Wings Over Scotland

Below is an extract from Rupert Murdoch's written witness statement to the Leveson Inquiry, specifically the entire section relating to his relationship with Alex Salmond. The first part (in bold) is the inquiry's request to Mr Murdoch, the second part is his response. The emphasis in the second part is ours. The text is otherwise unedited and unexpurgated. Compare to the Scottish media's spin and make your own judgements.

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Please describe the nature of your relationship with First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond. Please provide a list of all official and unofficial discussions and meetings with Mr Salmond, whether before or since his election to that office, indicating at whose initiative these meeings were called and a summary of the content of these discussions.

What Is the value of this relationship to you? To what extent is political support for any Individual, party or policy discussed in such Interactions? Specifically, please give an account of your titles’ editorial stance to the Issue of Scottish devolution and Independence, and the part you expect your titles, and your interectlons [sic] with Mr Salmond, to play in the run-up to the current planned referendum on Scottish Independence.

You should explain in your answers the extent to which your interactions with Mr Salmond are similar to or different from your Interactions with other senior politicians on this Issue, Including the First Minister of Wales, and the First Minister and Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland.

112 Mr Salmond has a fine sense of humour and I enjoy speaking with him. I am interested in his exploration of independence for Scotland, although I question its practicality, and I have enjoyed discussing the subject with him. I also have discussed News Corporation’s investment in Scotland, a matter of interest to both of us. BSkyB Is one of the biggest private employers in Scotland. My calendars indicate that I have had about a half dozen calls or meetings with him over the last four years. I have attached as Exhibit KRM28 a list of the discussions and meetings requested by the Inquiry.

113 As for the ’value" of the relationship, I can say that I like Mr Salmond, I am interested in Scotland because I am half-Scottish. I am interested in the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment, and intrigued by the Idea of Scottish independence. The topics we have discussed include Scotland’s economy and possible NI investments in Scotland. He has not explicitly asked me for the political support of Nl’s titles and we have not discussed any such support, but of course Mr Salmond is a politician.

114 I am informed that the stance of NI titles on the issue of Scottish devolution and independence to date has been as follows:

(a) The Scottish Sun, the leading newspaper in Scotland, has backed Labour (2007) and SNP (2011), while not supporting independence. It is neutral on Scottish independence.

(b) The Sunday Times supports greater fiscal autonomy but not independence.

(c) The Times has been supportive of devolution but leans against Scottish independence.

115 I do not know what, if any, part the NI titles will play in the run-up to the current planned referendum on Scottish independence in autumn 2014. I have no doubt all three titles will report upon the referendum and will publish thoughtful and interesting commentary on it.

116 I have no relationship with the First Minister of Wales and the First Minister of Northern Ireland, perhaps because I simply have not had the pleasure of meeting them.

The following is a transcript of an interview broadcast on last night’s Newsnight Scotland, between the BBC’s presenter Glenn Campbell, the Labour MSP Jenny Marra and SNP MSP Linda Fabiani.

GLENN CAMPBELL: What, Linda Fabiani, would be a “win” in the referendum that you hope to have? What’s a majority?

LINDA FABIANI: I think it’s quite clear: 50% is what we always look at for that bridge over into a majority, so it’s quite clear – those who vote, if you’re over 50% that’s a majority.

GLENN CAMPBELL: Even if that’s a minority of those entitled to vote, a minority of the Scottish people?

LF: Well, when you start talking round these things you’re back in the realm of 1979, when Scotland was stymied and then it was 20 years down the line before we got anything. So I think it’s very plain, very straightforward in a transparent process – as the referendum was carried out for devolution in 1999.

GC: If 50%+1, Jenny Marra, say yes to independence, is that enough in your view to end the Union? A simple majority?

JENNY MARRA: Well, I think we need to have, I think the real message of Angus Robertson’s visit to Canada, is that the process points of this referendum are critically important. The question is important, whether there’s one question or two, the size of the majority, the clear majority. [Our emphasis.] Now these have been written into Canadian legislation but they’re still not clear and the issue of independence just rumbles on and on and on in Quebec. This is something we don’t want in Scotland – we want a clear and decisive result, and then we can move on with the priorities of our country that [end of sentence indistinct].

