Wings Over Scotland

Well, we had quite the fun time yesterday. Having revealed by virtue of our ace investigative-journalism skills that the Telegraph’s dear Alan Cochrane had something of a beam in his own eye when it came to attacking the First Minister for using the word “Gauleiter”, we were mildly surprised when the Telegraph – which normally has a pretty liberal comment-moderation policy, certainly when it comes to its readers hurling abuse at the Scots – experienced a sudden outbreak of censorship.

Comments on Mr Cochrane’s column – which rumour has it are moderated by Alan himself – referring to the mildly embarrassing hypocrisy started to disappear at a rate of knots. We counted over 22 comments either linking to or quoting our piece which vanished, before the moderator gave up as user after user simply kept re-posting them. The result – as tends to be the case when people try to suppress information on the internet – was the biggest single day’s traffic in Wings Over Scotland’s history. But over and above our daft wee comedy tussle with Mr Cochrane hovers the wider agenda.

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We were perhaps a little unfair on Alan Cochrane earlier today. After all, the core of his comment about Alex Salmond’s reaction to being banned from commenting on the Six Nations at the weekend:

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi. “
(Alan Cochrane, the Telegraph, 5 February 2012)

…is a fair point, strongly made. After all, what sort of thoughtless idiot would casually toss around a highly-charged, potentially-offensive word like “Gauleiter” in reference to an obviously petty and trivial matter?

“I am on the horns of a dilemma this weekend. I have been invited to a posh dinner in the Scottish Parliament later this week and there are to be pre-dinner drinks in the Members’ Bar at Holyrood.

Although I have accepted the dinner invite, I am somewhat constrained in accepting the one to the pre-prandial cocktails. The reason is that the Scottish Parliamentary Journalists’ Association, of which I have the honour to be a member, is boycotting the said watering hole. We have taken this principled – if unusual – stance because we have been offered only limited rights of access by that Gauleiter of Holyrood’s catering facilities, Labour MSP Duncan McNeil.”
(Alan Cochrane, Scotland On Sunday, 22 January 2006*)

Whoops! Still, you have to admit, if the First Minister has sunk to Alan Cochrane’s level, maybe he DOES need to stop and think for a minute about his comportment.

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Not that it’s unusual or surprising or anything, but sometimes it’s hard not to raise a smile at the lack of self-awareness and the sheer brass neck of it.

“We could be generous and suggest that calling the hapless BBC mandarin a “Gauleiter” displays either an imperfect knowledge of the English language or of 20th century history – or both. But knowing our Dear Leader as we know, it is entirely possible that he thinks it is perfectly all right for him to liken those who dare to defy him as some kind of Nazi.” (dear old Alan Cochrane, frothing away furiously as usual in the Telegraph today)

The word “gauleiter”, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean a Nazi. According to Collins, it can also simply mean “a person in a position of petty or local authority who behaves in an overbearing authoritarian manner”, which is clearly the sense Alex Salmond used it in at the weekend – and perfectly appropriately, after ludicrously being banned from the BBC’s coverage of the Six Nations. But we were disappointed all the same to hear the FM – normally so careful with words – use a term which would so easily and so certainly be misrepresented by the Unionist media.

However, we’re not sure anybody writing for the Telegraph can be the one to lay any claim that particular moral high ground, as one of the paper’s alert readers pointed out.

“GERMANY HAS EVERY RIGHT TO IMPOSE A GAULEITER ON GREECE
I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with the general sense of outrage sparked by calls for an EU bureaucrat – or German gauleiter, as depicted in some quarters – to take control of the Greek economy.” (Jeremy Warner, the Telegraph, Jan 2012)

“I always love Ken’s attempts to blame Boris Johnson for absolutely everything that’s gone wrong in the world, from global warming to the death of Shergar. Now, game as ever, the old boy is trying to drag City Hall’s despised blond gauleiter into the News of the World hacking affair.” (Andrew Gilligan, the Telegraph, July 2011)

“A section of Ms Britton’s interview concerned itself with how Blair took his church attendance incredibly seriously, how it re-energised him in office when he was exhausted, with his former Gauleiter and evidently still very current image masseur Alastair Campbell popping up to confirm Blair’s duty to his devotions. “ (George Pitcher, the Telegraph, Dec 2009)

Is the Telegraph saying Angela Merkel, Ken Livingstone and Alastair Campbell are all Nazis, then? (The last of those using the capital-G form of the word which Collins specifically notes as normally being used in the Nazi context. And yikes, the first one might conceivably be seen as just a little on the tactless side.) We think someone should investigate. Are you busy today, Mr Cochrane?

