The Scottish media’s response to Friday’s launch of the Yes Scotland campaign in an Edinburgh cinema has been, as you might expect, extensive and varied.
Some of the coverage was dismayingly predictable, some of it rather more surprising.
If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you could be forgiven for thinking that the “positive case for the Union” was some sort of mythical beast, akin to the fabled unicorn. But that’s not quite the case. It did once exist, many moons ago, but has since become extinct – a victim of an ever-changing world where it was unable to compete and it couldn’t adapt to its new environment, thereby spelling its doom.
So just what was the positive case when it existed? Let’s find out.
It was very pleasant to see Lou Hickey and Dougie MacLean performing “Caledonia” at the Yes Scotland launch – it’s a nice enough tune, if a bit mopey, and “Flower Of Scotland” has been somewhat ruined for us as a national song by years of appallingly murdered, out-of-time renditions at Murrayfield and, especially, Hampden.
(We liked the brief period when The Three McTenors or something did a speeded-up rendition at the football, which was nicely modern and left less room for the crowd to balls it up in – for some reason football fans can’t grasp the concept of a pause – but the SFA with their trademark ineptitude soon abandoned it in favour of Ronnie Corrie barking it out in his Hielan’-wedding get-up again. We also approve of the SRU’s practice of making the band stop for verse two and leaving it to the crowd alone, but why not just count them in and then let them sing unaccompanied from the start?)
We can’t help feeling, though, that music is a bit of a weak spot generally for the Scottish nationalist movement – still basically mired in the misty-blue-hills-of-Tiree era, where Runrig are seen as modernist hep-cats and the SNP’s official song is a 1962 blues tune best known by the staggeringly inappropriate title of “Let’s Stick Together”.
Had it been up to us, the Yes launch would have seen Glasgow’s own Primal Scream stood in front of a giant backdrop of Gordon “British jobs for British workers“ Brown and pummelling out an apocalyptic rendition of “Swastika Eyes“, but we get that that might not have mainstream appeal. Anyway, the point is, it’s time to think positive.
We need to clone ourselves – there’s so much going on today we can’t possibly cover it all. The official launch of the Yes Scotland campaign was better than we expected, with particularly good contributions from Tommy Brennan, Dennis Canavan and a showstopping closing speech from Brian Cox all highlighting the broad base of support for independence – Alex Salmond was the only SNP politician on show, taking up just a couple of minutes of the hour-long presentation.
Online Labour activists were particularly keen to vilify Cox, unleashing a deluge of bitter attacks which succeeded only in drawing attention to how desperately the party wants to silence the 20% or so of Labour voters who actually back independence.
In an attempt to spoil the media coverage, the nascent No campaign chose the eve of the launch to release a YouGov poll they’d commissioned, with a headline figure of 33% in favour of independence and 57% against. Curiously, though – and little reported by the media – the poll didn’t ask the actual question that’s likely to be on the ballot paper, choosing instead the comparatively tortuous “Do you agree Scotland should become a country independent of the rest of the UK?”
Creating such an obvious hostage to fortune is a clumsy and guileless piece of work – especially given the enormous public fuss the Unionists have made about the precise wording and the possibility of bias therein – but the anti-independence parties presumably knew the media could largely be relied on to focus solely on the numbers and not mention what the actual question was.
Our favourite thing today, though, was an extraordinary outburst from Labour MSP Kezia Dugdale, who apparently wants the word “Yes” itself to be outlawed in the years running up to the referendum. On first reading of the piece we thought it was just a complaint that a democratically-elected government was daring to actively pursue the policies it had been elected on, but in fact it’s even nuttier than that – the leaflet and website Dugdale is objecting to isn’t actually anything to do with independence at all, but merely promoting a positive, “can-do” approach to Scottish enterprise.
To Labour, of course, promoting jobs and the Scottish economy is simply despicable populist cheating on the part of the Scottish Government – worse still when, in the immortal words of George Foulkes, the SNP are doing it deliberately. As Labour cling ever more tightly to negativity, as Ms Dugdale herself says: expect more of this.