GC: Okay, but can you spell it out? Because the Clarity Act in Canada doesn’t actually spell out what a clear question or a clear majority is, but we do know that a narrow win for the federalists last time around has not settled the question. So when it comes to the Scottish referendum, is 50% plus 1 enough to end the Union?

JM: Well, Glenn, that’s not a decision for me, Jenny Marra, to-

GC: What’s your VIEW?

JM: That is a decision for – well, we need to represent the views of the Scottish people and what THEY would want as a clear majority, so we need –

GC: And what do you think, what do you think that would be?

JM:  – we need to have that discussion with all civic society in Scotland and we all need to come to a consensus on what the process points of this referendum will be, and only once we’ve had that discussion will we then be in a position to move forward.

GC: Would you agree, Linda Fabiani, that if the result IS that slim it’ll certainly open the result to question, in the way that perhaps it has when the federalists won in Quebec?

LF: No, I think there should be a clear agreement amongst all parties that we judge this the way we judged the referendum in 1999, the way that people think of a majority. It should be clear, it should be straightforward, that’s what we want.

GC: Linda Fabiani, Jenny Marra, thanks both very much indeed for coming in.

So that’s pretty unequivocal. As far as Linda Fabiani’s concerned, the normal rules of arithmetic apply – the side that gets the most votes wins. 50%+1 was good enough for the 2011 AV referendum, good enough for the Common Market referendum in 1975, good enough for the 1973 Northern Ireland sovereignty referendum and good enough for the 1999 Scottish devolution referendum, so it’s good enough for independence.

Jenny Marra’s position, on the other hand, is rather more concerning. Asked directly three times by Campbell, she declined three times to answer whether a simple majority would be accepted by Labour as a win for the Yes camp, and refused to even express a personal opinion, inevitably raising the prospect that the Unionist parties might try once again to pull a fast one as they so infamously did in 1979, putting effectively impossible obstacles in the way of the Yes campaign.

The whole idea is, of course, a non-starter. We feel confident in saying that Alex Salmond would sooner move the UK’s Trident submarines to the stream at the bottom of his garden than be party to a 1979-style stitch-up. So what can Labour possibly hope to gain from refusing to concede even the most basic of mathematical realities?

Can they conceivably be hoping to manoeuvre themselves into a position whereby accepting that the side with most votes is the winner is considered some sort of compromise on their part, to be used as a bargaining chip? Frankly we think they’d get extremely short shrift on that one. And as a ploy to try to force the SNP to withdraw/boycott the referendum it’s a bit too transparent.

The only thing that makes any kind of sense is that the party is positioning itself on the premise that it might win the UK general election in 2015, and – unthinkable as it sounds – is accordingly preparing the ground to give itself some sort of basis on which to obstruct the process of dissolution, or even outright reject a narrow victory for independence, should they be in government at Westminster when the negotiations with the Scottish Government would be taking place.

If you’ve got any more convincing ideas for Labour refusing to publicly acknowledge that 51 is more than 49, do share them with the class.

May 2011 saw an earth-shaking event redefine Scottish and UK politics, when the sheer scale of the SNP victory over its opponents caught everyone – including the SNP – off guard. The shock of the Unionist parties, though, was plainest to see. Lacking a coherent response to an unforseen event they were paralysed into inaction (by a combination of disbelief, delusion and sheer terror at the prospect of Scots finally being given an unrestricted say in their constitutional future) as rigidly as a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car. 

The issue for the UK parties was that at first they simply couldn't comprehend the radically different new playing field they found themselves operating on. The result was an initial reflexive reaction of poorly thought-out attacks, smears and scaremongering that were easily dismantled by both independence supporters (most famously in 2011's hugely popular "#NewScareStoryLatest" Twitter hashtag) and neutral observers.

