Wings Over Scotland

I’ve been a nationalist pretty much all my life, or at least since I was old enough to grasp the basic concept of politics (probably from about the age of 10 or so). Leaving aside any precocious notions of specific policies, I’ve never been able to grasp the basic concept of a people who consider themselves to be a nation being afraid to actually stand up and take responsibility for running that nation themselves.

If you think you’re a country, you shouldn’t be having foreigners pick your government for you. And if you don’t, you need to accept that you’re just a region with ideas above its station, and act accordingly – no more “national” football teams, no rugby teams, no flags, no anthems, no different laws or any of the rest of it.

To me, the idea goes far beyond anything so base as cowardice, and belongs instead in the realm of “simply too mad to understand”. It’s like not believing in gravity or evolution or the Earth being round and orbiting the Sun – that is, once someone’s pointed it out to you, it’s just a bit mental to keep disputing it.

Nobody can have two countries, or at least not simultaneously. You can be a citizen of somewhere, carry a passport for it, live there for as long as you like, or whatever else, but countries are like wives and livers – you can only have one at a time. You can change your nationality, if that’s what’s in your heart, but not have two at once. I’ve only agreed with Norman Tebbit about one thing in my entire life, and it’s that.

I’m Scottish. I’m British too, just like I’m from West Lothian and from Europe and from the Northern Hemisphere and plenty more things, but only one of them is my country. As such, I believe that it’s a self-evident truth that the government of Scotland should be chosen by the people of Scotland, and the people of Scotland alone.

But occasionally, just very occasionally, I have the misfortune to witness something like BBC Scotland’s “Big Debate” last night, and I’m not so sure we can be trusted.

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As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here's some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.

Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.

Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you're a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?

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.

The 30th anniversary of the ZX Spectrum has sparked a flurry of nostalgia pieces in the games press, many of which for some reason can’t help comparing the Sinclair machine to its main American competitor. And since the games press is a dictatorship of dullards, the C64 has come out on top in most of them, invariably helped by a colossally biased selection of judges.

Eurogamer, for example, takes a big dump on the Speccy’s birthday cake by calling on Julian Rignall (editor of a C64 magazine), Steve Jarratt (editor of a C64 magazine), Gary Penn (writer on a C64 magazine), Gary Liddon (writer on a C64 magazine), Jason Page (a C64 coder) and Paul Glancey (writer on a C64 magazine) – with only some three-year-old quotes from the sadly-deceased Jonathan “Joffa” Smith holding up the Speccy’s end of the debate – to come to the startling opinion that it deems the C64 the superior machine. Last month’s Retro Gamer reached a similar conclusion for much the same set of spastic-faced reasons. (“Whine bleat SID chip wah wah wah.”)

But fuck all of them, because they’re all cunts and they can suck our dicks.

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The following is a transcript from an interview with Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont on BBC Radio Scotland’s “Good Morning Scotland” on Wednesday 25th April, concerning the relationship between Alex Salmond and Rupert Murdoch. (2h12m in.)

GARY ROBERTSON: Would you, if you were First Minister, be meeting Rupert Murdoch and others to talk about jobs in Scotland?

JOHANN LAMONT: Well, you would have to meet with people to talk about jobs and so on.

GARY ROBERTSON: So you would have had the same relationship, then?

JOHANN LAMONT: I would make this point: that we have all learned a lesson about dealing with Rupert Murdoch, and that is you sup with a long spoon.

The picture below comes from the Sun, in a 2011 feature entitled “Red Ed Is Dead“:

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We're sure that Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Unionist media en masse will once again line up to say that this is all just another bit of harmless fun banter and the sour-faced Nats really need to learn to take a joke. Right?

It's an extraordinary piece by Daily Telegraph leader writer Robert Colvile, following on from comments made by a former chairman of Conservative Future and current UKIP councillor, Tom Bursnall, and up-and-coming UKIP starlet Alexandra Swann, in which they suggested taking the vote away from the unemployed. Colvile's twist on the idea is that low-value members of the electorate be allowed to have a vote, but that richer people should get an extra one for every £10,000 in tax they pay.

