Wings Over Scotland

It sometimes feel as though the jagged, jittery line stretching from Gretna to Berwick isn’t so much a border as a fracture in a mirror, through which things look different according to which side of it you’re standing on.

On its south side, Labour decry a Tory government as the worst thing that can possibly happen. To the north, it’s an inconvenience Scots must bear for six or seven years out of every ten despite always rejecting the Conservatives at the ballot box, because to cast them out decisively would be selfish, childish “narrow nationalism”.

Scottish Labour MSPs abstain from voting for the replacement of Trident nuclear weapons, presenting a transparent lie of opposition to the weapons of global destruction. But something about the short train journey to London persuades Scottish Labour’s MPs to advocate Trident replacement enthusiastically, demanding only to know what else can be cut to ensure there’s enough money for it.

When in Scotland, the Tories and Lib Dems in the coalition government issue dire warnings that an independent Scotland would be cast out of the European Union and into international isolation. Safely back home in England, the Prime Minister promises UK voters a referendum that (according to polls) will achieve that very end.

The Huffington Post quotes the PM today on the subject of Scottish independence.

“He questioned why people should be made to choose between Scotland or Britain when they could be part of both, adding: “Britain works. Britain works well. Why break it?”“

But hang on. “Britain ain’t broke, don’t fix it” wasn’t Mr Cameron’s previous view.

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Remember when some of us made a bit of a fuss about the epically tasteless plans for the 100th anniversary of the start of World War 1, and were angrily told by various indignant British nationalists that the planned events were a “commemoration, not a celebration”? Turns out you can’t keep the truth down for long.

Astonishingly, the government even wheeled out some unbelievable numbnuts of a defence minister who offered up the following quote to describe this great sporting showpiece in which we will again be encouraged to see the Germans as our enemies:

“A no-brainer in terms of an event that is going to reach part of the community that perhaps might not get terribly entrenched into this”

Yep. He really said “entrenched”. Still, we agree with the first three words.

For those who haven’t already seen it on Twitter, we’ve been trying to follow up a recent comment made by James Kelly of the splendid Scot Goes Pop! blog, and we’ve drawn a blank. So: does anyone know when the UK Labour Party gave up its full membership of the Socialist International?

The party’s website still claims to be a member, and the Wikipedia entry concurs, so the change of status is likely quite recent*. But the SI’s own site is clear that the party is no longer a participating member, merely an observer. Yet we’ve turned Google upside down searching for any sort of news story about it anywhere.

(And since UK Labour has been an active member for the entire period of the international group’s existence – joining it when it took its present form in 1951 – you’d think someone somewhere would have seen fit to mention an event as significant as it leaving “the worldwide organisation of social democratic, socialist and labour parties”.)

Anyone?

.

*[EDIT @ 13.12: An alert reader uncovers an entry on archive.org still listing the party as a full member as recently as December 27th of last year.)

We checked with a few people on this one to make sure it wasn’t just us. Today’s Herald carries a story – by Magnus Gardham, no less – that on first glance sounds like good news for supporters of independence. But on closer inspection, it’s an incoherent jumble of word-noise that contradicts itself almost every paragraph. We honestly don’t have a clue what they’re up to over there.

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We’re not going to link to the Brian Wilson article which the Guardian unaccountably lowered itself to publishing yesterday. It’s embarrassing to see a still-widely-respected newspaper debasing its pages with the sort of swivel-eyed ranting you’d normally expect from a drunk shouting at a skip at 7am, which we can only assume the paper paid money for after LabourHame rejected it as being just too bitter and deranged.

One ugly little piece of innuendo is worth picking up on, though. With what’s the closest thing to subtlety in the piece, Wilson grudgingly concedes the SNP’s mandate to hold an independence referendum:

“The difference is that Scotland now has to answer a question which only a minority want to ask: ‘Should Scotland become an independent country?’ This is because, two years ago, 21% of Scots voted nationalist in the Holyrood elections, giving them an overall majority.”

Even in that tiny snippet there are several nasty little lies (nobody voted “nationalist”, for example – they voted for the SNP, which stands for Scottish National Party rather than Nationalist, and many did so despite opposing independence, just as tens of thousands of “nationalists” voted for other parties). But we’ll focus on the “21%” thing.

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FAO John McCormick

Dear Mr McCormick,

Last week you were widely quoted in the press on the subject of voters being informed in advance by both parties in the independence debate of the repercussions of their respective positions winning the vote. For example, your press release stated:

“The Commission has therefore recommended that the UK and Scottish Governments should clarify what process will follow the referendum, for either outcome, so that people have that information before they vote.”

Although your words seem clear to me, they seem not to have been understood by the No campaign. Ruth Davidson and Alistair Darling, for example, have both in recent days indicated their refusal to detail any proposed new devolution settlement, should Scotland reject independence, until AFTER the referendum.

Ms Davidson went so far as to suggest in one TV interview that she thought your comments meant people were unsure whether there would still be a UK Prime Minister after a No vote, and whether UK laws would still apply. As it appears extremely obvious that the “default” position in the event of a No vote would be that everything stayed the same as it is now, it seems unlikely that those were in fact the questions your respondents were asking.

