Wings Over Scotland

Our dear chum “Comical Tom” Harris is at it again, this time crying to Holyrood magazine about the evil SNP and their cyberbullying, as well as continuing to punt the hopelessly-discredited lie that online unpleasantness is the sole preserve of SNP supporters (particularly ironic given Tom’s status as the Unionist camp’s troll-in-chief). Given that Harris is fond of proudly announcing that he’s blocked readers from his Twitter feed if they post messages he disagrees with, it’s hard to see who’s managing to upset the poor lamb so much. (Particularly as he notes that these awful bullies “tend to cover up” the vitriol he alleges they bear.)

More serious is Harris’ ludicrous allegation that there will be “nothing remotely democratic” about the conduct of the independence referendum – a shameful, borderline-libellous attack echoing Labour’s previous slurs which compared the First Minister to Mussolini and Hitler – something Harris apparently manages to say with a straight face in the same interview where he asserts that:

“People say there’s just as much antagonism on the Labour side and Labour people are just as nasty – that’s a lie, that’s wrong, and it’s demonstrably wrong.”

(We await keenly Tom’s attempt to defy all known laws of reality and prove a negative. In the meantime, we’ve politely asked him via Twitter to provide some specific examples of this “bullying” so that the vicious perpetrators can be shamed.)

Of course, we’re falling into Harris’ trap by even reporting this garbage. Currently trailing in fifth place in the Labour leadership race despite there being only three candidates, Tom is lashing out bitterly at all and sundry – including Scottish Labour’s own MSPs for their understandable decision not to subject themselves to any of his demented haverings in person – in a desperate attempt to turn his indisputable car-crash appeal into some sort of political power. Readers can decide for themselves, however, if this is the sort of behaviour that characterises a prospective future First Minister of Scotland.

With the weather getting increasingly foul and wintry, why not curl up this weekend with an intriguing collection of Scottish political stories and commentary? The stuff's coming thick and fast these days, so get cosy on the sofa with a blanket and your laptop/iPad and work your way through this lot.

Over in the Scotsman, Joyce McMillan – not exactly noted as an SNP cheerleader – takes a sober look at the state of the nation(s) and concludes poetically that the times they are a-changin' in terms of people's attitudes towards independence, as the Scottish electorate looks for an alternative to the austerity future that isn't forthcoming from the UK opposition parties. Deeply sceptical of nationalism, McMillan nonetheless arrives at a near-Damascene epiphany: "in the absence of any better progressive project, there is a strong temptation to take a deep breath, and give it a go".

Dear old Alan Cochrane on the Telegraph is suffering no such doubts, lashing out at Labour's former First Minister Henry McLeish for giving succour to Cochrane's hated Nats over such issues as the anti-sectarianism bill, apparently in the belief that having held Holyrood's highest office somehow makes a person less entitled to offer his honest opinions than anyone else. Even Cochrane, however, is forced to also note the humiliating gaffe by the Tory leader Ruth Davidson at FMQs on Thursday.

The Express carries the latest attack on the SNP's referendum plans by Scottish CBI leader Iain McMillan, who fulminates furiously that uncertainty over independence will damage business – exactly as he's previously said of devo max, and indeed as he said back in 1997 about devolution. (McMillan's claims to speak for all of Scottish business in these outbursts, incidentally, has been disputed in the not-too-distant past by significant members of that community.)

Labour comedy relief Tom Harris, meanwhile, puts forward the view that what the Scottish people need most urgently in the coming years is someone who can make fun of the First Minister. Given that Harris is currently amusingly ranked by the bookmakers as fifth in a three-horse race for the Labour leadership, we're not sure he's going to have much chance to test that theory out.

Malcolm Harvey, formerly of the increasingly-erratic and confused Better Nation (which this week bizarrely invited us to take pride in the achievements of current Tory MPs who are implementing the coalition's brutal austerity measures but happened to be born in Scotland), has left BN and started a brand-new blog which promises an assessment of the current state of all the Holyrood parties. He opens proceedings by examining the condition of Scottish Labour, and his prognosis isn't good.

And on a related note, Labour Hame slightly surprisingly publishes a piece which faces up to the reality of Labour's current positioning on the political spectrum – namely, the fact that by any empirical and rational measure it is currently a party of the centre-right rather than the centre-left. The piece, by previously-unknown correspondent James Chalmers, concludes by saying the unsayable – that the only hope for Scottish Labour is to decouple itself from the right-wing UK party and operate in an independent Scotland, which would be more sympathetic to Labour's old values.

