Wings Over Scotland

Dear Mr Benn,

I was in Glasgow Concert Hall on Saturday for your interview, and the preview of the film about your life. And what a life! You are inspirational to many, as the crowd made clear. It’s easy to see why. You talk passionately of hope, of belief in a better future, of anger at injustice. Of engagement and democracy.

You recognise, too, that New Labour became right-wing, almost a second Tory party. You must understand how this played in Scotland.

It’s for these reasons I was depressed and perplexed by your answer to the question on Scottish independence. The question was a good one: would an independent Scotland be more socialist? It’s a question many in the independence movement grapple with. Can we cast off Westminster’s neoliberalism, corruption and corporate greed? There is no answer; no one knows.

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There’s a small but quite vocal subset of opinion among followers of Scottish politics that David Cameron and the Tories are doing their damnedest to “throw” the independence referendum. A string of implausibly clumsy interventions starting with the Prime Minister’s attempt to lay down the law of a year ago have led to growing speculation that the Conservatives would in fact be somewhere beyond delighted to see Scotland go its own way, but simply can’t be seen to be saying so.

It’s an argument that has a lot of rational weight. Scotland hasn’t returned more than one Conservative MP since 1992, and seems unlikely to change that statistic any time soon, effectively giving the Tories a handicap of 50+ seats in every general election. There’s now little remaining dispute that the balance of Scottish revenue/expenditure at the Treasury is basically neutral, so there’s no great financial blow to be endured if the Scots make off with the remainder of North Sea oil.

(And even senior Scottish Tories think that the sort of complete break with the toxic Conservative brand which would accompany independence is the only hope of ever reviving their fortunes north of the border.)

Are we really meant to believe, then, that Cameron’s party is unbreakably committed to keeping a pathologically ungrateful Scotland in the Union for purely sentimental reasons? Pull the other one, readers – it’s got bells on.

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Readers as alert as this site’s will no doubt have already noticed our latest addition, signified as it is by the rather jarring appearance of a Union Jack over in the central links column – The Sealand Gazette. It’s a Scoopit news-aggregator like Peter Bell’s fine Referendum 2014 (and others), but with a rather different theme.

The Gazette, simply put, records the many reasons why Scotland can no longer afford to stay in the Union. It was founded back in June 2012, then neglected for a bit, then taken up again, and then we belatedly realised that it had a greater relevance than its original purpose and gave it a bit of a brush-up.

If you ever forget what we’re fighting for (or against), it’ll remind you.

It’s commonplace for professional journalists these days to dismiss bloggers and social-media users as “internet bampots” – frothing, furious, abusive lunatics ranting at parked cars. But in fairness, some do tend to get a bit over-excited from time to time.

By way of example, let’s check out a couple of the wilder-eyed nationalists who’ve been allowed out by the nurses to air their rage in public this week.

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More from our trawl through the picture files of the Scottish Political Archive. Click the picture of this 1968 Conservative election leaflet to find the answer to its question, which remarkably is every bit as relevant (if not more) today as it was 45 years ago.

It’s not often we agree with the Tories, but this time they’re bang on the money.

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We’re unimaginably thrilled to bring you our very first ever official Wings Over Scotland cartoon, composed and drawn by regular reader and commenter Chris Cairns.

We feel like a proper grown-up newspaper now.

We’ve got a bit of a dodgy Freeview picture this morning thanks to the weather, but we THINK this is what we just heard on the news from all the Tories (and others) who want the UK to leave the EU, but Scotland to stay in the UK.

Thanks to many alert viewers for sending in some we didn’t quite catch.

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It’s almost too easy to take all the cheap shots that David Cameron’s much-trailed, long-awaited speech about UK membership of the EU left open.