(We're touched by the charmingly naive notion that rich people actually pay tax, and also by the choice of figures, which would imply that people earning £50,000 are no better in Colvile's eyes than filthy dole scroungers.)

Colvile's definition of low-value voters is "the unemployed, feckless and Scottish (I'm sorry if that's tautologous)", meaning that if a person is Scottish then it probably goes without saying that they're also unemployed and feckless. (Despite the fact that Scottish unemployment is lower than the rest of the UK, and Scottish employment is higher.) Yeah, we know – our sides are splitting too.

(The Telegraph, incidentally, has form on this. As recently as last year it ran another piece from a different writer also suggesting the unemployed shouldn't be allowed to vote, followed by an endorsement from the paper's deputy editor. It seems to be an idea that's gathering support.)

We look forward to the next rib-tickler. But for God's sake nobody suggest that any of this is "anti-Scottish", okay? We can't help but feel the Unionists would somehow manage to turn it into a call for Joan McAlpine to be sacked again.

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[EDIT 1.44pm: We discuss this in the comments but should probably add something above the line too for the sake of clarity. As our headline suggests, Mr Colvile's defence will likely be that his piece is intended as satire, based on the 1729 Jonathan Swift tract "A Modest Proposal…" and signified by the similar title. The words "modest proposal" also appear in the Ian Cowie piece from 2011. However, even if Colvile and Cowie, and the Telegraph's deputy editor Benedict Brogan also in 2011, were ALL attempting to satirise the absurdity of the idea – something about which we have very serious doubts, given the Telegraph's political ideology and the repetition of the "joke", which hangs entirely on people getting a pretty obscure reference which in Cowie's case is buried deep in the text – it would be a stupid and irresponsible act. The reactions in the comments on all the pieces show that to many Telegraph readers the notion is, unsurprisingly, not at all ludicrous. At the very, very best, the Telegraph's writers are shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a laugh, over and over again.]

Last week saw another deployment of Labour's secret weapon in the fight against the SNP and their dastardly independence plans. The device is a WMD (Weapon of MisDirection) which the party has unleashed several times. But the weapon has a persistent teething problem – it has a tendency to come straight back and hit the user in the rear when they least expect it, while rarely managing even a glancing blow off the intended target. (Which in this case is of course the SNP.)

We've seen the patented Attack Boomerang in action on many occasions (the most recent being the bizarrely ill-judged attack on the SNP's referendum consultation which rebounded particularly badly on the party's "deputy" Scottish leader Anas Sarwar, and forced even the BBC to reluctantly acknowledge Labour's embarrassment), but one of the strangest was Labour's bitter criticism of the SNP over the fact that it had persuaded Amazon, the internet retailing giant, to recently open a large centre in the Dunfermline area and provide thousands of new jobs.

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We couldn't help but note the Bill Walker story floating back to the top of the media agenda again this weekend like – well, you can finish that metaphor for yourself.

After an embarrassing week in which Labour had scoured Twitter and Facebook with a fine tooth comb trying to find obscure SNP councillors/candidates saying anything mildly contentious that they could fake some pious outrage about (of which this surely represented the pitiful, embarrassing nadir, as a fully-grown man tried pathetically to manufacture some kind of offence at a handful of primary-school-playground jokes that wouldn't have upset even the primmest Victorian maiden aunt), the beleagured party and its increasingly-desperate activists went back to some safer ground.

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In the light of the hoo-ha about the referendum consultation, we thought it was about time we submitted our own response. We couldn't really be bothered going through the whole palaver of the detailed questionnaire on the Scottish Government's website, though, so we thought we'd avail ourselves of the handy one-click form thoughtfully supplied by Scottish Labour for that very purpose.

Weirdly, despite asking for "your views" Labour had already typed out some views for us to have into the message box, but we weren't sure we wanted them to speak for us so we entered something else. And since we wanted to be sure it wasn't dismissed as a fake, we decided to use the name of someone trustworthy who knows that a name and email address provides foolproof identity verification and democratic accountability.

We clicked the Send button, and the rigorous monitoring process which the Scottish Labour deputy leader spoke of on The Sunday Politics Scotland yesterday duly authenticated our submission, and then asked us to get our friends to join in.

That's you, readers, so why not do your democratic duty and have a go too? (We had a practice run while pretending to be one of our friends, just to make sure it worked, and Labour's watertight security safeguards also ratified that submission, so you can rest assured that you shouldn't have any technical problems.) We owe it to Scotland.

If your fingers exert even the slightest amount of pressure on the pulse of the mobile-gaming zeitgeist, the image below is going to set your deja-vu-sense a-tingling.

If there's one thing you can't accuse App Store developers of, it's being slow to rip off a success story. In this case, the success story in question is the astonishing overnight smash-hit Draw Something, which exploded into the news so dramatically that notorious idea-pirates Zynga (the same company who shamelessly cloned Tiny Tower) actually opted to pay a rumoured $210m for the company who made it rather than just banging out their own hasty barefaced knock-off like they usually would.

The game in our picture is functionally all but identical to Draw Something, except with more features. You get extra drawing tools and lots more colours to play with, and there are extra game modes on top of the straightforward turn-based picture exchange of OMGPOP's No.1 phenomenon. (Which in fact barely qualifies as a "game" at all, but that's another feature entirely.) The funny thing, though, is that it ISN'T a knock-off.

It's a game that came out two months BEFORE Draw Something, is basically exactly the same but superior to it in almost every way, yet has conspicuously failed to earn so much money that its bewildered creators can do little but giggle all day at their insane good fortune. Why? Well, of course we can't say for absolute certain. But we'd be happy to wager a pretty substantial amount of money on the fact that some complete dogturd-brained demi-wit decided to lumber it with the name Charadium II.

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We were struck by a little parable in the Scotsman today, penned by our favourite teller of fireside morality tales Michael Kelly. (Who, as attentive readers will know, only fails to grace our “Zany Comedy Relief” links column due to the lack of any central hub address for his contributions to the paper.)

In what we could most charitably describe as a “there but for the grace of God” scenario, the man whose chairmanship of Celtic took it to within hours of the fate that’s currently befalling Rangers reiterated the tired old lie about how Scotland needs both of the Old Firm, but in the course of the article he also passed on an interesting fact we hadn’t previously known.

“Rangers were once before in financial difficulty. It was in the 1920’s when my grandfather, James Kelly (a former Scotland centre-half), was chairman of Celtic. Rangers had a temporary cash flow problem and their board came out to his house in Blantyre to explain the problem and seek help. Celtic gave them an unconditional short-term loan. The fact that Rangers felt able to ask and that Celtic willingly responded indicates that both clubs were aware of their inter-dependence.”

We couldn’t help but find the 1920s football situation strikingly analogous to the modern political one. Rangers and Celtic are supposedly the bitterest of rivals, and their fans treat each other like diametrically opposed poles, with honour and virtue the sole property of one side and bigotry and hatred found exclusively on the other. Yet when it comes to the crunch, the institutions themselves know which side their bread is buttered, and unhesitatingly come together in their mutual interest. Remind you of any two big political parties at all?

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Tom Harris MP on Twitter, 10th March 2012:

"To the homeless, the unemployed, the hungry, the vulnerable, I say this: the SNP will give you a Scottish passport!"

Oof! That's some biting satire from the Scottish Labour man there, suggesting the SNP will do nothing for these unfortunate people other than change their nationality! That's going to sting those pesky "Tartan Tory" Nats! Hurrah for the good comrades of the Red Flag who stand up for the poor and the dispossessed!

But wait a minute – who's this vile, compassionless Tory slimebag sort, being quoted approvingly in the Telegraph by arch-Tory columnist Alan Cochrane barely three months earlier for telling those same unemployed, homeless and vulnerable to go and get stuffed, because his party has nothing to offer them?

"We were set up as the party to represent the values of working people, working being the key word. We weren't set up as some sort of charity to help the poorest in society – the long-term unemployed, the benefit dependent, the drug addicted, the homeless."

What? It's Tom Harris of the Scottish Labour Party, you say? We're confused again.