Wings Over Scotland

Can anyone help reconcile these two facts for us?

“Seventy-one per cent of people trust the Scottish Government to act in Scotland’s best interests (up from 61 per cent in 2010), compared to just 18 per cent who trust the UK Government (down from 35 per cent in 2007).“

“The number of people prepared to support Scottish independence is falling substantially, new polling suggests. A Mori Scotland poll found just 35% said they would vote ‘yes’ to independence north of the border, compared to 55% saying ‘no’.“

It’s not a rhetorical question. We don’t get it.

After last weekend’s bizarre time-travelling “exclusive”, this weekend’s Sunday Herald has thrown up another little curiosity. A story in the lead section of the paper’s website today trumpets the latest positive argument from the Unionist camp – that mortgage rates will soar in an independent Scotland, as alleged by Danny Alexander.

The piece, penned by Tom Gordon, is headlined accordingly – “Alexander claims: yes to independence could mean mortgage rise”. What’s interesting, though, is a little piece of text that seems to have been left in by accident at the bottom of the page.

It appears to be a discarded alternative headline for the same article, given that the fourth paragraph cites “the SNP Government” dismissing Alexander’s claims as scare stories. (We did check by Googling to see if the headline had appeared on a completely different Herald piece, but turned up nothing.)

It’s quite instructive to see the paper’s thought processes laid bare. “Scottish Government Slam Scare Tactics” is a positive message from the SNP’s point of view, as it would portray them standing up against Unionist fearmongering.

The headline used instead is the complete opposite – it actually IS Unionist fearmongering, designed to produce an instinctively frightened reaction in the reader, by planting in his/her mind the image of a crippling rise in the cost of living and associating it with a Yes vote (no matter what the feature then goes on to say).

We just thought we’d point it out.

For weeks now, if not months, the independence community has been bombarded with claims from Unionists that it’s not independence if you have a shared currency, cooperate on defence, keep the monarchy, share embassies or empower others to act on your behalf. There’s been a continuing drone to the effect that if you don’t do everything personally then you’re not independent.

This view, as any student of English will tell you, is flawed – doing everything for yourself is not independence, but rather self-reliance.

Self-reliance – Not requiring help or support from others while acting autonomously. Self-reliance is relative freedom from needing to rely on others for help with instrumental or task-oriented activities and is distinguished from independence as the latter is a pre-requisite to self-reliance and not predicated on its existence.

In other words, you need independence to act autonomously and to choose to be self-reliant, if you so wish. Yet it would seem, having watched various Unionist politicians and commentators struggle with the concept of independence, that it is necessary to provide a definition that can be easily understood. So I’ll have a go.

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Can you spot what’s strange about this statement, viewers?

“We believe that the process of setting a single question should be taken out of the hands of elected politicians and given to relevant experts the public can have faith in.”

It comes from the mouth of Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont, and forms part of her latest demand – along with her two partners in the Unionist coalition – that the Scottish Government should allow the defeated opposition parties to dictate the terms and conditions of the implementation of the flagship policy behind which it was so resoundingly and unprecedentedly elected a little over a year ago.

(Note in particular the sneaky way the overt demand also slips in a covert demand.)

We’re pretty sure that a general election is already, pretty much by definition, the primary means by which the public expresses who it does and doesn’t “have faith in”. We have, on the other hand, absolutely no way of knowing how much faith that same public does or doesn’t have in the ironically-unelected Electoral Commission, which is appointed by – who’d have guessed it? – the UK Parliament. And just by the by, below are a couple of other relevant snippets from the Commission’s Wikipedia entry:

“The Electoral Commission has a number of responsibilities in relation to referendums. These include:

• commenting on the wording of the referendum question (the government is responsible for proposing the wording)

The Commission has no legal position in the legislation concerning referendums proposed by the devolved Scottish and Welsh administrations.”

