Wings Over Scotland

(See here for the whole story.)

"As we get closer to the referendum, people will realise that staying within the Union has substantial benefits for Scotland."
(James Kelly, Labour MSP, December 2011) (at 4m 20s)

"We've got a distinctive argument to make on the power of Scotland inside the United Kingdom."
(Johann Lamont, Labour leadership contender, December 2011) (at 23m 08s)

Sadly, both Mr Kelly and Ms Lamont ran out of time before they could actually explain what these substantial benefits and distinctive arguments were. Oh well.

Still waiting.

There are many good reasons not to envy Scottish Labour members, but the miserable choice they're being offered for their new leader must be near the top of the list right now. Last night's edition of Newsnight Scotland was devoted to a hustings between the three hopeful candidates at the BBC studios in Glasgow, and watching it felt like an intrusion on private grief.

To be fair, the setting didn't do much to portray the candidates in a good light. Newsnight's Raymond Buchanan was a clumsy host, alternately barging in over the top of the three when they were trying to give an answer then letting them waffle on when they were saying nothing at all. The audience was also a limp rag, putting up mostly feeble, long-winded and vague questions capable of inspiring nothing but empty platitudes from the contenders.

(One bloke in a red tie wasted about a minute of the show's limited airtime wittering on incomprehensibly about sport before Buchanan finally cut him off in exasperation, and the final audience contribution was particularly toe-curling. Some studenty girl came out with a half-baked Marxist polemic demanding to know what "direct action" the candidates were going to do about the nasty bankers and such. When Buchanan asked her what sort of direct action she'd like to see taken, she clearly wasn't expecting to be asked to provide a constructive suggestion and just stammered that she wanted to hear the candidates' plans. Even the vacant rhetoric she got in reply was better than the question deserved.)

But even allowing for the difficult circumstances, McIntosh, Lamont and Harris offered little to fire enthusiasm among the comrades, or even to distinguish themselves from each other. The only partial exception was Tom Harris, and we still can't tell if he's serious or just trying to use shock tactics to kick some life and sense into his party. Either way, we're not sure that coming out loudly and proudly in favour of tuition fees and nuclear power stations is the way to lead Labour to glorious recovery in Scotland.

Harris is also a dyed-in-the-wool Nat-basher, a strategy which failed Labour on an epic scale in 2011 and which Lamont and (especially) McIntosh appear to be backing away from as fast as is decent. We know these things because all three spent the vast majority of the broadcast talking not about Labour, or even about the Westminster coalition that's imposing savage austerity cuts on Scotland, but about the SNP.

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In the wake of a duller-than-usual First Minister's Questions, most of the press today is covering the report released by the Electoral Commission detailing the various parties' spending in the 2011 Holyrood election. The headline soundbite is that the SNP's expenditure was, in the words of The Scotsman, "close to the combined total of the three other largest parties", at £1.14m compared to £1.27m for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories together.

Predictably enough, Labour seize the opportunity to complain about large donations, with MSP Drew Smith pouting that "the SNP is addicted to big money, reliant on huge donations from a small number of wealthy individuals", in the light of the SNP having received two such large sums in recent months from the will of the former Makar Edwin Morgan and lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

We're not aware of Mr Smith having raised any such objections when, for example, Lord Sainsbury donated £2.5m to Labour in 2003 – eclipsing the SNP's two big donations put together – but we'll gladly publish any corrections should he have done so. We're also not sure that Mr Smith's party will enthusiastically welcome his objections to large donations from wealthy individuals, as a cap on such contributions (currently being proposed by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life) would have slashed Labour's income by 72% over the last five and a half years.

Most of the coverage today notes the growing financial health of the SNP compared to the other parties relative only to the situation in the 2007 Holyrood election, with its spending rising while that of the Unionist parties declines. What we found curious, though, was that none of the papers took the trouble to also make what would seem to be the most obvious comparison in a recent Scottish context – the parties' expenditures in 2011 compared to the 2010 UK General Election.

We had a little dig around on the Electoral Commission's website, and turned up its 2010 report, whose figures reveal some moderately interesting things.

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The Herald's Robbie Dinwoodie tweets this morning:

"Is this a record? 09:43 – Labour Press: "Gray demands Minister for Youth Jobs." 09:46 – Scottish Government: "First Minister announces Minister For Youth Employment.""

Looks like Gray's been taking timing lessons from Ruth Davidson…

Okay, so after yesterday's fit of grand polemic for St Andrew's Day we've got some normal news to catch up on again. We left off mentioning this before because the Newsnet Scotland server had a bizarre extended outage and because the feature itself is horribly written, but the statistical fact that the mainstream Scottish media is 11,319 times more likely to run a story based on the SNP being accused of some terrible wrong than they are to do the same thing to the Tories, and that "accused" stories directed against the SNP make up 88% of all such articles, is definitely worth examining if you haven't already.

Meanwhile, the BBC and Herald run a pair of bone-chilling pieces about the economic future of the UK (the latter one also echoed in the Scotsman). In the coming years before the independence referendum, it's increasingly clear that it's going to get harder and harder for the Unionist parties to credibly push the "stronger together, weaker apart" line, because it's hard to imagine how an independent Scotland bursting with natural resources could possibly be in a bigger mess than successive Labour and Tory governments have left Britain in, even if we elected The Krankies to run it for a laugh.

The Scotsman also runs with an interesting piece linking the gay marriage consultation with the independence referendum, highlighting comments by former SNP leader Gordon Wilson suggesting that the SNP can ill afford to alienate a single voter in the run-up to the vote with such controversial policies. It's a fair enough point, except that with Labour and the Lib Dems on the same side as the SNP on the issue, and the Tories actually led by a lesbian, we're not sure there's much scope there for the opposition to exploit it politically. (Curiously, while the Scotsman piece makes great play of Wilson's SNP connection, it neglects to mention anywhere that Bashir Maan, one of the other opponents of gay marriage extensively quoted in the piece along with Cardinal Keith O'Brien, is a prominent former Labour figure.)

And as with the sectarianism bill and minimum pricing, the SNP is wisely front-loading its more contentious policies into the first half of the Parliament – presumably counting on any furore having long died down by the time of the referendum, as armies of angry Old-Firm-supporting gay couples enraged by the price of booze for their weddings fail to materialise on the streets.

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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.