Wings Over Scotland

As regular readers will know, as a supporter of independence this blog fervently hopes that Tom Harris wins the contest for the leadership of Scottish Labour. Not only because Comical Tom – a fervent pro-Unionist who has already proclaimed that "I don't want Scotland to run her own affairs" – would be a massive recruiting sergeant for the Yes campaign, but also because he's simply the most entertaining.

It recently dawned on us that by joining Youth Labour for just £1, we could actually help to make such a thing happen by having a vote in the leadership election. We duly filled out the form with some enthusiasm, but were sad to realise that we lived far too far away from any of the hustings to quiz Tom directly. Until, that is, he sportingly hosted a live Q&A session on his website…

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Combined spending in Scotland by the four main parties for both the 2010 UK general election and the 2011 Holyrood general election, in descending order:

LABOUR: £1,785,000

CONSERVATIVES: £1,546,000

SNP: £1,456,000

LIB DEM: £647,000

(Sources: here and here.)

In the wake of a duller-than-usual First Minister's Questions, most of the press today is covering the report released by the Electoral Commission detailing the various parties' spending in the 2011 Holyrood election. The headline soundbite is that the SNP's expenditure was, in the words of The Scotsman, "close to the combined total of the three other largest parties", at £1.14m compared to £1.27m for Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories together.

Predictably enough, Labour seize the opportunity to complain about large donations, with MSP Drew Smith pouting that "the SNP is addicted to big money, reliant on huge donations from a small number of wealthy individuals", in the light of the SNP having received two such large sums in recent months from the will of the former Makar Edwin Morgan and lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

We're not aware of Mr Smith having raised any such objections when, for example, Lord Sainsbury donated £2.5m to Labour in 2003 – eclipsing the SNP's two big donations put together – but we'll gladly publish any corrections should he have done so. We're also not sure that Mr Smith's party will enthusiastically welcome his objections to large donations from wealthy individuals, as a cap on such contributions (currently being proposed by the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life) would have slashed Labour's income by 72% over the last five and a half years.

Most of the coverage today notes the growing financial health of the SNP compared to the other parties relative only to the situation in the 2007 Holyrood election, with its spending rising while that of the Unionist parties declines. What we found curious, though, was that none of the papers took the trouble to also make what would seem to be the most obvious comparison in a recent Scottish context – the parties' expenditures in 2011 compared to the 2010 UK General Election.

We had a little dig around on the Electoral Commission's website, and turned up its 2010 report, whose figures reveal some moderately interesting things.

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Our dear chum “Comical Tom” Harris is at it again, this time crying to Holyrood magazine about the evil SNP and their cyberbullying, as well as continuing to punt the hopelessly-discredited lie that online unpleasantness is the sole preserve of SNP supporters (particularly ironic given Tom’s status as the Unionist camp’s troll-in-chief). Given that Harris is fond of proudly announcing that he’s blocked readers from his Twitter feed if they post messages he disagrees with, it’s hard to see who’s managing to upset the poor lamb so much. (Particularly as he notes that these awful bullies “tend to cover up” the vitriol he alleges they bear.)

More serious is Harris’ ludicrous allegation that there will be “nothing remotely democratic” about the conduct of the independence referendum – a shameful, borderline-libellous attack echoing Labour’s previous slurs which compared the First Minister to Mussolini and Hitler – something Harris apparently manages to say with a straight face in the same interview where he asserts that:

“People say there’s just as much antagonism on the Labour side and Labour people are just as nasty – that’s a lie, that’s wrong, and it’s demonstrably wrong.”

(We await keenly Tom’s attempt to defy all known laws of reality and prove a negative. In the meantime, we’ve politely asked him via Twitter to provide some specific examples of this “bullying” so that the vicious perpetrators can be shamed.)

Of course, we’re falling into Harris’ trap by even reporting this garbage. Currently trailing in fifth place in the Labour leadership race despite there being only three candidates, Tom is lashing out bitterly at all and sundry – including Scottish Labour’s own MSPs for their understandable decision not to subject themselves to any of his demented haverings in person – in a desperate attempt to turn his indisputable car-crash appeal into some sort of political power. Readers can decide for themselves, however, if this is the sort of behaviour that characterises a prospective future First Minister of Scotland.

