Wings Over Scotland

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.

As we predicted last week, the BNP is now encouraging its members to join UKIP. The image below is taken from a Nick Griffin article on the former’s website. We’ve put it up as a screenshot in order to avoid linking to the site, but if you really want to find the entire piece you can Google for any of the phrases in the extract below.

(We do love the description of Farage as an “internationalist”, though. That’ll put him in good company with all the Labour sorts who insist we need to have Tory governments we don’t vote for in order to show “solidarity” with the rest of the UK, which does.)

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We don’t need it in Scotland. Look at the state of reality:

“THE pro-union Better Together campaign has refused to work with UKIP to persuade Scots to vote against ­independence. A Better Together ­spokesman said: “UKIP have asked to join us and we have said no. If they ask again, we will say no again. They are not a Scottish party and this is a Scottish debate.””

We assume this means that the No camp will be giving Ian Taylor his non-Scottish £500,000 back at last, and roundly condemning the interventions of the thoroughly non-Scottish Carwyn Jones in the debate, yes?

Are we doomed to decline if Scotland separates? I can think of lots of good reasons why Scotland might want to vote to remain part of the United Kingdom. But the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee report this week is not one of them.

According to the report, if Scotland votes for independence, it would mean the UK was “a world power in irreversible decline”. Setting aside the question of whether we should expect folk to vote in the interests of geopolitical greatness, does being small mean you’re doomed to be weak? Not at all. The assumption that in geopolitics strength comes from scale is simply not true.

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One of the weirdest things about UKIP’s spectacular success in the English local elections yesterday – up from EIGHT seats to 147 – was watching everyone in the unholy “Better Together” alliance desperately trying to downplay it.

From the Labour side came the traditional cry of “It’s ridiculous to separate Scotland from England just because you don’t like who England votes for (and therefore imposes on Scotland)!”, while Tories pointed out that they’d still retained almost 80% of their seats and that anyway it didn’t really matter, because UKIP had no chance of winning a general election and indeed still didn’t have a single MP.

Of course, as we’ve noted already today, they don’t actually need one.

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This shouldn’t take long. Since 1997, and particularly since 2001, what passes for the political ideology of the Labour Party in Britain could be accurately summed up in one short phrase: be the smallest possible single step to the left of the Tories.

Protected by the grossly undemocratic First Past The Post electoral system – which discriminates massively against third parties and ensures that Labour or the Tories can secure huge, unassailable majorities on barely more than a third of the vote – Tony Blair’s brilliant, ruinous flash of political inspiration was the willingness to fully grasp the implication of that fact: that Labour could effectively all but become the Tories and still capture the left-wing vote, because that vote had nowhere else to go.

A bit like when there’s someone breathing right down your neck on a crowded train, that sent the Tories shuffling ever further along the political spectrum in an attempt to put some distance between them and their opponents, only to be confounded as Labour doggedly matched them step for step, constantly pressing their manifesto-groins into the Tories’ rear like some sort of hideous nerdy sex pest.

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Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones yesterday:

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones today:

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Wait, what now? From BBC News: