Wings Over Scotland

Analysis later. If you simply want to read the two passages of the Leveson Inquiry’s report which concern the actions of the First Minister without wading through 2000 or so pages, you’ll find them below. Bored readers may wish to compare the contents with our own assessment/predictions from five months ago. (NOTE: Where it says “emphasis added”, the emphasis in question was added by Lord Leveson, not by us.)

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The Scottish media is winding itself up for another sustained assault on the Scottish Government. Kerry Gill of the Scottish Daily Express has been pushing the story hard since last night along with some journalists from other English papers, and the BBC’s Scotland correspondent James Cook set the scene in a tweet this morning:

Sure enough, the Scotsman carried it as a front-page lead below only the Leveson Inquiry report – while inflating the figure by over £31,000 for effect – and the Herald also carries a prominent piece, although at least only rounding the amount up by £1,420.

The reports reveal that 36 people spent around a week in the US, taking part in various business events in addition to attending the golf tournament, which the Scottish Government was contractually obliged to send a delegation to as part of the agreement to host it at Gleneagles in 2014, and which is predicted to be worth £100 million to the Scottish economy. But as the papers line up to hand the Holyrood opposition a club to hit the First Minister with over the spending, there’s a very significant part of the equation missing from the coverage.

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It was reported in the Scotsman on Wednesday that the President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Klaus had raised doubts over whether an independent Scotland could successfully keep using Sterling, because when Czechoslovakia split into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993 it took only 38 days for the currency union to split.

His views led to a rush of comments from supporters of the UK union arguing that a currency union is only possible with political union. Then a spokesman from the Treasury asserted that protectionism grew between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic after the split.

The evidence cited by the Treasury spokesman was the fall in Slovak exports to the Czech Republic from 42% of all exports to 13% between 1993 and 2003. Conversely, Czech Republic exports to the Slovak Republic fell from 22% of total exports to 8%. He noted ominously that currently 59% of Scottish exports are to the rest of the UK.

While the basic facts cited are correct, the interpretations put on them by Vaclav Klaus and the UK Treasury spokesman are, shall we say, at odds with the truth.

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The Guardian carries a rather provocative piece today, suggesting that the SNP and the other nationalist parties at Westminster might do a deal with the Tories to push through their controversial proposals on changing (or gerrymandering, as some would have it) the UK’s constituency boundaries, in return for a radical overhaul of the Scottish constitution which would hand an unprecedented package of powers just short of full independence to the Holyrood parliament.

The plans are generally presumed to be electorally advantageous to the Conservatives, who currently have to secure considerably more votes to form a majority than Labour do, and the Lib Dems have vowed not to back their coalition partners on the issue after House Of Lords reform was shelved, leaving the Tories in need of votes from the smaller opposition parties to have any chance of getting the legislation through.

We’ll put aside for a moment the unworthy notion that if the Lib Dems are vowing to oppose the changes then that almost certainly means they’ll end up voting for them, and concentrate instead on the broader plausibility of the story, which appears to be sourced solely from a single former Tory MEP. Would the SNP really enter such a Faustian pact with the Tories for the sake of devo max? Let’s delve into the detail.

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Good piece about Parliamentary standards today by Iain Macwhirter over on his personal blog. It covers a lot of ground, and we’re not 100% sure we go along with the comments on Nadine Dorries, but this passage (our emphasis) leapt out:

“And by the way, the PO should ban the practice of applauding at question time. Holyrood has turned into a bear-pit. It isn’t anyone’s fault in particular – though Labour’s conduct has been pretty inexcusable. You can’t win any argument by ranting – except in a pub. The Nats have been behaving in a heavy handed manner since they won their landslide majority and their packing of parliamentary committees hasn’t helped.

Labour’s frustration is partly down to their being locked out of all influence. But it was their fault they lost the election by such a crushing majority, and they aren’t helping their chances of re-election by restoring to the politics of closing time.”

We’ve said several times before that applause should be banned from all forms of televised political debate except at the start and end. It swallows up precious time and serves no purpose – all sides of any given debate will (or at least should) be represented in the audience, and will obediently clap their own man or woman, telling us nothing. It wasn’t permitted in the 2010 UK general election leaders’ debates, and so far as we can tell it wasn’t missed. Holyrood should be no different.