The official launch of the Yes campaign for the independence referendum takes place tomorrow. We imagine it’ll be a substantial and considered affair. But what it will amount to over the next two years is nothing more and nothing less than the image below. Obviously we can’t do art for toffee, but you get the general idea.
We’ve gone on at some length on this blog (and elsewhere) about how the referendum isn’t for deciding whether Scotland is a republic or a monarchy, whether we’re in or out of NATO/the EU, whether we use the Euro or the Pound or something else entirely, how many ships we need in our navy, which taxes we’ll raise and/or cut, or any of the rest of it. The purpose of the referendum is to decide one thing and one thing only: who elects the future governments of Scotland.
The five counties of South-East England (Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Essex and Greater London) are home to just under 14 million people, compared to the fractionally over 5 million of Scotland. Even if we take Greater London out of the equation, the other four still add up to a population a million higher than Scotland’s.
Those four counties voted so overwhelmingly Conservative in the 2010 general election that they returned 62 Tory MPs from 66 seats – enough Tories alone to outvote the entire bloc of Scottish MPs of all parties (which will soon be even smaller, falling from 59 to just 52). Greater London, despite its large concentration of extremely poor urban areas, still returned another 28 Tories, along with 38 Labour and 7 Lib Dems.
So in the South-East as a whole, even including the huge relative Labour stronghold of London, that’s 90 Tories to 38 Labour, plus 11 others – an overwhelming majority of almost two to one even if you count everyone else as anti-Tory. (If you count the Lib Dems alongside their coalition partners, it’s an even more terrifying 100 to 39.)
But really, the picture tells the story for itself. A small, overwhelmingly Tory corner of England vastly outmuscles the whole of Scotland when it comes to deciding the UK government. (The dark shaded area supplies almost a quarter of all the MPs in the Commons.) We can either face the reality that we get whatever government Kent and Sussex and Essex and Surrey want, or we can choose our own. However much the desperate Unionists try to muddy the waters, it really is as simple as that.
A curious phenomenon occurs when debating the issues of independence with those of the Labour party – one that was highlighted again in the debate published on this site last week. Labour constantly repeats the mantra of being “stronger together” and asserts that the SNP only cares about a poor child in Glasgow but not about a poor child in Bradford, citing this as a reason to maintain the Union.
(Quite why the Scottish National Party would ever be expected to concern itself with the sovereign affairs of England is a question we’ll leave for another day.)
The “solidarity” narrative insists that both issues must be tackled at the same time, and that it would be unfair to focus on only one of the children while failing to provide the same attention and resources to the other. In order to show solidarity, the fate of both children must be tied to that of the worst-off, and if the fortunes of both cannot be improved then neither should be.
(For some reason this narrative doesn’t usually extend to covering children from Istanbul or Delhi. There’s no discernible intent among Labour activists to create a European superstate so that all deprivation can be addressed simultaneously. The party appears to apply double standards for the UK and the rest of the world, only serving to highlight its British-nationalist ethos rather than any commitment to a global brotherhood of man.)
By way of illustration, imagine that (Heaven forbid) you find yourself in a lifeboat in the immediate aftermath of some terrible maritime disaster, and there are two groups of children in the water. The lifeboat can only accommodate one of the groups, and so a decision must be made which to save. At present the boat is captained by the SNP, who are intent on plucking the nearest of the two groups from the ocean and moving them to safety. Within the lifeboat, however, there are also Labour politicians who insist that as they cannot save all the children, it would be selfish and unfair to save only a few, and that therefore in order to show “solidarity” the lifeboat should pick up no children at all, leaving all to drown or succumb to hypothermia, comforted only by the identical fate of their companions.
Below is an open letter released today by the 42 signatories identified at the bottom. Wings Over Scotland endorses its contents, and urges its readers to republish and propagate the text as widely as possible by all available means.
