Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish Tories have issued a rather pompous press release today, seemingly based on the curiously mistaken assumption that their 15 Holyrood MSPs out of 130 are in a position to give orders to the Scottish Government

“The Scottish Conservatives demanded in early October that Finance Secretary John Swinney outlines exactly how policies such as free prescriptions and free buses passes for over 60s could continue in the face of an ageing population and tightening budgets. But the Scottish Government has failed to provide any information, with that deadline passing on Monday.

Scottish Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown MSP said:

“It should have been straightforward for John Swinney to present a 10-year plan, especially with him having most of the information to hand. Scotland is facing a demographic timebomb, yet the SNP seems determined to provide free prescriptions and travel to those who can well afford it.

Unfortunately, it is completely unwilling to show how this would be paid for, which can only lead us to the conclusion that it will be funded through vastly increased taxes and borrowing.”

As others have noted, it’s interesting that the Tories appear to assume the SNP will be in power at Holyrood for at least the next decade. But while we can’t speak for the Finance Secretary, perhaps the reason he didn’t waste any of his valuable ministerial time answering the Conservatives’ demand was that he knew Wings Over Scotland had already done it for him two-and-a-half months ago – and in fact for 20 years of “demographic timebomb”, not just 10. If there’s anything else the Tories would like to know that we’ve already comprehensively established, feel free to point them our way.

Once again: we’re more than happy to accept the Unionist parties’ assertions that Scotland couldn’t afford to pay for universal services if it stayed in the UK. But there’s an alternative to staying in the UK, under which we CAN afford them. We are, as always, grateful to the anti-independence campaign for pointing the fact out.

We were going to get 2013 up and running with a piece on how we’d like to see the independence debate approached in the coming year, but Ewan Crawford has rather kindly done the job for us in The Scotsman, in a snappy 113 words:

“Labour has decided to mount a campaign based primarily on a combination of all-out personal attack against the First Minister and an assault on what they characterise as Scotland’s “something for nothing culture” typified by free personal care for the elderly and the abolition of university tuition fees.

In 2013 they should feel free to get on with this to see if this is indeed the platform that people in Scotland have been crying out for from a potential party of government.

The overwhelming focus of the independence campaign should instead be about a sense of possibility and a conversation with people concerned about jobs and the economic prospects for themselves and their families.”

In an ideal world, the last paragraph on its own would probably have sufficed. But it’s vitally important to understand the opposition’s position not just on the superficial political level, but also what it tells us about the consequences of a No vote.

If there’s one truth the independence movement really needs to get across to the people of Scotland in the next 12 months if it’s to build towards victory, it’s that there will be no additional powers for Holyrood within the UK should Scots reject the opportunity to run their own affairs. Indeed, the opposite is likely to be the case.

Helpfully, the message compresses down neatly to just four words – words the Yes movement must, for all its positivity, drum into the minds of the Scottish people if it wants them to fully understand the choice they face in 2014: Vote No, Get Nothing.

Someone recently directed us towards a recording of an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “PM” news and current-affairs show broadcast early in June of this year. It featured a discussion between presenter Eddie Mair and Dr Alex Woolf, a listener to the show who’d contacted it after an interview with Alex Salmond.

You can listen to the whole discussion on YouTube, but we always prefer to see this sort of thing written down for ease of reflection and reference, so we gritted our teeth for another transcription session. (Though this one was made less painful by the superb Chrome plugin Transcribe, which we recommend unreservedly).

The result can be found below. It seems an appropriate way to start the year in which the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence will be published.

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We must admit, we thought Ian Davidson would be a shoo-in for this particular award after his unforgettable implosion on Newsnight Scotland in August. But then we read something twice as mad and half as comprehensible. It was a piece from STV News in October, based on some comments by unfortunately-named Scottish Labour “deputy” leader and hereditary MP Anas Sarwar. We’ve read it eight or nine times now, and we still have genuinely not the slightest clue what he’s wittering on about.

We’re going to step through it line-by-line and see if we can get it to make any sense. Feel free to join in if you’ve got any ideas, because we’re stumped.

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On Friday, the Guardian reported Ed Miliband’s New Year message to the people of Britain. The key passage was one in which he promised this would be the year his party actually came up with some policies:

“One nation Labour is about reaching out to every part of Britain, it’s about a party that is as much the party of the private sector as the public sector, a party of south as well as north, a party determined to fight for the future of the United Kingdom, and a party rooted in every community of our land.

I’ve set out a vision of what this county [sic] can be, one nation, and in 2013 we will be setting out concrete steps on making that vision a reality from business to education to welfare.”

There’s a pretty big hint there to Scottish voters about the consequences of a No vote in the independence referendum. But in case anyone needs it spelling out: you don’t create “one nation” by letting the different parts of it have powers to create their own individual approaches to business, education and welfare, which is why this year Johann Lamont started the job of softening the Scottish people up and getting them used to the idea of Holyrood obediently following London policies.

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This’ll probably come off sounding sarcastic and snide, but it honestly isn’t meant that way. In a world where it’s becoming harder and harder to get paid for journalism, we’re genuinely full of admiration and no small amount of jealousy that weel-kent pundit Gerry Hassan yesterday managed to extract yet more money from the Scotsman by writing the same article for roughly the 50th time* this year.

The piece, in which – shock of shocks! – Gerry calls for a more mature, serious and respectful kind of debate about independence, comes at the end of a year in which the publications who keep commissioning him to write that same piece have determinedly undermined any possibility of that more mature, serious and respectful debate about independence ever happening, by engaging in a concerted campaign of smear, innuendo and malicious spin directed almost entirely against one side.