This is, of course, all an absolutely standard modus operandi for the Unionist camp – see also their propensity to bleat piously about being called names and “bullied“ by Nat supporters, while simultaneously likening Alex Salmond to a whole string of murderous, psychopathic dictators. We shouldn’t expect anything to change in the next two-and-a-half years: indeed, it’s likely to get a lot worse. But it’s always comforting to have their clumsy, overt hypocrisy laid bare in black and white.

The Scotsman is a big paper (in terms of content if not readership). Today’s issue is 104 pages long, a full five of which are devoted to its front-page lead story. But here at Wings Over Scotland we appreciate that you’re busy people and can’t always afford to devote hefty chunks of your day to reading everything in full, especially when there’s so much happening in the world of Scottish politics at the moment.

So to save you some time we’ve helpfully edited the article down, cutting it off at the point where you can safely stop reading without fear of missing anything. (It doesn’t just work today – any time you see these three words, you can confidently move on.)

“ONE of Scotland’s leading experts on public finance has cast doubt on the Scottish Government’s ability to produce fair and accurate economic reports, ahead of the debate on independence. Professor Arthur Midwinter -“

That’s a good 15 minutes of your life rescued there, in which you can get on and do something more productive and rewarding instead, such as seeing if you can make the sky turn purple just by thinking at it. No need to thank us, it’s all part of the service.

It won’t have come as any surprise to SNP supporters that the media – the same one that devoted hundreds of column inches to misrepresenting Joan McAlpine’s “anti-Scottish” comments on Twitter – was today absolutely silent on Labour MP Denis McShane’s comparison of Alex Salmond to Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

MacShane, who voted in favour of the Iraq War, hasn’t deleted the tweet, despite a storm of protest on Twitter. But he’s only the latest in a long line of Unionist politicians to compare Scotland’s democratically elected First Minister (who as far as we know isn’t implicated in a single death) to murderous genocidal dictators.

Labour in particular are fond of crying about the nasty cybernat “bullies” who occasionally call Labour politicians names online, but those are pseudonymous internet users with not a shred of evidence that any of them are members of – or even vote for – the SNP. We’re not aware of any elected Nat representative or even pro-independence journalist ever having likened Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Ed Miliband to Hitler, but the brave defenders of the Union have no such scruples. MacShane is merely the latest in a long and ignoble line, so we thought it’d be a good idea to keep track and see if we can get a full house.

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Among Scotland's professional media, there's a pretty wide consensus that the Herald is the best of a bad bunch when it comes to fair and balanced reporting. It's arguably Scotland's only genuine remaining "quality" newspaper, the Scotsman having to most intents and purposes become a large-format tabloid, full of shrieking headlines and "SNP accused" churnalism fed by Unionist-party press releases. While openly opposed to independence, the Herald offers regular commentary from all sides of the political spectrum, takes a mostly non-partisan line in editorial and rarely allows overt bias to seep into its news coverage.

Every now and again, though, it lets its guard down.

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There could have been nothing more predictable in the independence debate than that the Unionist parties, having furiously demanded a clear, simple, yes/no question for the last eight months, would be in a tumultuous rage when they finally got one. The First Minister had barely announced the Scottish Government’s chosen ten-word proposition to the Scottish people when a chorus of angry voices in the Unionist camp were on the airwaves denouncing it as “leading”, “unfair” and “rigged”.

Supposed experts were hastily summoned to explain to us how the phrasing of the question was designed to lead brainless voters down a “cognitive chute”, because the poor stupid Scottish electorate had no idea of what the SNP meant by “independent”. The Telegraph leapt into action, conducting its own polls with various possible versions of the question in an attempt to demonstrate how widely responses could be altered by simple changes in wording. It then swiftly wrote up the results in doom-laden terms, thundering in the article’s strapline that:

“The “loaded” question Alex Salmond wants to ask in the Scottish independence referendum leads to at least a 10-point increase in public support for ending the Union”

That analysis came a little TOO swiftly, as it turned out.

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We've been super-busy, so here's a very quick pointer at some of the best recent stories you might not have spotted in the current avalanche of independence coverage (not least because both of the country's leading papers have websites with simply abysmal search facilities). First and best is this tremendously good piece by Anthony Barnett over on Our Kingdoms, while behind the Herald's paywall lurks a triple whammy of excellent columns from Iain Macwhirter (one which is literally impossible to access from the mobile version of the paper's website), Ian Bell (who's on fire at the moment) and an uncredited editorial.

