Wings Over Scotland

We’ve been digging around behind the scenes for the last few days now trying to make sense of the labyrinthine tangle of claim and counter-claim over what’s going on at the Ineos refinery and petro-chemical plant at Grangemouth. The press is full of competing assertions from the various parties involved, so we’re just going to tell you what we know for sure and see where it ends up.

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The coalition government’s horrific new immigration bill passed its first hurdle in the House Of Commons last night by 303 votes to 18.

The administration that brought us vans touring cities telling foreigners to leave or be arrested, gangs of armed officers sweeping tube stations for any dark-skinned undesirables, British citizens being harassed by text message and incomers to Scotland met with UK Border Agency posters urging them to go home intends to make life even more wretched and intolerable for vulnerable refugees and people who want to come here and contribute to our economy and culture.

And Labour? Labour bravely abstained from the vote.

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And this one might just take the entire cake stand and banana hanger.

It’s former Tory MP and junior minister Edwina Currie, speaking about someone called “Alex Salmon” on Radio 5’s Stephen Nolan show on Saturday. (From 2h 16m on that iPlayer link.) We do recommend listening to all six-and-a-half minutes. It sets a very high standard from the off, but somehow maintains it the whole way through. Enjoy.

You may have noticed we’ve been a bit paralysed by choice today. Bizarre idiocy from the No camp has broken out across so many different fronts at once that we couldn’t decide which one to tackle first.

Labour’s extraordinary attempt to steal the SNP’s clothes in Dunfermline? The Mail’s hilarious editorial on the “bitter attacks” of the “demoralised” Yes campaign? Alan Cochrane’s disintegrating composure and sanity? The cluelessly deranged “Braveheart and Sassenachs” wordspew from Andrew Gilligan in this morning’s Telegraph?

On reflection, the most significant is probably the increasingly noticeable shift in the tone of coverage in the Guardian, the UK newspaper with by some distance the most extensive Scottish reporting. At the weekend we highlighted a truly horrible piece of sub-Daily-Express smearmongering by the  paper’s Scottish correspondent Severin Carrell based – on its own open admission – entirely on rumours and speculation from a couple of Labour activists.

Today, the same reporter adopted a more subtle approach.

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Experienced readers will know that it’s a rare and special day when the BBC deigns to open up a Scottish story on its website to reader comments.

The results are invariably to be cherished, as our friends elsewhere in the UK share their considered, informed and thoughtful views on why we’re all better together.

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By now most of you will probably have seen the BBC’s revelations about HS2, and how the government tried to conceal the predicted negative economic effects on areas not served by the new line. A Freedom Of Information request revealed the plan would see almost £320m a year sucked out of the Aberdeen and Dundee areas alone, with the benefit going to London (£1.5bn), Manchester (£834m) and Birmingham (£764m).

(In fairness, the document also suggested Edinburgh and Glasgow would be net winners, though we can’t for the life of us understand how. If reducing the journey time from Edinburgh to London generates more investment in Edinburgh – a dubious enough premise to start with – why does reducing the journey time from Aberdeen to London by the same amount of time have the opposite effect?)

The good news for the residents and businesses of the North-East, of course, is that Scotland’s share of the cost of HS2 is a mere £4.2bn at the latest estimates (which are of course likely to be revised dramatically upwards over time), which is only enough to double the current government investment in ScotRail for around 14 years.

Where do we sign up for this bargain?

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This week, the University and College Union (UCU) have set out their manifesto for higher and further education in anticipation of the independence referendum. It denounces the funding system preferred by the big three Westminster parties and offers full backing to the Scottish Government’s policy of free tuition, while calling for immigration changes in order to support students and academics coming from abroad to study and work in Scotland.

“It is right that students who benefit from higher-than-average incomes should pay something back, but they should do so through progressive income tax,”

“Business depends on graduates and should make a contribution rather than receiving tax breaks. Higher education should be substantially paid for through general taxation.”

“Scotland does not have great concerns about an immigration influx and should relax rules which could lead to greater recruitment of students, though they may be put off by negative perceptions of the UK system.”

While the report doesn’t say so explicitly, these views put the UCU clearly on the Yes side – immigration and taxation would continue to be powers reserved  to Westminster in the event of a No vote, and the prevailing political climate in England (particularly the south) suggests a very different direction of travel.

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The sun rarely shines on the council estates of Maryhill. But on the rare occasions when it does, they emerge, dragging their Argos Value deckchairs behind them.

The high-rise flats do their best to block the light, but they find a spot in the concrete playground where the sun peeks through. They plant their chairs, flap open their Daily Records, crack open their cans and bask in the thin angle of the sunlight.

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The following stories all come from a single day’s edition of a single British newspaper – the Independent’s issue dated 16 October 2013. Welcome to the United Kingdom.

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A brand-new scare story raised its head this week, coming in from the blind side and catching the voting public unawares with the news that Westminster has decreed that independence would see Scotland struggle to sell its food and drink products abroad.

During a visit north of the border, Owen Paterson (the UK Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), claimed that Scottish exporters gained massive advantages from the UK government’s “clout” in markets such as China and Russia. He said an independent Scotland would struggle in comparison.

“What I see time and again after the success of the Olympics last year, the Royal Wedding and the Jubilee, is that there’s a real interest in British products… There’s a real positive for great Scottish firms like Walkers and those in the Scotch whisky industry in using the British government.

The UK is the sixth biggest economy in the world and we have real clout. When we asked that our whisky is treated fairly and ask hugely important governments in very important potential markets like China and Russia to look at counterfeiting or geographical indicators, that is to the massive advantage of that industry.

How people vote in the referendum is down to them, but I would make a very strong case that there’s a clear advantage for Scottish farmers and manufacturers to stay within the UK.”

But the minister’s assertions fall apart under scrutiny.

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Because frankly we could write 10,000 words and not say as much about the state of the United Kingdom in 2013 – and its future – as these two pictures do.

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Alert readers may recall a piece yesterday in which we highlighted the strange nature of this weekend’s Sunday Post front-page lead story. It appeared to regard the Scottish Government pursuing the policies on which it had stood for election as some sort of illegitimate guilty secret, and made great play of the fact that the Scottish Government had attempted to withhold the cost of some expert advice it had sought.

There are, of course, two protagonists in the independence debate, so it would seem only fair to examine the UK government’s conduct in preparing the reports with which it seeks to counter the Scottish Government’s documents, and the transparency thereof.

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