Wings Over Scotland

This week, Johann Lamont called for an end to the “something for nothing culture” with regard to the provision of universal benefits in Scotland. We found the phrase oddly familiar. But where had we heard it before, and from whom?

“This is our contract with the British people – to bring an end to the something for nothing culture”
– Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative minister, October 2011

“We are repairing the damage of an age of irresponsibility. Ending the something for nothing society that flourished during it”
– George Osborne, Conservative Chancellor Of The Exchequer, October 2011

“The hard working people of Britain want their government to bring an end to Labour’s something for nothing culture”
– Baroness Warsi, Conservative peer and former chairman, December 2011

“[The welfare state] has sent out some incredibly damaging signals. That it pays not to work. That you are owed something for nothing”
– David Cameron, Conservative Prime Minister, June 2012

“There are some who really are sitting at home and putting little effort into moving on in life… A something for nothing culture does no one any favours”
– Chris Grayling, Conservative minister, August 2012

“Jobless young adults will soon be forced to do three months’ full-time work or have their benefits cut under a scheme being piloted in Croydon to tackle its “something for nothing culture””
– Boris Johnson, Conservative mayor of London, September 2012

Oh yeah. Now we remember.

Ever since May 2007, one of the strangest aspects of Scottish politics has been the poisonous hostility of the Scottish Liberal Democrats to the SNP. The parties sit very close to each other on the political spectrum, and the SNP are sympathetic to some key Lib Dem policies – most obviously a local income tax – which the Lib Dems stood no chance of implementing in coalition with anyone but the nationalists.

(The Lib Dems are also still officially a party of federalism, committed to far stronger devolution than Labour or the Tories.)

Yet a succession of leaders have treated the SNP as little short of pure evil. Nicol Stephen, Tavish Scott (especially) and now Willie Rennie appear to regard Alex Salmond’s party with undisguised hatred, for no immediately obvious reason, and the idea of any sort of co-operation on any issue about as unthinkable as Barack Obama announcing a treaty of friendship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In this site’s view, that approach was at least as responsible for the Scottish Lib Dems’ humiliation in 2011 as the UK party’s Westminster coalition with the Conservatives. Most people had expected the Lib Dems to form a coalition with the SNP in 2007, and when they refused we suspect that middle-ground Scottish voters no longer saw the party as serving any sort of practical purpose.

But the reduction of the Scottish Lib Dems to a tiny, embarrassing rump of just five MSPs, without a single constituency on the entire Scottish mainland, has given them a useful role in the service of the anti-independence campaign: that of cannon fodder.

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…is unfortunate, twice is careless, and three times in quick succession starts to look like a trend. Sober viewers may recall a post from a few days ago, in which we noted the latest example of the Herald’s increasingly-frequent habit of telling outright lies. It turns out that the formerly-respectable publication was being even more economical with the truth than we knew, as a tiny piece in a corner of today’s edition reveals*:

Still, it was nothing too serious. The original piece only exaggerated the number of turbines by around 400%, and the potential area to be covered by the new development by a trifling 3,300%. (In addition to suggesting that the land was to be sold off to private industry whereas in fact it was remaining in public ownership.) Apart from those few minor issues, the story was almost entirely accurate.

The Herald is currently circling the drain. We can’t imagine why.

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*We’re indebted to keen-eyed reader “McHaggis” for pointing out the correction to us.

Scottish Labour mouthpiece the Daily Record is currently running a long series of horror stories about Atos “Healthcare” and their appalling persecution of the sick and disabled. We heartily and sincerely commend the Record for doing so, even if it usually fails to note that Atos were unleashed on the poor and vulnerable by a Labour government, and occasionally just outright lies about it.

You might expect, then, that the valid concerns of the Record and its readers would be earnestly reflected by the nation’s Labour MSPs when the Scottish Parliament debated the issue of Atos’ conduct of Work Capability Assessments yesterday.

