by long-term disuse, decay and demolition of long-term empty properties. The picture chosen to illustrate it, though, is of London Road in Bath.

It's not, admittedly, the most salubrious part of town. But Bath is more accustomed to being employed to depict the grand Edwardian age in period dramas. To serve as a passable imitation of deprived modern-day Bradford instead may well be seen by the city's inhabitants as its darkest hour since it was bombed by the Nazis in 1942.

If you’re pushed for time, we’ll give you the answer up front: when it’s in the Scottish media. But a closer analysis of yesterday’s and this morning’s press and broadcasting provides a full and and illuminating picture of the reality. The fact is, the nationalists aren’t paranoid – their own country’s media really is out to get them.

Those of us watching events unfold yesterday afternoon were a little bemused when various sources started tweeting summarised results, which showed Labour as the biggest winners. To anyone comparing the results to those of the last election, those gain/loss figures were perplexing. Set against 2007, the SNP had gained 61 seats, not 57, and Labour just 46 rather than 58. (In both cases almost entirely at the expense of the Lib Dems, who lost nearly 100 seats. Hardly any seats anywhere in the country changed hands directly from Labour to SNP or vice versa.)

We couldn’t at the time, and we still can’t now, find any published record of where the numbers for the second interpretation derive from.

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The following is a transcript of an interview broadcast on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, between the BBC’s presenter Glenn Campbell, the Labour MSP Jenny Marra and SNP MSP Linda Fabiani.

GLENN CAMPBELL: What, Linda Fabiani, would be a “win” in the referendum that you hope to have? What’s a majority?

LINDA FABIANI: I think it’s quite clear: 50% is what we always look at for that bridge over into a majority, so it’s quite clear – those who vote, if you’re over 50% that’s a majority.

GLENN CAMPBELL: Even if that’s a minority of those entitled to vote, a minority of the Scottish people?

LF: Well, when you start talking round these things you’re back in the realm of 1979, when Scotland was stymied and then it was 20 years down the line before we got anything. So I think it’s very plain, very straightforward in a transparent process – as the referendum was carried out for devolution in 1999.

GC: If 50%+1, Jenny Marra, say yes to independence, is that enough in your view to end the Union? A simple majority?

JENNY MARRA: Well, I think we need to have, I think the real message of Angus Robertson’s visit to Canada, is that the process points of this referendum are critically important. The question is important, whether there’s one question or two, the size of the majority, the clear majority. [Our emphasis.] Now these have been written into Canadian legislation but they’re still not clear and the issue of independence just rumbles on and on and on in Quebec. This is something we don’t want in Scotland – we want a clear and decisive result, and then we can move on with the priorities of our country that [end of sentence indistinct].

GC: Okay, but can you spell it out? Because the Clarity Act in Canada doesn’t actually spell out what a clear question or a clear majority is, but we do know that a narrow win for the federalists last time around has not settled the question. So when it comes to the Scottish referendum, is 50% plus 1 enough to end the Union?

JM: Well, Glenn, that’s not a decision for me, Jenny Marra, to-

GC: What’s your VIEW?

JM: That is a decision for – well, we need to represent the views of the Scottish people and what THEY would want as a clear majority, so we need –

GC: And what do you think, what do you think that would be?

JM:  – we need to have that discussion with all civic society in Scotland and we all need to come to a consensus on what the process points of this referendum will be, and only once we’ve had that discussion will we then be in a position to move forward.

GC: Would you agree, Linda Fabiani, that if the result IS that slim it’ll certainly open the result to question, in the way that perhaps it has when the federalists won in Quebec?

LF: No, I think there should be a clear agreement amongst all parties that we judge this the way we judged the referendum in 1999, the way that people think of a majority. It should be clear, it should be straightforward, that’s what we want.

GC: Linda Fabiani, Jenny Marra, thanks both very much indeed for coming in.

So that’s pretty unequivocal. As far as Linda Fabiani’s concerned, the normal rules of arithmetic apply – the side that gets the most votes wins. 50%+1 was good enough for the 2011 AV referendum, good enough for the Common Market referendum in 1975, good enough for the 1973 Northern Ireland sovereignty referendum and good enough for the 1999 Scottish devolution referendum, so it’s good enough for independence.

Jenny Marra’s position, on the other hand, is rather more concerning. Asked directly three times by Campbell, she declined three times to answer whether a simple majority would be accepted by Labour as a win for the Yes camp, and refused to even express a personal opinion, inevitably raising the prospect that the Unionist parties might try once again to pull a fast one as they so infamously did in 1979, putting effectively impossible obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign.

The whole idea is, of course, a non-starter. We feel confident in saying that Alex Salmond would sooner move the UK’s Trident submarines to the stream at the bottom of his garden than be party to a 1979-style stitch-up. So what can Labour possibly hope to gain from refusing to concede even the most basic of mathematical realities?

Can they conceivably be hoping to manoeuvre themselves into a position whereby accepting that the side with most votes is the winner is considered some sort of compromise on their part, to be used as a bargaining chip? Frankly we think they’d get extremely short shrift on that one. And as a ploy to try to force the SNP to withdraw/boycott the referendum it’s a bit too transparent.

The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that the party is positioning itself on the premise that it might win the UK general election in 2015, and – unthinkable as it sounds – is accordingly preparing the ground to give itself some sort of basis on which to obstruct the process of dissolution, or even outright reject a narrow victory for independence, should they be in government at Westminster when the negotiations with the Scottish Government would be taking place.

If you’ve got any more convincing ideas for Labour refusing to publicly acknowledge that 51 is more than 49, do share them with the class.