Wings Over Scotland

Normally we enjoy a little chuckle at Kevin McKenna’s weekly column in the Guardian, as befits one of the stalwarts of our Zany Comedy Relief link section. On taking an early peek at this week’s effort, it looked to be one of those rare occasions when Kevin takes a break from slagging off the SNP and talks about something else, but instead we were horrified to witness one of the most despicable things we’ve seen in the mainstream “quality” press for quite some time.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Tories blow £110,000 on tea and biscuits in a single department in three months:

Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, Alex Salmond pays for two cups of tea and two Caramel Wafers out of his own pocket and makes £1m profit in a single afternoon:

Is it any wonder the canny Scottish people would rather have the clever First Minister running their country than the hapless Tories?

So another 24 hours go by, and still absolutely nobody in the Scottish media thinks it at all newsworthy that the country's main opposition party has a deliberate policy of refusing to support ANY Parliamentary motion put forward by the SNP, regardless of its merits. We wish we were more surprised.

Scotland Tonight, which at least engages with its viewers on Twitter, claimed its reporting team were "not excited" by the astonishing revelation, openly and publicly made by a Labour MP, that Scotland's second-biggest political party was more interested in party advantage than the interests of the people. Newsnight Scotland and Reporting Scotland both ignored the story, as did all of the nation's newspapers.

The Herald and Scotsman did both run tiny pieces on the less-interesting prelude that brought the news to light (Labour's ham-fisted refusal to vote against George Osborne's 50p tax cut for the rich), but neither could find even half a sentence in passing to mention the much more significant discovery of the Bain Principle.

The other story covered by Wings over Scotland yesterday DID manage to secure a lot more media attention, though. Following on from the Telegraph and Caledonian Mercury, both Scottish broadsheets were able to find large amounts of space to repeat the powderpuff story about Alex Salmond offering a couple of long-standing SNP members a cup of tea and a biscuit in Bute House.

The Herald put it on the front page – in a piece so poorly researched and edited that it managed to knock £30m off the value of the Weirs' Euromillions jackpot (repeatedly giving the amount as £131m rather than the actual £161m) – and presented the story as dramatically as possible, giving plenty of space to Labour's Paul Martin to make lurid accusations which the paper depicted neutrally (Martin merely "said" things) while it portrayed the SNP spokesman's response as angry and defensive, using phrases like "The First Minister's most senior aide stormed…" and "reacted with fury" .

The Scotsman, meanwhile, outdid its rival with TWO separate stories, featuring on the front page of the website and as the lead item in each of the "Scotland", "UK" and "Politics" sections. And this, remarkably, happened despite the paper also running a leader column which explicitly noted that the Weirs' donation did NOT belong in the same category as those that have been solicited and/or covered up by Labour, the Tories and the Lib Dems:

"At the heart of this affair there is a serious problem for political parties. They need money to run expensive campaigns. People who give large sums of money tend to be those who do not hand over cash without expecting something in return. There are people who simply believe in the party cause – the lottery winners who have given £1m to the SNP, for example – but they are few and far between."

It probably goes without saying that the Daily Record also managed to cover the Weirs' so-called "tea party", and it also ran it twice – though it should be noted that both pieces were handled rather more soberly and even-handedly than either of its two supposedly more grown-up counterparts – but didn't consider either Willie Bain's admission or Labour's tax-rate abstention to be worthy of even a few lines.

Supporters of independence are often accused of paranoia by the Scottish media, but no belief is paranoid if it's true. The embarrassingly transparent attempt by the press to bury the story of the Bain Principle, while devoting page after page after page to repeatedly casting aspersions on an entirely legitimate, open and above-board donation which the SNP conspicuously announced the moment it happened and which absolutely everyone accepts was not made with any ulterior motive or seeking any benefit, will do nothing but fuel the nationalists' fire.

The story isn't, of course, that Labour failed to vote against the 50p tax-rate cut when the SNP and Plaid Cymru put forward a motion in the House Of Commons. The truth that it was a "screw-up" is entirely believable in the light of Labour's general ineptitude, and not that big a deal in itself. The rate cut was happening anyway no matter whether Labour voted on the motion or not, and in the flurry of essentially meaningless post-Budget motions, missing out on one of them is pretty insignificant.

Had Labour left it at that, a compliant Scottish media would probably have seen them get away with it altogether, as they'd hoped. (Even now, more than 36 hours later, only the Scotsman has covered it at all, in a tiny little story with no byline buried near the bottom of the Politics section.)

But then Willie Bain stepped in. Late on Tuesday night, the MP for Glasgow North East responded to some criticism of Labour's abstention on Twitter, with an admission of what many in Scotland have long suspected/known – that Labour opposes anything proposed by the SNP, regardless of the merits of the thing in question.

The SNP, unsurprisingly, summed the comment up in uncompromising terms:

“It is clear that Labour hates the SNP much more than it loves Scotland. Even when it came to voting against a Tory tax cut for millionaires, Labour could not put its resentment of the SNP aside in the interests of ordinary working people."