It's the nationalists' good fortune that the anti-independence parties have taken until a mere two weeks before the local-government elections to begin to formulate a more useful response. The easy ride of obviously-ludicrous scare stories, conflicting messages and sheer shambolic ineptitude is finally, perhaps, drawing to a close.

While we can still expect to see plenty examples of the former tactics, the Unionists are no longer a rabbit in headlights. Rather, as they begin to focus their efforts with some faltering semblance of competence, we're seeing at least some signs of them turning into the symbol of Britishness they most cherish – the lion.

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This site was originally supposed to be quite a low-maintenance affair, planned to mostly link to interesting stories from other places. So much for THAT theory. But for old time's sake (and because we've got some paperwork to do today), let's round up a few worthwhile pieces that might have escaped your attention lately, especially if you don't keep an eye on our Twitter feed for some inexplicable and frankly rude reason.

Promising fairly-new blog A Sair Fecht offered up this impassioned plea to Labour and Liberal Democrat voters (in particular), which could probably have done without the word "fascism" but is otherwise a terrific piece of heartfelt commentary that couldn't be further away from the media myth of the "cybernat". While over on the other side of the fence, hardcore Labour activist Duncan Hothersall (who we're currently trying to tempt into a Straight Debate) broke a long blogging silence with a very honourable call for more decent discourse, which we hope he'll put into action here.

In the professional media we enjoyed Alain Massie's thoughtful appraisal for the Scotsman of Labour's chances in the Scottish local elections next month and his long-term analysis of how the party found itself in its current state in Scotland, while we were entertained in a very different way by trying to work out the exact shade of purple in Kevin McKenna's face as he embarked on a particularly bitter, vitriolic rant against the SNP in the Observer (yes, even by Kevin's high standards), perhaps as a result of his humiliation after the paper apologised for McKenna's lies in an utterly disgraceful piece about Jocky Wilson.

Away from party-political issues, Iain Macwhirter was also in good form in the Herald, spelling out the thing a great many people were thinking about the recent Elish Angiolini report on women's prisons but were afraid to say for fear of being immediately denounced as a vile misogynist by the increasingly militant fundamentalist-feminist (femdamentalist? fundafeminist?) camp. And on the Rangers front there was an intriguing financial investigation of the club's immediate future by Paul McConville, arriving (by way of well-sourced study of the available facts) at the conclusion that one way or another there'll be no Rangers in Scottish football next season.

With luck we'll have time later for a closer look at yesterday's First Minister's Questions and the disturbing picture it paints of deterioration in the quality of Parliamentary debate, but that should be enough to keep you going for a while.

We're sure that Labour, the Tories, the Lib Dems and the Unionist media en masse will once again line up to say that this is all just another bit of harmless fun banter and the sour-faced Nats really need to learn to take a joke. Right?

It's an extraordinary piece by Daily Telegraph leader writer Robert Colvile, following on from comments made by a former chairman of Conservative Future and current UKIP councillor, Tom Bursnall, and up-and-coming UKIP starlet Alexandra Swann, in which they suggested taking the vote away from the unemployed. Colvile's twist on the idea is that low-value members of the electorate be allowed to have a vote, but that richer people should get an extra one for every £10,000 in tax they pay.

(We're touched by the charmingly naive notion that rich people actually pay tax, and also by the choice of figures, which would imply that people earning £50,000 are no better in Colvile's eyes than filthy dole scroungers.)

Colvile's definition of low-value voters is "the unemployed, feckless and Scottish (I'm sorry if that's tautologous)", meaning that if a person is Scottish then it probably goes without saying that they're also unemployed and feckless. (Despite the fact that Scottish unemployment is lower than the rest of the UK, and Scottish employment is higher.) Yeah, we know – our sides are splitting too.

(The Telegraph, incidentally, has form on this. As recently as last year it ran another piece from a different writer also suggesting the unemployed shouldn't be allowed to vote, followed by an endorsement from the paper's deputy editor. It seems to be an idea that's gathering support.)

