Wings Over Scotland

To be honest, on the evidence we’ve seen on the rare occasions when Labour lets its Scottish “leader” speak to the public, we’ve been left with the impression that it doesn’t take all that much to confuse her. At the weekly joust of First Minister’s Questions, Johann Lamont is frequently exposed as unable to adapt her script to Alex Salmond’s replies, often leaving her haplessly repeating the question that’s just been answered.

Even in that context, though, the quote attributed to her in today’s Daily Record in regard of the latest referendum poll is a dismaying one for anyone concerned about the standard of Scottish political debate. With the stage set by an earlier quote from a “source” in the No campaign flatly asserting that the reason for the drop in support for independence was “There is just too much uncertainty – over jobs, defence, even the currency – everything, basically”, Lamont gallumphed in with her 2p’s-worth:

“This shows that the more people hear the arguments, the more they see through the absurdities of Alex Salmond’s case for separation”

Hang on. Is it because people ARE hearing the arguments and being convinced against independence by them, or is it because there’s “too much uncertainty” and people just don’t know where they stand, so they’re erring on the side of caution? We’re reasonably sure it can’t be both, and look forward to “Better Together” getting its story straight. We have a sinking feeling that might not be any time soon, though.

We think our brains may have been completely fused by a story in today’s Daily Record, which is based around comments by Rutherglen Labour MSP James Kelly, pictured below in a scene from the particularly bad acid headache he’s just given us.

Here’s the bit that’s been making our minds spin round and round and round in circles this morning until we’re dizzy trying to make sense of it:

“ALEX Salmond was accused of “double standards” yesterday over his efforts to woo Rupert Murdoch. Labour raised further questions about the First Minister’s links with Murdoch following claims the media mogul lobbied Tony Blair to wage war in Iraq.

Former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said in the latest volume of his memoirs that Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us, etc”.

Salmond won plaudits across Scotland for his outspoken opposition to the war which he described as “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of recent times”. But it did not stop him from trying to get closer to Murdoch to win The Sun newspaper’s backing for the SNP.

Labour MSP and chief whip James Kelly said: “This could make the conversation a little uncomfortable the next time Alex Salmond has Rupert Murdoch round to Bute House for tea and biscuits. Alex Salmond was against the Iraq war but that didn’t stop him cosying up to Rupert Murdoch. This is classic double standards from Alex Salmond who is prepared to put his party’s interests ahead of any issue.””

Let’s try to talk our way through this slowly: LABOUR is attacking the SNP for not being sufficiently critical of RUPERT MURDOCH when he backed LABOUR Prime Minister TONY BLAIR over going to war in IRAQ in 2003? What, seriously?

That can’t really be it, can it? Labour, who instigated the illegal war that left hundreds of thousands dead, attacking an opposition party who voted against that war (and which actually tried to impeach Blair for it) for not being critical enough of a newspaper proprietor whose papers enthusiastically backed Labour at the time and who made Tony Blair godfather to one of his children, because when subsequently in government it had a couple of meetings with that newspaper proprietor (also one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers) the best part of a decade later?

Are we dreaming this stuff? Please tell us we’re dreaming it.

We were intrigued by a piece we read on the Sunday Mail’s website today. It centred on last Thursday’s session of First Minister’s Questions, when Labour MSP Michael McMahon used (rather improperly) a constituency question to make a political attack on Alex Salmond. The FM slapped the question down, angrily noting that McMahon’s allegation about Salmond calling HMRC on behalf of Sir David Murray with regard to Rangers was categorically untrue, and later issuing a statement pointing out that his only call to HMRC came eight months AFTER Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte.

In the Mail’s story McMahon’s subsequent posture was full of bravado, insisting that he wasn’t about to apologise. “I stand by my comments and Alex Salmond knows they are true, as his response showed how much the truth gets under his skin”, he retorted, but what he said next demonstrated an admirably bold and inventive redefinition of the term “standing by my comments”. See if you can spot the difference.

FIRST MINISTER’S QUESTIONS VERSION:

“The First Minister was quick to call HMRC for his friend Sir David Murray“

“I STAND BY MY COMMENTS” VERSION:

“The First Minister has shown in the past that he is happy to come running to the aid of his bigwig friends when they are in trouble. For example, the way he tried to pressurise HMRC to apply special treatment in the wake of the damage caused to Rangers by his pal Sir David Murray.”

Keen students of the English language may have spotted a subtle alteration there. In the first version, Salmond was allegedly trying to use his influence for the benefit of Sir David Murray personally, on account of their supposed close friendship. In the second, the First Minister was allegedly trying to assist Rangers Football Club, owned by Craig Whyte, to recover from damage CAUSED BY Sir David Murray.

(This would presumably imply that Salmond was also a friend of Craig Whyte, an assertion which must be sailing fairly close to defamation in the current climate. And since Murray has repeatedly publicly claimed that both he and Rangers were “duped by” Whyte, it’s rather stretching the bounds of plausibility to imagine that Salmond could have been helping Whyte at Murray’s behest or on his behalf.)

Wings Over Scotland would like to applaud Michael McMahon for his bold and courageous refusal to back down on this issue, and that furthermore we’re standing by those comments when we point out that in fact he’s a contemptible liar who even lies about his lies in an impressive illustration of the fine art of meta-lying, in order to cover up what was in reality a weasel-worded and entirely craven retraction of them. And you can, or possibly can’t, quote us on that.

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A surprise development today, as the moribund and long-neglected LabourHame website sprang suddenly back to life with its fourth post in as many months. And what a stirring comeback it was, as the party’s Shadow Secretary Of State for Scotland Margaret Curran launched into a vitriolic diatribe awkwardly entitled “Absurd to claim a separate Scotland would continue to be part of Britain“.

(There was plenty of room left in the headline to turn the car-crash grammar into English, for example by prefixing it with the words “Why it’s”.)

The centrepiece of the article’s argument was Curran’s unequivocal assertion that “Britain is the country we live in, not the island it exists on”, which is a claim only slightly spoiled by being completely factually wrong in every respect. Rather than waste all afternoon explaining why, we’ll just quote the Wikipedia entry and let you get on with your day. If you’re really pressed for time, you can stop after the first sentence.

“Great Britain or Britain (Welsh: Prydain Fawr, Scottish Gaelic: Breatainn Mhòr, Cornish: Breten Veur) is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, the largest European island, and the largest of the British Isles. With a population of about 60.0 million people in mid-2009, it is the third most populous island in the world, after Java and Honshu. Great Britain is surrounded by over 1,000 smaller islands and islets. The island of Ireland lies to its west. Politically, Great Britain may also refer to the island itself together with a number of surrounding islands which comprise the territory of England, Scotland and Wales.

All of the island is territory of the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and most of the United Kingdom’s territory is in Great Britain. Most of England, Scotland, and Wales are on the island of Great Britain, as are their respective capital cities: London, Edinburgh, and Cardiff.

The Kingdom of Great Britain resulted from the political union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland with the Acts of Union 1707 on 1 May 1707 under Queen Anne.”

You’d hope someone aiming to be the Secretary of State for a part of somewhere would at least have a grasp of the most rudimentary geopolitical facts about it, but nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of Scottish Labour.

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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