Wings Over Scotland

The Scotsman’s last attempt at a live webchat didn’t go too well. In fact it didn’t happen at all, and the page has now vanished entirely. So we were pleased to see them having another go today, in the shape of a well-trailed Q&A session with “Better Together” campaign head Alistair Darling. We tuned in to see how it went.

We submitted a question of our own a few hours in advance of the event, on the subject of this. It wasn’t selected. We also made a few comments during the “chat”, but none were printed. Indeed, nothing at all was published which wasn’t a prepared question – there were no apparent responses to anything Darling said, and no discussion at all, just question followed by answer followed by new question.

You can see a full transcript below (verbatim – we haven’t corrected any typos), along with our analysis of Darling’s responses in red. Did he engage in full and informative answers, or did he just dodge his way to the end? See if you can guess.

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Someone recently directed us towards a recording of an episode of BBC Radio 4’s “PM” news and current-affairs show broadcast early in June of this year. It featured a discussion between presenter Eddie Mair and Dr Alex Woolf, a listener to the show who’d contacted it after an interview with Alex Salmond.

You can listen to the whole discussion on YouTube, but we always prefer to see this sort of thing written down for ease of reflection and reference, so we gritted our teeth for another transcription session. (Though this one was made less painful by the superb Chrome plugin Transcribe, which we recommend unreservedly).

The result can be found below. It seems an appropriate way to start the year in which the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence will be published.

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We don’t often get to see Johann Lamont on the telly, so when she made one of her rare appearances in a five-minute interview with STV’s excellent Bernard Ponsonby this week we couldn’t only do half a job. As we’re still stuck in the house fighting off this year’s unusually-horrible and persistent germs – and as Lamont repeated most of the speech at today’s FMQs – we steeled ourselves, sat down with a large medicinal hot toddy and transcribed the rest of the piece.

What with it being Christmas and everything, though, you’re probably busy, so if you’re in a rush we’ve condensed all of Johann’s umming and aahing and stumbling and waffling down to its essence, where there is such a thing. The parts highlighted in red below are all you really need to read.

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Supporters of independence often level the accusation at Unionists that they think Scotland is “too wee, too poor and too stupid” to thrive on its own. Unionists generally affect great insult at the suggestion, and have taken to being much more circumspect about the first two, nowadays tending to claim that Scotland could survive without Westminster control, just that it shouldn’t, because of all the positive aspects of the Union such as [SUB FILL IN LATER PLEASE].

Accordingly, the “too wee, too poor” element of the argument against independence has taken something of a back seat in the last year or so, and the “too stupid” part has been correspondingly pushed to the foreground.

Firstly, we’re simply told that – for some reason – Scotland does better if all its big decisions are taken in London, leading inescapably to the conclusion that we’re not as bright as our betters to the south. But more crudely, we’re also shown on a regular basis just how bad independence could be.

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It’s possible to watch video footage of Nicola Sturgeon’s speech to the Holyrood chamber on Thursday (and the debate following it) online, but it’s rather difficult to find the text in searchable form. The only place we were able to locate it took some advanced-level Googling to find and was behind a paywall, so we’ve reprinted it below for reference, because we’re about to cite it in another article.

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Here’s a little weekend brainteaser for you, folks. On the BBC’s This Week show on Saturday, veteran presenter Andrew Neil interviewed two former senior government ministers about the UK’s nuclear deterrent – one was a Conservative former Defence Secretary, the other a Labour former Culture Secretary. For now we’ll call them Politician A and Politician B.

See if you can match the following quotes to the person who said them.

ANDREW NEIL: What is your view – should [Trident] be renewed?

POLITICIAN A: No, I think it’s all nonsense.

NEIL: Should we have any kind of nuclear deterrent?

POLITICIAN A: No, it’s completely past its sell-by date. It’s neither independent, because we couldn’t possibly use it without the Americans, neither is it any sort of deterrent, because now largely we are facing the sorts of enemies – the Taliban, Al Qaeda – who cannot be deterred by nuclear weapons. It’s a tremendous waste of money, it’s done entirely for reasons of national prestige, it’s wasteful, and at the margins it is proliferatory.

NEIL: Okay. But the government – or at least the Conservative part of the coalition – looks like they’re going to proceed with it. What will [your party’s] position be on it [, Politician B]?