We look forward to the next rib-tickler. But for God's sake nobody suggest that any of this is "anti-Scottish", okay? We can't help but feel the Unionists would somehow manage to turn it into a call for Joan McAlpine to be sacked again.

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[EDIT 1.44pm: We discuss this in the comments but should probably add something above the line too for the sake of clarity. As our headline suggests, Mr Colvile's defence will likely be that his piece is intended as satire, based on the 1729 Jonathan Swift tract "A Modest Proposal…" and signified by the similar title. The words "modest proposal" also appear in the Ian Cowie piece from 2011. However, even if Colvile and Cowie, and the Telegraph's deputy editor Benedict Brogan also in 2011, were ALL attempting to satirise the absurdity of the idea – something about which we have very serious doubts, given the Telegraph's political ideology and the repetition of the "joke", which hangs entirely on people getting a pretty obscure reference which in Cowie's case is buried deep in the text – it would be a stupid and irresponsible act. The reactions in the comments on all the pieces show that to many Telegraph readers the notion is, unsurprisingly, not at all ludicrous. At the very, very best, the Telegraph's writers are shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre for a laugh, over and over again.]

A double whammy of upbeat happy thoughts from the Huffington Post today:

Stick with the Union and there's almost no chance of Salmond burning Holyrood down!

…but vote for independence and you WILL die of cancer. We're just saying.

This blog likes to think it can give credit where credit's due, so we have to take our hats off to the British establishment this week. Westminster has clearly been playing a far longer game than any of us had previously imagined when it comes to the threat of Scottish independence, and it's more than just successive Labour and Tory administrations suppressing the explosive McCrone Report way back in the 1970s.

Because it seems that Westminster has spent the last four decades (and possibly the last three centuries) cunningly sabotaging Scotland from within, with the intention of creating a Doomsday scenario whereby if the Scots should ever look like voting for independence, the UK Government can reveal the lethal Sword of Damocles hanging by a thread over the country's economic prospects and terrify them back into line.

We have, of course, already been hilariously told that should an independent Scotland reject nuclear weapons, it would have to pay the multi-billion-pound costs of the rUK building replacement facilities to house them, despite the stunningly plain fact that as the sole property of the rUK, the Trident fleet would be entirely the rUK's problem. (And despite the fact that Scotland never asked for or wanted it in the first place.) The taxpayers of independent Scotland would also be likely to be left on the hook for billions more to decommission nuclear power stations built by Westminster.

But the latest outbreak of gunboat diplomacy from the Unionists is pointed menacingly at Scotland's very heart. The media is suddenly full of tales of a staggering £30bn bill to clean up the North Sea oil rigs when they finally stop production 30, 50 or 100 years from now, and apparently that invoice will be coming straight to Edinburgh too.

It's an odd notion, and one immediately undermined by the fact that despite the screaming headlines, the incomprehensibly vast sum wouldn't actually be an expense as such at all – it would supposedly take the form of tax relief to be offset against income tax receipts from the sale of the oil. Nevertheless, the can of worms opened up by this theory is almost infinitely deep.

The questions are numerous and obvious. Since the UK has been enjoying the benefits of the oil infrastructure for the last four decades and collecting 100% of the tax receipts, how could it possibly expect to get away without sharing the burden of the clean-up for a mess it created? How can you offset unknown future costs against present tax receipts anyway? What would be to stop an independent Scottish Government from simply changing its tax-relief rules 20 years from now? And most bafflingly of all, how in the world is it going to cost £30bn to shut down a few tiny outcrops of steel in a vast ocean in the first place?

There are a lot of oil rigs and related structures in UK waters – almost 500, in fact – but it's not like they're radioactive. They'll only be abandoned when there's no more oil (or very close to none) left to be pumped, so the risk of pollution would be negligible. They're hundreds of miles from shore anyway, and well away from shipping lanes. Even if they were to somehow explode they're not going to present any discernible danger to anything, and would burn out soon enough. To be blunt, given all the horrific other stuff we're doing to the environment anyway, what does it matter if we just pour concrete down the pipes, walk away and let them slowly rust into the sea?