As reported by many outlets today, Labour's latest complaint to the Parliamentary Standards Committee – this time an allegation that Scottish ministers conspired improperly in the decision to nominate Brian Souter for a knighthood – has met with an unambiguous rebuke, as the independent inquiry cleared the government of any wrongdoing. Only the Scotsman bothers to print Labour's bitter and graceless response to the committee's findings, one which suggests the party still isn't quite ready to approach opposition (or anything) in a positive and constructive manner.

Labour's previous complaints to the standards committee have all been similarly dismissed, whereas when accusations against the party have been upheld Labour has dismissed them as "partisan" and "politically motivated". It's tempting to wonder why Labour persists in filing complaints with a body it clearly does not consider to be impartial, and how much taxpayers' money it's wasting by doing so.

Speaking as a heterosexual atheist who thinks marriage for anyone is a stupid idea, I like to think I’ve got a pretty neutral view of the gay-weddings debate. So a blog post by devoutly religious SNP MSP John Mason last week addressing the issue wouldn’t on the face of it seem the sort of thing likely to bring a glow to my cold misanthropic heart. But it has, because it’s a refreshingly open and honest statement of his heartfelt position, coming from a member of a group of people – politicians – much better known for vague platitudes and cowardly evasion.

I disagree completely with Mason’s view that homosexuality is a sin, and I absolutely believe that gay people should be allowed to get married if they want to, and to specifically call the resulting union a marriage rather than a “civil partnership”. But it also seems to me to be plainly ridiculous that churches which espouse the same views as Mason does could be forced by the law to conduct such ceremonies against their beliefs. Churches are not state-funded organisations, and church weddings confer no legal status upon anyone that isn’t conveyed equally and fully by registry offices, so there is no “human right” or need to be married specifically in a church, any more than I have the right to walk into a vegan cafe and demand a pork chop. And if there’s no right, then there are no grounds for anyone demanding such a service should the church in question decline to provide it, for any reason it feels like.

Mason puts forward his view in a calm and dignified manner, while explicitly stating that he does not oppose gay marriage or any other form of discrimination against homosexuals. He supports the right to fully pursue a lifestyle that is at odds with his personal beliefs, and is entitled to expect the same courtesy in return without being called a homophobe, as has already happened with disappointing predictability.

As a politician the easy course of action would have been for Mason to keep his head down, avoid frightening any horses and let events take their course. But he has spoken up for his beliefs, and those of the many people who hold them, while unequivocally upholding the freedoms of others, risking opprobrium and vilification in the process. I wish we had more politicians with the courage of their convictions and the guts to express them freely and truthfully, even when those convictions are ones we might personally find distasteful. It is the very essence of freedom.

Holyrood witnessed an exceptionally dismaying FMQs this week, with all three opposition leaders embarrassing themselves to varying degrees. Iain Gray once again wasted his entire allotted time on pointlessly demanding a precise date for the independence referendum, which is still some three or more years distant. The First Minister's replies could have been provided by a tape recording and accurately predicted in advance by a primary-school child or an Old Firm supporter, and Gray was further humiliated by some stinging quotes from prominent Labour figures, including one previously highlighted by this very blog.

The Labour leader also came disturbingly close to an outright lie, in misrepresenting the views of the Parliament's former Presiding Officer George Reid by claiming that Mr Reid wanted the referendum supervised by the Electoral Commission. This was despite Mr Reid making his (somewhat different) actual position painstakingly clear in the Scotsman's letters page on the very same day.

But the real clanger was dropped by the new Tory leader Ruth Davidson, who castigated the Scottish Government for dropping legislation aimed at preventing the reduction of minimum sentences, affecting (among others) rape cases. The First Minister gently informed Ms Davidson that she had been misinformed by her researchers, pointing out that the legislation was in fact going ahead and would be brought before Parliament by the end of this month. Davidson sailed straight over the correction without a suggestion of retraction or apology, and went on to make an impenetrable point about demanding life sentences without possibility of parole for certain serious offences – seemingly asking the Parliament to do so regardless of the restrictions placed on such actions by the European Convention of Human Rights.

For the Lib Dems, Willie Rennie went for a worthless point aimed at the tabloid "Our Brave Boys" audience, demanding to know if Scottish soldiers serving in the British Army would be forced to resign and join a Scottish Army in the event of independence. Once again, an opposition leader could think of no more pressing concerns facing Scotland in 2011 than a trivial and hypothetical issue from a hypothetical future, many years away from anyone needing to worry about it.