POLITICIAN B: Actually, the position that Phillip Hammond has taken is very close to the position that we agreed some time ago when [Politician C] was Defence Secretary. The decision about whether to proceed […] won’t be taken until 2016…

NEIL: …but you’re happy that Mr Hammond’s going ahead with the spending, the seed money, which allows the decision if you want to?

POLITICIAN B: Yeah, completely, yes, yeah.

We’re going to assume that you’re ahead of us here, readers. The former Tory Defence Secretary (Michael Portillo) is, of course Politician A, the one who thinks that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is a pointless, ineffectual waste of time and money aimed solely at letting the UK grandstand on the world stage, while the former Labour Cabinet minister (Tessa Jowell) is Politician B, who wants to spend billions of pounds just on the preparatory research for upgrading it – let alone the £84bn cost of actually doing so – at a time when her party is telling us that we can’t afford to educate our young people or look after the elderly.

You can watch this remarkable development for as long as it’s still available on the iPlayer (from 31 minutes), or listen to a permanent audio clip here. The politics of the Union are now truly through the looking glass.

Ed Miliband spoke to the Labour conference for over an hour this week. The transcript of his speech ran to almost seven-and-a-half thousand words. The vast bulk of them, however – well over six thousand – comprised a collection of well-worn anecdotes and homilies which the party’s leader has been peddling for many months already.

So given that we all live busy lives these days and you probably don’t want to sit through the entire speech including 20 minutes of guff about how he’s from a family of immigrants and went to a comprehensive AGAIN, we’ve filtered it down a bit for you.

Below is an edited transcript redacting all the waffle, the stuff about how the other parties are simply beastly and the things he WON’T do, and leaving only the actual bits of policy (a term we’ve interpreted as broadly as possible), helpfully highlighted in red (or at least as close to red as Labour is prepared to get these days), along with our own brief analysis in bold. We hope you find it useful.

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When the history of the independence movement is written, and should the 2014 referendum result in a Yes vote, last night may be celebrated as one of those iconic “Portillo moments” about which the victors ask each other “Were you there?”

Like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, in the future the number of people claiming to have been watching last night’s episode of Newsnight Scotland may one day eclipse the population of the country. The BBC programme featured perhaps the most spectacular on-air implosion of a British politician that we’ve ever seen, wherein a senior Labour MP and Commons Select Committee chairman embarked upon a suicidal and sustained diatribe of thuggish, juvenile petulance the likes of which – well, let’s not spoil the fun if you didn’t see it. Take a look for yourself, from 1m 44s.

We’ve painstakingly transcribed the entire incident for posterity below, just in case you don’t believe the evidence of your own senses the first time. We’ve also added some analysis of our own, in red, because there’s a lot to take in and it’s easy to miss bits. (Regular readers will recognise this Labour tactic.) See you down there.

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We had a fairly astonishing conversation on Twitter yesterday, after we ran this piece on an ugly incident at a July 12th parade (if that’s not tautology) in Belfast earlier this month. It was such a spectacular exhibition of doublethink, disingenuity and flat-out denial we felt it was worth sharing it with a wider audience.

We think it illustrates fairly neatly why Scotland still has a problem with sectarianism, and probably will for a long time to come. Have a read and judge for yourself.

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Now, let’s get something straight right from the start: the headline on this feature ISN’T referring to the people pictured below. We’re sure they’re fine, lovely, good and honest Scottish folk you’d be happy having live next door to you, who just happen to disagree with us on a particular political issue. Nothing wrong with that.

But the “Better Together” campaign’s launch video appears to have gone out of its way to make them appear to be simple-witted idiots, in order to try to disguise the utter hollowness of its argument.

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If you’re anything like us, you’ll have been frustrated by most media coverage of the Rangers liquidation saga, and in particularly the failure of journalists to ask the questions that ordinary people are asking over and over again on Twitter and internet messageboards, or just shouting at the telly.

So we were hugely impressed when professional insolvency practitioner Maureen Leslie of MLM Solutions, who has recently appeared on both Newsnight Scotland and Reporting Scotland in connection with the Rangers case, held an online Q&A on the subject today (along with the company’s senior manager Allan McLeod), devoting over an hour of her valuable time to answering questions from clueless members of the public such as ourselves.

Below is an edited transcript of the proceedings (leaving out questions that were outwith MLM’s expertise). We haven’t changed the content of any questions or answers, but have corrected typos, occasionally made slight adjustments to wording for clarity, and grouped questions on the same aspects of the situation together. (Suspicious readers can view the original unedited webchat in full here.) We hope you’ll find it as informative and enlightening a resource as we do.

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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.