Wings Over Scotland

Sorry this post is a bit late, folks. We’ve been pretty stymied all morning trying to get a handle on the extraordinary, unmockable mendacity that’s being fed to the people of Scotland as we speak, which keeps crashing our powers of rational comprehension.

We quite often highlight the utterances of The Labour Party in Scotland (henceforth TLPiS) as examples of “blackwhite”, the Orwellian term for presenting the truth as the exact opposite of reality. But today must surely have set some sort of world record.

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The Scottish media is full today of Gordon Brown’s latest attempted intervention in the independence debate. Scotland on Sunday and the Sunday Herald both report that the former Prime Minister will urge Scots to “ditch the Tories, not the Union” (as the original SoS headline put it before being changed online to the rather more sober “Brown urges Scots not to give up on UK”, presumably out of respect for the gentle sensibilities of the paper’s Conservative-leaning readership).

(We’d like to take a brief moment here to appreciate a couple of beautifully acidic, deadpan lines from the Herald’s piece, written by Paul Hutcheon. Our emphasis.)

“Brown, who led his party to defeat at the last General Election, will be the special guest at an event in Glasgow. Although Labour has a dominant role in the cross-party Better Together campaign, senior party sources last year pushed for a separation to convey Labour’s distinctive message.”

The substance of Brown’s argument, in so far as it can be said to have any, is founded on a lie that was comprehensively disproved on this very website well over a year ago – namely that “if Scottish Labour supporters vote to leave the UK it would mean abandoning colleagues in England to years of Tory rule”.

That proposition is demonstrably untrue (not to mention a remarkably defeatist assertion that Labour can’t now defeat the Tories in England, despite having done so in 1997, 2001 and 2005). But even if it wasn’t, what then?

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We’re a little suspicious of yesterday’s Ipsos MORI poll on Scottish politics.

It’s not so much the numbers for independence, which are within normal fluctuations and error margins and may also reflect a recent tsunami of doom-laden, irrational and hyperbolic media coverage on the currency issue. No, what’s got us in sceptical mood are the frankly ridiculous Holyrood voting intentions figures, which appear to suggest a shift towards Labour of about 16 points in the space of two months during which the party did nothing but make a laughing-stock of itself.

Frankly, if we could find even a single Labour supporter who thought Johann Lamont was actually going to be Scotland’s next First Minister we’d be astonished, so we’re putting the poll down as a rogue until it’s corroborated by another one. But there was something even stranger about it.

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Sir Alex Ferguson (no relation) resigned as manager of Manchester United this week. The resulting deluge of newspaper articles covered a wide range of opinions, both gushingly complimentary and rather less so, but one characteristic of the man was uniformly (and approvingly) agreed on – that he always defended his players.

And it was hard not to contrast that unwavering loyalty (a trait described by Ferguson himself as “the anchor of my life”) with events in the independence debate last week.

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Somewhat to our surprise, the tabloid press at least hasn’t been able to avoid covering Labour activist, election candidate and BBC pundit Ian Smart’s astonishing brainfail outburst of Sunday night. (We’ve just noticed a Herald piece too, leaving – surprise! – the BBC and Scotsman as the only media not to consider it worthy of note.)

[EDIT 7pm: Scotsman now belatedly also covering.]

Smart himself has attempted a hasty damage limitation exercise, claiming that his comments, which presented Scotland as a nation of violent racist bigots suppressed from attacking minorities only by (relative) economic stability, were in fact directed solely at a small faction of independence-supporting “cybernats”.

But that isn’t true.

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It’s indescribably beautiful that the No camp’s much-trailed “500 questions” PDF about independence actually features 507. At least they’re getting their arithmetic wrong downwards for a change. When all those are answered they promise hundreds and hundreds more, so we thought we’d give them a head start on Volume 2.

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There’s more to the campaign for independence than merely putting forward a good case for independence. People in general are afraid of change – they avoid it if possible and need not only good reasons to change, but also reasons why what they have at present isn’t working.

If a salesperson were to try to sell you a car, would they succeed if you already owned a car that you liked and felt performed the function it needed to perform? They might try to highlight the increased fuel efficiency, smooth ride, warranty and additional extra features that your current vehicle doesn’t have. They could offer options on financing to show that you can afford it.

But what if in addition to pointing out the positive benefits of a new car, they also begin to highlight where your own car was serving its purpose poorly? The fortune you’re paying in petrol, the discomfort you suffer as you drive, the constant breakdowns and repair fees, and so on. Would you start to be more interested in changing then?

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In this site’s view, there are just two things the Yes campaign needs to get across to the Scottish people in order to win the independence referendum. All the quibbling over this detail and that detail, as seen in the No camp’s ridiculous (and so far mythical) “500 questions”, will ultimately come down to two simple facts at the ballot box:

1. There will be NO significant new powers for the Scottish Parliament in the event of a No vote. If anything, the opposite will be true.

2. The Scottish people already want independence. They simply haven’t yet realised that the thing they want is called independence.

Win on those two, and the Yes side will win everything.

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Let’s imagine for a second, just for a bit of fun, that this was a prominent SNP or Yes Scotland activist, rather than a Labour one who’s the main contributor to LabourHame and regularly employed by the BBC for some cosy chat on the Sunday Politics.

Charles Green wasn’t using the P-word in a hateful or prejudiced way either, but he got slammed all over the media, chased out of his job and fined £2500. We’re guessing it’s a non-story here, though. Shall we all have a look at the papers tomorrow and find out?

But incredibly, the P-word isn’t even the most offensive thing.

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August 2012:

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We don’t need it in Scotland. Look at the state of reality:

“THE pro-union Better Together campaign has refused to work with UKIP to persuade Scots to vote against ­independence. A Better Together ­spokesman said: “UKIP have asked to join us and we have said no. If they ask again, we will say no again. They are not a Scottish party and this is a Scottish debate.””

We assume this means that the No camp will be giving Ian Taylor his non-Scottish £500,000 back at last, and roundly condemning the interventions of the thoroughly non-Scottish Carwyn Jones in the debate, yes?

The Scottish press has chosen its latest martyr well. Perhaps aware that the average politician – whose day job is basically one long playground name-calling session – doesn’t tend to cut a very convincing figure as the subject of “bullying”, this week the print and broadcast media chose someone a little more sympathetic to portray as a broken, pitiful victim of the Evil Cybernat Hordes: a poor vulnerable wee lassie.

A tiny 4’11”, Susan Calman is nevertheless a former lawyer (who’s worked on Death Row in the USA) as well as a comedian, and one might reasonably expect that she’d be fairly used to both being asked for evidence and being heckled. It’s quite difficult to imagine that any time she was challenged in a courtroom, with someone’s life hanging in the balance, she crumbled in tears at the shock of anybody requesting that she support her case with some sort of verifiable facts.

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