Even when given a clear and direct answer from the FM – that no, soldiers would not be forced to do such a thing and would be free to choose which army they wished to serve in – Rennie persisted in some aimless rhetoric about soldiers currently fighting side-by-side somehow being pitched against each other and made to "choose between their colleagues and their country". Salmond slapped the line of attack down uncompromisingly with a retort about coalition-imposed redundancies among serving forces and election results in constituencies with military bases, and that was that.

First Minister's Questions is theatre, but it's nonetheless depressing to see all three opposition leaders so ham-fistedly squandering their main opportunity to hold the government publicly to account, something vital to any functioning democracy. Salmond can occasionally be made to look evasive and blustery at FMQs, but he didn't have to get out of second gear to crush his opponents today. He could have phoned it in, and that's no fit state for any self-respecting Parliament.

There's a fair old explosion of activity in the Scottish political scene today, with what appear to be some potentially highly significant policy movements starting to creak into life. In the Scotsman, slightly-renegade Labour MSP Malcolm Chisholm once again urges his party to back a referendum offering a devo-max option (or as he describes it, "devolution plus"), albeit one which stops short of full fiscal autonomy. Chisholm doesn't specify precisely how far the new devolution should go, instead proposing a cross-party convention – also including representatives of civic Scotland – to agree on the details of the option. While a commendable and sensible approach in theory, Chisholm is likely to struggle to get his own party to back such a plan, let alone persuading the Lib Dems and Tories to join in as well.

Meanwhile, over on the Herald Iain Macwhirter identifies signs of Labour beginning to shift on their current policy of backing the status quo, and examines the implications for the other parties if Labour manages to successfully occupy the middle ground. His conclusion is that should Labour suddenly become converts to the cause of devo max, the SNP may backtrack on its offer of a devo-max question and instead run a straight Yes/No referendum on full independence. In this blog's view, those are two very big assumptions – Labour (and the other opposition parties) are going to find it very hard to change their position now without looking utterly ridiculous, and the SNP would similarly find it extremely tricky, having made such a play of offering a devo-max question, to then retract the offer if the Unionists actually did manage to come up with a defined interpretation.

In the Guardian, Severin Carroll offers a different perspective on the debate over the number of questions on the referendum, from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, which represents over 50,000 voluntary charity workers. The organisation, while not explicitly taking a view on the referendum itself, urges that in the light of the Westminster government's brutal attacks on the poor and the sick, Scotland must take control of its own welfare revenue spending – a status which would in practice require either independence or an extreme version of devo max.

Carroll then spins off in some odd directions from the SCVO's comments, for example getting Labour's Margaret Curran to apparently support the coalition's policy, claiming that "a million voters supported Labour's tougher stance on benefits". (She presumably means Scottish voters, and is presumably citing Labour's 2010 general election result in Scotland as backup for the assertion, which is a rather strained assumption about what people were voting for.)

He also states that "Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary and most powerful Scot in the shadow cabinet, confirmed last Saturday that Labour's stance on more powers for Holyrood had now shifted, in favour of greater devolution", which is something of a stretch. What Alexander actually did in his speech to Scottish Labour's youth wing was express a personal opinion which at present is still explicitly rejected by all three of Scottish Labour's leadership candidates in favour of the status quo. If the party is indeed now in favour of greatly-expanded devolution, it's not letting on.

Finally, the Dundee Courier picks up on an embarrassing display of hypocrisy by the UK Government. Having spent weeks and months demanding that the SNP publish the Scottish Government's legal advice on an independent Scotland's position with regard to membership of the EU and the Euro, the Westminster coalition has now refused to publish its own legal advice on the same issue. Oops.

We'll let you digest that little lot for a while.

(See here.)

"The starting point is that we are equal nations choosing to come together and that equality means we in Scotland can make demands in a claim of right for the powers and responsibilities that we want. Beyond that however we need to describe the positive advantages of being part of a new United Kingdom."
(Malcolm Chisholm, Labour MSP, November 2011)

"[the proponent for independence] deserved to win, because he did the thing which usually wins a debate: he asked the question which mattered, and didn’t get a satisfactory response. And the question was this: what is the positive case for the Union?"
(Andrew McKie, conservative political commentator, November 2011)

Still waiting.

