Wings Over Scotland

Do Ed Miliband, Tony Benn and George Galloway and now Sir Menzies Campbell (who appeared on today’s edition of The Sunday Politics Scotland) have some sort of problem with foreigners? It sounds like they do. For instance, read these words from Tony Benn, the great elder statesman of the Labour Party, this summer:

“If Scotland wants to be independent they have the absolute right to do so. But I think nationalism is a mistake. And I am half Scots and feel it would divide me in half with a knife. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.”

When asked about Benn’s views in a recent Holyrood magazine interview, Labour leader Ed Miliband had this to say:

“I am not the only person with family ties abroad and family is family, whatever the accent or postcode. But the Scottish people with family in England, or vice versa, will be living in a foreign country if Alex Salmond gets his way, that’s just a fact. We live in an increasingly interconnected world; we shouldn’t be building artificial barriers, we should be working out how to work more closely together.“

And on an episode of Scotland Tonight a few months ago, where Galloway discussed the issue of Scottish independence with YesScotland chair Dennis Canavan, the Respect MP talked passionately of solidarity between working-class people, which Scottish independence would, he claimed, damage. He felt just the same solidarity, he suggested, with bus drivers in Glasgow, Bradford and Belfast.

To which the most obvious immediate response is “What about bus drivers in Dublin, Oslo, Marseilles, Toronto or Lagos?” Does George Galloway not have the same sense of solidarity with them? Clearly not, if he feels that Scottish independence is somehow contrary to his solidarity with bus drivers either side of the border. If Scottish bus drivers somehow becoming citizens of a different country to bus drivers in his own Bradford constituency has any relevance to his ability to be in solidarity with them, you have to wonder about the nature of his socialism and his solidarity.

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It’s hard to level accusations of bias based on nothing but tone, so let’s stick to the facts. Most of last night’s edition of Question Time on BBC1 discussed general political matters rather than the independence debate (overlooking the fact that one informs the other, of course), but there was a hefty section explicitly on the subject.

At the time of writing you can still watch the show for yourself on the iPlayer, but to save you sitting around with a stopwatch here’s how it broke down.

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“There is a widespread assumption that the SNP has been outmanoeuvred by David Cameron in agreeing to a single question on independence” – the Independent, 15 Oct

Good work, Dave. Keep it up.

Look, it’s not that we like to brag about our predicting skills, but:

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From the BBC’s “at a glance guide to the referendum agreement” feature, written by the Corporation’s political reporter Andrew Black:

What the agreement actually says, if you bother to read it properly:

(Severin Carrell of the Guardian made the same mistake, incidentally. We’ve let Mr Black know, and we’ll watch with interest to see if the BBC corrects its error as quickly as Mr Carrell did when we pointed it out to him. EDIT: the article has now been fixed, but with no acknowledgement of the fact and with the “last edited” timestamp at the top of the page not changed. Naughty, BBC.)

We don’t want to be too obnoxious about it – heaven knows we can all get a bit mixed-up now and again amid the heat and chaos of battle – but the matter of who conducts the referendum seems to us to be a fairly important one to get right first time. You know where to come if you want things reported accurately, readers.

So that’s that, then. There’s going to be a referendum on independence, with no legal challenges. The entire Scottish media’s about to be choked with analyses of the 30-paragraph agreement signed today by Alex Salmond, David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon and Michael Moore, so we’re going to aim for the most concise one.

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We’ve noted before that it’s both naive and unreasonable to expect the BBC to be impartial with regard to Scottish independence. The Corporation has a direct vested interest in the status quo, partly financial and partly self-preservation. It’s important, when watching BBC Scotland in particular, to keep in mind that independence will mean the journalists, producers etc in question losing their jobs and careers.

(They would, of course, in theory be able to join any replacement state broadcaster, but it’s fair to say that many of them have already burned their bridges in that respect.)

If you think that’s a little paranoid, have a listen to these two short interviews by (we think) Auntie Beeb’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith, which are currently being looped on the BBC website in the absence of any developments in the meeting between Alex Salmond and David Cameron.

Interview with Michael Moore

Interview with Nicola Sturgeon

Does the tone and content of the questioning strike you as fair and balanced? Or does one interviewee get, let’s say, a rather more sympathetic and less confrontational hearing than the other? We wouldn’t like to say. You call it.

There’s an intriguing story in the Sunday Times today, which quotes the Conservative former Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth describing the Prime Minister as “Pontius Pilate” and granting the First Minister “a walkover” in respect of the negotiations over the independence referendum, which are apparently to be finally concluded with the signing of an agreement in Edinburgh tomorrow.

We;ve attached the full story below so you can have a wee keek through the Times’ paywall and read it for yourself. But we can’t help wondering: if the PM is Pontius Pilate in this analogy, then who is Alex Salmond?

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BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” was interesting this morning, which isn’t a sentence you can use every day. The main topic of discussion was David Cameron’s planned 2014 “commemoration” of the start of World War 1, and as host Kaye Adams noted repeatedly during the programme, the overwhelming opinion among listeners was that it was a disgraceful and cynical piece of political opportunism.

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We mark the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, not the day it opened.

Imagine if it were otherwise. Imagine if someone were to propose commemorating the dead of the Holocaust on the 14th of June rather than the 27th of January, because it was a pleasant summer morning rather than a bitterly cold winter one when the first transport of prisoners was marched through the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gates.

There would be revulsion, disbelief and horror at such a sick notion, and rightly so.

World War 1 killed ten times as many people as died in Auschwitz, and almost three times as many as were murdered in the entire Nazi extermination programme. For the past 94 years humanity has marked their deaths on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, because that moment in 1918 was when the guns of the Western Front finally fell silent. Yet a little under two years from now, that solemn tradition will be cast aside in favour of a lavish series of public events to be held not on the day the senseless slaughter ended, but on the day it began.

It’s hard to come up with a plausible or convincing reason why.

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Sorry folks, we’ve got a cold coming on and we’ve been a bit enfeebled today, so we’ve only just caught up with this. Evidently, independence campaigners such as ourselves were being far too complacent when we imagined that 2012 was the last opportunity for a major Union Jack-waving Festival Of Britishness. Stupidly, it hadn’t occurred to us that in a time when we can’t even afford to pay Disability Living Allowance to blind paraplegics with terminal cancer because the lazy scrounging scum could be out getting work as draught excluders or something, the country’s economy could manage to find 50 million quid spare for a big knees-up to celebrate the START of a war.

After all, World War 1 isn’t generally thought of as all that great a thing. Millions of young lives were squandered senselessly on the Western Front and elsewhere, not in the heroic defence of an innocent nation invaded by an aggressor but because of some inept, spectacularly stupid political manoeuverings and failures of diplomacy. When it finally ground to an end having slaughtered the flower of a generation, the peace-making process was handled so ineptly that it set up another world war just 20 years later, this one three times more catastrophic. Sounds well worth a party.

In our Lemsip-befuddled state, we can’t actually figure out if this is in fact all a ploy specifically designed to foil the referendum or if the Tories really do just get a massive hard-on for ANYTHING that’ll let them wave a flag around and reminisce fondly about the Empire and the spilled blood of the working class. If we do, we’ll let you know.

Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories have all recently called for the good people of England to speak up for the Union, and express how much they value the contribution of Scots to the UK. Helpfully (and very rarely), the BBC has allowed comments on a Scottish story today to give them the opportunity. We must admit, we didn’t manage to get through everything, but these are some of the ones that DIDN’T get modded off.

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