Wings Over Scotland

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.

If you’re still not convinced that the UK coalition government’s plans to “reform” welfare – by slashing tens of billions of pounds from the DWP’s budget, in order to fund tax cuts for the rich – are an example of pure, unambiguous evil at work, we suggest you spend half an hour reading this page and the ones linked at the bottom of it.

Done that? Filled with boiling rage and an urge to commit violent acts of revolution? Good. That suggests that you’re a vaguely decent human being with at least some basic level of compassion for the most vulnerable people in society. Congratulations.

It probably also means you’re NOT a Labour Party politician or activist, because a 2010 report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies (entitled “Not much disagreement on welfare reform”) pointed out that Labour’s policy on the brutal state persecution of the poor and the crippled – like its policies in almost all other areas – differs from that of the Tories and Lib Dems only in degree and speed, and even then only slightly.

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Alert readers will have noticed that we gave up on maintaining our Scottish media appearance log a while back. With pressures of work and a shortage of help, it was just too much to keep up with by ourselves, requiring hours of monitoring every day even just for the “big three” of Good Morning Scotland, Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland, let alone shows like Call Kaye or anything on commercial radio.

However, we did continue to record appearances for quite a while after our last report, so it seemed remiss not to at least compile the stats to that point, which covered the first five months of 2012. The figures for January 1st to May 31st are as noted below.

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Barely a day’s gone by since we started this site on which we haven’t cursed our failure to save an opinion piece we read in one of the English broadsheet newspapers a few months before the 2011 Holyrood election.

Labour were riding high in the polls, and the more exciteable elements of the Unionist press in Scotland were even tentatively talking of an absolute majority. But the column we read in the Telegraph, or the Times, or perhaps even the Mail On Sunday, by a writer whose name we can’t recall a syllable of, was having none of it.

It confidently predicted an SNP victory, despite them being something like 12/1 against with the bookies at the time, on very simple grounds: no matter what the polls say, when it comes to the crunch voters never elect the party with the worst leader. The most famous UK example is Neil Kinnock, but our infuriatingly-unknown author pinned the same label on Iain Gray, and was proven right in the most spectacular manner. We may have forgotten his name, but we’ve never forgotten the lesson.

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It was all the way back in February that this site started questioning the true nature of Johann Lamont’s unprecedented “leadership” of Scottish Labour. For the first time in the party’s history, the Scottish branch was supposedly (and somewhat ironically) completely independent of UK Labour, with Lamont allegedly in charge not just of the MSP group in Holyrood – the limited remit of her predecessors – but also all of Labour’s Scottish MPs at Westminster and the whole Scottish party organisation.

Ever since, in the interests of journalistic accuracy, we’ve put the word “leader” in inverted commas whenever we’ve referred to Ms Lamont’s position, because the evidence just kept stacking up that her authority simply wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. An impartial observer arriving from Pluto and watching the Scottish press and media for a few months would have come away with the impression that she was – at best – fourth in command, behind Anas Sarwar, Margaret Curran and Jim Murphy.

True to form, the Scottish newspapers are running approximately six months behind Wings Over Scotland when it comes to political observation and analysis, so last weekend they were right on schedule when they finally noticed that Scottish Labour’s power structures perhaps weren’t what they seemed.

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