Wings Over Scotland

In a year characterised by a marked increase in heat, as the Holyrood opposition focused its efforts almost exclusively on personal attacks against SNP ministers in an attempt to decapitate the Yes campaign, very few things could be said to have united a wide spectrum of the political sphere, from the radical arch-left to soft nationalists and Labour traditionalists alike. But a speech in September saw almost the entire Scottish media and blogosphere react with one astonished, horrified voice.

You don’t need us to tell you which one, do you?

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Disappointingly, since we examined the state of censorship in Scottish political blogs back in April, the situation has only got worse. Even those sites which previously sat atop the table for freedom of debate have gone backwards – Bella Caledonia now snootily demands a WordPress login before it’ll deign to allow you to comment without days in the moderation queue, and Lallands Peat Worrier has tragically fallen foul of the dreaded Curse Of Captcha – while many of the others have tightened their grip even further over the year, allowing only the most anodyne of opinions to be aired.

Our award for Moderator Of The Year, though, goes not to obvious suspects like Better Nation or Labour Hame (RIP). While both still reject wholly inoffensive comments by the bucketload lest they cause their delicate readers to faint at the prospect of civil disagreement (and the former now closes comments on stories as soon as three or four days after publishing them), at least within a few days the “offending” item tends to be deleted altogether so that the would-be commenter knows where they stand.

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Fewer than one in ten of our readers follow us on Twitter, which is a bit annoying as it’s a great way of passing on interesting stuff quickly without having to put together a whole post on it. (We don’t really understand people’s objections to using Twitter. Some say it’s full of daft trivia about what celebrities had for their tea and suchlike, but that’s only true if you choose to follow those people. There’s no law that says you have to follow 1000 folk, you can follow just one if you like.)

Anyway, the point is that while everyone on Twitter is talking about it, if you aren’t you might well not have come across this piece by baby-faced left-wing wunderkind Owen Jones for the Independent yet. Called “The Strange Death Of Labour Scotland” (in a nod to Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw’s recent book of the same title), it doesn’t contain much we haven’t been saying here for the last year. But it’s always interesting to see the English left slowly starting to notice what’s going on in North Britain. Their assessment is rarely kind, and currently readers are approving of Jones’ analysis by a margin of around 15 to 1. It’s well worth a read.

Last week, unnoticed by the media, the “Better Together” website issued a rather disturbing “Activist Briefing”. It was based around what’s been a core facet of the anti-independence campaign for years – the notion that even with oil revenues, Scotland is too poor to go it alone. (Despite regular assurances to the contrary in more recent times, this is still a fundamental belief of the No camp.)

The alarming passage was this one:

“Even with a generous allocation of Scotland’s oil revenues (a geographical share) the best estimate is that in 2011-12 Scotland was running at a significant deficit. Assuming a geographical share of oil revenues – which would in no way be guaranteed – Scotland would have run at a significant deficit in each of the last ten years.”

The two troubling aspects of the quote above are pretty obvious. Firstly, the notion of Scotland receiving its clear rights under international law is described as “generous”, as if it was somehow in the gift of the UK to decide where Scotland’s maritime borders lay in the event of a Yes vote. But much more worrying is the second part, which reaffirms the assertion that such a share “would in no way be guaranteed”.

Any attempt by the rUK to annexe internationally-recognised Scottish resources after independence would be quite simply an act of war, and as such can be discounted as belonging to the realm of fantasy. But what such comments do point to is a mindset and possible strategy that’s barely any less discomforting.

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Johann Lamont actually taught English, hard as that can be to believe sometimes. But for the sake of the children of Rothesay, Springburn and Castlemilk, we hope she was never asked to fill in on a Geography class, judging by this remarkable extract from her speech to the Scottish Labour conference in Dundee back in March:

“But let me tell you one phrase which really is meaningless. North of the border. And here is another one. South of the border. Because we have no border. We haven’t had one for three hundred years. We don’t need a border to be Scottish.”

You kinda do, Johann. How can you be Scottish if there’s no such thing as Scotland? And if there is, how do you know whether you’re in it or not, unless it’s got borders?

If there’s no border, how do we know whether a crime committed somewhere near Berwick comes under the jurisdiction of Scots law or English law? How do we know if the Scottish NHS or the English NHS is responsible for looking after the victim? And how do we know whether to charge the future lawyers who’ll fight the court case for their law degrees or not, if we don’t know which country their university’s in?

Okay, we know you’re working on that one.

While we’re not planning to shut Wings Over Scotland down during the festive break, obviously political stories are likely to be a bit thin on the ground with Parliament on recess and everyone plonked in front of Doctor Who full of turkey and booze. So to fill the gaps we’ll be resorting to some traditional methods – scattered in among new articles will be some end-of-year awards, best-ofs and perhaps the odd reprint of stories from earlier in the year when we had only a fraction of the readership we do now, and which most people therefore won’t have seen.

So let’s start with our favourite piece of terrier-like interrogation from the nation’s broadcast journalists, reporters and presenters. These are the people ultimately charged with holding our politicians to account on our behalf – literally so in the case of the BBC – so it’s vital they keep on top of their game with a firm grasp of the issues and an ability to cut through the waffle and obfuscation of their interview subjects and get to the heart of the matter.

So for a gem that dates way back to almost the first political programme of the year but which nobody managed to better for the entire 11-and-a-bit months that followed it, our first-ever “Wingy” goes to… Raymond Buchanan of BBC Scotland!

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When we wrote a story earlier today about another piece of embarrassing evidence falling off the Scottish Labour website, we thought it was nothing more than the latest in a long line of attempts by the party to clumsily cover its tracks over policy U-turns. But when we did a little digging, we found something altogether more interesting.

