Wings Over Scotland

The Daily Record, 5th May 2010:

“Before Margaret Thatcher, Scotland made steel, ships, cars and trucks and produced coal. By the time she had finished with our country, all those industries were devastated – and tens of thousands of proud men and their families were living in ravaged communities with no jobs and no hope.

Scotland could wake up tomorrow to the grim reality of a new Tory government, led by Thatcher disciple David Cameron. And for all his talk of “compassion”, few doubt that we will suffer again if he wins power. We spoke to five men who lost their livelihoods under the Tories, and they all had the same message for the voters: “Don’t let them loose on Scotland again.”“

Well, voting Labour didn’t work. What else could we try?

This is from last weekend’s Sunday Herald:

“The largest cheque, for £500,000, came from Ian Taylor, a Scots oil trader with a major stake in the Harris Tweed industry, after a meeting on Lewis with Alistair Darling, the Better Together leader and former Labour Chancellor.

Although most of the large donors are registered to vote in Scotland, Taylor is not, prompting calls from the Yes camp for donations in excess of £500 to be restricted to those actually voting in the referendum.”

And then there’s this, from the Herald back in January:

“It is ‘nauseating’ that rich political donors like Sir Sean Connery should be allowed to support the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) campaign for independence, a Labour MP claimed today.

Jim Sheridan (Paisley and Renfrewshire North) said only those who lived within Scotland and paid their taxes should be allowed to donate towards the campaign for independence ahead of the referendum next year.”

(All emphases ours.) Mr Taylor lives in London – not located in Scotland the last time we checked – and is Chief Executive of an oil-trading company called Vitol, whose extremely colourful history includes the fact that “Last year, it was revealed that for a decade the company had been using Employee Benefit Trusts which avoided tax on incomes of its UK staff and was in discussion with HMRC about a deal to pay this off.”

(The next-biggest donator, author CJ Sansom, sent their £161,000 cheque from their home in Sussex, which we’re fairly sure also isn’t in Scotland.)

We’ve dropped Mr Sheridan a line asking if he finds non-Scottish-resident, tax-avoiding Ian Taylor’s huge donation to the No campaign “nauseating”. We’ll let you know his answer the minute it arrives, which surely won’t be long.

We were a little mystified, on watching last night’s newsgasm about Margaret Thatcher, to see the degree to which Tories were suddenly punting the ancient Labour line about the SNP being somehow responsible for her becoming Prime Minister in 1979, and therefore by implication for everything that happened subsequently.

Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, Michael Forsyth and Ruth Davidson have all been enthusiastically joining the usual parade of absurd Labour pantomime sorts like Lord Foulkes over the last 24 hours or so, which struck us as a mildly odd joint bit of anti-independence smearing, reliant as it is on people not realising that the two parties are cynically colluding while making diametrically opposite points.

We don’t think the electorate is quite that dim, though of course it’s never wise to overestimate people who would repeatedly elect Michael Forsyth and George Foulkes in the first place. So we’re just going to leave this here:

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Attentive readers will of course recall the shocking revelations from the No campaign earlier this year about the terrifying cost of independence to Scots – £1 a head. But what’s the latest info on the price of staying in the UK?

“The [Institute for Fiscal Studies] data shows that a couple with children, where one parent works, will be worse off by £3,995.65 a year on average after the tax and benefit changes introduced since 2010. Average households will be worse off by £891 a year.”

£1 for independence or £891 for the Union? Tough call.

As we browsed the print edition of the Daily Record today to compare its coverage of the latest independence referendum donations news with the online version (with particular regard to Kevin McKidd), we spotted something else curious.

We’ve already noted a curious hypocrisy in the Scotsman’s reporting of the same issue this morning, where it pointedly questioned whether the SNP had handed over some sizeable donations to the party to the Yes campaign, while allowing Blair McDougall to make a virtue out of the fact that Labour and the Conservatives hadn’t transferred party funds to the No campaign. But the Record’s arithmetic is even more confused than the Scotsman’s logic.