You’d be wrong, of course.

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Well, that didn’t last long. No sooner had Johann Lamont announced the Bonfire Of The Benefits, to nationwide astonishment and horror, than the hapless Scottish Labour “leader” was hastily retreating from almost the entire content of her speech. First up was the SNP’s increase in police numbers:

“We need to be honest that the target of 1,000 additional ‘bobbies on the beat’ is not the best use of police resources”

But within 30 minutes Lamont’s panicking team had performed a complete reverse-ferret, as reported by the Scottish Police Federation on their Twitter account:

And there was more to come.

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So, who saw that coming? Johann Lamont, leader of Scottish Labour, just abandoned over a century of Labour values in a single speech. More so even than Tony Blair did when he set light to Clause 4 in the name of “New Labour”,  Lamont made a bonfire of pretty much the entire set of founding principles of social democracy. Because, as George Eaton succinctly put it in today’s New Statesman:

“universal public services, to which all contribute and from which all benefit, are the essence of social democracy. Once this principle is abandoned, greater cuts will inevitably follow as the rich, no longer receiving, have less incentive to give (you could call it “nothing for something”). For this reason, as Richard Titmuss sagely observed, “services for the poor will always be poor services””

And let’s make no mistake: what Johann Lamont did yesterday was consign the entire notion of universal services to the dustbin of history. Because if you accept her argument that universal services mean “the poorest pay for the tax breaks for the rich”, then you inescapably also accept that they’re a fundamentally, inherently bad thing whether a country can afford them or not.

Is it EVER good to have the poor subsidise the rich? You’d have a job finding even the most extreme right-wing Tory prepared to say such a thing out loud, so Johann certainly isn’t going to, and that means that all universal services must go, because every one of them is subject to the same “unfairness”. (In the perverted modern sense of the word.) Every service provided free to a person who could afford to pay for it themselves must by definition rob the poor to do so.

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This is what our dear old pal, the arch-loyal true-believer Scottish Labour activist Duncan Hothersall, appears to believe happened (or rather, didn’t happen) yesterday:

This is what actually did happen:

“Alex Salmond is quick to point to the high levels of welfare in Scandinavia but those universal benefits are paid for by high levels of taxation. Scotland cannot be the only something for nothing country in the world. And I will not tolerate a country where the poorest pay for the tax breaks for the rich.”
– Johann Lamont, 25 September 2012

We’re trying really hard, but for the life of us we can’t formulate an interpretation of those words that ISN’T saying universal benefits in Scotland are “something for nothing”, and that DOESN’T attack them on the grounds that they represent a subsidy of the rich by the poor. Can any keen students of doublethink help us out?

We hardly know where to start on Johann Lamont’s grand act of madness yesterday, and we have SO many real-life crises to deal with this morning that we have to go out for a couple of hours now to address some of the most pressing of them. So here’s just a quickie to get the ball rolling. See if you can spot which of these three statements doesn’t belong with the others. (Our emphasis in all cases.)

“Ed Miliband said yesterday that even millionaires should get child benefit as he attacked the Government’s welfare cuts. The new Labour leader said his party would defend the principle of universal benefits – even for the best off.

Asked if he thinks that ‘if you’re a millionaire, you keep it’, Mr Miliband said: ‘I’m in favour of that, yes, and I’m in favour of it because it’s a cornerstone of our system to have universal benefits. Frankly, there aren’t that many millionaires in this country. Families on £45,000 need child benefit and it’s a way that society recognises the costs of having kids.’”
(Ed Miliband, Labour Party leader, 11 October 2010)

That’s the UK/England (we’re not sure which) spoken for. How about Wales?