Because when we typed the page’s address into The Internet Wayback Machine for fun, we fully expected to find that the line about continuing free prescription charges had been deleted yesterday, or at least in the weeks since Johann Lamont made her infamous “something for nothing” speech.

Instead, however, TIWM listed only one previous version. While it’s not the sole factor, pages tend to show up on the archive site when they’ve been amended, and the only time the Wayback Machine had been called on to notice this particular page since its creation in November 2010 was on Friday the 6th of May 2011 – the day after the Scottish Parliament election delivered a historic landslide victory to the SNP, and an unprecedentedly humiliating defeat for Labour.

Results were still coming in on the 6th of May, but Scottish Labour had clearly already decided to eradicate mention of their promise to maintain free prescriptions. Now, it seems rather unlikely that the party convened a meeting of its executive committee, debated the policy, decided on a change and dutifully edited a page of its website while everyone was still digesting the scale of their defeat and/or catching up on some much-needed sleep after a long night of results.

(Indeed, it’s possible that the web page was changed even earlier than the 6th.)

The only reasonable conclusion it’s possible to draw, then, is that the policy was already internally a dead duck before election day. The party’s manifesto pledge (which can be found on page 41) that “with Scottish Labour, there will be no reintroduction of charges for prescriptions in Scotland” must therefore have been a deliberate and cynical lie, set to be abandoned even if the party won power.

It took almost 18 months from that day before Johann Lamont announced her “review” of policy to consider whether universal benefits like prescription charges would be retained under a future Labour government at Holyrood. The review isn’t due to publish its conclusions for almost two more years, and some prominent Labour MSPs have already suggested that free prescriptions will “probably need to stay” (despite the same member also describing them as a “right-wing policy”). But in the light of this evidence, we think it’s a reasonably safe bet what the final verdict will be.

Were readers to further conclude that it’s rather unwise – and perhaps even literally damaging to one’s health – to accept a word of anything Scottish Labour ever says at face value, we’d find it hard to disagree.

Yesterday we noted how Scottish Labour deleted evidence of an embarrassing policy U-turn from its website after it was highlighted by Alex Salmond at First Minister’s Questions. We suspected that it wouldn’t be the last example of the phenomenon, and sure enough we happened to stumble across this page earlier this morning.

It’s a press release from before the 2011 Holyrood election, by Scottish Labour’s shadow health minister and serial fibber Jackie Baillie. But we noticed something seemed to be missing from it that we were sure we remembered. So we went and checked out the same press release on Jackie Baillie’s own website. In the quote below, the sentence in bold is a line still visible on Baillie’s homepage, but which is oddly missing from the Scottish Labour version.

“The Tories’ solution is to increase prescription charges, putting an even greater burden on patients suffering from chronic illnesses. Their message is that if you are ill we will also make you poor. Labour is fully supportive of free prescriptions and will continue this policy if we are elected to Government next May.“

The text of the two releases is otherwise identical down to the last word. Just that one solitary line has unaccountably fallen off the page in the journey between sites. We don’t mind telling you, readers, we’re completely baffled.

There’s been much hot air unleashed in Holyrood in recent weeks over various “wastes” of money by the Scottish Government. First the opposition accused the SNP of spending £100,000 (which turned out to be a wild piece of back-of-a-fag-packet guesswork vastly overestimating the actual £4,000 cost) in fighting a Freedom Of Information request over EU legal advice. Then there were complaints about £48,000 spent sending a team to the premiere of Brave, despite the obvious benefits to be had marketing Scotland’s tourism industry on the back of the movie.

And finally, Labour in particular screamed themselves hoarse (and were still doing so as recently as yesterday’s FMQs) about the £470,000 the Scottish Government delegation to the Ryder Cup cost, even though it was a contractual obligation, encompassed numerous other business engagements which generated Scottish jobs, and in fact represented a 30% saving on comparable trips by the last Labour-led Holyrood administration. (Which weren’t contractual obligations.)

But still. If just for the sake of argument you were to accept the Unionist parties’ line, that’s a whopping £522,000 the Scottish Government has cavalierly thrown away in recent months. Meanwhile, how has the UK government in Westminster been doing?

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This was the “Education” page of the Scottish Labour website this morning:

After Alex Salmond referred to it at FMQs, the page has now been deftly amended to fall in line with the rest of party policy, as you can see in the image below:

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We don’t often get to see Johann Lamont on the telly, so when she made one of her rare appearances in a five-minute interview with STV’s excellent Bernard Ponsonby this week we couldn’t only do half a job. As we’re still stuck in the house fighting off this year’s unusually-horrible and persistent germs – and as Lamont repeated most of the speech at today’s FMQs – we steeled ourselves, sat down with a large medicinal hot toddy and transcribed the rest of the piece.

What with it being Christmas and everything, though, you’re probably busy, so if you’re in a rush we’ve condensed all of Johann’s umming and aahing and stumbling and waffling down to its essence, where there is such a thing. The parts highlighted in red below are all you really need to read.

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We’ve spent the last 90 minutes watching an incredible video someone linked us to in a reader comment earlier today. It’s a public meeting of the Clydebank Trades Union Council on November 29th, headed by a panel comprising Gil Paterson (SNP MSP for Clydebank and Milngavie), Jackie Baillie (Labour MSP for Dumbarton), chairman Tom Paterson (secretary of Clydebank TUC), Stephen Boyd (assistant secretary of Scottish TUC) and Cathy Leach (Scottish Pensioners’ Forum).

Throughout the meeting the sense of anger and hurt coming from the traditionally-Labour audience and directed mostly at Baillie is overwhelming. Time and again the party’s betrayal of its core audience is bitterly attacked. But an hour and 25 seconds in, there’s a particularly remarkable exchange.

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