More tomorrow.

There's a fair old explosion of activity in the Scottish political scene today, with what appear to be some potentially highly significant policy movements starting to creak into life. In the Scotsman, slightly-renegade Labour MSP Malcolm Chisholm once again urges his party to back a referendum offering a devo-max option (or as he describes it, "devolution plus"), albeit one which stops short of full fiscal autonomy. Chisholm doesn't specify precisely how far the new devolution should go, instead proposing a cross-party convention – also including representatives of civic Scotland – to agree on the details of the option. While a commendable and sensible approach in theory, Chisholm is likely to struggle to get his own party to back such a plan, let alone persuading the Lib Dems and Tories to join in as well.

Meanwhile, over on the Herald Iain Macwhirter identifies signs of Labour beginning to shift on their current policy of backing the status quo, and examines the implications for the other parties if Labour manages to successfully occupy the middle ground. His conclusion is that should Labour suddenly become converts to the cause of devo max, the SNP may backtrack on its offer of a devo-max question and instead run a straight Yes/No referendum on full independence. In this blog's view, those are two very big assumptions – Labour (and the other opposition parties) are going to find it very hard to change their position now without looking utterly ridiculous, and the SNP would similarly find it extremely tricky, having made such a play of offering a devo-max question, to then retract the offer if the Unionists actually did manage to come up with a defined interpretation.

In the Guardian, Severin Carroll offers a different perspective on the debate over the number of questions on the referendum, from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, which represents over 50,000 voluntary charity workers. The organisation, while not explicitly taking a view on the referendum itself, urges that in the light of the Westminster government's brutal attacks on the poor and the sick, Scotland must take control of its own welfare revenue spending – a status which would in practice require either independence or an extreme version of devo max.

Carroll then spins off in some odd directions from the SCVO's comments, for example getting Labour's Margaret Curran to apparently support the coalition's policy, claiming that "a million voters supported Labour's tougher stance on benefits". (She presumably means Scottish voters, and is presumably citing Labour's 2010 general election result in Scotland as backup for the assertion, which is a rather strained assumption about what people were voting for.)

He also states that "Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and most powerful Scot in the shadow cabinet, confirmed last Saturday that Labour's stance on more powers for Holyrood had now shifted, in favour of greater devolution", which is something of a stretch. What Alexander actually did in his speech to Scottish Labour's youth wing was express a personal opinion which at present is still explicitly rejected by all three of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates in favour of the status quo. If the party is indeed now in favour of greatly-expanded devolution, it's not letting on.

Finally, the Dundee Courier picks up on an embarrassing display of hypocrisy by the UK Government. Having spent weeks and months demanding that the SNP publish the Scottish Government's legal advice on an independent Scotland's position with regard to membership of the EU and the Euro, the Westminster coalition has now refused to publish its own legal advice on the same issue. Oops.

We'll let you digest that little lot for a while.

A wise old German proverb was quoted in the Guardian recently. It runs like this:

"What do two monsters do when they meet each other in the forest?"

"They smile."

It's hard not to think of it as you watch the progress of the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill through Parliament. The media has devoted a lot of column inches to the bill in recent days, with a variety of viewpoints. SNP MSP Joan McAlpine wrote an impassioned opinion piece for the Scotsman in support of the bill yesterday, while legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier took the opposite approach, forensically examining the finer details and concluding that in extreme circumstances it could conceivably be used to criminalise behaviour that might seem trivial at worst.

The Scotsman's main editorial coverage today takes an uncharacteristically neutral stance, reporting the fact that the opposition parties, particularly Labour, are refusing to back the bill despite having put forward no amendments to it. They also provide two further short opinion comments, one from each side of the debate.

Against the bill, a sociology lecturer from Abertay University (no, us either) offers a rather unfocused ramble that sounds uncomfortably like some bloke in the pub sounding off after a couple of pints and concludes dramatically that the bill is "the most authoritarian piece of legislation in recent history", while the President of the Association Of Scottish Police Superintendents contends that in fact it's a welcome clarification and simplification of the law with regard to sectarian offences.

The vast majority of the Scottish people, meanwhile, heartily sick of the poison that spreads outward from Ibrox and Celtic Park and infects the rest of Scottish society, wait to see if something is finally going to be done.

