Wings Over Scotland

The Scottish independence campaign has been left reeling today, after two alert Wings Over Scotland readers brought our attention to the calamitous striking of a hammer blow that seems certain to all but guarantee a No vote in autumn 2014.

We don’t quite understand how persuading the English of anything is going to help, since they won’t have a vote in the referendum, but who are we to interfere in Unionist business? Rather more relevantly to the interests of this blog, the piece goes on to note that according to an unnamed “Scottish Tory spokesman”:

“We have to make a positive case for the Union.”

We couldn’t agree more. We are, as ever, all ears.

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TIME ELAPSED: 32 years, 0 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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Keen followers of the “is it or isn’t it?” debate surrounding the legality of an independence referendum conducted without “permission” from Westminster have had much to digest recently. The much-travelled Dr Matt Qvortrup wrote a piece for the Herald yesterday [paywall] averring that – if we might strip it down to its barest bones – the legal status was actually quite strong, but didn’t really matter anyway as political reality would trump boring, nitpicky old law.

Unsurprisingly, this enraged Lallands Peat Worrier, who took several of the good Doctor’s assertions as something akin to a professional slight and launched a stinging rebuke in uncharacteristically blunt and earthy terms. Meanwhile, the UK Constitutional Law Group (comprising a number of distinguished academics) published a paper more in keeping with the Peat Worrier’s usual loquacious style, thoughtfully analysing both the legalities and the political ramifications and concluding that everyone really needed to knock their heads together and deliver the requisite mechanisms to Holyrood with the least possible delay.

Support for this view came from the Electoral Reform Society Scotland, who offered the opinion [Herald paywall link] that Holyrood should be given the explicit legal right to conduct the referendum by the UK government without any strings attached. Indeed, perhaps surprisingly the organisation went even further in suggesting that the Electoral Commission would not – despite the strenuous and sustained demands of the Unionist parties – be the appropriate body to oversee the vote.

Finally, blogosphere newcomer the Scottish Times revealed that the Scottish Democratic Alliance (yep, a new one on us too) has asked the Council of Europe to step in and monitor the referendum, fearing interference from Westminster that would contravene the UN Charter on the right of peoples to self-determination.

Pressure from impartial quarters does seem to be building on the UK Government to confer a Section 30 order on Holyrood swiftly and without conditions, although as we saw with the blunt refusal last May to enhance the Scotland Bill with measures commanding cross-party support in Edinburgh, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll listen. But with the SNP having added 2000 new members in a single month since David Cameron’s initial intervention in the debate, perhaps they should.

As our fast-growing number of readers (all viewing records broken again last week) will be glad to hear, we’re just about back online after a weekend cursing the ineptitude of the laughably-named TalkTalk Business (“Here to help you 24/7, where by 24/7 we mean 10/5”). We’ve still got a somewhat restricted service, but fortunately enough access to direct you to this excellent piece on Newsnet Scotland, which eschews the site’s unfortunate tendency towards wild-eyed polemic in favour of a calmly insightful and perceptive look at the reality of one of the Unionist camp’s favourite scare stories – that Scotland would be kicked out of the EU if it became independent.

It’s a terrific bit of analysis, pointing out how disastrous such a scenario would be for the rump UK and how it would also mean Scotland being able to walk away from the Union without any share of Britain’s crippling £1trn (and rising) debts. Call us optimists, but we’d love to believe it means the end of that particular tired old canard from the FUDs. We’re not holding our breath, though.

The Scotsman is a big paper (in terms of content if not readership). Today’s issue is 104 pages long, a full five of which are devoted to its front-page lead story. But here at Wings Over Scotland we appreciate that you’re busy people and can’t always afford to devote hefty chunks of your day to reading everything in full, especially when there’s so much happening in the world of Scottish politics at the moment.

So to save you some time we’ve helpfully edited the article down, cutting it off at the point where you can safely stop reading without fear of missing anything. (It doesn’t just work today – any time you see these three words, you can confidently move on.)

“ONE of Scotland’s leading experts on public finance has cast doubt on the Scottish Government’s ability to produce fair and accurate economic reports, ahead of the debate on independence. Professor Arthur Midwinter -“

That’s a good 15 minutes of your life rescued there, in which you can get on and do something more productive and rewarding instead, such as seeing if you can make the sky turn purple just by thinking at it. No need to thank us, it’s all part of the service.

It won’t have come as any surprise to SNP supporters that the media – the same one that devoted hundreds of column inches to misrepresenting Joan McAlpine’s “anti-Scottish” comments on Twitter – was today absolutely silent on Labour MP Denis McShane’s comparison of Alex Salmond to Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic.