“Free prescriptions and free school breakfasts will be protected from spending cuts, vows First Minister Carwyn Jones – who marks his 100th day in the job today. Mr Jones said ministers were going through departmental spending “line by line” to prepare for next year’s budget, due to be published in the autumn. Asked about free prescriptions, introduced in 2007, the Welsh Labour leader said yesterday:

“We are not going to touch free prescriptions. If you look at what people have found most beneficial to them they will talk about free bus passes, they will talk about free school breakfasts, they will talk about free prescriptions. Those are the areas that I think members of the public will expect us to protect.”“
(Carwyn Jones, Welsh Labour leader & First Minister of Wales, 19 March 2010)

Wales seems pretty clear too. How about Scotland?

“What is progressive about a chief executive on more than 100,000 a year not paying for his prescriptions, while a pensioner needing care has their care help cut? What is progressive about judges and lawyers earning more than 100,000 a year, not paying tuition fees for their child to follow in their footsteps at university, while one in four unemployed young people can’t get a job or a place at college?”

“I believe our resources must go to those in greatest need. But if the devil’s greatest trick was to convince the world he didn’t exist, [Alex] Salmond’s most cynical trick was to make people believe that more was free, when the poorest are paying for the tax breaks for the rich.”
(Johann Lamont, Scottish Labour leader, yesterday)

We must admit, we’re not aware of a TV reality show called Britain’s Toriest Labour Parties. Perhaps that’s because until yesterday, even the craziest TV executives wouldn’t have dared to imagine a reality as insane as this.

More to come.

As you might expect, attendance at yesterday’s independence rally in Edinburgh has been the subject of much spin and counter-spin. The police, who have of course never knowingly overestimated the size of a march for any cause, put the crowd at 5000, a figure which the Unionist press has repeated as fact. The marchers themselves seem fairly united around an equally-predictably higher claim of 10,000.

Out at the extremes, a few exciteable nationalists somehow got it into their heads that the capacity of the Ross Bandstand auditorium was a frankly ambitious 12,500 while poor old mad Ian Smart of Labour suggested there were fewer people at the rally than St Mirren took to their game at Rugby Park, ie under 1000.

(Though he subsequently conceded that it might just have been as many as 2000, albeit while also asserting that we should expect significant SNP resignations in the next 48 hours as a result of something or other connected to the event.)

This excellent shot taken from Edinburgh Castle and sent to us by WingsLand reader Jean T should provide some sort of guide as to whose estimate is closer to the mark.

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Two stories from opposite ends – or at least, what USED to be opposite ends – of the newspaper spectrum caught our eye this morning. On first glance they have nothing in common, but closer investigation shows that they’re in fact cut from the same cloth. And although one of them is a little more contemptible than the other (admittedly by a narrow margin), it isn’t the one you might think.

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We hope the turnout for the independence rally in Edinburgh tomorrow is good. We encourage you to go if you can – the weather’s going to be quite nice, and it’s always lovely to be in Edinburgh for any reason. But we’re not quite sure what the point of it is or what it hopes to achieve, because as far as we can see the most – indeed, just about the only – likely outcome of it is a big propaganda coup for the No campaign.

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From “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, by George Orwell, published in 1949:

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed.”

From the Daily Record, 20 September 2012:

“Iain Duncan Smith promises more disabled benefits cuts in Scotland: the Work and Pensions Secretary was the man behind bringing in Atos, who have been criticised for humiliating fit-for-work tests.”

Atos Healthcare was first employed to conduct Work Capability Assessments on claimants of Incapacity Benefit (and other disability benefits) in October 2008, under the Labour government of Gordon Brown, when said Labour government introduced Employment Support Allowance in order to reduce the welfare bill by replacing the previous benefits with one that was, for most recipients, around a third lower.

A 2009 report by the Citizens Advice Bureau highlighted Atos’ tendency to find people unexpectedly fit for work, but Brown’s government took no action against the company.

Iain Duncan Smith has merely continued Labour policy, using the same company hired by Labour to carry it out. The Daily Record is attempting to nakedly rewrite history to excuse Labour from responsibility for a measure which hurts a great many Record readers. Unfortunately for the Record, people are watching.