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The Panelbase poll from October that we referred to in this morning’s post deserves a little more analysis. There are two key sets of figures in it, relating to two alternative scenarios of how the UK political situation might look come autumn 2014, with a Westminster general election only a few months away.

IF LABOUR LOOK LIKE WINNING THE ELECTION
Yes: 37%
No: 45%
Don’t know: 18%

IF THE TORIES LOOK LIKE WINNING THE ELECTION
Yes: 52%
No: 40%
Don’t know: 8%

The survey also noted Holyrood voting intentions, with the constituency and regional polls averaging out at 45% SNP, 30% Labour, 12% Tory, 8% Lib Dem, 4.5% Green, 0.5% others. These numbers lead us to some interesting conclusions.

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On the one hand, there’s this, from Michael Kelly in the Scotsman on Thursday:

“Fatal errors made by Alex Salmond this year have ruined his chances of a 2014 referendum victory. The year of reversal for the cause of independence – that’s how 2012 will be recorded in footnotes to the political history of the United Kingdom.

The SNP tries to convince us that the new Scotland will be the same, only better – dependent independence. That is the fatal flaw, the fundamental inconsistency that has ensured the failure of the SNP’s only real policy. Fat ladies don’t sing in tragedies, but the chorus has begun to lament the fall of the hero. It’s all over bar the shouting.”

And on the other, there’s this, from PoliticalBetting.com in mid-February 2011:

“Unless all opinion polls are utterly wrong in Scotland, Labour will be comfortably the largest party in the Scottish Parliament post-May 5th. Labour should either win outright or come fairly close. Iain Gray will probably form a new Scottish Government. His decision is likely to be whether to go it alone or to invite the remaining Scottish Lib Dems to join him.”

Aside from comedy idiots like Kelly, though, a great many more sober commentators have also been proclaiming 2012 as a terrible year of catastrophe for the Yes campaign – by which they usually explicitly or implicitly mean its chief protagonists, the SNP. Yet for all the disasters which they allege have befallen the independence movement – the great patriotic celebrations of the Jubilee and Olympics, the supposed unravelling of SNP policy on Europe, the dogged personal smearing of Alex Salmond and his cabinet – what’s actually happened to the polling figures for independence?

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Here’s a friendly tip – this is why people think you’re all biased Unionist stooges:

The sort of corporate tax avoidance perpetrated by companies like Vodafone, Amazon, eBay and Starbucks is indeed a scandal. It is, however, a scandal that resides entirely at Westminster. The Scottish Government has no control whatsoever over corporate tax policy, which rests wholly in the hands of David Cameron and George Osborne. For a newspaper to instead illustrate a story on the subject with a giant picture of Alex Salmond, then – on the very flimsiest of contrived justifications – is exactly the sort of thing that’ll lead people to believe you’re pursuing some sort of agenda.

(Given that the First Minister has absolutely no influence on how much tax Amazon pays, all he can do is at least try to get some benefit from them by securing hundreds of jobs for Scotland, rather than having them go elsewhere in the UK or Europe.)

So in 2013, please spare us all your hurt protestations of injured feelings at the terrible unfair slight on your integrity when awful cybernats say you’re Unionist mouthpieces. Because while your paper looks like a duck, walks like a duck and acts like a duck, nobody’s going to hear your complaint above all the quacking.

Now don’t panic, readers. We wouldn’t, of course, be so crass and tasteless as to celebrate the death of an individual human being. (Though it’s hard to sensibly dispute that a great dark psychological weight will be lifted from the Scottish psyche whenever Lady Thatcher finally gasps her last.) Instead, for the latest of our “Wingy” end-of-year awards we’ll be marking the passing of something that started the year full of health and vigour and promise, but has ended it as a tragic corpse, lying unnoticed by the neighbours for months until the smell became too much to ignore.

We speak, of course, of Unionist blogging.

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One of our very favourite No-campaign scare stories of the year was the Huffington Post’s “Vote Yes And You’ll Die Of Cancer”. But if Scotland chooses independence in 2014, will it actually affect our healthcare? After all, we’ve already noted how NHS Scotland has been independent since inception (and why we need a Yes vote in order to provide it with a stable funding base that won’t be cut out from under it via the effect of Barnett consequentials under Westminster austerity).

But it’s also worth examining how it would work in practice. What about if we travel to the rUK or in Europe? What about the cross-border co-operation that currently characterises the relationship between the UK’s two health services? Would we still be able to be treated in an English hospital if we vote for independence? Let’s find out.

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With very few exceptions (notably the Guardian), it’s almost unheard of for senior media commentators to ever participate in below-the-line (BTL) discussion on their own articles. Less frequent still is for articles to be amended with provocative challenges expressly soliciting abusive comments from readers. (“PS This article has been up for five whole minutes, without me being denounced by Cybernats. Where are you all?”)

Yet such was the extraordinary spectacle that was served up to startled readers of the Spectator (annual subscription: £111) back in October of this year.

In an outburst so bizarre we genuinely suspect it can only have been motivated by an office bet of some sort, the magazine’s editor Fraser Nelson embarked on a critique of the SNP’s autumn conference unencumbered by such trivial inconveniences as having attended it. The piece itself was some pretty standard right-wing bombast of the sort more often peddled by Alan Cochrane on sister paper the Telegraph, notable only for a more sneering tone and the mind-boggling assertion that “Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reform agenda could yet make British poverty history”, but Nelson’s numerous interjections in the comments below took it to a rather less mundane level.

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