A possible sighting coming up later today, readers, according to The Scotsman. Keep your eyes and ears peeled, this could be the big one.
We’re standing by.
Word has reached us that today Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats, has allowed himself to be photographed holding an oversized pledge card he’s signed, promising to back equal marriage rights for homosexuals.
We’re sure that he’ll uphold the proud traditions of Lib Dems signing oversized pledge cards, and that equal marriage rights for gays are now definitely a done deal as a result. Because if there’s one thing we all know for sure in this uncertain world, it’s that once a Lib Dem has signed an oversized pledge card, there’s no going back.
Seriously, did nobody tell him or something?
This is Scottish Secretary Michael Moore in The Times (Saturday 11th February 2012, paywall link), in an interview widely interpreted as a pledge to move forward with greater devolution for Scotland should the country vote No to independence in 2014:
“The central point is to let Scotland decide whether it’s part of the part of the United Kingdom or not. I’m confident it will say ‘we are’. Then we can work through the detail of what the next stages of devolution will be… The referendum is the start of the conversation, not the end.”
This, on the other hand, is Scottish Secretary Michael Moore, quoted by the Telegraph on the 22nd of December 2010 on the subject of the coalition government:
“Tuition fees [are] the biggest, ugliest, most horrific thing in all of this. I signed a pledge that promised not to do this. I’ve just done the worst crime a politician can commit, the reason most folk distrust us as a breed. I’ve had to break a pledge and very, very publicly, in what is a car crash, train wreck, whatever metaphor one wishes to put in terms of the politics of this, and it is deeply damaging to my party, to me individually and lots of others.”
Far be it from us to suggest that Mr Moore’s promises literally aren’t worth the paper they’re signed on. We don’t need to, because he’s just told you that himself. You’ll have to make your own mind up how far you trust him to deliver more powers to the Scottish Parliament if you decide to leave those powers in the hands of Westminster.
But when you’re doing that, be crystal clear on how things will stand in 2014 – a No vote is a vote for the status quo. Anything after that depends on the honesty of liars.
It’s nearly always nice to get a surprise, and a couple certainly came our way from the mainstream press and blogosphere today when two of the most diehard Unionists in the field had sudden rushes of blood to the head, threw off the reins and revealed what they really thought. First up was Kevin McKenna in the Observer, who in his frustration at his FUD comrades presenting Alex Salmond with an endless series of open goals let slip this, in contravention of the constantly-expounded party line:
“There is a growing sense in this country that we must be allowed to become the masters of our own destiny, for good or for ill, and free from any Westminster interference. This has been reflected by significant increases in support for independence, two-and-a-half years before the event, in every opinion poll since the die was cast last month.”
Kevin will be getting his wrists slapped by Unionist Central on Monday, we’re certain – the official policy is that support for independence is stalled at either a quarter or a third of the electorate, depending how hardline you are. Admitting that it’s on the rise at all – far less significantly so – will doubtless have Mr McKenna in hot water, but it pales beside the weekend’s other great “Whoops, did I say that out loud?” moment.
That appeared on the blog of Labour activist and media commentator Ian Smart, talking about his appearance on today’s Sunday Politics, and the cat he let out of the bag was one concerned with this blog’s favourite urban myth, the positive case for the Union. Because what Ian did was give away the poorly-kept secret that Johann Lamont, Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, Willie Rennie, Michael Moore, Ruth Davidson and David Cameron and all the others are lying through their teeth when they constantly promise to make said case. Quoth Ian:
“There is no need to make a “positive case for the Union”. We know, for good or ill, what the Union entails. There is simply the need to make a case against “Independence”.”
We can’t exactly affect surprise at this revelation. After all, we’ve been tracking promises of the “positive case” ranging back 32 years, without a single actual sighting of it. But Smart’s unguarded moment is no less depressing for its confirmation, because it tells us that Labour plan a scorched-earth strategy for the independence debate. They will happily destroy Scotland to keep it in the Union, by running a campaign based on fear, distortion and outright lies with no thought for the state that will leave the country in after the referendum, whether the vote is Yes or No.
Two and a half years of unrelenting, poisonous negativity can only have a hideously toxic effect on the entire body politic of Scotland, because for a negative campaign to win it must catastrophically undermine the confidence of the Scottish people in their ability to run their own country successfully. (Because if you DO believe you can do that, why on Earth would you ever let the voters of another nation impose on you governments and ideologies you consistently reject?)
Bewilderingly, and infinitely depressingly, Smart believes that independence supporters want Unionists to campaign positively only as some sort of trick, that it’s a trap we’re luring our unwary opponents towards. But in fact it’s because whichever way Scotland votes in autumn 2014, we’d like to move forward as a nation that hasn’t been torn in two by years of vicious infighting, bitterness and dirty trickery.
We’re not at all sure we’d like to live in Ian Smart’s future Scotland even if it did vote for independence. Such a divided country – set implacably against itself like an Old Firm derby writ large, and crushed by an inferiority complex – would be a dark, benighted place. But maybe that grotesque vision is exactly what Smart and his Unionist allies want – to tell the Yes camp that even victory would be Pyrrhic, the winners inheriting nothing but ashes and ruins. For such a despicable worldview and strategy we hold nothing but contempt. But we’re glad to see that at least it’s finally out in the open.
There are some stories which persist long after they’ve been debunked, a recent example being Joan McAlpine’s supposed accusation that anyone opposing the SNP was “anti-Scottish”. However many times it was shown that she didn’t say any such thing, however often she explained what she HAD said, the lie kept being perpetuated (and will doubtless continue to be in the coming months and years) by people who knew full well it wasn’t true, because it suited their agenda to do so.
The notion that Scotland is massively subsidised by England is another such political legend, and we don’t imagine for a second that this story from today’s Sunday Times will stop the endless stream of idiots on the Telegraph, Mail and Express (both above and below the line) from continuing to assert it at every opportunity.
But at least now you can handily link them to the actual facts, even if they don’t want to hear them. The full article can be read below.
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.
(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:
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.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