Scotland on Sunday drops a bomb from David Cameron which we'll be looking at in more depth very shortly, and raises its recent game somewhat with strong articles from Duncan Hamilton and an unusually even-handed Eddie Barnes, as well as a surprise leader supporting the SNP's call for 16/17-year-olds to vote in the referendum.

Hindsight provides comedy as a Telegraph piece on the referendum question is horribly overtaken by events rendering its commentary idiotic, while Gerry Hassan talks a lot more sense on the nature of the Yes and No camps, a view echoed more concisely by the increasingly-unmissable Alex Massie in the Spectator.

When you're done with digesting all that lot, we'll have something new of our own ready for you in the morning.

We’ve had our hands full in the real world for a few days, so let’s catch up on what’s been worth reading recently. Iain Macwhirter is on the money as usual as he ponders why Unionists cling to the “scare story” [paywall link] tactics that have proven so spectacularly unsuccessful over the past decade or so and propelled the SNP into power, while Alex Massie in the Spectator eloquently expresses his frustration with the idiotically negative approach of his fellow Great Britain fans in the right-wing press. Kenny Farquharson takes a related line in Scotland On Sunday, excoriating the FUD camp’s ludicrous attacks on Sir Peter Housden.

Jackie Ashley, one of the Guardian’s more thoughtful commentators on Scottish affairs, takes an interesting angle on how the Scottish situation relates to and impacts on the centre-left in England, while Socialist Worker demolishes the lie still being implausibly peddled by Labour that the Union serves the interests of the left, by openly advocating independence for Scotland.

In the blogosphere there’s a really good piece on BaffieBox, spinning off a theme we’ve been shouting about for a while – the fact that independence is in essence merely an administrative change to the electoral register, with post-independence policy being a matter for the Scottish people, not just one party. Better Nation covers a very similar point in less detail and with less insight, but does see an excellent debate in the comments section, with numerous posters eviscerating Labour’s recent dismal smears and sneers about an independent Scotland’s defence policy.

And finally, if you’re having trouble sleeping this evening, try penetrating this vision of a more fully devolved Scotland by Labour activist Ian Smart. It’s a commendable attempt at a positive argument, describing in some detail where devolution could go rather than sticking to the “LABOUR SAYS NO” party line, but if you can get all the way to the end of it you’re a better blog than us.

Enough to keep you going until lunchtime there, we reckon.

While this blog commends the Guardian's continuing commitment to quantity of Scottish coverage, its quality is too often dismaying. Today it runs with the tired, feeble line introduced by Willie Rennie into the independence-referendum debate a few weeks ago, and laughingly dismissed by most grown-up commentators minutes later – what happens if there's a referendum with a devo-max option and 99% vote for devo-max but 51% vote for independence?

(To be fair, the Guardian impressively increases the precision of the question tenfold by adding a somewhat gratuitous decimal point into the equation, but to keep things nice and tidy we'll stick with the whole numbers.)

Rennie's question is so feeble because the answer is so obvious. If a majority votes for independence, Scotland should become independent. Devo-max is a wholly-contained subset of independence (despite some very silly recent assertions to the contrary by new Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont, who has suddenly decided that "some powers – more powers – all powers" isn't a linear progression), and we can say so without fear of contradiction because in Rennie's hypothetical example the number of votes totals 151%, which you clearly can't have in a vote between opposing options.

You can self-evidently ONLY have a vote adding up to more than 100% if people are allowed to vote for two (or more) things at once, and you can't do that if those two things are in conflict with each other. In an election, we'd call that a spoiled ballot.

Rennie's complaint is irrational and illogical whether taken on face value or examined more closely. Either devo-max and independence are exclusive concepts – in which case you can't let people vote for both of them – or one is a subset of the other, in which case supporters of devo-max are getting everything they wanted if Scotland becomes independent (plus more on top) and there's no problem. But for the sake of argument, let's indulge him for a moment and see where it leads.

If we let Rennie have his cake and eat it, and the result comes out as absurdly extreme as his example, what does that actually tell us? It tells us the Scottish people have the following order of preference for their governance:

The Union: 1%
Devo max: 48%
Independence: 51%

…because of the 99% who approved of devo max, more than half of them also approved of independence. There is no sane way of spinning a poll in which most Scots have voted for independence, but the country doesn't end up independent.

We know Unionists do like to rig a referendum in exactly that way, because the last time 51% of Scots voted for something in a referendum (51.6%, in fact) they didn't get that either. You can bet your last Royal Wedding teatowel that the SNP will not allow Scotland to be stitched up the same way twice.