From a Scottish perspective it was difficult to suppress a hollow laugh, for example, when the Prime Minister said of some prominent non-EU nations: “I admire those countries and they are friends of ours – but they are very different from us. Norway sits on the biggest energy reserves in Europe, and has a sovereign wealth fund of over €500bn“

It’s also tempting to simply marvel (again) at the mind-boggling witlessness of the “Better Together” campaign, who spent the final weeks of last year hollering from the rooftops about how Scottish independence might bring about the terrifying prospect of Scotland finding itself out of Europe, when they MUST have known that Cameron was about to make that same thing a far more real possibility within the UK than outside it.

(The No camp’s willingness to keep on energetically hurling hefty boomerangs at the independence movement, no matter how many come flying back and hit them in the teeth, is truly one of the wonders of the modern age.)

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(We suspect this might become a regular series.) We try not to take any notice of the often-ludicrous propaganda churned out by the official “Better Together” campaign, but today’s was too utterly ridiculous to ignore. We’re not going to deface our nice pages with the image, though you can see it here if you want to without giving them any hits.

The graphic claimed, mind-bogglingly, that the award of £2.3bn in grants to good causes in Scotland by the National Lottery since its advent in 1993 was “another reason we are better together”, as if the figure represented some great largesse towards Scotland on the part of the UK. This, as any reader with an IQ higher than the number on a lottery ball will immediately realise, is such a monumental and obvious misrepresentation of how the lottery works that we can only concur with the Twitter user who enquired “When will the glue-sniffing stop at BT strategy HQ?”

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There was an interesting article in today’s Herald entitled “SNP snub plan for more tax powers at Holyrood”. It centred around the latest report from the Institute of Public Policy Research, advocating a new form of further devolution settlement (dubbed “Devo More”) as a solution to Scotland’s problems rather than for independence.

The article itself was devoid of any analysis of the report’s findings, though in fairness to the Herald it did note that the IPPR “has close ties to Labour”, thereby alerting suspicious readers to potential bias within the document.

As far as many independence supporters are concerned, any offer of further devolution at this point is merely an empty promise of “jam tomorrow”. Had any Westminster party seriously intended to increase the level of devolution to Scotland, runs their argument, then they could have done so during the Calman Commission, the Scotland Act or more recently by including an offer of further devolution on the ballot paper for the 2014 independence referendum. They did none of these things.

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We’ve already highlighted the absurdity of the comments made by several Unionist politicians last week (in both the Commons and the Lords) about the Scottish Parliament being “undemocratic” and a “one-man dictatorship”. But we only mentioned Scottish representation in doing so. What about the whole UK?

The majority – 53% – of votes cast by the British electorate in 2010 were worthless, because they were cast for candidates who didn’t win the seat they contested and are therefore simply thrown in the bin by the “first past the post” electoral system. Thousands of people were locked out of polling stations across the country on the evening of the vote, but it didn’t really matter, because statistically speaking their vote would probably have been completely ignored anyway.

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We’re indebted to commenter “DougtheDug” on A Sair Fecht for spotting this one. On Tuesday in the House of Commons section 30 debate, Labour MP Ian Davidson bitterly attacked the Scottish Government for allegedly timing the independence referendum to coincide – at least to within six months – with the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn. (Ignoring the fact that the referendum would have happened years ago had it not been vigorously opposed and blocked by Labour.)

Davidson claimed that the timing amounted to “celebrating the murder of hundreds or thousands of English people“, and accused the SNP of exploiting anti-English sentiment for “partisan advantage”. It was a contemptible enough piece of dog-whistle politics in its own right, but all the more extraordinarily hypocritical in the light of this:

Lurking in the Westminster archives is an Early Day Motion from late 2003, in which Mr Davidson was happy to attach his name to a Parliamentary celebration – tabled by the Conservative MP for Romford, Andrew Rosindell – of what we presume we must call “the murder of hundreds or thousands of French and Spanish people”.

We must admit, we’re a little confused. Apparently openly and explicitly rejoicing at the historic deaths of enemy troops is fine if you’re a British nationalist, but disgusting, racist political chicanery if you’re a Scottish one (even when you’re not actually doing it). Can anyone point us at the rulebook for this sort of thing?