MacShane, who voted in favour of the Iraq War, hasn’t deleted the tweet, despite a storm of protest on Twitter. But he’s only the latest in a long line of Unionist politicians to compare Scotland’s democratically elected First Minister (who as far as we know isn’t implicated in a single death) to murderous genocidal dictators.

Labour in particular are fond of crying about the nasty cybernat “bullies” who occasionally call Labour politicians names online, but those are pseudonymous internet users with not a shred of evidence that any of them are members of – or even vote for – the SNP. We’re not aware of any elected Nat representative or even pro-independence journalist ever having likened Gordon Brown or Tony Blair or Ed Miliband to Hitler, but the brave defenders of the Union have no such scruples. MacShane is merely the latest in a long and ignoble line, so we thought it’d be a good idea to keep track and see if we can get a full house.

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There’s a new poll on Holyrood voting intentions out today – a proper Ipsos/MORI one with a valid sample size, not some of the useless micro-polls the press have been getting in a lather about lately – and the results are dramatic.

While the SNP have actually dropped very slightly – down 2 points to 49% – they’ve still extended their lead over Labour, who fall 6 points to an all-time low of 23%. It’s the first time the SNP have ever polled over twice Labour’s figures, and the Nats continue to find favour with more voters than the three main opposition parties combined (at 49% to a total of 46% for the others).

When translated to a predicted outcome via www.scotlandvotes.com, the spectacular findings are that Labour are reduced to ONE – yes, one – constituency seat (from 15 now), that of Elaine Murray in the Borders constituency of Dumfriesshire. With the exception of the Tories taking back Eastwood from failed Labour leadership candidate Ken McIntosh and holding onto one other Borders seat (Roxburgh & Berwickshire), the rest of the entire Scottish mainland goes canary yellow, with the SNP securing 73 seats overall to increase their Parliamentary majority to 17. It’s quite a picture, no?

Stay positive, Unionists!

Proceedings in the House of Lords are little seen by the public. While it’s possible for the determined to locate online coverage in the depths of the internet, very little ever makes it to popular broadcast media, and as a result the general public remains mostly ignorant of what goes on there. So we’d very much recommend you find a few minutes to watch some of this. (Annoyingly requires Microsoft Silverlight.)*

It’s the Lords debate on the Scotland Bill, which took place on the 26th of January 2012. It starts at 11:36.55 in the embedded video above (we think the timestamp on the clip represents the time of day the debate took place), and goes on for some hours. Don’t panic, you don’t need to watch all of it – you’ll get the gist from the first 20 minutes or so, by watching the speeches from Lord Forsyth and Lord Foulkes.

There are no SNP representatives in the House of Lords. This is how they talk about us when we’re out of the room.

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There could have been nothing more predictable in the independence debate than that the Unionist parties, having furiously demanded a clear, simple, yes/no question for the last eight months, would be in a tumultuous rage when they finally got one. The First Minister had barely announced the Scottish Government’s chosen ten-word proposition to the Scottish people when a chorus of angry voices in the Unionist camp were on the airwaves denouncing it as “leading”, “unfair” and “rigged”.

Supposed experts were hastily summoned to explain to us how the phrasing of the question was designed to lead brainless voters down a “cognitive chute”, because the poor stupid Scottish electorate had no idea of what the SNP meant by “independent”. The Telegraph leapt into action, conducting its own polls with various possible versions of the question in an attempt to demonstrate how widely responses could be altered by simple changes in wording. It then swiftly wrote up the results in doom-laden terms, thundering in the article’s strapline that:

“The “loaded” question Alex Salmond wants to ask in the Scottish independence referendum leads to at least a 10-point increase in public support for ending the Union”

That analysis came a little TOO swiftly, as it turned out.

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(See here for the whole story.)

“We need to hear detailed reasons and hard facts about why Scotland is better off as part of the UK — not slogans and scaremongering.“
(The Sun editorial, January 2012)

“In a speech in Glasgow later today, Ed Miliband will seek to go beyond the process-driven debate over independence for Scotland, seeking to make a positive case for Scotland to remain within the Union.“
(Left Foot Forward, January 2012)

“Darling – whose reputation was enhanced after he warned of the looming global economic meltdown in defiance of then PM Gordon Brown – said he was determined to make a positive case for Scotland remaining in the UK.“
(Sunday Mail interview with former Chancellor of the Exchequer, January 2012)

“Questions abound. How will the campaign be structured? Who will lead it? And can it develop a positive case for the United Kingdom?“
(David Torrance, commentator and biographer of Alex Salmond, January 2012)

“I have a positive vision for Scotland.“
(Johann Lamont, Scottish Labour leader, January 2012)

“Everyone wants to see positive arguments for the Union, and we will have these in spades.“
(Murdo Fraser, Conservative MSP, January 2012)