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If Tom Harris’ bid for the leadership of Scottish Labour is indeed some form of elaborate practical joke, you have to applaud his comic timing. On the very day that the media covers the announcement that Scotland is to host the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, providing clean renewable energy for almost half the Scottish population from a single installation (and destroying the UK government’s recent assertions that uncertainty over the independence referendum is deterring investment in the country), Harris has chosen to go public with a call for the building of more nuclear power stations in Scotland, insisting that “renewables cannot meet all our energy requirements”. We’re sure it’ll be a votewinner.

The story appears behind the Times paywall, but you can see it by clicking below.

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As a newspaper, The Scotsman is under absolutely no obligation to report the news impartially (a fact frequently misunderstood by a great many people). But it's becoming less and less subtle in its distortions of the truth the further we get into the SNP majority administration. One of its big politics stories today is a case in point. As a reader of Wings over Scotland you are by definition a normal, well-adjusted person, so how would you interpret the following headline?

"Swinney demands £20bn to secure the economy"

Since John Swinney is an MSP with a remit which covers only the devolved Scottish Government, naturally you'd assume he was demanding this £20bn for Scotland, right? Particularly as the story opens with this sentence:

"Finance secretary John Swinney has demanded billions of pounds from the UK government for major building projects in Scotland"

Even for the most ardent nationalist it sounds an outrageous demand, even in less austere times than these. £20bn is around two-thirds of the Scottish Government's entire annual block grant, and would pay for every conceivable major infrastructure project in Scotland – finishing the Edinburgh trams and the Edinburgh and Glasgow airport rail links, dualling the entire A9, building the new Forth road crossing, completing the Borders railway, implementing the Beauly-Denny power line and opening the carbon-capture plant at Longannet – with a good £10bn still left over.

But with readers duly inflamed, the next paragraph quietly reveals the truth. Swinney wants the Chancellor to spend £20bn on capital investment projects in the whole of the UK, with just a tenth of that money coming to Scotland. He's asking for £2bn, not £20bn, and – we find out another nine paragraphs later – that £2bn would be spread over three years, amounting to a somewhat more modest £0.67bn a year for Scotland, set against the UK government's total annual Scottish spending of £53bn.

The arguments for extra capital investment to drive growth, create employment in the construction sector and avoid a double-dip recession are economically sound, but that's another debate entirely. The Finance Secretary has in fact asked for approximately one-thirtieth of what the Scotsman's highly-misleading headline implies. It's hard to see that misrepresentation as an accidental one.

An alert viewer draws attention to an interesting historical curio in the Scotsman today. It's a letter to the paper from Labour MSP Hugh Henry, dating from a few days after the 2011 Holyrood election, in which he rejects the idea of an early independence referendum in the most unambiguous of terms:

"Mr Salmond and the SNP clearly stated that any referendum would be held later in the life of this parliament. That's what many Scots voted for, that's what gave Mr Salmond his majority and that's the mandate which the SNP has."

Henry isn't exactly a radical dissident in Scottish Labour – he was Education Minister and Deputy Justice Minister in the second Lab-Lib coalition administration, and was mainstream enough to be the party's nomination for Presiding Officer earlier this year. In the light of Labour's recent threats to back the Westminster government in forcing an earlier UK-controlled referendum over the Scottish Parliament's head, it would be interesting to find out if his position is the same now as it was six months ago.

Scottish Viceroy Michael Moore is banging away on the same old drum in the Herald today, demanding that the SNP detail every last conceivable detail of policy in an independent Scotland before the referendum, continuing to rather clumsily miss the entire point of what referenda are for. But as we wearily ploughed through the rhetoric one more time, a thought dawned on us.

The only way Moore's complaints would make any kind of sense would be if a vote for independence was also a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity. Only if the SNP are going to rule an independent Scotland forever would it be incumbent on them to lay out every last line of what they stood for before the referendum, because then (and only then) the electorate would have no opportunity to reject at the ballot box a government implementing policies that voters objected to.

Could it be that Moore believes no other party could ever rise to power in an independent Scotland, and that the nation would in effect become a one-party dictatorship, lost to democracy forever under the iron thistle of the First McReich? (He's at least two-thirds right, after all – the Tories and Lib Dems aren't going to be providing a First Minister any time soon.) If so, we think he should come out and say so instead of beating around the bush. The people deserve to be warned. 