Abdelbaset al-Megrahi has now died without having been able to clear his name of the destruction of Pan Am flight 103 on the 21st of December 1988 during his lifetime. Now all those politicians and Megrahi-guilt apologists who regard compassion as being a weakling’s alternative to vengeance, who boast of their skills at remote medical diagnosis, and who persistently refuse to address the uncomfortable facts of the case, will doubtless fall silent. Finally, the ‘evil terrorist’ has been called to account for himself before a ‘higher power’.
As huge crowds of primitive villagers turn out to marvel at some fire this weekend, here’s some old-fashioned journalism to ponder. Click the image to read the article.
Enjoy the torch (possibly the last spectacle invented by Adolf Hitler to still be regularly performed and celebrated), and the two weeks of the Games while they last. Try not to get sick, in either sense of the term. Try not to be alarmed if anyone sticks a missile battery on your roof (and slaps an eviction order on you for making a fuss about it or for just not being lucrative enough), or a sonic cannon, or by the bored police with machine guns hanging around your train station waiting to shoot anyone who tries to protest or take an unlicenced beverage or snack into one of the state-of-the-art stadia.
Enjoy all the top events (on telly, unless you’re a corporate sponsor), and as Boris Johnson gallivants around turning them into a giant Tory showpiece, take a moment out to give thanks to Tony Blair and the rest of Labour for making it all possible (with our money, of course) for him. Who needs hospitals and schools anyway?
It’s been a while since our first Straight Debate and we’d hoped to have had more by now, but it’s surprising how many Unionists (nearly all of them) aren’t prepared to have a simple and open discussion. Duncan Hothersall, though, is one of the most prominent and hardcore online Labour activists in Scotland. We’d been badgering him to take up the cudgels for ages, and last week he finally agreed. This is how it went.
As part of our continuing look at the people who haven’t yet their minds up about independence, we’re delighted to present this piece by Sue Lyons. If you’re a “Don’t know” too, we’d love to hear from you – why not drop us a line?
I am a mum and a wife. In point of fact, I’m an English wife married to a Scottish husband, with three English children from my first marriage and two Scottish children from my current marriage. Why would I even bother to mention that at all, you might wonder – surely it doesn’t matter where my children were born, surely I love them just the same? And you would be right.
What makes it worth mentioning is that my husband is a Scottish nationalist. In fact, he’s such a Scottish nationalist that were the UK government to say tomorrow “You can have independence for Scotland but you have to pay for it yourself”, he would say, “Where do I sign?”
He describes himself as “rabid” and he’s absolutely right – if you cut off his leg he would have a saltire running through it like a stick of rock (but not Blackpool rock, because that’s in England). Not for him the sitting on the fence that others might do, not for him the idea that you can vote for the SNP and yet still be undecided on independence. John is for an independent Scotland completely and absolutely. That sometimes causes fun and games in our own personal Union – our home.
An unexpected development!
Would anyone like to help them out with some suggestions?
We mean Bing Hitler, of course. The First Minister recently gave a special interview to The Late Late Show in the US, which was broadcast last night, in which he warmly and repeatedly praises Mr Hitler – or if we’re being strictly accurate his alter-ego, the show’s Scottish presenter Craig Ferguson – at around the two-minute mark. (And in fairness, Labour actually haven’t found a way to be furious about it yet as far as we know, but as sure as night follows day they will soon. Probably the usual torn-faced bleating about the FM having the temerity to gallivant around on telly when he could be out personally filling in potholes in Pollokshields or something.)
Anyway, Wings over Scotland is proud to present the world-exclusive first UK airing, extracted from the complete show by our own fair hands:
It’s actually a pretty interesting and intelligent interview by chat-show standards (and especially considering the normally irreverent tone of TLLS), and was preceded by a nice piece about the Declaration Of Arbroath, which is discussed throughout. Sadly, though, we couldn’t possibly condone the flagrant breaching of copyright by giving you a link to download the (excellent) entire episode, or we’d be extradited and put in jail forever. Thanks for THAT ace bit of modern progressive lawmaking, Labour!
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