But we'll charitably assume that Bain's extraordinary on-the-record revelation (he hasn't deleted the tweet, though it's impossible to say if that's out of honour or a recognition of the futility of trying to delete internet trails) occurred too late at night for the Scottish press to have picked it up in time for the morning editions. We'll be watching closely, though, to see if tonight's TV and tomorrow's papers consider it in any way newsworthy that Scotland's Labour MPs are now by their own acknowledgement more concerned with pettily fighting the SNP than serving the interests of their voters.

The Scottish Tories gather in Troon this weekend for their annual conference. It must be time for another of WingsLand’s super-popular Unionist photo-galleries, then!

Warning: contains scenes of an adult nature. Quite some way beyond “adult”, in fact.

Read the rest of this entry →

We were struck by a little parable in the Scotsman today, penned by our favourite teller of fireside morality tales Michael Kelly. (Who, as attentive readers will know, only fails to grace our “Zany Comedy Relief” links column due to the lack of any central hub address for his contributions to the paper.)

In what we could most charitably describe as a “there but for the grace of God” scenario, the man whose chairmanship of Celtic took it to within hours of the fate that’s currently befalling Rangers reiterated the tired old lie about how Scotland needs both of the Old Firm, but in the course of the article he also passed on an interesting fact we hadn’t previously known.

“Rangers were once before in financial difficulty. It was in the 1920’s when my grandfather, James Kelly (a former Scotland centre-half), was chairman of Celtic. Rangers had a temporary cash flow problem and their board came out to his house in Blantyre to explain the problem and seek help. Celtic gave them an unconditional short-term loan. The fact that Rangers felt able to ask and that Celtic willingly responded indicates that both clubs were aware of their inter-dependence.”

We couldn’t help but find the 1920s football situation strikingly analogous to the modern political one. Rangers and Celtic are supposedly the bitterest of rivals, and their fans treat each other like diametrically opposed poles, with honour and virtue the sole property of one side and bigotry and hatred found exclusively on the other. Yet when it comes to the crunch, the institutions themselves know which side their bread is buttered, and unhesitatingly come together in their mutual interest. Remind you of any two big political parties at all?

Read the rest of this entry →

Here we go, then. The debut Straight Debate is with Douglas "Edinburgh Liberal" McLellan, a Lib Dem member and activist, and in it we discuss the timing of the referendum, the meaning of the word "independence" and, appropriately enough, the tone of public discourse. (We had more stuff we wanted to cover too, but after we got to 2500 words from just two questions each it seemed a good time to take a break. So here's how we got on for starters.)

Read the rest of this entry →

We greatly enjoyed the intervention of former First Minister and now Lord of Glenscorrodale, Jack McConnell, in the referendum debate last night. Appearing on both Scotland Tonight and Newsnight Scotland, he graced the nation's airwaves to present a statesman-like call for "compromise" on the planning of the vote on Scotland's constitutional question, and generously offering his assistance to the Prime Minister and First Minister in untangling the situation. Our favourite was his explanation of how to compromise on the timing of the poll.

"There are those who are pressing for the referendum to be held this year as quickly as possible, the SNP want it to be held in nearly three years' time – I'm suggesting we compromise on that, let's have an agreement that we hold the referendum in about 18 months' time, maybe 15 months' time."

Now, we're not quite sure who the people allegedly "pressing for the referendum to be held this year" are. We don't know of anyone even remotely sane who's seriously proposed that it could or should be held in 2012 – the UK government's own suggested timetable is for an "early" vote in September 2013. The SNP, meanwhile, want "Autumn 2014", which is widely held to mean October of that year. The SNP have never confirmed that claim, but let's use it for the sake of argument.

What that means is that Lord McConnell's proposal for a "compromise" date between September 2013 and October 2014 is, um… September 2013. (Or alternatively June 2013, ie three months earlier than even the UK government's preferred date, never mind the Scottish Government's.) No wonder he repeatedly struggled to conceal an embarrassed smirk during the Scotland Tonight interview.

Lord McConnell's other envisaged compromises follow surprisingly similar lines.

NUMBER OF QUESTIONS:
Unionists: one question
SNP: open to second question
Compromise: one question

FRANCHISE:
Unionists: no vote for 16/17-year-olds
SNP: vote for 16/17-year-olds
Compromise: no vote for 16/17-year-olds.

LEGALITY:
Unionists: UK Government must give permission to hold the referendum
SNP: Scottish Government has the right to hold the referendum
Compromise: UK Government must give permission to hold the referendum

And so on and so forth. Amusingly, the noble Lord also still hasn't even conceded that independence gets to be the "Yes" answer in the referendum, putting forward the hilarious "compromise" notion that BOTH sides should get a "Yes" option, astonishingly concluding that this would be an aid to clarity and decisiveness. (Though he subsequently went on to talk of "the Yes and No campaigns" anyway.)

We await the logical outcome of Lord McConnell's thought process – that we should compromise between the SNP's position of having a referendum and the Unionist side's ingrained opposition to the whole idea, by simply not having a referendum at all.

