Wings Over Scotland

Much of the Scottish media today is full of (mostly right-wing) commentators bleating piteously about the dreadful carnage in Edinburgh yesterday in which, um, a couple of dozen scruffy student types shouted at a silly man for a bit. Here, for example, is the usually-sane Alex Massie wringing his hands about the horror of it all in the Spectator:

“The hounding of Farage is a reminder that Scotland  – or at least Scottish politics – is not quite as generous, open-minded and tolerant a place as it likes to fancy itself. There is, it seems, a narrow spectrum of views deemed acceptable or legitimate. Anyone who falls outside that range can be ignored or, better still, suppressed.”

Suppressed? Are we talking about the same Nigel Farage?

THAT Nigel Farage, up there?

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…does this page appear in today’s edition of the SCOTTISH Sun?

Anyone got a copy to hand? We could find out, but we’d rather not hand over the 69p.

We got an email from our Prague correspondent last night, but that’s not the only thing the disgraceful pun in the headline refers to. As Michael Moore was kicked around the playground by Nicola Sturgeon in the first Scotland Tonight debate that same evening, the soggy security blanket he clung to more than anything else was the currency issue, which the No camp appears to believe is now its most powerful weapon.

It’s a two-pronged Trident, if you’ll forgive the even more tortured wordplay in that metaphor. Firstly there’s the scaremongering part containing the (empty) threat that the rUK would refuse to enter a currency union with an independent Scotland, forcing it to join the embattled Euro, and as back-up there’s the claim that if we DID get a currency union, Scotland would somehow end up getting less consideration from the Bank of England governors when it came to monetary policy than the none it gets now.

Let’s take the briefest look we can manage at both of those assertions.

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Never let it be said we don’t do balanced reporting.

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Loveable right-wing extremist Nigel Farage has been the toast of England for the last few weeks. This is what happened when he came to Scotland today.

We’re feeling very proud of our countryfolk right now.

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The Guardian today reports the incredibly depressing news that “Labour voters [are] increasingly turning against the poor”, with growing numbers of the party’s supporters now blaming the victims of recession and austerity for their own plight.

Julia Unwin, chief executive of the anti-poverty Joseph Rowntree Foundation, is quoted in the piece saying “The stark findings of this report highlight the increasingly tough stance people are taking against people in poverty. We appear to be tough on those experiencing poverty, but not tough on its causes.”

How can such a horrific, callous scenario, with the supposed party of the downtrodden and voiceless abandoning those who need the most support, ever have come to pass?

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BBC News, 2.53pm today:

“Organisers of the ‘United With Labour’ campaign say they’re arguing for a fairer, better Scotland that stands strong within the United Kingdom. They’ll work with the ‘Better Together’ campaign run by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.”

Our emphasis, as ever. Poor old Alistair Darling. Where was he, anyway?

(Full package here.)

The Scottish media is full today of Gordon Brown’s latest attempted intervention in the independence debate. Scotland on Sunday and the Sunday Herald both report that the former Prime Minister will urge Scots to “ditch the Tories, not the Union” (as the original SoS headline put it before being changed online to the rather more sober “Brown urges Scots not to give up on UK”, presumably out of respect for the gentle sensibilities of the paper’s Conservative-leaning readership).

(We’d like to take a brief moment here to appreciate a couple of beautifully acidic, deadpan lines from the Herald’s piece, written by Paul Hutcheon. Our emphasis.)

“Brown, who led his party to defeat at the last General Election, will be the special guest at an event in Glasgow. Although Labour has a dominant role in the cross-party Better Together campaign, senior party sources last year pushed for a separation to convey Labour’s distinctive message.”

The substance of Brown’s argument, in so far as it can be said to have any, is founded on a lie that was comprehensively disproved on this very website well over a year ago – namely that “if Scottish Labour supporters vote to leave the UK it would mean abandoning colleagues in England to years of Tory rule”.

That proposition is demonstrably untrue (not to mention a remarkably defeatist assertion that Labour can’t now defeat the Tories in England, despite having done so in 1997, 2001 and 2005). But even if it wasn’t, what then?

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Yesterday we were reading an engrossing article by Peter Kellner, the president of YouGov. It’s only available in PDF form as far as we can tell, and in terms of formatting it’s a bit of a trial to get through, but the information within is fascinating.

It’s a study of the difficulties faced by Labour in their attempt to win the 2015 election, and without wanting to spoil it for you, Kellner’s conclusion is that it’s going to be extremely difficult. That won’t be news to Wings Over Scotland readers, of course, but the depth of detail is well worth getting into if you’ve a head for that sort of thing.

We gleaned something different from the piece, though.

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Extracts from a piece last year on the highly influential Conservative Home:

“Drawn up more than three decades ago by now Lord Barnett the [Barnett] formula distributes taxpayers’ money across the UK. Even Lord Barnett now describes the formula as “unfair”. On both the Left (IPPR) and Right (TaxPayers’ Alliance) there is agreement that the formula is well past its sell-by date. Scotland and Northern Ireland receive a much greater share of UK taxpayers’ money than need in either country would require. The biggest losers are the poorer English regions and Wales.

This seems one of the great no-brainers of British politics. England is losing up to £4.5 billion every year because a Conservative-led government is sending that money to parts of the UK that stubbornly refuse to vote Conservative. So let a [2015] Conservative Prime Minister call for the phased ending of the Barnett formula.”

“Vote No, Get Nothing” is starting to look a little optimistic.