We’re all used to the modern “apology”. You know, the one where someone does something idiotic and then says “I’m sorry if anyone was offended”, rather than “I’m sorry for the idiotic thing I did”, cunningly turning what’s ostensibly an apology into the opposite – an attack on the reader/viewer for being so pig-thick as to have plainly or wilfully misunderstood the actually-perfectly-reasonable thing the offender said or did, and which they’ve been forced into unwillingly pretending to regret.

Labour troll-in-chief Tom Harris MP, however, may have taken this artform to a new high. He’s lasted less than a month in his new job as the party’s official “Twitter czar” before having to quit after posting a video on YouTube which portrayed Alex Salmond as Hitler (or more precisely, the other way round), and reacted with the sour bad grace anyone who’s had interactions with Harris online would have come to expect.

“The video I posted has been a well worn joke used to parody a range of public figures. However, context is everything and in the context of Johann [Lamont]’s and my desire to improve the level of political debate on social media and the context of Joan McAlpine’s much more serious statements about all political opponents of the SNP being anti-Scottish, my actions have been an unhelpful distraction for which I apologise.”

Did you get that? Tom is apologising, not for likening the democratically-elected First Minister of Scotland to a fascist dictator responsible for the murder of millions of innocent civilians, but for causing an “unhelpful distraction”, ie for damaging his OWN party with his buffoonish antics. Furthermore, he’s using this “apology” to actually repeat the attack, by shamefully continuing to misrepresent the recent comments by SNP MSP Joan McAlpine which were the subject of the spoof clip.

Now let’s be clear. The only thing offensive about the video in itself is what a tired, lame old joke it was – “Downfall” spoofs were already old hat in 2009, to the extent that even the fusty old Telegraph was making that point.

(On a personal level, while this site just about sees the humour value in the first one or two, all the literally hundreds of feeble imitators which followed it have achieved is to distastefully cheapen one of the best and most powerful films of this century.)

But Tom Harris has spent most of the last six months piously crying about nasty, bullying “cybernats” on the internet, deliberately blowing up the tiniest of slights – or even completely inventing them – so that he can manufacture fake offence at the supposed poisonous bigotry of the SNP.

(Tom nearly always blames “the SNP” explicitly for the opinions of random internet users, despite usually having no evidence that any of the people in question are members or even supporters of the party, far less controlled or directed by it.)

The particularly startling thing about this case, though, was that just minutes before posting his Hitler movie, Tom had huffily complained on Twitter about a user who’d mentioned the Vichy government in WW2 France (or as Tom chose to put it, “Nazi collaborators”, although the person involved hadn’t mentioned the Nazis at all), as evidence of how awful “CyberNats” were.

That Harris then thought there was nothing odd, hypocritical or contradictory about creating and promoting a video in which Alex Salmond was directly and deliberately portrayed as the Nazi leader (and which, at the time of our writing this piece, Harris has not deleted from YouTube) reveals much about Labour’s inbred policy of double standards which has served the party so well of late.

This blog picked him up on it immediately (as you’ll see in the pic above), and tweeted our own thoughts on the subject, without claiming to be offended but noting the laughable hypocrisy. To be honest we sort of wish we hadn’t now, because it started the chain of events which led to Harris’ departure as Labour’s new-media guru, and as long as he was actively using Twitter in such a puerile manner, support for Scottish independence grew with every passing day. Sorry about that, fellow nationalists. And that’s an apology more sincere than anything you’ll ever get out of Tom Harris MP.

(See here for the whole story.)

Once again, we were lured into foolish optimism. "The irresistible case for England and Scotland remaining united", thundered the Daily Mail's editorial headline. Sadly, the reality turned out all too familiar – a lengthy rant about how Scotland was too wee, too poor and too stupid to go it alone, how we'd be crushed by a £140bn (new high score!) share of UK debt, how we couldn't afford to bail out the "Scottish" banks again (yawn), how we'd struggle without the £10bn a year subsidy from England (oh dear). But then our hopes sparked momentarily into life again:

"Add these deeply serious warnings to the positive case for maintaining a union which has served the English and Scottish people well for 300 years and Mr Cameron has an irresistible argument."

This time, here it must surely come! The fabled, mythical "positive case"! But sadly not. Like so many before it, the Mail apparently assumed this positive case to be axiomatic, so self-evidently obvious that it required no explanation, and the editorial came to an abrupt end. We should know better by now.

TIME ELAPSED: 31 years, 11 months
CONFIRMED SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0