A wise old German proverb was quoted in the Guardian recently. It runs like this:

"What do two monsters do when they meet each other in the forest?"

"They smile."

It's hard not to think of it as you watch the progress of the Scottish Government's anti-sectarianism bill through Parliament. The media has devoted a lot of column inches to the bill in recent days, with a variety of viewpoints. SNP MSP Joan McAlpine wrote an impassioned opinion piece for the Scotsman in support of the bill yesterday, while legal blogger Lallands Peat Worrier took the opposite approach, forensically examining the finer details and concluding that in extreme circumstances it could conceivably be used to criminalise behaviour that might seem trivial at worst.

The Scotsman's main editorial coverage today takes an uncharacteristically neutral stance, reporting the fact that the opposition parties, particularly Labour, are refusing to back the bill despite having put forward no amendments to it. They also provide two further short opinion comments, one from each side of the debate.

Against the bill, a sociology lecturer from Abertay University (no, us either) offers a rather unfocused ramble that sounds uncomfortably like some bloke in the pub sounding off after a couple of pints and concludes dramatically that the bill is "the most authoritarian piece of legislation in recent history", while the President of the Association Of Scottish Police Superintendents contends that in fact it's a welcome clarification and simplification of the law with regard to sectarian offences.

The vast majority of the Scottish people, meanwhile, heartily sick of the poison that spreads outward from Ibrox and Celtic Park and infects the rest of Scottish society, wait to see if something is finally going to be done.

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Scottish Labour embarrassed themselves horribly today when they jumped on comments from SNP MSP Stewart Maxwell in which he noted that the Scottish Government was only legally empowered to hold an advisory referendum on independence rather than a binding one. Not withstanding the fact that ALL referenda in the UK are only advisory, whether conducted by Holyrood or Westminster or anyone else, Labour’s humiliating blunder was in triumphantly asserting there was something new about this position, when in fact the very first sentence of the SNP’s National Conversation website – dating back over two years – says the exact same thing:

“The First Minister has outlined plans for a public consultation on a draft Referendum Bill which sets out proposals for an advisory referendum on extending the powers of the Scottish Parliament.”

But there’s another aspect to the nature of referenda that everyone seems to be inexplicably overlooking of late. The Unionist parties have recently ramped up a campaign in which they demand the SNP “clarify” every last item of policy in an independent Scotland, from currency and EU membership to renewable energy transmission costs, pension provision, and all the way down to what colour the First Minister’s going to paint Bute House’s front door. What nobody seems to have grasped is the fairly crucial point that that’s not what a referendum is for.

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Ever since the SNP achieved what was thought by most people to be impossible – winning an absolute majority in the Scottish Parliament under its proportional representation system – the Unionist camp has discovered a sudden pressing concern about the perils of majority government (regardless of the fact that almost every UK Parliament in history has operated with an absolute majority on a minority of the vote, and that Labour and the Tories regularly proclaim this as a great benefit of the wildly undemocratic First Past The Post method thanks to its delivery of "strong" governments, and oppose any form of PR for Westminster).

This concern was given voice today in a report by the Electoral Reform Society, proposing a change in the rules governing Holyrood's system of proportional representation, to a format which – quite coincidentally – would have resulted in the SNP narrowly missing out on a majority in May. The society's justification for the change was that "democracy works better with more parties represented", which seems a hard argument to find fault with.

The odd thing about the report, though, is that the Sainte-Laguë system which it put forward as the solution would have done precisely nothing to increase the number of parties represented at Holyrood, as this analysis of the results by Better Nation shows. The existing parties/groups would have had their representations fiddled around with slightly, but the same six (SNP, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, Green and independents) would have won seats as actually did. The only difference would have been that the pro-independence Greens would have held the balance of power, wielding a disproportionate influence with their 7 seats over the 64-seat SNP, as they could have held them to ransom over any policy they chose as a price for supporting an independence referendum.

This blog is a supporter of PR, so that's all fair enough. But it's curious that this report has suddenly raised issues with Holyrood now, after 12 years, just at the point where the SNP has taken control over it. It'll be interesting to hear the Unionist parties' take on it, and how they'll square it with the FPTP system at Westminster. Is "strong government" good or bad? As with many things, we suspect the answer depends which side of the border you're on.