We're being somewhat glib and simplistic, of course. But we can't for the life of us see how it could conceivably cost £60m+ to shut down each and every oil-industry installation – some of which are extremely small – in the North Sea. And there's a very good reason for that: it can't.

The Great Oil Clean-Up is just the latest in a long line of Unionist scaremongering myths. If you were to believe every piece of half-baked gibberish that's cropped up in the last 12 months alone, an independent Scotland would be crushed under a debt mountain beyond imagining. According to the London parties and the UK media, we'd be lumbered with £30bn in oil clean-up, a £140bn share of the UK deficit, perhaps £20bn to pay the rUK to move Trident, another few billion to build some defence forces from scratch, a few billion more for the nuclear power stations, £187bn in bailout money for the banks (because naturally we'd be responsible for the entire support of both banks, as they did have the word "Scotland" in their names), and of course the small matter of a whopping £1.5 trillion in liabilities for them as well.

That little lot, if we throw in a bit extra for inflation and all the other stuff that's bound to come up, comes to a kick up the kilt off £2 trillion – or for perspective, around 1,500% of Scotland's entire annual GDP. We would lead the world league table of proportional debt by a dizzyingly vast margin – the current runaway leader, Zimbabwe, has managed to rack up just 230%. (Even if we discounted the liabilities part of RBS and HBOS, cutting the total to around £500bn, we'd still be on about 400%.)

There are, clearly, two things we need to draw from these figures. Firstly, that they're complete cobblers. But secondly, if we were to imagine just for the fun of it that they were true, Scotland would be by far and away the poorest country on the face of the planet. And if that's what being in the Union for the last 300 years has brought us, you have to ask just how much worse a job of things we could possibly do by ourselves.

As we browsed the papers this morning, naturally our attention was captured by the implausible-sounding headline "Rennie Hails Breakthrough At Launch Of Poll Campaign". Coming the day after a YouGov poll suggested the Liberal Democrats had suffered the indignity of falling behind UKIP in nationwide voting intentions, we were intrigued at the notion of a positive turnaround in their fortunes.

The story wasn't quite as exciting as it sounded, referring as it did to a local-council by-election in Inverness that the Lib Dems had captured from Labour in November 2011 (quite why the Herald feels it to suddenly be front-page news in April 2012 we're not sure), beating the SNP by seven votes. But as we casually skimmed the piece we were startled into alertness by the revelation that the election had been brought about by the conviction of the previous Labour councillor for benefit fraud.

Attentive readers can't have failed to notice that the Unionist parties and media have been on something of a witch-hunt against the SNP recently, particularly the party's councillors and prospective councillors as – quite coincidentally, we're sure – crucial local-government elections loom.

The best-known example is of course that of MSP Bill Walker, which we've documented at some length before, and who has been the recipient of far more media and political opprobrium for violent crimes he's alleged to have committed 20 years ago as a private individual (but strenuously denies and has not been charged with, let alone found guilty) than Scottish Labour MP Eric Joyce, who pleaded guilty to a number of violent drunken assaults committed while a serving MP (indeed, committed in the House Of Commons) yet remains the elected representative of the people of Falkirk.

But we've also had the bizarre case of Lyall Duff, a man hounded out of the party under concerted and suspiciously-timed media pressure – most notably from the Telegraph, the Scotsman and the Herald – for some frank but fairly innocuous comments made weeks ago on a private Facebook page which appears to have been hacked in order to view them, leading to the curious situation where none of the newspapers involved have actually printed any images of Duff's alleged comments, citing possible legal issues.

(It's curious because if the information was obtained lawfully, there can be no possible grounds to fear publishing it. If Mr Duff expressed his views in public, they're fair game to reproduce. If he didn't, the newspapers concerned are guilty of intercepting someone's private communications, which is a criminal offence.)

