Wings Over Scotland

When you hear an organisation is “linked to the Taxpayers’ Alliance”, you don’t build your hopes up too high. The TPA are a bunch of Tea Party-esque loons at the best of times, and the phrase suggests some sort of renegade splinter group too crazy even for that particular nut-house. We’re probably still just about entitled to expect fractionally higher standards from the Telegraph, though.

We were directed to this piece yesterday by a Labour source who really ought to know better, and who was citing it as conclusive proof that an independent Scotland’s economy would be crippled by debt repayments. (Our source later admitted to not actually having read the article before linking to it, which perhaps tells you something about the quality of debate one tends to get from Unionists.)

That anyone at the Telegraph, a once-respectable newspaper, actually thought this rubbish was worth putting its name to may be even more instructive as to how desperate the FUD camp is for scare stories which might frighten Scots away from independence. You can scour the “story” all day looking for how it arrived at the headline figure, or trying to piece it together yourself from the random fragments of made-up “data” scattered through the text (a spurious £9bn here, an invented £7.5bn there, a pulled-from-thin-air 30% somewhere else), but you’ll be out of luck.

If in occasional moments of weakness over the next two and a half years you doubt our chances of success, glance back at this and see just how afraid of us they are.

First Minister's Questions is rarely a hugely edifying spectacle, but this blog could barely watch to the end of yesterday's proceedings. Labour's leader exhibited a heady mix of ignorance and xenophobia, while the FM's Conservative counterpart opted for a barely-believable combination of direct personal abuse (which could truthfully be paraphrased as "You're fat, ha ha!") and petty timewasting. If we tell you, dear readers, that Willie Rennie took on the role of the calm, intelligent voice of reason (with a dull but substantive question about freedom-of-information laws), you'll perhaps grasp the full degree to which the other two opposition leaders lost the plot.

It was one of the rowdiest FMQs in recent memory, with the Presiding Officer forced to repeatedly call for order, specifically warn Labour's Jackie Baillie to behave herself, and on one occasion even resort to a sharp bang of her gavel in order to silence the cacophanous hooting and jeering coming from – mostly – the opposition benches. The First Minister himself looked dismayed, surprised and somewhat ashamed at the picture of Scotland's political elite being portrayed to the world, and it would be hard for any impartial observer to disagree with his judgement.

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(See here for the whole story.)

Like most people, we don’t pay a lot of attention to anything the Scottish Lib Dems say these days. But we always enjoy the reliably-petulant blusterings of their Nat-hating former leader Tavish Scott, if only because they never fail to bring to mind this picture from election night in May 2011. So we were sure to click on his column in today’s Scotsman, and thereby joined the tiny elite group who got to see these words:

“There is a desperate need to say why Scotland is better, stronger and more united as part of the UK. Make the case. Get the pro-Scotland in the UK side on the pitch and let battle commence.“

Now, we’re pretty sure Tavish is on that side. So we’re a little mystified as to why he didn’t just go ahead and make said case himself, rather than demanding that his team-mates did it. (Appropriately to his analogy, it’s a bit like the current Scotland rugby squad – nobody seems to want to take on the responsibility of picking the ball up and heading for the try-line, because they don’t appear to believe they can do it.)

Maybe he forgot, or a sub-editor deleted it by mistake, or perhaps he’d used up all his word count wittering on about Rembrandt and Canoletto to no obvious purpose for the first half of the article. We don’t know. All we know is, we’re still waiting.

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TIME ELAPSED: 32 years, 0 months
ACTUAL SIGHTINGS OF POSITIVE CASE FOR UNION TO DATE: 0
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Credit to the Scotsman’s Eddie Barnes for finding this tremendous pic, which seems to have undeservedly escaped the attentions of a wider audience. On the left, we have the Scottish Sunday Express front page from 29th January 2012. On the right, the Scottish Daily Express front page from the following Tuesday, 31st January 2012.

Looks like the timing of the referendum will be even more crucial than we thought.

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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