Wings Over Scotland

Do you think the Scotsman is concerned that readers might miss the latest front-page attack piece on the Scottish media’s November target-of-the-month Mike Russell?

(Note that this isn’t just multiple links to the same page, the clever trick that the paper pulled last Friday in relation to essentially the same incident – this is the same story repeated word-for-word on two separate pages, as you can see by the fact that one has three comments while the other has 59 comments. It’ll be interesting to see which one gets pulled if and when they correct the error – our money’s on the one with 59.)

[EDIT 12.05pm: Sure enough, the 59-comment version of the page has now vanished, leaving only the three-comment version.]

We just caught up on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, which examined whether oil revenues were enough to sustain future Scottish public spending. Remarkably, it even interviewed Professor Gavin McCrone, and highlighted the fact that his infamous report was suppressed by the Westminster government for 30 years. And yet bizarrely – but as always seems to be the case – the programme insisted on analysing the economy of a future devolved Scotland, not an independent one.

That, however, is a startlingly stupid thing to do. Let’s keep this simple.

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Crikey, Euan McColm seems to have an awfully thin skin. Today, for the second time this month, Wings Over Scotland has found itself the recipient of a cryptic threat, which on this occasion coincided with a spot of maintenance by our webhosts and accordingly caused some momentary alarm among readers.

Mr McColm apparently feels that yesterday’s post and/or some of the comments below it constitute his being, and we quote, “defamed to fuck on a cybernat smear site”, though despite our asking him some time ago to specify the offending material so that we might take any appropriate action he’s declined to identify any.

So far so ho hum, then, except that for some inexplicable reason Mr McColm is threatening to take his anger out on the SNP, and the party’s spin-doctor Kevin Pringle in particular. This morning he issued the menacing warning “dear @theSNP and @KevinJPringle.  please thank @WingsScotland for what you are about to receive”, in a tweet he’s subsequently deleted.

Mr McColm has also deleted all the other tweets he directed to us, but you can see the original and some of the others here:

(Incidentally, the second and third tweets down in the image above see Mr McColm suggesting that he doesn’t know my name, which is odd as it’s clearly printed directly below the headline of every post I make on the site. He’s not the first Scotsman writer whose journalistic skills weren’t quite up to that level of in-depth investigation, and he also didn’t reply when I asked if I was eligible for the free curry.)

Now, this sort of moaning is pretty humdrum everyday stuff which comes with the territory if you dare to stick your head above the parapet and offer a political viewpoint on anything, let alone if you dare to critique the media itself. It’s water off a duck’s back to us. But it’s another tweet, which Mr McColm hasn’t yet deleted (and which was in any event helpfully retweeted by our dear friend Tom Harris MP and by unsuccessful Conservative “2010 Holyrood election” candidate Allan Smith), that takes this case somewhere altogether more sinister.

Euan McColm is a professional journalist regularly employed by the Scotsman, which claims political neutrality. Yet here, we appear to see him directly threaten to publish a story he considers will be damaging to the SNP and/or to Kevin Pringle personally, for purely vindictive reasons resulting from him being criticised on a website run by a 20-year Liberal Democrat voter.

We would invite readers to bear that fact in mind the next time a Scotsman column with Mr McColm’s name on it professes to be conducting an impartial analysis of Scottish political issues, and we’d further invite them to consider the point of issuing this threat in public, and in what ways it might conceivably be intended to intimidate or influence the actions of SNP MSPs and the independence campaign generally.

We keenly await hearing from Mr McColm’s solicitors with regard to the alleged defamation. Our contact form is at the top of the page.

Alex Salmond, rumoured to have a fiery temper, must be hopping mad today. Johann Lamont wasted her time on a speculative exercise at First Minister’s Questions, aiming (as is her wont) for nothing more than a petty point of snark, and instead a clumsy piece of SNP briefing allowed her to extract an embarrassing retraction and apology to the chamber, which the Unionist press has of course seized on gleefully.

(The Scotsman has emblazoned no fewer than THREE links to the same article across this morning’s front page to make sure none of its remaining readers miss it. The Herald, meanwhile, had Magnus Gardham write a frothing piece entitled “Salmond apologises for misleading MSPs at Holyrood”, only to bizarrely pull it – and all its comments – and replace it with an almost-identical one in order to change the headline to “Salmond says sorry for misleading MSPs again“. The original has been deleted from the Herald’s search facility, but can still be found on the server.)

In fact, rather than being increased by 0.18% as Salmond claimed at FMQs, the budget for Further Education colleges has been reduced by 1.7%. Given the austerity measures being inflicted on the Scottish Government by Westminster, that’s actually a near-miraculous protection of funding, particularly given the other investments being made in education, and a properly-briefed Salmond could have calmly and effectively pointed that out. He might also have noted that Lamont had no genuine interest in FE funding and nothing constructive to say on the subject – such as where Labour would make the savings necessary to maintain/increase it.