The growing rift between Labour and the trade union movement in Scotland was highlighted yesterday by a statement from the STUC flatly contradicting the narrative spun by all three opposition parties this week, namely that that uncertainty over the date of the independence referendum was damaging the prospects of business investment in Scotland.

In a statement striking for its lack of ambiguity, an unnamed spokesman for the congress was reported by the Scotsman as saying that the unions "had come across no evidence that the forthcoming poll was deterring investment in the country", and that as a result it "did not believe it was necessary to hold a referendum as soon as possible, as is being urged by both the UK government and opposition parties", adding that "There are far more immediate problems that need to be looked at."

Oddly, this fairly dramatic divergence of opinion was afforded just 126 words by the paper, compared to the 2,348 devoted to Douglas Alexander's rather less newsworthy speech to a Labour youth conference.

Not for the first time, the Scotsman is today apparently guest-edited by Douglas Alexander. The paper offers blanket coverage – including a secondary article, analysis, leader column and a personal profile, as well as the front-page lead story itself – to the shadow foreign secretary's latest speech to a Labour audience, in which he urges the Scottish party to back greater devolution rather than campaign alongside the Tories and Lib Dems for the status quo. (The Herald doesn't mention the speech at all.)

The story barely justifies such excitable trumpeting. Alexander has already made public his concerns about how Labour should approach its policy on the constitution, in a speech which was heavily-featured across the Scottish media just a month ago. The latest one puts no meat on the bones of his earlier effort – Alexander makes no specific proposals as to what further devolution the party should support, and maintains Labour's position of opposing a devo-max question on the referendum paper.

Alexander is not an MSP, and therefore has no control over the Scottish party's decisions. (If, that is, Scottish Labour is an entity as autonomous as its supporters frequently insist.) So basically what we have is an outsider with no official influence suggesting that Scottish Labour should slightly change its pronouncements about devolution, but not its actual policies or actions. In other words there is, in essence, no actual news to report here at all.

The Scottish electorate still overwhelmingly supports greatly-extended powers for the Scottish Parliament, albeit with roughly half of the backers of devo-max also supporting independence. Scottish Labour is desperate to tap into this support and create clear Saltire-blue water between itself and the UK coalition, but has painted itself into a difficult corner by  opposing a devo-max option in the referendum.

It's a circle that the party is going to find very difficult (perhaps impossible) to square – it would, in effect, be campaigning on a position of "Vote No to independence and we might give Scotland some (unspecified) extra powers, at some unspecified point in the future, probably after yet another Calman Commission, if we win a Westminster majority under Ed Miliband, and if we keep our promises (unlike with electoral reform and tuition fees), and if we haven't changed our minds again by then".

At present, all Alexander is really achieving is drawing attention to that fact.

Labour's former Lord Provost of Glasgow and celebrity Celtic fan Michael Kelly would have an entry in the "Zany Comedy Relief" section of our blogroll if there was a central link hub for his outpourings. His latest rant in the Scotsman, though, is demented even by his standards. Under the bizarre title "Alex Salmond’s anti-sectarian purge has gone too far" (is it possible to go too far against sectarianism? Are we saying there's an acceptable level above zero?), he attempts to make an extraordinary case which twists and turns on itself with every line.

Firstly, he expresses his outrage that the police reported Celtic to UEFA for alleged sectarian singing during their Europa League match against Rennes, rather than arresting the perpetrators. Yet in the very next paragraph he relates a tale of them doing just that to a fan accused of singing a pro-IRA ditty during a Celtic-Hibs game, and claims that the arrest "seems excessive".

Kelly then launches into a more general diatribe against the anti-sectarianism legislation currently making its way through the Scottish Parliament, culminating in the astonishing claim that the IRA "was not a sectarian organisation". Because we all remember all its many prominent Protestant members, of course. But Kelly isn't quite done yet. His penultimate paragraph contains the following mind-boggling passage:

"But further, both Celtic and Rangers fans argue there is a significant difference between celebrating the actions of current terrorist groups and remembering with nostalgia the exploits of the freedom fighters of a century ago. Thus the Boys of the Old Brigade and Here Lies a Soldier should be classified as folk songs like the Massacre of Glencoe and the grossly offensive but condoned Flower of Scotland."