Yesterday the Scotsman whipped up another smear about an SNP councillor, this time a non-story about a non-existent conflict of interest with a company in administration, and today the lead story – that's the lead story – in its Politics section is an absurd and hysterical piece based around an article openly written by an SNP MSP in a newsletter and illustrated with a picture of her, but which (in addition to spelling her name wrongly) attributes her academic history to the wrong university. This error leads the Scotsman to bewilderingly describe the entire newsletter as a "fake leaflet".

Earlier this month the same paper prominently reported some rather feeble allegations of "ballot-rigging" by SNP members (in an internal candidate-selection process), and also ran with a story of another SNP councillor who'd apologised for making a tasteless joke. Attentive readers will note that the media rarely fails to include the word "SNP" in the headlines of articles like the ones we've listed in this piece.

But oddly, even though it only happened a few months ago, we couldn't remember reading of any Labour councillor being convicted of benefit fraud, which seemed strange as you'd imagine it was a bigger story than a badly-subbed newsletter or some sour grapes from an unselected council candidate. So we got our Googling hats on.

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We’re probably all sick of the “Skintland” furore already. The sneering, condescending front cover of the Economist (coupled with a truly dreadful Photoshopped image of Alex Salmond inside which was oddly reminiscent of one on a campaign leaflet the Lib Dems had to apologise for and withdraw last year) achieved its aim of provocation, while the feature it purportedly advertised was an altogether more innoffensive beast, cobbling together some fairly bog-standard Unionist innuendo, supposition and misrepresentation amounting to nothing much that we haven’t heard a hundred times before, and which was excellently dismantled by Gerry Hassan.

The most interesting thing about the article was that it started with a preamble about the Darien Scheme, a 17th-century business venture which went horribly wrong and which anti-independence activists are very fond of bringing up as a stick to beat Scottish nationalists. This very week, for example, saw the publication (given much prominence by the Unionist media) of a report by Professor Malcolm Chalmers on the future of Scottish defence, in which the learned academic also felt it bafflingly necessary to cite the three-centuries-old events of the Darien adventure.

The Chalmers report was noteworthy not just for its politically-motivated conclusions, but also the emotive language and narrative of British nationalism running through it. We’ll deal with the report itself in more detail soon, but for this weekend’s in-depth feature we’re going to look at the theme of BritNat mythology, and in particular the re-writing of the story of the Darien Scheme to that end. Trust me, it’ll be fun.

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Picture special!

We were going to write about something else today, but we have a touch of the flu and we're not quite up to a hefty post. As we bravely ploughed through some research, though, we stumbled across another example of something we've noted before on this blog – Labour's curious (some might say outright untruthful) habit of presenting the SNP's position on things as the precise opposite of what they actually are. The latest accidental misunderstanding came from Johann Lamont's speech to the Scottish Labour conference last month. Here's what Johann claims the SNP say:

"The SNP want to sell a skewed vision of where Scotland is at. They want you to believe that Scotland is somehow oppressed."

Here, on the other hand, is what the SNP actually say, from two months earlier:

"Scotland is not oppressed and we have no need to be liberated."

How odd. In the interests of fair and honest political discourse, should we all perhaps club together and offer to buy the leader of Scotland's opposition some new batteries? We'll throw in 50p to get things started. Pledge the amount of your support in the comments below and let's see if we can make the world a better place.

RUNNING TOTAL: £0.50

Last week saw another deployment of Labour's secret weapon in the fight against the SNP and their dastardly independence plans. The device is a WMD (Weapon of MisDirection) which the party has unleashed several times. But the weapon has a persistent teething problem – it has a tendency to come straight back and hit the user in the rear when they least expect it, while rarely managing even a glancing blow off the intended target. (Which in this case is of course the SNP.)

We've seen the patented Attack Boomerang in action on many occasions (the most recent being the bizarrely ill-judged attack on the SNP's referendum consultation which rebounded particularly badly on the party's "deputy" Scottish leader Anas Sarwar, and forced even the BBC to reluctantly acknowledge Labour's embarrassment), but one of the strangest was Labour's bitter criticism of the SNP over the fact that it had persuaded Amazon, the internet retailing giant, to recently open a large centre in the Dunfermline area and provide thousands of new jobs.

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