Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been scratching our heads a bit throughout the developing story of BAE’s job cuts in Portsmouth, Glasgow and Rosyth. Not least because it seems Scots are meant to be grateful that the Govan and Scotstoun yards have been “saved”, despite the reality being a huge slice of the workforce being made redundant.

(Curiously, not one story that we’ve been able to find mentions how many are actually employed at the two Clyde docks. We had to go back to 2010 to find out that it’s apparently 4000, meaning that the cuts will be slashing 20% of the yards’ manpower.)

But the strangest thing is something else.

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It’s bleakly appropriate that we found ourselves having this conversation with the former Labour spin doctor and now BBC political pundit John McTernan on the day that BAE announced almost 1800 job losses.

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“Hi there,” writes an alert and cheery reader this afternoon, “I work for ******* within an RBS contract and so have my own RBS PC log-in and security card. During lunch today, I tried to take a look at the website for the Yes Campaign.”

Well, that’s understandable, we suppose.

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This was Glasgow South West MP Ian Davidson speaking (around 5:40) on Scotland Tonight just over a week ago, in a debate about independence and left-wing values sparked by the findings of a poll commissioned by this very website.

His contention was that independence wasn’t necessary to achieve left-wing goals:

“I used to be a councillor in Strathclyde. In many ways Strathclyde was actually far more radical than the Scottish Government has ever been. We had clear policies to combat deprivation – there was an emphasis on pre-fives, there was an emphasis on tackling poverty and misery and class differences in education that no Scottish Government has replicated.”

When we heard that, we went and checked some dates.

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We don’t normally post if we’re just repeating another publication’s article and don’t have anything to add to it, or if there aren’t mistruths in it that need correcting. Simply spreading existing news wider is what Twitter is for.

But we’ll make an exception for this extraordinary piece from the Evening Times.

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In reference to this article we ran on Saturday, here’s (courtesy of several alert viewers) a timely piece from this week’s Scottish Catholic Observer.

Click the image to read it at full size.

If you click the image below, you can listen to just over nine minutes of Johann Lamont – whose £85,000 salary you pay –  on “Good Morning Scotland” earlier today.

Presenter Gary Robertson does about as good a job of questioning the Scottish Labour “leader” (never before have the inverted commas we habitually put around that word rung so true) as anyone could ask, so no criticism can be attached to him.

But after you’ve listened to all nine minutes, can anyone tell us a single actual fact we’ve learned about the Labour Party in Falkirk that we didn’t know before?

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I make videos. The written word is not my weapon of choice. But “Better Together” have left me with no alternative. Let me explain.

I’m a recently-retired video producer. Another recently-retired video producer (aka ‘the wife’) and I decided to make a series of films about how the grassroots of the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns were bringing their respective messages to the people of Scotland.

We kicked off by covering Yes Garnock Valley and West Kilbride’s public meeting in Kilbirnie. We contacted the local organisers who were very happy to have us come along, even providing us with a private side room where we could get ‘sound bites’ from the speakers, Dennis Canavan, Shona McAlpine and Alex Bell. Everybody was most welcoming, and frankly they couldn’t have been more helpful.

We’ve released the speeches and the Q&A in their entirety, warts and all, so that anybody interested can listen to the arguments and make up their own mind.

Our next foray into citizen video journalism was to have been the Better Together East Ayrshire launch event on November 1st at the Burns Monument Centre in Kilmarnock. That was where things started to go pear-shaped.

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“There’ll be nae books or pencils fur Our Lady’s High School if the SNP gets in here.”

I heard those words first-hand at a door in Motherwell some years ago. But let me give you some context first. Lots of people reading this in parts of Scotland will have no idea about what I’m about to describe here so I’d better establish my credentials and provide some background.

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We’re really, really sorry about that headline, on several levels.

But wait until you see what this one’s about.

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Blair McDougall, director of “Better Together”, Dundee University, 30 October 2013:

“UK ministers are not going to fall into the trap of acting against Scotland until Scotland decides to leave the United Kingdom”

You heard it straight from the horse’s – well, let’s be kind and say “mouth”, folks.

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Oh, I was irritating when I was 15.

On our way to school, my friends would stop at Ian’s Newsagents and scatter their pocket money on the counter to work out how many fizzy cola bottles and packets of Space Raiders they could get. I’d do the same, but mine would have a copy of The New Statesman thrown in too.

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