This blog doesn't know about you, readers, but we've never heard "The Massacre Of Glencoe" being lustily bellowed from the Fir Park stands when Motherwell take on Kilmarnock – indeed, we've never heard it spontaneously sung anywhere ever, let alone at a football match. Perhaps for the strikingly obvious reason that, just like Michael Kelly's beloved ballads of a century-old war in a foreign country, it's got absolutely sod-all to do with Scottish football. But the notion that "Flower Of Scotland" – Scotland's national anthem – is "grossly offensive" leads us to wonder why in the world Michael Kelly still lives in such a hateful nation.

"Flower Of Scotland" could at a stretch be deemed to contain some anti-English lyrics, but the song is a tale told from a purely defensive perspective. It's about repelling a foreign invader ("and sent him homeward to think again"), not invading others (compare and contrast with the infamous verse in "God Save The Queen" about crushing the Scots in Scotland), and in that deeply moral theme it stands with some of the world's finest anthems, such as "La Marseillaise". Even then "Flower Of Scotland" sounds a pacifistic note, pointing out that:

"Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain."

To call it "grossly offensive", then, is fairly unarguably deranged. (Not to mention irrelevant, since this blog is unaware of any group of supporters having ever sung FoS at league games, which are what the sectarianism bill is designed to tackle.) The Scotsman no longer allows comments on Michael Kelly's posts. Perhaps it should take the logical next step and no longer employ him to write them at all.

Professor John Curtice, a psephologist at Strathclyde University and the Scottish media's go-to guy for all political analysis, is often attacked by "cybernats" for alleged partiality in favour of Labour. This blog sighs in despair whenever online nationalists automatically scream "Biased!" at anyone who doesn't come onscreen in a kilt and Jimmy hat singing "Flower Of Scotland", but it has to be said that Prof. Curtice has done himself no favours at all this week.

As co-author of a report published yesterday by the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, the good professor has launched what the Scotsman today calls a "strongly worded attack" on Holyrood's proportional electoral system, under which the SNP won a majority of seats (53%) on 45% of the vote. As we noted yesterday, it's odd that the ERSS has chosen now to demand changes to the system, given that when Labour/Lib Dem coalitions had Holyrood majorities in 1999 and 2003, they also commanded less than 50% of the vote (45.5% between them in 2003, 49.5% in 1999), and nobody seemed to have a problem with that.

Now, to be fair to Prof. Curtice, the Scotsman does put words in his mouth, in their characteristic manner. The headline of the piece claims that the report brands the Holyrood system "a failure" (a description which we can't find anywhere in it) and also asserts that the report demands the system "should be changed to prevent one party winning an overall majority", which is something of an exaggeration – Curtice only actually says that the objective of the proposed changes is to make a majority "more difficult", not impossible.

But by fronting such a suspiciously-timed report, the Professor and the ERSS have allowed their credibility to be undermined by exactly the sort of distortion the Unionist media specialises in, and in doing so have left themselves dreadfully open to allegations of political colour. The society claims their motivation is honourable, and aimed only at promoting a fuller range of political views:

"We are convinced our democracy would work better with more parties in the system, so that more voices are represented and heard and that power is shared, checked and balanced."

…but the current method of electing the Scottish Parliament is perfectly capable of delivering that – in 2003, for example, the Greens got 7 seats, the Scottish Socialists won 6 seats and two independents also secured seats, those three groups between them providing almost 12% of the Parliament's MSPs. (For comparison, imagine the UK Parliament having 78 MPs from outwith the three main parties – the actual number is 28, with only one of those representing an English constituency.)

The simple fact is, the electorate could have elected a wider range of MSPs if they'd wanted to, as they have done in the past. Instead, they overwhelmingly chose the SNP. That's democracy, because in practice almost no democracy on Earth is perfectly proportional. This blog has no objections to bringing the Scottish Parliament closer to that ideal, but it's decidedly odd that supposedly neutral organisations like the ERSS didn't feel the need to suddenly press for it until the SNP won a majority.

We're absolutely confident, however, that the author of the above quote – the society's director Willie Sullivan – also being a Labour councillor in his day job (a fact the Scotsman inexplicably neglects to mention) is entirely coincidental.

PS The replacement PR method proposed by the ERSS report is one devised by the French mathematician André Sainte-Laguë. His most famous work is the calculation that it was scientifically impossible for bumblebees to be able to fly.