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England:

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In the world of journalism, being second to a story carries certain advantages. The Sunday Herald scored a high-profile exclusive with its list of “Better Together” donators yesterday, but only told half the tale. Keen-eyed cyber-sleuths immediately started digging, and came up with some troubling information about by far the biggest contributor to the No camp’s fighting fund, excellently and concisely detailed here by Michael Gray of National Collective.

You’d imagine, then, that the likes of the Scotsman – with the advantage of an extra 24 hours to do some investigating and with all the leads already conveniently found and collected together for them – would have come up with some pretty interesting in-depth analysis on the subject, especially given how keen it usually is to look into anyone who financially backs the nationalist side.

(Not to mention the golden opportunity to get one over on its rival’s big exclusive by pointing out what they missed in their haste to be first.)

Oh well.

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Those wishing to read some more detailed background on today’s Scotland on Sunday stushie can find at this link a paper (full title: “Fortify the Cheviots! The Nazis and the Nats”) presented by Gavin Bowd – author of the SoS article in question – to the University of Edinburgh in June 2012. Here’s the opening paragraph for colour:

“In January 1939, Douglas Young, future leader of the SNP, wrote to his fellow poet, George Campbell Hay: ‘If Hitler could neatly remove our imperial breeks somehow and thus dissipate the mirage of Imperial partnership with England etc he would do a great service to Scottish Nationalism’.

Young thus showed the ambiguous, to say the least, attitude of Scottish nationalists towards Fascism. Hatred of the English led to the downplaying of the Fascist threat to freedom and peace, while more radical nationalists could be attracted to the authoritarian and xenophobic solutions offered by the Fuhrer and the Duce.”

Make your own judgements from the evidence.

So this sort of thing’s fine now, is it?

After all, there are plenty of well-documented links between the UK royal family and the Nazis. So presumably something as crass and offensive as the above image would be regarded as an acceptable illustration in a broadsheet Scottish newspaper, were it for some reason to be running a thinly-disguised smear against British nationalists.

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On the 12th May 1916, a man born 48 years previously in Edinburgh’s Cowgate was strapped to a chair in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin and – after receiving the last rites – was shot by a firing squad. He was too weak to stand.

In 2002 a BBC poll for its presentation of the “100 Greatest Britons” had him in 64th place. Yet he is hardly known in Scotland. Virtually the only time his name impinges on public consciousness is when those who wish to honour his name by public march in Edinburgh have to be given police protection from violent Unionist bigots.

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The Prime Minister made a rare appearance in Scotland this afternoon, showing up at defence contractors Thales in Govan to answer questions from what the BBC described as “the public”, but looked in fact to have been exclusively employees of the company and who appeared to have been briefed not to ask anything difficult, instead serving up softballs like “What is the government doing to encourage business?” and other similar blandities that we’ve already forgotten five minutes later.

As you can see, he went down a storm.

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Iain Banks blew my mind. I read The Wasp Factory as a teenager when it came out in 1984, and I’d simply never encountered anything like it. I devoured it in an afternoon.

Until then my library had consisted pretty much solely of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy books – brilliant and funny and quietly profound, but essentially lightweight stuff. The most “adult” literature I’d tackled was Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, an agonisingly painful experience that took nearly six months of teeth-gritted determination to plough through, one hideous chapter at a time, waiting for a promised epiphany of knowledge and understanding that never arrived. It single-handedly gave me a dislike of hippies that endures to this day.

The Wasp Factory was a revelation. Dark, disturbing, but funny and ultimately uplifting, it was at once both palpably Scottish and nationless. I hovered outside bookshops waiting for Banks’ subsequent releases – Walking On Glass, The Bridge, Espedair Street. Every one was utterly different from the last, united only by the warm, optimistic spirit of humanity underpinning them. I’m a natural misanthrope, but every time I read one of Iain Banks’ novels I’m turned away from despair towards hope again.

I made sure I took them with me when I left home, and they sit in my bookshelf still, growing more well-thumbed with the years. And when Banks moved into science-fiction, I came along for the ride. His undramatic, matter-of-fact depiction of an enlightened “post-scarcity” galactic Utopia – the Culture – was beautiful and politically thrilling, and as a young videogame obsessive the author’s clear connection with and understanding of the alternative worlds offered by games reached out to me in an incredibly direct and personal way that Douglas Adams’ work hadn’t.

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