Our emphasis, there. So, and we admit this is just a crazy madcap idea we’re putting out there, maybe the business of government should properly be conducted by the people the electorate have democratically chosen to do the job, no?

And so the phoney war rumbles on and gathers pace. The ‘No’ campaign – or whatever it decides to refer to itself as – will be unveiled shortly and we’ve heard (with a certain sense of deja vu) that the SNP has been debating the relative merits of the words “independenT” and “independenCE”. We have independence and Unionist groups galore appearing on Facebook and the web, we’ve got Cybernats and Britnats, republicans and monarchists, hawks and pacifists and goodness knows what else.

In the meantime, I still have the bills to pay, the washing to dry in the incessant rain, the mundane monotony of the “what’s for dinner?” conversations. Today a friend’s daughter is having a baby, while another lady I know has lost her best friend. The neverending cycle of joy and tears, grief and laughter rolls on.

Politicians would do well to stop and think about this – that away from Parliaments ordinary people are still living their everyday lives, and when we occasionally get to lift our noses from the grindstone we might appreciate a little passion from our politicians, a little honesty, some better research, and an end to the sniping and spin that threatens to suffocate the independence debate.

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The current issue of Private Eye (which also features a fascinating full-page piece on Craig Whyte) relates news of another Labour dividend for the people of Glasgow – the decades-long neglect and imminent destruction of a much-loved green space. We’ve attached the story below for your convenience.

On the upside, though, we’re pretty sure we know where another large green space, which already comes with goalposts, is about to become available.

To be honest, on the evidence we’ve seen on the rare occasions when Labour lets its Scottish “leader” speak to the public, we’ve been left with the impression that it doesn’t take all that much to confuse her. At the weekly joust of First Minister’s Questions, Johann Lamont is frequently exposed as unable to adapt her script to Alex Salmond’s replies, often leaving her haplessly repeating the question that’s just been answered.

Even in that context, though, the quote attributed to her in today’s Daily Record in regard of the latest referendum poll is a dismaying one for anyone concerned about the standard of Scottish political debate. With the stage set by an earlier quote from a “source” in the No campaign flatly asserting that the reason for the drop in support for independence was “There is just too much uncertainty – over jobs, defence, even the currency – everything, basically”, Lamont gallumphed in with her 2p’s-worth:

“This shows that the more people hear the arguments, the more they see through the absurdities of Alex Salmond’s case for separation”

Hang on. Is it because people ARE hearing the arguments and being convinced against independence by them, or is it because there’s “too much uncertainty” and people just don’t know where they stand, so they’re erring on the side of caution? We’re reasonably sure it can’t be both, and look forward to “Better Together” getting its story straight. We have a sinking feeling that might not be any time soon, though.

An Ipsos-MORI poll in this morning’s Times has shown a small decrease in support for independence, with figures among those certain to vote running at 35% Yes (down 4%) to 55% No (up 5%). The poll was the first full-sample one conducted in several months, and asked respondents the Scottish Government’s favoured question, so it’s a sound enough survey, and the headline figures clearly aren’t great for nationalists.

What’s odd, though, is that most commentators seem to be treating it as evidence of a fundamental shift in the direction of opinion. The reality is that at this moment in time, these numbers are something close to miraculously good for the Yes camp.

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We think our brains may have been completely fused by a story in today’s Daily Record, which is based around comments by Rutherglen Labour MSP James Kelly, pictured below in a scene from the particularly bad acid headache he’s just given us.

Here’s the bit that’s been making our minds spin round and round and round in circles this morning until we’re dizzy trying to make sense of it:

“ALEX Salmond was accused of “double standards” yesterday over his efforts to woo Rupert Murdoch. Labour raised further questions about the First Minister’s links with Murdoch following claims the media mogul lobbied Tony Blair to wage war in Iraq.

Former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said in the latest volume of his memoirs that Blair “took a call from Murdoch who was pressing on timings, saying how News International would support us, etc”.