The Labour “leader” sought only to make party-political hay out of semantics, at Mike Russell’s expense, to give her hapless back-benchers something to cheer, but in her flailing landed herself an unexpected hit on the First Minister himself. Someone somewhere in a dark corner of SNP headquarters will be nursing a severely chewed ear this morning, and deservedly so.

Labour, meanwhile, will crow delightedly about the Nats’ own-goal. But at the end of the day, we suspect the electorate will remember who it is who wants to impose crippling tuition fees on students, and who wants to end free personal care and bus travel for the elderly, and free prescriptions for the sick, and increase Council Tax, and use the money to pay for nuclear weapons so that Westminster politicians can strut around on the world stage. We know we will.

Below is a picture of the headline and opening paragraph of a David Maddox-penned story that appeared on the Scotsman website last night.

It is, as you can see, an essentially positive story, noting that independence per se represents no threat to RBS staying in Scotland. Those readers wondering if that was perhaps a little at odds with the Scotsman’s normal editorial position on the issue would be reassured, then, to see how the story looks this afternoon.

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Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to look at things from a neutral viewpoint (something which is possible even when you’re not a neutral, incidentally), you can’t help but throw your hands in the air and bang your head off the desk in frustration at the sheer clueless stupidity of certain politicians. Today provided a case in point.

Dear old Magnus Gardham has a piece in the Herald covering last night’s inaugural public conference of the Labour For Independence group. After a very brief report on the event he quite reasonably solicits a reaction from “official” Labour, whose constitution spokeswoman Patricia Ferguson obliges with one of the most cosmically witless statements to disfigure the independence debate thus far (no small feat):

“This really seems like desperate stuff from the Yes Scotland campaign. Trying to claim Ricky Ross as a Labour supporter when he was a founding member of Artists for Independence as far back as the 1980s is just absurd. It begs the question of how many other supporters of this group are really just SNP supporters.”

Horrendous as such a prospect is to contemplate, the evidence inescapably points to the conclusion that Ms Ferguson may be so inconceivably thick she genuinely doesn’t see what’s wrong with the above comments. So just this once, we’ll spell it out for her.

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A press release on the always-positive Scottish Labour website this morning blares a wake-up call to the reckless and irresponsible Scottish Government. “IPPR Report Shows SNP Economic Policy Is Financially Illiterate”, it rages, going on to quote the party’s finance spokesman Ken Macintosh:

“This report shows that the SNP’s economic policy is financially illiterate. Not only do we get more spending than we raise as a result of being in the Union, but the SNP’s commitment to turn Scotland into a low-tax corner of Europe would see revenues plummet and public spending slashed to the bone. Scotland would be crippled by what could only be described as economic suicide.”

Oof. Strong words for sure. Hang on, though – which SNP economic policy are we actually talking about here? The preamble to Macintosh’s furious blast references “the SNP’s plans to cut Corporation Tax to 12.5%”. But the only problem with that is that the SNP doesn’t appear to have any such plans.

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Alert readers will perhaps recall our story on the shocking PFI scandal that saw Labour-run North Lanarkshire Council needlessly throw away almost £600m of public money, because it was only about four hours ago that we published it. But some excellent sleuthing by a keen-eyed reader in the comments has thrown up some startling new information that makes the £729m cost of a £150m school-building programme look an even more appalling piece of financial mismanagement.

The contract was signed in 2006/07, the last year of the Labour-led “Scottish Executive”. Over its two Holyrood administrations from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant to the collective tune of £1.5bn – money which was returned to the Treasury at Westminster because, incredibly, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on.

(£1.5bn would have been enough in 2006 to build the Glasgow [£210m] and Edinburgh [£500m] Airport Rail Links and upgrade the entire A9 to dual-carriageway [£600m], spreading the benefits around the country and with £190m still left over.)

On taking control of the Parliament in 2007, the SNP minority government was able to reach an agreement to recover the money for Scotland over the four years of its first term (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here), so at least this huge sum wasn’t completely lost – although of course, a third of it has in essence been uselessly swallowed up in paying off the PFI debt for this one project alone. But nevertheless, the information leads to a mind-boggling and horrifying conclusion:

A Labour council, operating under a Labour Scottish Executive and a Labour government at Westminster, needed to spend £150m on its schools, but rather than use a small fraction of the effectively free money that was sitting around unspent in the Executive’s coffers, signed off on a PFI contract that would cost Scottish taxpayers £729m to do the exact same job.