But it’s the second paragraph quoted above that’s even more on-the-nose. In much the same way that they didn’t ever seem to genuinely accept the fact that they lost the 2007 election – seeing it instead as a blip, a grudgingly-permitted technicality, that the SNP got more seats than them – Labour in Scotland have absolutely refused to acknowledge the much bigger hiding they took four years later.

Johann Lamont constantly demands an input that her party simply didn’t earn – the electorate chose, entirely democratically and after looking at the conduct of the previous administration and opposition, to give the SNP the power to run the country without any petty, obstructionist interference this time round. Labour are going to have to suck that up for another three-and-a-half years at least, and if they don’t get a grip on themselves pretty soon they’re going to burst a blood vessel.

When the No campaign launched its website, the Unionist parties behind it helpfully included video clips of what they called “real Scots” giving their reasons for wanting to keep the UK together. The most repeated assertion in the series of testimonies was that shipbuilding would cease to exist in an independent Scotland.

First there was Tanya, who reckons we’re stronger as a “family unit”, that apprenticeships will vanish overnight somehow (or possibly be made illegal, we haven’t ascertained the logic of them just vanishing yet) and that we should stick together to build big warships to show the world what we can do.

Next up we had Robert, whose view is that there would be no shipbuilding in an independent Scotland. Presumably we’ll just be using strong language to keep enemies from our waters. (In fairness, Robert does admit that he hopes, rather than knows, that shipbuilding on the Clyde will have a future within the UK.)

Then there was Craig, proud to build UK warships and who believes there will be no work under independence. His argument takes a subtly different tack: “There’s no commercial shipping at all, it’s all MoD work, that’s all we get, that’s what sustains us, that’s what keeps these doors open here is MoD work, and Rosyth as well, so if we’re not going to build commercial ships and all we’re going to build is defence and frigates and aircraft carriers then that’s our livelihoods and that’s what keeps us alive”.

Finally we have Frank, who believes that shipbuilding is safe within the UK. “We build ships to the world and we’re fantastic at that!” is his view, though he offers no explanation as to why we would suddenly lose the ability to construct a seaworthy vessel if not ruled from Westminster.

So that’s four repetitions of the same argument – that an independent Scotland would have no shipbuilding as only the MoD uses the yards on the Clyde. But does any reality underpin the assertion? Let’s find out.

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There’s a very good piece in the Scottish Sun today by Andrew Nicoll – entitled “Why promise more devolution when it will never happen?” – on the consequences of a “No” vote in the 2014 referendum. It’s well worth reading in full, but if you’re in a rush we’ll just quote the last line of it to give you the flavour:

“Independence has been a gun at Westminster’s head for decades. What do you think will happen when they find out there are no bullets in it?”

We are, as ever, pleased to see the mainstream Scottish media catching up with the stuff we’ve been saying for months, although the reality is in fact even worse than Nicoll suggests. Nonetheless, it’s good to see the analysis disseminated in Scotland’s biggest-selling paper, and by a proper senior staff journalist rather than the cop-out option of an opinion columnist. The Scottish Sun has almost ten times the circulation of the Scotsman, the country’s supposed “quality” broadsheet, and it’s worth remembering that pieces like this will therefore reach far more people than the likes of Michael Kelly, Brian Wilson or Magnus Gardham could ever dream of. Slowly but surely, the independence campaign is winning the argument, and the opposition’s panicked response tells the story. Stay out of the mud, folks.

This is Labour MSP Michael McMahon in today’s Daily Record:

“Now it seems the official record can be changed at the First Minister’s whim without anyone’s knowledge. Parliament should look to its rules.”

For once, we wholeheartedly agree with Mr McMahon. We can’t abide people quietly rewriting history to pretend they said something other than what they actuallly said.

There’s much merriment in the pro-independence community today at a campaign flyer the No campaign has apparently been handing out at train stations this morning:

We’ve examined whether independence would really be a journey with no return before, and even the head of the Better Together campaign himself can’t seem to get his story straight. But we love that Unionists have so little understanding of their opponents that they imagine we’d be going to all this trouble just to come back. And what we love even more is the reality spelled out at the top centre of the image.

The UK is currently undergoing the greatest process of division in the three centuries of its existence, with the super-wealthy enriching themselves to obscene levels even as the poor are cast aside, demonised and savagely assaulted at every turn by a government of Eton millionaires and an impotent opposition that has conceded all of its traditional values and offers no protection to the vulnerable. An independent Scotland will indeed take ALL adults and ALL children with it, not just the rich, and we don’t think the idea of that being a permanent trip is a frightening one.

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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.