Salmond won plaudits across Scotland for his outspoken opposition to the war which he described as “the most disastrous foreign policy decision of recent times”. But it did not stop him from trying to get closer to Murdoch to win The Sun newspaper’s backing for the SNP.

Labour MSP and chief whip James Kelly said: “This could make the conversation a little uncomfortable the next time Alex Salmond has Rupert Murdoch round to Bute House for tea and biscuits. Alex Salmond was against the Iraq war but that didn’t stop him cosying up to Rupert Murdoch. This is classic double standards from Alex Salmond who is prepared to put his party’s interests ahead of any issue.””

Let’s try to talk our way through this slowly: LABOUR is attacking the SNP for not being sufficiently critical of RUPERT MURDOCH when he backed LABOUR Prime Minister TONY BLAIR over going to war in IRAQ in 2003? What, seriously?

That can’t really be it, can it? Labour, who instigated the illegal war that left hundreds of thousands dead, attacking an opposition party who voted against that war (and which actually tried to impeach Blair for it) for not being critical enough of a newspaper proprietor whose papers enthusiastically backed Labour at the time and who made Tony Blair godfather to one of his children, because when subsequently in government it had a couple of meetings with that newspaper proprietor (also one of Scotland’s largest private-sector employers) the best part of a decade later?

Are we dreaming this stuff? Please tell us we’re dreaming it.

We were intrigued by a piece we read on the Sunday Mail’s website today. It centred on last Thursday’s session of First Minister’s Questions, when Labour MSP Michael McMahon used (rather improperly) a constituency question to make a political attack on Alex Salmond. The FM slapped the question down, angrily noting that McMahon’s allegation about Salmond calling HMRC on behalf of Sir David Murray with regard to Rangers was categorically untrue, and later issuing a statement pointing out that his only call to HMRC came eight months AFTER Murray sold the club to Craig Whyte.

In the Mail’s story McMahon’s subsequent posture was full of bravado, insisting that he wasn’t about to apologise. “I stand by my comments and Alex Salmond knows they are true, as his response showed how much the truth gets under his skin”, he retorted, but what he said next demonstrated an admirably bold and inventive redefinition of the term “standing by my comments”. See if you can spot the difference.

FIRST MINISTER’S QUESTIONS VERSION:

“The First Minister was quick to call HMRC for his friend Sir David Murray“

“I STAND BY MY COMMENTS” VERSION:

“The First Minister has shown in the past that he is happy to come running to the aid of his bigwig friends when they are in trouble. For example, the way he tried to pressurise HMRC to apply special treatment in the wake of the damage caused to Rangers by his pal Sir David Murray.”

Keen students of the English language may have spotted a subtle alteration there. In the first version, Salmond was allegedly trying to use his influence for the benefit of Sir David Murray personally, on account of their supposed close friendship. In the second, the First Minister was allegedly trying to assist Rangers Football Club, owned by Craig Whyte, to recover from damage CAUSED BY Sir David Murray.

(This would presumably imply that Salmond was also a friend of Craig Whyte, an assertion which must be sailing fairly close to defamation in the current climate. And since Murray has repeatedly publicly claimed that both he and Rangers were “duped by” Whyte, it’s rather stretching the bounds of plausibility to imagine that Salmond could have been helping Whyte at Murray’s behest or on his behalf.)

Wings Over Scotland would like to applaud Michael McMahon for his bold and courageous refusal to back down on this issue, and that furthermore we’re standing by those comments when we point out that in fact he’s a contemptible liar who even lies about his lies in an impressive illustration of the fine art of meta-lying, in order to cover up what was in reality a weasel-worded and entirely craven retraction of them. And you can, or possibly can’t, quote us on that.

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From this morning’s Telegraph: the Union option.

From this morning’s Sunday Herald: the independence option.

The Conservatives, Lib Dems and Labour back option 1. The pro-independence parties (SNP, Greens, Socialists, Solidarity) all back option 2. It’s up to you.