But as we were not privy to your testing, we don’t know specifically which information voters were requesting be made available to them. I wonder, then, if it might be possible for you to issue some clarification on the matter, at least in broad terms.

A great many members of both the UK and Scottish Parliaments were extremely vociferous before the publication of your report in insisting that its recommendations be followed in full by all sides. It would perhaps therefore be valuable if you could be more specific about what sort of information your quote above referred to.

Thanking you in advance,

Rev. Stuart Campbell

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We know the No campaign is dead set against entering any discussions before the independence referendum, but we were so moved by Willie Rennie’s concern today about Scotland not having enough time to “negotiate over 14,000 international treaties“ in the 16 months between a Yes vote and the first elections to an independent Holyrood that we thought we’d help him out a bit with some advance work.

We did enquire of Mr Rennie as to where these “14,000 international treaties” could be found, but he was too busy helping poor people by fining them £80 a month to answer. Luckily, alert reader Angus McLellan was hot on the case, and swiftly directed us to a handy Foreign Office website featuring the magic number.

We’ve now had a brief skim through some of the UK’s historic agreements with other countries, and to save some time after 2014 we’ve knocked a few off the list.

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Unionists often like to talk about independence in terms of a “divorce” to try to tug at our heart strings and make us feel like we’d be leaving a much-loved partner. The implication, of course, is that divorces are always bad, with losers on both sides.

They get very huffy when independence supporters suggest that it’s more like an abusive marriage, despite our relationship with England being far more like Stockholm Syndrome than they would like to admit. (Something their own “it’s a big, bad world out there, you’ll never survive without us” rhetoric suggests is the case.)

But if we take the metaphor of the United Kingdom being a marriage at face value, then what kind of marriage is it? And more to the point, is it worth saving?

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Since we’re on the subject of Willie Rennie, we may as well have a look at the comments he’s made today in response to the Scottish Government’s publication of its “transition” plans in the event of a Yes vote. A clearer, more dispiriting example of the “We cannae dae it, Cap’n!” mentality would be hard to find.

“Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie insisted today that the SNP has “hopelessly underestimated the scale and complexity” of the task ahead.

“They would have to negotiate over 14,000 international treaties, a currency, the division of assets, membership of NATO and the host of international organisations,” he said.

“To say they will bang all this through in just 16 months is absurd. This will give most people in Scotland the shivers and fuel suspicion that the SNP are just making it up as they go along.”

Now, “making it up as they go along” is a pretty strange reaction in the first place to someone publishing a detailed planning document almost TWO YEARS ahead of the time it would be needed. But let’s humour the poor man and glance through his terrifying list of impossible tasks.

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It’s one of the defining mysteries of the independence debate so far. The Scottish Government says that an independent Scotland would remain an EU member at all times before, during and after the process of dissolving the UK, with the precise terms being negotiated. The UK Government, meanwhile, insists that Scotland would be thrown out of the EU and have to reapply for membership.

The EU has said it’s happy to settle this dispute, but only on receipt of a request from the UK Government to issue a definitive position. The Scottish Government has urged the UK Government to do so, but the UK Government refuses, despite its professed confidence in its view and the huge propaganda victory that would presumably result.

We can only assume that the UK Government is too busy to write the letter, occupied as it is with destroying the British economy and society. So as a helpful time-saving gesture of goodwill and in the interests of informed debate, we’ve done it for them.

We’re even happy to put a stamp on it, pop out (we need milk anyway) and stick it in the postbox ourselves. Just say the word, Prime Minister.

This is “No” campaign director Blair McDougall, telling lies:

“There’s one thing that’s absolutely certain – if the nationalists get a Yes vote, Scotland will be leaving the UK and so we’ll be leaving the European Union.”

That’s a lie, isn’t it, Blair? It couldn’t possibly be any more clearly a lie. Nobody actually believes that Scotland will “leave” the European Union as a result of a Yes vote. No matter how much they deliberately spin, misrepresent and mislead about the EC President’s comments, nobody honestly believes that there will be so much as a single solitary day on which Scottish people are not EU citizens. (Unless, of course, they choose to stay in the UK and the Tories then take the whole UK out.)

Even the feeble semantic-hairsplitting defence that an independent Scotland might for a split second technically “leave” the EU while negotiations over the precise terms of membership were concluded and amended is anything but “absolutely certain”. Such a scenario is, in fact, a hugely unlikely, but strictly speaking astronomically-small theoretical possibility, so irrational that a lunatic might clutch desperately at it. Either way, we would in every meaningful sense remain in the EU.

The only absolute certainty here is that Blair McDougall is a liar.

We hadn’t previously bothered commenting on the Guardian cartoon by Steve Bell that had a lot of independence supporters hot under the collar this week. We’d assumed, as seemed the most likely explanation, that it had actually been a comment on what David Cameron was alleged to have mouthed to Angus Robertson at Prime Minister’s Questions, and that Cameron was therefore the main intended target.

We worried that the nationalists who beseiged the paper with angry comments were perhaps being a little oversensitive and looking for offence where none had been meant. Ironically, the cartoon happened only days after we’d highlighted our own habitual inability to understand what Bell’s cartoons were supposed to be about, and that comment turned out to be prophetic, because we had indeed called it wrong.

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