We have a paid subscription to the Herald, but it's not working at the moment, locking us out from access. In case it's a widespread problem, we feel compelled to reprint this amazing story – which curiously didn't make the website front page today and was buried in the politics section – just to make absolutely sure that nobody misses it.

ENGLISH 'WOULD BOMB OUR AIRPORTS'

Glasgow and Edinburgh airports, in an independent Scotland, could be bombed by an English government if it was threatened by an unfriendly country, a former deputy leader of the UK Conservative Party has warned.

Lord Fraser of Carmyllie also warned that SNP policies removing nuclear forces from Scottish bases and reducing Scotland's navy "essentially" to fishery protection vessels could make Scotland a war zone. He said a country with a few fishery protection vessels was "asking to be invaded".

The former Lord Advocate and Solicitor General said he did not see who might have "evil intentions" against England but he had missed "the import of the Balkan crisis and the ramifications of 9/11" and would hesitate "to predict the crises even in the rest of the century".

He foresaw the possibility of an enemy commander ordering the runways at Scottish airports to be cleared because his planes would be landing and "if that were to happen what alternative would England have but to come and bomb the hell out of Glasgow airport and Edinburgh airport".

He suggested one solution would be to base the nuclear fleet, currently based on the Clyde, to Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

Ponder for a moment, readers, the media coverage if a significant SNP figure had suggested the reverse scenario. Wouldn't that be fun?

Okay, so it's not the most shocking headline we've ever run. But it's dismaying to see how openly Scottish Labour recoils from the very idea. Over on LabourHame today, Tom Harris runs yet another another one-eyed piece we won't dignify with a link, about how SNP supporters are nasty and arrogant while Labour's are paragons of humble virtue to a man. It only took him a few minutes to delete our comment in response:

"The fact is the nationalists might win. I hope they don’t, but they might. We might win. We might not, but we might." [Tom Harris]

Speaking as an evil cybernat, I agree completely with this statement. But when moaning on about how SNP supporters apparently have a monopoly on certainty, as usual you ignore the beam in your own eye. You don't have to look very far to see that attitude on the Labour side – in fact, only as far as your nearest rival for LabourHame's most prolific contributer, Mr Ian Smart, who asserts at every opportunity that (a) there won't be a referendum at all, and (b) if there is, the Yes vote will be 28%.

You're a pretty clever guy, Tom. Imagine what a force you could be in the campaign if you abandoned the puerile, transparently-hypocritical sniping that makes you so easy to mock and dismiss as a troll, and actually tried engaging in a vaguely mature debate.

Sadly, despite our (actually entirely genuine) plea, Tom has very much nailed his colours – we're not really sure which ones those are – to the "puerile, transparently hypocritical sniping" mast. We think that's a terrible shame, for reasons we've covered previously in some detail, but on Labour's head be it.

If you’re a bit naive, it can be hard to understand why the parties of the Union are so bitterly opposed to a second question on the referendum ballot. All three of them, after all, claim to want more powers for Scotland (though not yet, and they don’t want to tell us which ones), and after all the fuss they’ve made before it seems odd that they don’t feel the need to get any democratic mandate for them.

It’s also odd because it’s pretty much agreed by everyone on all sides that a second question for, let’s call it Devo-X, would all but completely sink the SNP’s chances of winning a Yes to full independence, whereas in a straight two-way face-off it’s already very close and the numbers (as well as the arguments) are slowly but steadily moving in the Nats’ direction. That appears an awfully big gamble for the No parties to take purely in order to deny the SNP something (more powers, but short of independence) that all the Unionists are supposedly in favour of.

So what’s the real reason? Well, it’s not too hard to figure out.

Read the rest of this entry →

The Unionist parties aren’t completely stupid. While we all know that one of their core arguments against independence is that Scotland is too wee, too poor and too stupid to survive without the rest of the UK, they’re not quite daft enough to be caught coming out and bluntly saying it in those terms.

So they were faced with a tricky dilemma with the release of the latest GERS figures last week, which showed that Scotland contributed over £2bn more to the UK economy in the 2009/10 fiscal year than it got back in UK Government spending. (And that figure itself neglects a number of large discrepancies in the figures, where money considered as “Scottish spending” isn’t actually spent in Scotland at all, such as almost a billion pounds on defence alone.)

One approach is to get friendly journalists to print unchallenged quotes and then use them in your headlines. The other, not-unrelated strategy is to spin the figures in such a way that Scotland subsidising the rest of the UK somehow sounds like the exact opposite – or as the Herald’s story put it, “Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat politicians claimed the report proved Scotland was better off within the UK.”

The job of explaining this remarkable distortion of the truth fell to the unfortunate Ken Macintosh, finance spokesman for Scottish Labour, who was shoved onto Newsnight Scotland on March 7th to explain why Scotland having more money on the plus side of its books would be a bad thing. It was a tough line to push, and poor Ken was forced to begin by trying to convince viewers that he didn’t understand the basic concept of how arithmetic works. Let’s break down his comments and see how he did, and what it tells us about the Unionist vision of Scotland, starting with his opening gambit.

Read the rest of this entry →