“I am not going to run a campaign that says Scotland cannot survive on its own. I am going to run a campaign — and others will run a campaign — about the advantages of being together. Let’s have a positive conversation, because I think the Union is a very positive thing.“
(David Cameron, UK Prime Minister, January 2012)

“There is a positive case for the Union.“
(Gerry Hassan, Scottish political commentator, January 2012)

“We are likely to see the likes of Labour’s Alistair Darling, the Liberal Democrats’ Charles Kennedy and the Tories’ Annabel Goldie playing leading roles in putting a positive case for the Union.“
(Leader in The Scotsman, January 2012)

“My ten tartan rules for success: 1. Make the positive case for the Union.“
(Peter Duncan, former Conservative MP for Galloway, January 2012)

Do we need to bother indicating to you, beloved and attentive readers, whether any of these fine people and publications went on to actually explain what this ever-elusive “positive case” might be? We suspect, all too sadly, that we do not.

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TIME ELAPSED: 31 years, 11 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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We're supposed to live in an age where politicians are trained to within an inch of their lives by media advisers, in order that they can spout bland pre-programmed soundbites about any given subject at a second's notice. (With the infamous nadir of the phenomenon being represented by Ed Miliband's toe-curling broken-robot impression at the time of the public-sector strikes.) So perhaps we should be happy on the rare occasions when we discover a couple of elected representatives still willing to appear like clueless idiots in front of the public.

First came a few comments in the Scotsman from the leader of the SNP group on Glasgow City Council, Alison Hunter. With the SNP hoping to take control of the Labour stronghold this May – or at least deprive Labour of its majority – she was asked which policies she would seek to implement if her party pulled off such a titanic feat. Hunter's scarcely-believable and less-than-inspiring response was "I haven’t thought about that yet. Actually, I’m not an out-there leader. I’m a team leader. So we haven’t actually thought about that yet."

Before you ask, we have no idea what the difference between an "out-there leader" and a "team leader" is either, and we imagine Ms Hunter will soon be leaving SNP HQ with a well-skelped erse and a disinclination to say anything quite so stupid out loud ever again. In her defence, however, we suppose we could offer up the fact that she's highly unlikely to ever have to consider such a scenario – with Labour currently holding 45 seats (out of 79) to the SNP's 22, even denying Labour a majority in Glasgow this time round would be a huge and significant achievement for the Nats. Winning outright or even plurality control this year is surely beyond its reach.

We're not sure what Johann Lamont's excuse is, though.

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You can’t heave a brick into the Scottish political media and blogosphere without hitting half-a-dozen Labour MPs, MSPs or activists all claiming that they belong to “the party of devolution“. This self-awarded title is based on the premise that Labour “gave” Scotland the limited degree of home rule it currently enjoys. It’s a premise of dubious merit – given that it was the Scottish electorate which actually made it happen by voting for it – but let’s be generous for a moment and treat it as truth.

Labour also regularly claims ownership of the phrase “devolution is a process, not an event” – although despite it being commonly attributed to Donald Dewar (whom the party self-aggrandisingly dubbed the “Father Of The Nation” in much the same way that Michael Jackson presumptuously crowned himself “King Of Pop”), the term was in fact coined by the former Welsh Secretary, the pre-disgrace Ron Davies.

So how can it be that Labour is suddenly so desperate to disown and deny the thing it claims so proudly to have invented? Because the party’s extraordinary outbreak of poisonous hostility towards devolution as an ongoing process – in the shape of its advanced forms, so-called “devo plus” or “devo max” – since the SNP won a majority in the Scottish Parliament can only be interpreted, on any sort of remotely rational examination, as a complete reversal of its entire ideology on the subject. But why?

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We've been super-busy, so here's a very quick pointer at some of the best recent stories you might not have spotted in the current avalanche of independence coverage (not least because both of the country's leading papers have websites with simply abysmal search facilities). First and best is this tremendously good piece by Anthony Barnett over on Our Kingdoms, while behind the Herald's paywall lurks a triple whammy of excellent columns from Iain Macwhirter (one which is literally impossible to access from the mobile version of the paper's website), Ian Bell (who's on fire at the moment) and an uncredited editorial.

Scotland on Sunday drops a bomb from David Cameron which we'll be looking at in more depth very shortly, and raises its recent game somewhat with strong articles from Duncan Hamilton and an unusually even-handed Eddie Barnes, as well as a surprise leader supporting the SNP's call for 16/17-year-olds to vote in the referendum.

Hindsight provides comedy as a Telegraph piece on the referendum question is horribly overtaken by events rendering its commentary idiotic, while Gerry Hassan talks a lot more sense on the nature of the Yes and No camps, a view echoed more concisely by the increasingly-unmissable Alex Massie in the Spectator.

When you're done with digesting all that lot, we'll have something new of our own ready for you in the morning.