Bumbling incompetence is one thing. But if we were the current Scottish Government we’d have police crawling all over North Lanarkshire trying to find out how anything so self-evidently insane, and such an utterly criminal waste of taxpayers’ money, was ever allowed to happen. And when we found out, we’d want to see some bodies hanging from Motherwell lamp-posts before the sun went down.

The Daily Record carries not one but two “Fury” stories today. One is headlined “Fury as new Labour councillor takes seven-week holiday just six months after being elected”, which tells pretty much the whole story without having to read the article.

(In case you were wondering, the compelling defence of the East Ayrshire comrade in question is “It’s only seven weeks.” We commend Councillor Mair’s thrift in being able to save the cost of a two-month cruise from his modest £16,000 municipal salary.)

The second piece, though, is much more disturbing. Titled “Fury at £729m bill to build schools worth a fifth of that amount”, it reveals SNP Cumbernauld MSP Jamie Hepburn’s discovery that the Labour-controlled (a fact the Record strangely overlooks) North Lanarkshire Council signed a PFI contract in 2006/07 to build and renovate schools in the area, to the value of £150m.

While that sum will have been repaid to the contractors by 2017, unlucky North Lanarkshire taxpayers will continue to hand them money for a further two decades, in the amount of a staggering £29m a year.

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We read something odd in the Herald yesterday.

“In a joint statement, Labour’s Johann Lamont, Tory leader Ruth Davidson and the Liberal Democrats’ Willie Rennie said: “It is vital that the referendum properly reflects the will of the Scottish people. We look forward to hearing the views of the Electoral Commission and will abide by its ruling.”

In the same spirit of magnanimity, Wings Over Scotland would like to humbly and solemnly announce that from today onwards we will abide by the law of gravity and the requirement for human beings to breathe oxygen in order to respire. Thank you.

It can be a full-time job keeping up with the many inconsistencies and contradictions in the anti-independence campaign. (Labour’s professed hatred for the Tories but willingness to let them govern Scotland when Scottish voters reject them, and the Conservatives’ belief in the UK Union but deep-seated antipathy to the European one, leap out as two of the more obvious examples.) Today’s is a corker, though.

Attentive readers will recall that the “Better Together” camp has spent the five months since its launch constantly warning Scots that independence would be “irrevocable”. Here’s figurehead Alistair Darling being reported in the Telegraph as saying just that at the No campaign’s launch in June of this year (our emphasis, as usual):

“This is not about picking a government for the next five years. If we decide to go down the independence route it is an irrevocable step – you’re talking about a completely different constitutional relationship, maybe for the next 200 or 300 years.”

Pretty unequivocal, then – independence is forever, no going back in our lifetime, or that of our children, or their children, or their children. But wait. Fast-forward to last night and the former Chancellor appears to have had a radical change of heart, in a BBC story headlined “Darling predicts independent Scotland would rejoin UK”:

“Speaking as he delivered this year’s John P Mackintosh Memorial Lecture in Prestonpans, East Lothian, on Friday evening, [Darling] said the ‘most obvious problem’ with a common currency was that ‘sooner or later it takes you to economic and then political union. So Scotland would leave the UK only to end up in the same place as it began, with all the trauma that would entail.'”

Of course, if you’re a Wings Over Scotland reader you already knew the “irrevocable” line was a load of rubbish that could only be true if the core claim – and indeed, the very name – of “Better Together” was a cynical lie. But it’s nice to see Mr Darling admit it this early in the day. Which strident assertion, we wonder, will he recant next?

Labour today is a far cry from the party of old, a party that was set up to provide a voice for the working class so as to gain control over the means of production for the masses rather than to be dictated to by capitalism. The modern incarnation is now peddling the notion of “One Nation Labour”, with Johann Lamont decrying what she calls the “something for nothing country” of Scotland, presumably referring to the stubborn preference of the Scots for the social democractic principles of “old” Labour over the neoliberal New Labour. As justification for the rightward shift, Lamont asserts:

“If we wish to continue some policies as they are then they come with a cost which has to be paid for either through increased taxation, direct charges or cuts elsewhere. If we do not confront these hard decisions soon, then the choice will be taken from us when we will be left with little options.”

(Clearly she’s been using Gordon Brown’s sub-editor.)

On the face of it, that seems a relatively straightforward statement of fact: if you can’t pay for something then you have to cut back, go without or find new money to properly fund it. It should be noted that as we’ve seen, at present there’s no need to make this choice because current spending is fully funded. However, as costs rise and privatisation, budget cuts and PFI in England (along with some creative accounting of England-only spending as “UK” projects or reserve-budget items) continue to cause reductions in the Scottish block grant, we soon will.

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